One of Ruin’s jointed arms reaches out. Its six fingers split and flow like latex, the strands forming mycelious nets that shiver and shimmer. They snare Misery in their grasp. The threads pass through her, into her, and become her. Misery is plunged into a stream of screaming and song. A typhoon of sound and image and impression across her consciousness: alien civilizations, branching symmetries, beings made of silicon and silver and gel, ships that resemble fungi. Her thoughts shatter in a million directions. So much to witness. So much to absorb.

Misery. Look at me.

Knowledge comes into Misery, pressed into her like a flame. She has a red-hot awareness of a thing, a place, that she has to get to. The sear of this location pin floods every nerve ending and every capillary.

Come to me. I will show you what you were made for.

The light in her dream grows and grows until the angel obliterates everything that Misery is. There is nothing but the Forge. Her mind goes white as the atoms of her body dissipate. Death and rebirth. What is she expected to become?

The first things to return to Misery are touch and feel: her body lying on its back, foam against her neck and spine, cool metal against her arms. Sound from the real world filters in as she emerges from the fog of sleep. Body monitors chirrup, voices converse in tones too low to parse, and somewhere comfortably distant a colossal mechanical heart beats with a low, steady thrum. Misery’s fuzzy mind pushes out a thought: I’ve been here before.

Awareness swamps her in an avalanche-rush. Her life. The station. Her position in the world. Memory sharpens into specifics: The seraphim. The exercise. The helplessness.

The terrifying, unyielding crush.

Misery makes the mistake of opening her eyes too quickly and has to shut them again. Light hurts; the world outside is not a welcoming one. She lets the yellow-pink of her lids normalize before cracking them open. Eases herself into the pain of reawakening.

“Take your time. There’s a war, but it can wait.”

She knows that voice. Dr. Sower Cabbage. The one who put her implant in. The one with all the stories. Her eyes refuse to focus. Misery struggles to speak through the desert of her mouth and throat and lungs. “Wh—” A wheeze of air.

Water streams into her mouth from an unknown source. Misery swallows. Dr. Cabbage, enormous in Misery’s bleary vision, tuts. “Feel better?”

Her voice splutters to life like an electrical engine. “What happened?”

“You died. And the Forge brought you back.”

“I died?”

“Don’t move. I need to run some scans.”

The doctor leaves Misery’s field of vision and a series of beeps happen where she can’t see. Misery fixates on the ceiling, low and white and inscribed with concentric circles. One of them goes blue, bathing Misery in its glow.