Of course, that is how the Faithful tell it. From the side of the Heretics, the followers of Hall and Lu, the fallen Messiahs who splintered from the Empire and rejected the word of the Larex Forge, surely the tale is different. After all, they do not believe in a benign universal force who decided to take humanity under its wing. They do not believe in the sanctity of holystone or the seraphs. They call it technology, and technology can be manipulated. I wonder how they see this sequence of events? What stories do they tell their children at night, what songs do they put on in times of quiet? I suppose we’ll find out.

CHAPTER 3

In the Archbishop’s measured wake, Misery gets a grand voyage of the buffed, gilded interiors of the Capital. She doesn’t know how much of the station’s anatomy comprises meandering corridors like this—tiled with glossy deadmarble, wide enough for armies and tall enough for mechs, garnished with silver fixtures and yellow light—but what she’s taken through, personally, is a lot. Pretty, though, peppered with flasklights and towering kino sculpts that glow and loop in voxels of white and teal. Shrubbery punctuates the creamy spaces with artful bursts of color. Misery might appreciate the excursion if she were a tourist, but as a prisoner, all of this is hostile architecture, looming over her with a patrician air. The air of a disapproving elder brother, unsurprised by yet another fall from virtue on her part: peak Misery. And the actual air, the stuff she’s pulling into her lungs, comes in so crisp and sterile it refuses to register on her senses. She’s breathing nothing, asphyxiating in purity.

“How easy it is to upset you,” Ruin says, like it’s the winning argument to a fight Misery never asked to have. The delusion strides casually alongside them, flitting between the gapped interior and exterior of the saint-phalanx that keeps her hemmed in. Their retinue—a candyball mix of soldiers, saints, archbishop, and a fucking royal princess apparently—is afforded wide berth by the regular citizens of the Capital, good old traders and sailors and other rich shoecanoes who just want to get on with their soft and well-scented lives. Some of them have drones capturing the Archbishop’s procession as it marches on by. Misery mouths Apisian obscenities at them. Pulls an ugly face. Hopes it ruins their pretty little copies.

“Misery,” says the Duke, in a long-suffering tone, “please. I beg decorum of you while we are being watched.”