“Shut up.” She seizes him, collar-first, and pulls his lips onto hers. She always plays the aggressive lover in the sims and it works great. Jericho concedes, and she pushes his body to the floor, the wild cracked-slate floor that looks like it’s half-broken, looks like it’s been through the end of the world. She weighs him down with her hips. “Let’s fuck.”

“There’s a bed back there,” he says, gesturing to the doorway she left.

“No.” She doubles down, forcing all her weight into her lower body. “Let’s fuck here.”

She craves it, this unbinding of the flesh under the bleeding stars, her back open to the lashings of the universe. And Jericho assents, letting her take him in while galaxies writhe and flare overhead. Letting himself be used as a distraction, a handy tool, an anchor for the body and mind while the world fractures around Misery. Under the auspices of the Demiurge’s Creation she stops worrying about what she wants—Power? Influence? Getting the girl?—and what her next steps should be. She stops trying to piece together an uncertain future as pilot, as Messiah, as hope of the foolish Faithful. Here she is just trashbag moonrat Misery Nomaki, liar, thief, and murderer, getting her rocks off in a delusion of her own making. She’s alive. That’s what matters. That’s all that matters.

INTERLUDE 5

Thus do two weeks pass on Angelsteeth. Misery Nomaki, shoved headfirst into military life, is forced to adapt. No longer in control of when they sleep, when they eat, or what they are allowed to do. Ono Red-2 is pushed unceremoniously into the flow of Angelsteeth’s routines. This is how each day plays out: waking at oh six hundred to shower before breakfast, then a full morning’s worth of seraph practice. Lunch, two hours of physical conditioning, then break for curriculum time. They’re free to choose the modules they take; Tank does courses on practical machining, Spider does additional combat classes, the Lady Alodia Lightning ignores everything to sleep it off. Misery Nomaki chose classes on history and military tactics, jumping from topic to topic at will. They wanted to learn everything about the new world presenting itself to them.