The query comes from very far away. Misery hears it perfectly fine, but she can’t find her jaw or tongue in her body. She’s too dizzy to answer and the world grows more insubstantial every minute. Or maybe it’s Misery that’s vaporizing. Phasing out of existence. The nullvoid clipping though her. Is this how Mother felt when she died?

High abovehead, and everywhere at once, Ruin says, “Come find me.”

Then zie’s gone, and the vacuum zie leaves behind sucks Misery in. Her dizzy mind whirls, trapped in a shrinking radius of thought and coherence, and at the center of that maelstrom is the blue seraph. She will die if she doesn’t touch it. The agony she feels is fire in her bones.

Cool hands on her cheeks. A face before her that she mildly registers as Alodia Lightning’s, but she can’t condense the various features into a cohesive whole. “Let’s get you back to the doctor’s,” she’s saying. “Something’s gone wrong.”

CHAPTER 18

Misery is dreaming. Misery is falling. Her mind is a bottomless pit, a primordial cave, an endless night without relief. It is the great empty that stands in opposition to the hereness of all the universe. It is the nullvoid.

Connection: light and sound, a boy blinking in the vastness of the not-cosmos. Jericho. Her other delusion. Most nights, they meet in vistas strange to Misery’s eyes, but pleasant to look at, like a walk through a meditative sim. On the left, you will see the twin suns breaking over the horizon of Yerven-4, their yellow light symphonious over the purple waters. Breathe in. Hold. Breathe out. But today there is nothing but void. Whirling, screaming void, and they’re plunging through it like they’re skydiving. Wind whips hair into Jericho’s eyes and mouth. “What’s going on?” he shouts over the howling. “What have you done?”

“It’s over,” she says. “The void won. Your side won.”

“We’re not enemies, Misery.”

It occurs to her that she’s never heard Jericho shout like this. “Yeah, we are.”

“I don’t want to be.”

She doesn’t care what he says. Why should she trust what a delusion says?

He thrusts a hand across the wild void, trying to reach her as they fall. “Give me your hand,” he says. “Please.”

But she won’t. He thinks he can stop her from falling, but he can’t. No one can save her.