They’re all looking at her. They’re all hoping the same thing. They pray the divine touch has already reached her, showing their Messiah the shame tucked so deep within the lightless folds of Angelsteeth, an abomination known only to those in closest orbit of the Throne. There lies gleaming desire for miraculous pathfinding that will solve their immediate quandaries, a tool put into their waiting hands. They don’t know the truth of Misery’s dreams, that maelstrom of carnal desire, and the weaknesses they carved into her. They won’t understand the well of hate that has sprung open in Misery’s chest, unless she explains it to them. She doesn’t want to explain it to them.

Her mouth has dried out. She has to ask. “Is he Jericho? Is that his name? What he calls himself.”

The General doesn’t answer her directly. These things cannot be discussed before the serving heads—they don’t have the right kind of gold to their name. “Meeting dismissed,” they say, directed at the gathered and gawking captains. “We’ll continue later.” They point at Misery, Lightning, Diamond. “In my office. Now.” But the anxiety in their eyes tells Misery all she needs to know. Jericho is real. He had not lied to her about being a Heretic prisoner. And right now, at that very moment, he is somewhere in the depths of Angelsteeth, away from Misery’s sight and perception. Alive. Breathing. A witness to her shame.

“This is a lot to take in.”

Major Reyes presses xer fingers against the bridge of xer nose, half-slumped in a chair. The General’s private office is a long oval that accommodates a dozen, located in one of the tips of Angelsteeth. The floor is ivory carpet and the walls are real wood, bisected by acrylplate that extends to the ceiling. The cosmos overhead blesses the meeting suite with cold light. A glass partition keeps them segregated in a corner of the office: there’s the General, stoic as usual; the major with xer bone-deep exhaustion; the Duke, underslept; Diamond and Lightning, holding it together; Dr. Sower, summoned for her expertise; and then there’s Pyrex Imogen. Caught between dismay and hope.

Over their collective heads looms a data lozenge, bright and unavoidable, plastered with a photo of the man imprisoned in the deep guts of Angelsteeth. The mug shot exposure blows out the finer features of his face—the lines under his eyes, the hollows of his cheeks—but Misery cannot deny his identity.

That’s him.

Until Dr. Sower pulled up the picture she had clung to the mad hope of prophetic coincidence. The promise of the creature in her dreams bearing no resemblance to the prisoner held in secret on the base. But Jericho was telling the truth that one time.