She says: “You can’t just say I died and leave it at th—”

“Stop talking. Scan.”

“But I died?”

The doctor reappears in her vision, irate. “I’ll tell you, if you promise to shut up for the rest of the scan.”

“Fine.”

Misery stares at the ceiling and counts the beats of her heart. There’s a scream embedded in the lining of her throat, in the sacs of her lungs, in the churn of her stomach. She died. She came back to life. She saw unbelievable things, felt indescribable things—was any of that real? Is any of this real? What if she suffocated in the guts of the seraph and this is just one long, drawn-out extinction dream? Stripped of her body, she is nothing more than nullvoid, delusion from end to end.

“There we go.” The doctor sounds pleased as the scan completes. The blue lights go off.

“Can I sit up now?”

“You can learn the patience to stay put a bit longer.”

Misery seethes, but the doctor keeps talking out of sight. “Remarkable. You’re in perfect health. Maybe even better health than you started. Huh.”

“You said I died.”

“When we cut you out of the seraph you had no pulse and weren’t registering. We thought, oh, we’ve done it. But then you breathed. We didn’t have the chance to intervene. Another miracle, huh.”

“And I’m fine?”

“More than fine.”

Misery lets that information crystallize. She was dead, and now she’s alive. The image of the angel in her dream—hallucination?—looms large in her imagination. She picks her next words with great care, yet feels like she’s being careless in asking anyway. “What are the chances this is voidsickness?”

“Voidsickness? Is that what you think happened? Well, you’re clear. I’d know for sure.”

“How? You can’t scan for it.”

“That’s what they want you to think. But you can.”

“I don’t believe that.”

Dr. Sower reappears in her sight, annoyance incarnate. “You don’t believe me, the subject matter expert in the room?”

“My brother said—”

“Your brother and his backwater Church doctors don’t know everything. All right? If you were voidsick, we would have picked it up the moment you crossed the station boundary.”

“Even before?”

“Before what?” Dr. Sower’s frown deepens, and suspicion bubbles under the surface of her irritation. Not the outcome Misery wanted, but one she feared. “You mean before any of this happened? No. I would have detected it too.”

“So I’m not voidsick?”

“No.”