Fuck. Ruin’s voice. She would have leapt out of her skin if she had any in this world of nothingness. The angel—the delusion—has been here all along, she’s forgotten, and it unnerves as though she’s being watched. She’s not being watched. Ruin is part of her mind, of course zie would be in here with the rest of her. Misery recovers pieces of her persona, bit by bit. Messiah. Fuckup. Unbeliever and disloyal child. Liar, liar, ass on fire. That’s who she is, that’s what she’s doing. She’s fooled everyone into thinking that her madness is holy.

How did she get here?

How does she get out of here?

Her panic is shattered by a burst of yellow light, a grid with orderly text. Words. Language. She wrestles her consciousness into understanding how to read. How to process information.

A ranking screen hangs in the void, her name on top. She scans it for familiarity. Teá Spider? Oh. A list of their performances. That can’t be right. Is that right? She’s the first listed—does that mean she did the best? Misery reads the lists again, carefully this time. Slowly her brain comes back online. She’s tied with Ghost for first place. A perfect score. Perfect. The voidmad nixen and the abomination, better at this holy shit than all the normal humans. Spider, for all his talk and experience, is a mere midlist result. Pathetic.

Where’s the princess? Misery hasn’t seen Her Royal Highness’s name. She miss something? Then she looks down. All the way down. There it is, right at the bottom: Lee Alodia Lightning Chrysocolla. She failed the exercise entirely. Really not cut out for this, is she, despite her sainthood? It’s true: pilots have to be saints, but not all saints can be pilots. How embarrassing, to be found wanting while everybody watches.

The results aren’t what Misery expected. But before she can process this, the helmets de-plug and Misery tumbles back into the flesh world. Aches spring from joints overly confined in the crags of holy labo. She climbs out of the pilot module to find Spider stretching fluidly, working out the kinks in his back.

Her servingmate catches sight of her. “So. They weren’t kidding about you.”

Misery smiles, fuzzy and generous. The floor is uneven and alien under leaden feet. After hours away from her body and conscious mind, reentry into human existence feels like an avalanche. “What about?”

Spider laughs and strikes her over the shoulder. “No one gets into a module for the first time and returns results like that. Even that one”—a tilt of the head toward Ghost’s luminous form—“made for order, couldn’t touch you. I’ll believe it, cap. I didn’t before, but I do now. You’re blessed.”

Misery proceeds as cautiously as she can. “Is that so.”