A saint with heavy eyes and a silver waterfall of hair. Glorious in her melancholy and elegance. It is a picture of the commander of Monkglass Station, the Lady Storm Mirelle. Misery recognizes her immediately. She knows that face from other quarters. The dream of the dark room, the long brushstrokes through glittering hair, the grief and slow acceptance.

The bottom falls out of her stomach. She had this dream on her first night on the Capital, right after meeting Pyrex Imogen. The dream kept returning to her, and she kept ignoring the signs. Thinking it wasn’t important. Thinking it was some quirk of the nullvoid. After all, she’s had repeating dreams all her life, and nothing about these changed very much. It felt like the same dream, over and over.

She missed it. She missed what was right under her nose, nestled in her mind, coming to her in her sleep. The clues have been in front of her all this time. She knew the name of Monkglass’s commander. She could have looked for a picture anytime she wanted. But she did not.

Lightning picks up on her stillness and shock. “What is it? What have you found?”

“This is it,” Misery says, tongue thick in her mouth. The bone-bright certainty she has been looking for. “This is the sign.”

“A dream? I don’t understand.”

Strain cracks Major Reyes’s voice as xe speaks, exposing a vein of frustration that borders on exhaustion. The decisionmakers on Angelsteeth have been hauled into a meeting room at a voidtouched hour; sleep dep and weeks of extraordinary stress have demolished every psychological wall that keeps their minds intact. Before Misery’s eyes they are being torn down and remade by the Larex Forge. Let their tempers flare here, in this sealed room—silver-lined, top of the station, fenced by guards and holy obsidian, all of them clumped around a long table and still scrabbling toward the light. Let them struggle with the scale of revelation in the way that mortals do. When they leave the room, they will be firmly set upon the path that has been opened to them. Of this Misery will make sure.

She explains, again: “Since my time on the Capital, I have had a recurring dream of a saint I did not recognize. I thought little of it, as there was much else to worry about. I couldn’t have guessed I dreamed of a real person. After the previous meeting, I looked deeper into the siege of Monkglass. When I saw a capture of the Lady Storm Mirelle, I recognized her immediately. She was the one who was haunting my dreams.”

Major Reyes drags thumbs across xer eyelids. “And you never thought to say anything?”