feet and moved right up through your legs to your spine, and I felt it in your hands, I felt it on your tongue. I felt it go chattering up the back of your head. It made your scalp softly fuzz over with electricity.
Maybe there is a word: omen.
“But you can’t get into the Tomb.” God sounded genuinely interested, but in this deeply casual way, as though he were hearing the result of a competition. It was the interest of someone at a party hearing the end of an anecdote. “Not without me.”
The corpse was grim. “I came armed.”
“It doesn’t matter what you came armed with, Commander—”
“I had the baby,” said Wake. “The baby I’d had to incubate myself for nine long fucking months, when the foetal dummies these two gave me died.”
“Oh, God, it was yours,” said Augustine, in horror. “I thought you’d used in vitro on one of Mercy’s—”
“I said they all died,” said Wake. “The dummies died. The ova died. Only the sample was still active, no idea how considering it was twelve weeks after the fact, but I wasn’t about to look a gift horse in the mouth.”
“So you used it on yourself,” said Augustine. “Anything for the revolution, eh, Wake?”
“Are you judging me?”
“Only your intense self-delusion.”
“I always see the job through.” Wake sounded bored. “You sent me out there to kill a baby and open those doors. Whose baby didn’t matter on my end. I carried that thing under my heart … threw up every morning that first trimester … felt it kick … had to induce labour and give birth in a shuttle, alone, knowing by then that Gideon was catching up … Do you know, I gave that thing a nickname, my whole pregnancy? I used to call it Bomb.”
Anything could have happened, then. One thousand futures stretched out in front of me.
“Okay. Let’s get this straight,” God was saying. “You brought a baby—a baby you’d made inside yourself, well done, that’s the classic—so you could, what, kill it and create a huge thanergy cascade at the door? I wish Harrowhark were here; it would do her good to know there are more people in the world with an imagination like her parents’. But you’re not a necromancer; you couldn’t have manipulated the thanergy burst. I mean, it’s appalling, but it would never have worked—”
While he was saying all this, someone else had stepped into the foyer. It was a man who looked like he had been stripped bloody by a wind machine and hadn’t healed up all the way; a wiry, knuckled-up tendon of a man, with the face of someone who had been starved once and burned recently. Joining the growing line of antiques on board this place, there was a gun holstered at his hip, and at the other hip a plain rapier with a basket hilt and a piece of fraying crimson ribbon tied to the pommel. His clothes were stained with green slime, and so was the scintillating white robe he wore, hood up over his head—he closed the door behind him and turned to look at Ianthe and me, with that weird scratched-up face and those dark eyes, and I knew that we were now well and truly rumbled.
He swept aside the robes. He looked at us, Harrow. Then he made this weird, half-grimacing, excuse me expression, and he reached forward. I was so far fucking gone that I didn’t even flinch as he slipped the sunglasses off your nose. He slid them over his face, and then he let the robes drop back over me and Ianthe, and he walked straight into the shitshow.
Augustine lifted his head, and he said hoarsely, “Gideon?”
The woman I was pretty sure was actually my mother—wearing the body of a woman I’d had a crush on, who in turn had been wearing the identity of a woman she’d murdered, until I fell on a spike so that my boss could kill her—craned her head around in her bonds.
Harrow, I will never forget the look on her face as long as I live, or as long as I die. For the first time, she smiled—a small, dusty, crooked smile that was totally alien to Cytherea’s mouth, which had smiled at me often but never like that. It was the smile for your old cellmate who’d just landed back in prison, the one that told them at least you were in it together—or more correctly, the smile of someone stepping out of jail