rounded your spine up cautiously and looked around the shuttle, underwater, at the dissipating blooms of brown and red in the liquid, as though someone were bleeding out into it. At the back of the shuttle, you thought—you thought you could perceive a high and keening wail, at the very edge of your hearing—but neither God, nor the elder Lyctor, and certainly not Ianthe reacted to it.
The wail was coming from within the shuttle. It had a hard, pained edge to it, like frustration. You cast around trying to figure out from where. There was another big wet thump as a fourth body slammed itself on the plex, and this one managed to hold on, scrabbling gruesomely; but you focused on the thin cry of violence. You found yourself saying, “Someone’s crying, Lord,” but he just made a nonsense sound beneath his breath, a mumbled word that you didn’t recognise.
“Two minutes, thirty seconds remaining,” said Mercymorn, and her voice took on a hard edge of caution.
The Emperor said, “They’re not as numerous as I’d have expected.”
“I do not like this,” said his Lyctor.
Your eyes slid back up to the ceiling. The water, oleaginous and warming, was thick now with the flotsam and jetsam of bits of corpse. When something bumped your foot, you flinched and grasped a fine fleck of bone from your tibia, tried to work it through your skin to ice over your feet. It didn’t precisely succeed. Instead of a fine outer needle of matter, you pulled a wet plug from just above the epiphyseal line, and your shinbone opened like a flower; your blood and cellular matter opened up on your rainbow robe and floated upward, and God turned around, and his face was indistinct in the murk but his voice was not—
“Oh—” He used a word you did not understand. “Harrowhark, no theorems!”
“Don’t be ridiculous. She can’t be using theorems,” said Mercy. “She’d be barely awake and it’s totally beyond her at this poi—John, stop her, she’s using theorems!!”
The pain did not matter. The shuttle had shivered, somehow, around you: synaptogenesis had erupted in your braincase, and your eyes were opening. You were lying in a sea of bodies. They had bumped up against you before you had realised it, before you could flinch away from their nearness: perhaps the blood conjured them into being, so suddenly were they there. You stood up without thinking, and more bumped gently into your elbows, your arms. They carpeted the bottom of the shuttle. They bobbed in an unseen current low to the ground, lacking the air to drift to the top. Through a thin curtain of your blood you could see the dizzying array of slippery corpses, their faces painted in black and alabaster greys. Dead girls in their teens, their half-exposed bones still caught in the act of fusing at the caps; dead boys still shedding their milk teeth; ungendered infants, mostly skull, their nails like tiny chips of stone. A rubber-bodied toddler with a painted face and very red hair lay dead beside your knee and for some reason it was this that destroyed you, it was this that kindled within you something you had no hope of defending against. You howled in a purity of fright.
The Emperor was wading toward you through this bobbing array of dead. He was saying something you paid no particular attention to: “Harrow, it’s not real. Only you can see what you’re seeing, and everything inside the shuttle is illusion. It’s the River. The River is a predator—the dead are in your brain. It’s trying harder with you because you’re fundamentally deeper in it than Ianthe. I didn’t think you’d be able to go this deep, first time in, but you have. Walk back toward me.”
“Two minutes remaining,” said Mercy. And: “They are coming for the source of the noise. I stood on the bank and watched Cassiopeia die, Teacher—”
“—do not rev that engine, Mercymorn—”
“She led them away from the brain; I was there in projection, and I saw when they seized her legs and arms … I was laying stakes for the Beast, and I was there, and I thought to myself, Lord, But what will we do with your ceramics collection? There is so much of it.”
You pressed your hands to your face and were startled all over again that you could not close your eyes. When you pressed the lids down, the light changed, and—you recalled this, as though you had done it before—you lost visual