The glass doors open to a different world entirely. Saint Ono’s Park bristles with huge-leafed palms and flower-laden bushes, and every few steps the air offers a new scent, fresh but unnameable. Misery pads carefully through the deliberate hush, trying to remain invisible. The rhythms of life linger at the periphery of her senses, light and sound from the busier, bustling tiers just filtering through. The Capital going about its business, unperturbed by war and heresy and now by a fugitive in its midst. Funny, that. Growing up Misery was told so many times that the peace in her life only existed because of the sacrifices made elsewhere by Church and Throne. Every time they had a shortage of something—gellose cubes, holy charge, protein packs—the denizens of Rootsdown were told it was because of the war, the war, the hardships they experience are nothing to compared to the suffering of those facing the brunt of the war. They should be grateful. But the truth of the Capital and the life of the nobility speaks for itself. They’re doing fine, with their clean air and bright lights and polished floors. On the Duke’s ship Misery ate fresh plants—real plants!—every day, with every meal. The extravagance! Yet his crew groused about the food, speaking of how those stationed on the Capital got meat, the real thing, carved from the flesh of living creatures.

She should have known they were depraved here. The signs were there all along.

The park is not empty; a scattering of families amble in the dappled light, conversations muted. Several look like the family in the elevator lobby: mundane parents, burdened with worries, accompanied by a silent saint and a child carefree with ignorance. One such unit perches across a bench of warm slate. As the saint-nanny bounces the child in hir lap one of the parents looks on, feeling pleased. The baby has recently gotten fussy around food, and grows cranky without a daily walk to starbathe. Sainthood is surely just around the corner. Perhaps it’s time to invest in a radiolight.

Misery shakes her head as if she can rattle the thoughts out of it. It’s a bad habit of hers, pretending she’s in someone else’s mind, reading too much into their thought processes, filling in gaps where she shouldn’t. When she’s right she’s always very right, so it’s hard to resist. But she knows nothing about the lives of these absolute strangers, and she has no business imagining she does. She’s merely projecting her fears onto them. Focus. Misery puts one foot ahead of the next and pays attention to her greater surrounds instead.