“Well. Look how far you’ve come,” the major said to Misery last evening, and it wasn’t all sarcasm. But the phrase implies progress, implies a direction, implies a starting point of mediocrity from which Misery has journeyed into greatness. But there is no vector to Misery’s development. No forward, no backward, no sideways hop. The last two weeks have felt like her mutating in place, trapped while things happen around her. She is not driving herself forward. She is not driving at all. Misery craves directionality. She wants to feel the coordinates change, approaching a distant goal or fleeing a site of disaster. But her life right now feels like neither.

“You have direction,” Ruin says. “You are being guided.” In the darkness her delusion squats upon her dresser, elbows tacked to knees, wrists dangling, head tilted like a bird’s. “You can’t ignore all the map markers then complain about being lost.”

Misery only smiles. Keeps breathing. Tells herself she’s lucky that her delusion hasn’t gotten worse, that zie still plays the same tune zie did when zie first appeared. No new eruptions of voidsickness since Jericho, either. By the Grace of the Forge, or some other means, her voidsickness has stabilized. For now.

Time to shower. The one time she has true privacy; even Ruin doesn’t disturb her while she’s in the stalls. Her mother’s amulet hangs heavy around her neck, and Misery gently places it on the counter, reverently drizzling the cord around the unverifiable patterns upon its surface. Stay there. This feels safer than leaving it in the common areas of the bath. She has come to trust her servingmates, but not to that extent.

Over the weeks Ono Red-2 has worked out an unspoken but comfortable morning routine, with an order in which they access the two bath stalls. Misery’s sandwiched in the middle, and she runs into Tank as the girl makes her way out, freshly cleaned. Tank, who wakes fresh-eyed at any hour and stays that way till bedtime, pops her fingers in Misery’s direction. “It’s your day, big shot!”

“It’s our day,” she corrects, in her gentlest voice.

“You nervous?”

Misery smiles, all saintlike. “I trust in the Forge.”

The girl sweeps out, all cheer and promise, and Misery allows her face to fall into its customary scowl.

The frosted door to the second bath cubby softens, and the hand that pushes it aside belongs to Spider. “I see that look,” they say.