Esse Temple, demanding answers from the confines of her screen. Behind her the walls undulate at random angles, dark and gleaming, glass and mica embedded in the surfaces. It’s Misery’s first glance at a Heretic ship and it makes her ill.

“I’m sorry,” says the Lady Storm. Misery’s hackles raise further. Apologizing to a Heretic—apologizing to the monstrous Heretic Esse Temple. In all the calculations on Angelsteeth, they never considered this: What if the Lady Storm, beloved sister of the Archbishop of Remus, has herself fallen to the nullvoid? “They’re renegades, I’m trying to deal with them. Please—”

“We’re renegades?” Lightning’s voice goes up a pitch. She’s vibrating with disbelief and indignation. “Look at you, pleading for supplication from a Heretic. Is this my brother’s will? Or was this just you, with your history—”

“Shut up,” snaps the Lady Storm, and Misery knows that flavor of anger. The initial eruption of rage, the sting of a slap that follows soon after, fury that turns its wielder into a beast. She clenches her fists, fight-or-flight activating, as the station’s commander turns on Lightning. The princess bristles, but she shuts up, struck by the ferocity of the Lady Storm’s wrath. She knows when not to fuck around.

“You can’t control them,” says Esse Temple. “I have to protect my fleet.”

“No,” says the Lady Storm. “I have it under control. We have both their mechs, and they’re both here, if we can get a message through to the Throne, we can sort it out—”

“They’re selling us out,” Lightning whispers.

She’s a traitor. The Lady Storm is a traitor. All this time Pyrex Imogen has been worrying themself skeletal about their sister’s fate, and here she’s been, cozying up to the enemy, whispering sweet nothings to a monster, letting the nullvoid in. Misery fills with righteous disgust. There will be a reckoning.

“Cut the feed,” she says to the angel. She’s seen enough. She’s seen all she needs to know.

Ruin tilts hir head and Esse Temple vanishes in the middle of an angry sentence about broken trust. Broken trust, as if Heretics could be trusted with anything, as if they were good for anything except extermination.

Misery flashes her teeth. The rot at the heart of Monkglass is finally laid bare. Was there even a siege in the first place? Were the Heretic ships for show? All the news stories, all the handwringing, that entire pathetic narrative, had it been a lie? The station is not asking to be saved. It has never been.