“Fuck.” She takes off to the right. There’s an opening in the wall—more a slit, really—and she darts into it. It’s another corridor, so narrow and dark it barely qualifies as one. More like an open vent. Misery can barely see the walls or floor, but she has no time to care, not between the running and feeling sick and angry and tired. How many more of these cursed creatures are there? Can she outrun them all?

There’s a square of bright freedom at the end of the vent, growing in Misery’s view, and she bursts out of it onto the upper floor of an enormous chamber staggered with ship-sized machinery. It looks like a recycling plant, fractious with heat and noise and the song of holystone hard at work. Misery vaults over the lightly guardrailed edge and lands below on her toes and fingertips, perfect for springing into a run. Adrenaline masks pain; her body will serve her until it gives out. If she uses her speed and her smarts, she might be able to hide, or lose the saints.

Misery bursts from between two growling deatomizers into open space—thermal cushioning—and freezes.

Backlit by the industrial droplights, stark in the wavering heat, is a lithe figure, weight on one hip, coil of a whip in one hand. The posture of someone confident in hir ability to hurt people. Other details: the perfectly tailored mesh top and fight pants, lace-up boots. Quality shit. But most of all Misery is drawn in by hir face, a sculpted oval with high cheekbones and narrowed, angry eyes. Atop hir head sits a coil of burning crimson, glazed deep with gold. A saint, wilful and wrathful, waiting for her. Alarm and confusion stop Misery in her tracks. Her brain won’t slide into easy solutions for this apparition. Who?

The white saints catch up. The flame-haired stranger curls hir lip. “Stand down. This one’s mine.” A voice clean and brisk as scissor-blades, striking Misery in the spine. The white saints fall back obediently. They listen to hir—a lieutenant of the Emperor’s, then? The stranger’s face is somehow familiar, but Misery can’t place it.

Then zie stalks forward, hips swaying, lips pulled into a deadly line, and Misery has no time for questions. She can worry when she’s not actively being murdered. The whip hums in her new adversary’s hand, and glows red along its length as zie activates it. Shit. That’s holy ruby at the core; it’s a killing weapon, and deeply illegal. Suppose it doesn’t matter if you’re the one making the laws. The stranger smiles, actually smiles like a psychopath, before zie lashes the whip into action.