The Duke’s head pops over the garden’s edge and she’s too far away to read his expression, but she can hear him as he yells: “Misery! Void take you!” She flexes the bastard’s finger at him. Too bad, so sad. Her tricks with holystone won’t hold him long, nor will it stymie the strange white saints. But she’s got a head start.

Misery falls. Lights and tiers flash past in a dizzying reel, which would scare the nullvoid into anyone, but not her. Misery knows speed and falling in the bones of her body, and gravity on this station is so weak. She has so much time between each pulse of slowdown magic she needs, using the holy tigereye embedded in each tier to reverse gravity and dilute her fall. Back home Misery cut her teeth on fall control by perfecting stonegliding, a sport she’d invented wholesale, and that boasted her as its sole participant. She’d climb the summit of Death Head’s Peak with a fistful of holy tigereye and fling herself off the top, careening from jagged cliff face to jagged cliff face with only the holystone to control her descent. That she survived was pure luck—or some would say, the Grace of the Larex Forge. Now she’s invincible and fearless as she falls. Wind howls in her ears as she plunges through half the length of the Capital in one sitting. The blaze of shops and commerce cedes to the dull sidings of residential districts, but Misery’s target is further below, in the thick-walled, hopelessly grim service sectors. Industrial settings will always be terra familiaris: she’s not a moonrat for nothing, and she knows she can find a hidey-hole, someplace warm and dark where she can catch a breath. Misery selects a jutting platform with heavy markings beneath her—some kind of loading bay—and directs her fall toward it, slowing herself for the landing. Which she nails, by the way, blinking past the aegis and landing on her feet in a smooth run. One hip flares sore at the impact, but that’s nothing. She’s good at this.

“Don’t get too self-congratulatory.” Ruin has manifested at the other end of the loading bay, perched on a boxy scanner rimmed with idle blue light. “You have not yet outrun your pursuers.”

“If you’re so clever,” Misery says, “why not help, instead of mouthing off?”