The deacon Bridge looks at her dead-eyed, unimpressed. At least she tried.

Next to each golden door is a glossy rectangle of strange black stone. Mundane, not holy, some kind of electronic rig. Over its blank surface, the deacon Bridge makes a sequence of signs with hir hands that look like nothing to Misery. Then the door opens, retracting into the wall. Zie points Misery inside.

Misery manages about two steps before awe overtakes rational thought and she has to stop to understand what she’s seeing. She hasn’t entered a room. Instead she’s standing on … the surface of an asteroid? Rough oceanic black stretches before her and drops off at a jagged edge, beyond which the void of space yawns; the green-red-blue veil of a distant nebula wreathes the party sprinkle of stars. A golden half pavilion sits in the middle of the rocky slate, its elegant struts curving overhead into an open dome. The pavilion surrounds a holy jade table with matching seats, one for the confessor and one for the priest.

“Wait here,” Bridge says from outside the door, a moment before it slides shut. The wall vanishes. There’s no wall, only open space and the raw border of an asteroid flank with no aegis, no barrier, and if Misery takes a step forward inertia might fling her over the edge into open space from which there will be no return. She’s afraid to draw breath. Afraid of opening her lungs and welcoming the nullvoid inside.

“It’s all illusion,” says Ruin. The angel sways unperturbed on the filigreed curve of the pavilion, smug as a bureaucrat’s cat. “You have not left the Capital. Its gravity still binds you. Its atmosphere still fills you.”

Logically, she knows that this is true. Logically, she knows that the ground beneath her feet is the ground of the Church and Capital. But the animal part of her mind refuses to be placated. She forces herself to move forward, fixating on the holy jade furniture. The furniture tugs at her from the navel and chest, and their clarion insistence punches through her terror and anxiety. Misery finds her way back to the ambient song of all the stone that human habitation needs to be put together. See, she’s still on the Capital after all. She breathes in Saint Agneta’s pattern as she walks: four in, six hold, seven out. Mechanically she puts one foot before the next until she reaches the pavilion. Sits herself down and keeps her back straight. She’d known not to expect anything like the cramped honeycomb cells of the confessionals back home, but she hadn’t expected her emotions to go off like that. She’s better than this. Smarter than the dumb tricks the senses play on the body. She needs to be both if she wants to survive in space.

“It’s a very low bar,” Ruin purrs, crouched hungrily on the pavilion’s open roof.