Silence reigns. Around them, other soldiers are busy; they’re barely spared a passing glance. It’s nice to think that the Imperial princess and the Holy Messiah—two high-profile criminals condemned to execution—blend in so easily on Angelsteeth. As if they are ordinary humans like everyone else. Misery walks, the Lady Alodia Lightning walks. The steel-boned elevator that will take them to the Butchery is unguarded, unutilized, and the doors open automatically as Alodia Lightning approaches. They board. Misery positions herself where she can look the Lady Alodia Lightning in the face. The princess stares back, undaunted.

Buoyed by the lightness of her salve haze, Misery asks: “Why do you hate me?”

“I don’t. I don’t know why you think I do.”

“You literally called me a liar and a fraud before we boarded the seraphs.”

She looks away. “I had my reasons.”

“What reasons?”

The elevator reaches its destination and its metal doors grind open, sparing Alodia Lightning the ordeal of giving Misery an honest answer. Misery tails after her silent form while pushing her sluggish mind to find new angles of attack. This deep in the restricted zone the floors aren’t coated with padding, and their boots clatter against bare metal. The rhythm of the noise is hypnotic.

Misery asks: “Where’s the General? I haven’t heard from them. I haven’t heard from anyone.” Since waking up she’s talked to two people, the good doctor and the princess, and neither are in her direct chain of command. Where’s her captain, where’s the debrief? These dreamlike, illogical events lend themselves to her post-death delusion theory. Why else would it be Alodia Lightning who waited for her as she lay near death, as if she cared about Misery?

The princess says: “The General is in a crisis meeting. Presumably enacting emergency plans to deal with what happened to your seraph.”

They’ve stopped in front of the Butchery’s double doors, big enough to swallow ships, big enough to hold destinies. The fully armed guards on either side are unreadable under their opaque faceplates, and Misery imagines they’re not really human at all. Just statues. Or overlays on her implant. Hallucinations.

She says: “What happened to the seraph?”

Alodia Lightning frowns, all action in suspension. Misery watches her breathe slowly and deliberately for a few seconds, a pattern she recognizes. Finally she says: “You’re about to see.”

Her seraph has changed. Her seraph is blue.

Misery paces the length of the Butchery’s viewing balcony, sick. She tilts her head to make sure it isn’t a trick of the light. But there’s no denying it. Among the regular seraphs, with their pale golden flesh that she’s used to, hangs a singular creature made out in terrifyingly dense blue. A twilight-sky blue. Gold flecks glitter in its depths.