Breathe. This is holystone she’s never met. She has to be cautious. And yet curiosity burns: she wants to get to know this stone. Misery touches her chest, out of habit, seeking the warmth of Mother’s amulet. The bones of her sternum twinge in response. The song of the stone agitating the atoms in her blood. What’s different? She aches in a particular way she can’t put words to. Her mother’s amulet, strung around her neck, is vibrating: not in the physical world, but where Misery can feel it. She shuts her eyes and tests the stone, experiments with letting it come into her being.

The stone leaps at the chance. She’s never run into holystone this eager, bounding in like a toddler too young and stupid to know the sting of rejection. A moment of panic: What if it’s a trap? But there’s more of her than there is stone, and she’s the one in charge. She wakes the stone—makes it happen, allows it to blossom like a lily in her palm. In her blood. Somewhere, far away, outside, there’s a pressure felt in the body that belongs to Misery Nomaki, but in the stone-space there’s only euphoria, star-light and star-bright. The stone is awake, and singing with the same frequency as her blood. She doesn’t know what this means, or what this does, but it feels beautiful. The rhythm of the stone guides her, drawing her into a climax, then easing off, drawing away from her. Misery lets the stone’s flare fade naturally into satisfied afterglow.

She opens her eyes. The faux nebula spins around her, placid and unbothered. Her heart strains in her chest as she takes in her surroundings, hardly touched. On the table the Tear of Assan spins in place, looking unchanged. The holy jade of the table, however, has been pulled so taut its surface is glossy. Polished to the molecular level. That’s strange. She didn’t touch the holy jade at all.

“You woke it,” says Pyrex Imogen.

The Archbishop’s pale complexion has blanched further with awe. Wonder, fear-laced, breaks through a calm that sits like a chemical lake in the dead of night.

“I don’t know what I did,” says Misery, which is true.