Yet Misery gets the sense, somehow, that the princess’s worries extend beyond the cheap psychological hack of team spirit, or at least the facade of team spirit. Like Misery, she struggles with voidbeasts no one else sees. Private battles she refuses to let others witness. Misery doesn’t know what the princess fears, or hates, or feels. She’s spent two weeks digging but two weeks isn’t enough to mine secrets that deeply buried in the core. But the longer she keeps at it, the more she wants to know what lives in the heart of the Lady Alodia Lightning. Forge above, she wants to know.

CHAPTER 16

Angelsteeth’s most precious resource lives in a massive hangar that glows fat and golden on the station map. Sacred and legendary, it lives in the vernacular of the rank and file as the Butchery. Ono Red-2 walks through the massive steel doors of Bay 3 and emerges on a platform centered against a massive wall. On either side the seraphim hang like corpses, elongated heads fixed to steel hooks meters above, feet dangling over the mesh bottom of the floor, a vertiginous drop away. Fifty feet tall and pure holystone. Despite herself, Misery has to stop for breath.

Seraphim. No longer dreams carried upon the booming voice of evangelical leaders or the bright polish of wave dramas. Seraphim in the flesh, bigger and heavier than Misery imagined. Bodies the size of churchhalls, hands larger than homes, feet that can crush buildings. Brutal, many-limbed forms that promise efficiency: sleek and sharp-edged and aerodynamic. So brilliant they hurt to look at. Weeks in the mock units have tuned Misery to the particular song of holy labradorite, but that was a single, plaintive melody, like a high flute on the wind. In the Butchery the melody punches through her like a siren blast, a sound loud enough to be heard from either end of a planet. The seraphim glitter brilliant gray, and as Misery turns her head they flash glorious stripes in blues and greens and purples and golds. This feeling, it’s been so long since it’s been wrapped around her throat. As a child Misery used to hike to the dumpgrounds in the middle of the desert, powering through dry heat and burning light to complete her pilgrimage to the graveyard of constructor mechs that built the colony. Decommissioned a hundred years ago and stripped of holystone, the cheap metal was left to rot into the landscape, but in the sterility of Rootsdown’s artificial atmosphere they persisted over decades. Misery liked to sit in the foot of one she called Daisy and stare up into the shadows of its shell, and let herself be overwhelmed by the sensation that she was but the tiniest of specks in the universe. Back when she was more sincere about religion it felt like a place where she was in communion with the Forge.