Misery settles into the awkward pilot’s cubby like she always does. It’s uncomfortable, as usual.

Then the stone starts to move.

Misery spits a startled expletive as the holy labo wakes. It turns liquid and wraps around her calves, her wrists, climbing up her skin like floodwater. She swears again, trying to pull her arms free, but she’s stuck. Trapped in stone that’s surging up to cocoon her neck and face. Panic surges through her, constricting her chest and throat; she can’t even scream for help.

“Don’t panic.” Ruin’s voice in her head. “This is supposed to be happening.”

She’s not drowning, she’s not going to die. Every pilot goes through this. Her mother’s amulet is ice against her skin as the stone creeps to her jawline and then over it. She holds her breath as the tide line envelopes her mouth, her nose. Shuts her eyes just before the holystone gets them. The darkness—it’s fine—it’s just like putting the simulation helmet on, dig? Any moment now she’ll see the neon grid of the simulator, telling her what to do and where to go.

Something’s wrong.

Misery is machine and the machine is Misery. Zie has no sense of hir body, did zie ever have a body? Who or what is zie? Where are hir limbs, hir wings, hir weapons? Hir visual cortex floods with information. Instead of the simulation’s clarity there’s a wild cascade, a torrent of data—sensors, pings from hir fellows, feedback from Control—and zie cannot separate them. The data isn’t coming in right. It’s written backwards on a mirror and zie can’t process it. The seraph, Misery, perceives hir surroundings in a wide panorama, front and sides and behind, and the world tilts as articulated arms rise from hangar floor and hoist hir free of hir bonds. Hir fellow seraphim are in line, headed for the slowly opening bay doors.

As the body of the seraph moves, propelled by the machinery in the Butchery, Misery struggles to unite mind and body. Make sense of something. The line of seraphim progresses one unit at a time. But the last one in line is pilotless. This is worse than hir first time in the simulator. Nothing connects. Panic. It’s not working. Why isn’t it working? There’s pain, perhaps, somewhere far off. A mortal thing, pain. But Misery is no longer mortal and—something’s gone wrong.

Why can’t zie activate the holy labradorite like zie should? Why won’t it talk to hir?