She steps on his throat. The bob of his larynx comes through the rubber of her sole as he swallows. She peels her lips back. “Shut up. Shut the fuck up. You’re a lying piece of the void and I fed you when I should have killed you.” Why did she indulge these dreams? She knew something was wrong but just kept quiet about it. Didn’t report it. Didn’t tell anyone and let the dreams continue, night after night. Selfish. Stupid.

Jericho speaks in quick, halting sentences: “Just ask anyone. Ask your superiors. Ask Dr. Sower. I’m real, they can tell you the truth—”

She stomps on his throat. Just raises her foot and drives it down with all the weight in her body. Goes through the cartilage with a crunch and a wet sound, and—

Misery wakes into the dark of her quarters, limbs tangled around Lightning and Spider. Heart in overdrive like it’s hooked up to holy ruby. The sensation of flesh and bone collapsing still fresh in her mind. She breathes calm into her lungs, letting the tension drain from her muscles. The anger she feels isn’t real. It doesn’t matter. It was only a stupid dream.

Too late. She’s got Lightning awake, warm and worried in the dark. “Bad dream? What’s wrong?”

Misery digs her nails into the foam of the mattress. Her chest hurts and sweat prickles along the length of her spine. Fuck. She doesn’t have to say anything. Doesn’t have to explain what happened. Yeah. Just a bad dream. Nothing to it. No one needs to know about the hold the void still has on her.

Ruin sits on her dresser, well haloed and nuclear-eyed in the gloom. “Dumping your problems out of the airlock again, are we? I thought you’d learned better by now, Misery Nomaki.”

She shuts her eyes and clamps her teeth together. Suppresses her first thought, which is that she would absolutely toss Ruin out of an airlock if she could.

“Hey,” Lightning says. “What’s wrong?”

Now Spider is stirring from sleep too, his soldier’s instinct alerting him to a developing situation in the room. Misery can’t wipe the memory of her foot going through Jericho’s windpipe. The way he looked at her, all resigned and pathetic, before she did it.

She breathes. Saint Agneta’s pattern, four in, six hold, seven out. Buries all thought of Jericho deep in the landfill of her heart. They don’t need to be brought into this. They don’t need their faith in their Messiah shaken. Right now, both their visions are clear; she doesn’t need to muddy it with confessions of voidsickness and delusions. Jericho is her burden to bear, and hers alone.

“It’s nothing,” she says. “A bad dream. Go back to sleep.”