Blacklights is a double-tiered affair, walls darkened metal and lights radiation-blue. The bottom half is largely dance floor, bodies churning mad with song, jostling against one another. Sweat and alcohol sublime into a thick soup. Ono Red-2 trickles through the crush, elbows in ribs and breaths caught in the cups of their ears, until a pink flasklight swivels and directs its cherry beam into Misery’s face. Recognition hits and a roar goes up from the crowd. The dancing stops, even though the music continues, pulsating and blood-hot. The waters of the dance floor part for Ono Red-2, and a wave of adoration follows Misery as they cut through the room. A sea of supplicants yearns for contact with their Messiah; fingers grasp furtively across the gap and fragments of prayer split the air. Misery recalls her brother, hands filled with holystone—was it a lump of holy ruby or holy sapphire they kept in that chest?—threading the pews on feast days, the sway of the congregation as they reached to brush hands across that luminous surface. She never cared for that kind of reverence, but now she sees the raw animal power it bestows upon the one who wields it. But she has to be careful. This fire could go wild at any moment, lashing out like a tongue of holy obsidian.

“Let’s get upstairs,” Diamond says. “Less of a ruckus there.”

Upstairs is for officers only and Tank isn’t interested in its stuffy bounds. She convinces Ghost to stay with her on the dance floor. They split: Diamond, Spider, Lightning, and Misery ascend. It’s quieter above, the music subtly baffled, the thin ring of byway packed with small clusters of people, drinking and talking but not dancing. They find space in half of a dim-lit alcove, vaulted ceiling high enough it doesn’t feel intimate. Diamond gets them canisters of peach-laced cremoline, which Misery downs in two gulps, spilling froth down her chin. The alcohol hits hard and fast; around her the room fuzzes into pleasant noise and light. Touch and sound grate less. While Lightning wanders over to talk to Spider, Diamond settles next to Misery on the circular foam of the couch. “You look better,” she observes.

“Better than what?”

Diamond laughs softly, but there’s no real mirth in it. “You’ve looked like death for most of the day. The fight took a lot out of you.”

“I am death,” Misery intones, “destroyer of worlds.” An old story from an old story, quoted over the millennia. Misery feels particularly apocalyptic now; every time she shuts her eyes, every time her attention drifts, her mind turns alien again. She tastes life as an archangel, bright and blessed and terrible. A being for whom the galaxy is a plaything. When she clenches her fist she remembers the sensation of her blade in the flesh of the Heretic warship, the electric surge of holystone transforming under her.