No wonder they call her a genius. Faster than anyone else her captain has picked up what Jericho put down. The Heretic shuts his eyes, still in agony. “It shouldn’t be hard. If you know. You have to collapse the pillars—they’re built on KD principles … if you calculate the ratio. It’s probably one plus six.”

Misery frowns. “What the fuck does that mean?”

“It’s okay,” Diamond says. “I got it. The reso engineers can figure it out.”

“So we got what we needed?”

Her captain nods. The stiffness in her spine telegraphs wariness; Diamond was surprised by the force and swiftness of Misery’s violence. She doesn’t know what it’s like. Must be nice, growing up in a place where you didn’t have to watch yourself, where you weren’t always aware of the potential for violence curled up in any moment, waiting for the slightest trigger to lash out.

She leans forward and lifts Jericho’s chin one last time. Looks into the bruised face, the mismatched eyes with one sclera half-red. Burst vessel. “You got off easy,” she says. “You can thank the Larex Forge that you made it out alive. Think on that in your cell, Heretic. Maybe you’ll finally wake up.”

CHAPTER 29

“You’re upset,” Lightning says.

Misery unclenches her cramped fists in the middle of the wide circuit she’s been making. “Oh? I hadn’t noticed.”

After the interrogation they came to rest in one of the observation modules, she and the princess, tumbling from the bright flare of that confrontation into the cool, wide quiet of this contemplative space, acrylplate dome open to the velvet fabric of space, a place where the light of the Forge can touch the soul. The saints who come here to starbathe often congregate during the times non-saints eat, as though the routine would impart them some sense of normalcy. A relatability. Right now they’re alone, just Lightning and Misery and her elevated blood pressure. Misery turns away from her lover and toward the patient carpet of stars, who offer no judgment, only light. The acrylplate catches her reflection and displays her as other people see her: this short, squat nixen, with their freckled skin and springy hair, deep bags around the eyes and the scar bisecting a swatch of their face. Just some regular schmuck, a dozen of them on every backwater moon and settlement. Nothing worth taking notice of.

Ruin stands to her left, hands latched behind slender back, contemplating the stars also. “The chosen one could have been anyone. But it was you. That means something, doesn’t it?”