“It’s an illusion. A projection of a cluster billions of light-years away, with some color added for flavor. A beautiful illusion, though.”

How droll, a delusion in a dream talking about things not being real. Misery looks up at the picture of a hundred thousand suns in a death ballet and feels exactly as small as she should. “I like it.”

“I’m glad.” His expression softens further. “You seem different today. Tired, somehow. Touched by something else.”

Misery leans against a crystal cluster, propping her arms up like it’s a railing. “Today I learned to pilot a seraph.”

“Indeed? How did it go?”

“Very well. Shockingly well. Maddeningly well. Turns out that voidsickness makes you really good at controlling seraphim. Who knew?”

Jericho scratches his chin. “An interesting prospect,” he says. “Of course, given the deep connection between holystone and the nullvoid, it makes sense. Humans are very poor pilots of seraphim, physiologically. You seem to have a natural advantage.”

“An unnatural advantage,” she counters, wagging a finger.

He laughs, and Misery studies the way the skin bunches up around his eyes. It’s such a particular feature, delicate and transient. She’s surprised her delusion comes with so much detail. The scene sits uneasily in Misery’s reckoning: there’s a grit to it that seems real, yet it’s full of surreal leaps that only exist in dreams. It’s a dream, of course. But it wants to trick her into thinking it’s not. Half of her wants to leave, head for the green-rimmed exit called waking up. The less advantage she gives to her voidmadness, the better. The other half is fascinated by this particular delusion. In this weird theater of dreams he has a presence that sits on her tongue like melonwater, bitter but in a good way. Jericho fits so perfectly one of the rom-sim archetypes, the soft-spoken intellectual who stays aloof and polite until the end, the one character you can get the best ending with and yet not know how zie really feels about you. She understands that the shape of her delusions betrays something about her, the way Mother’s delusions betrayed her wish for her children to be bigger and better than she was. The way her conjuration of Ruin betrays her desire for Mother’s prophecies to be true. Her desire to be something other than a failure, an abomination. So what does Jericho represent? Her desire to be loved? To be worthy of gentle want and care?

“Is something wrong?”

She’s been quiet for too long. “Give me a break. My brain got turned inside out today. I don’t want to think anymore. Let’s just fuck.”

“Are you sure? I thought maybe you wanted to air your thoughts for a bit.”