Oh god it hurt so bad.

I discovered I really didn’t like having a knife in my kidney. My ribs were supposed to get in the way, but they’d failed me. Apparently Erid was good at shanking people. I screamed as she stomped on the back of my leg, sending me to my knees. The knife scraped nauseatingly against my ribs on the way out, and I heard blood splatter all over the tile floor before I fell over.

Hey, I thought feebly. I need that blood.

In retrospect, that was probably shock.

“—had it with your skullduggery,” Erid was ranting above me as my focus wavered.

“—dare bring a bladed weapon—” the Magistrate was saying.

“—highly irregular circumstances—” Pellonine’s voice insisted.

The tile was very well done. The word “tile” made you think of the nice, lacquered white tiles from your local swimming pool, but you could tell this used to be a rock. Up close, it was shot through with grains of colors.

“You can lose about twenty percent of your blood before it starts to affect your cognition,” Val commented idly. “Have you activated the medical translator in your coat yet?”

Right. Inside pocket of the hakmir. Fuck, it hurt so bad. Pain so sharp it was intruding on other sensations. So sharp it was cold. I felt simultaneously like I was inflating and deflating. Warm liquid seeping into corners of my body I’d never felt before. Like drinking hot tea, but in my back.

Plug the hole first. Fix the internal bleeding next. My consciousness was weak. It took two tries to send the instructions to the translator.

“SILENCE!” the Magistrate yelled. The overlapping hubbub ceased immediately.

The sensation of draining in my veins slowed to a halt. This was probably still a lethal wound for anyone else, but the translator could handle it.

“There are to be no blades on Ethelios,” the Magistrate said coldly.

Erid’s tone was deadpan. “Oh, this? This is for cooking.”

Facedown on the floor, I couldn’t really see what was happening, but there was a beat of silence. My organs hurt.

“I’d advise flashing out,” said Aulof. “We’ll handle the angel while you’re recovering.”

“Throw it away,” the Magistrate was saying. The knife bounced off the tile next to my face. I felt some blood splatter on my cheek.

“There is another way,” Val said, carefully neutral.

“Don’t,” Markus interjected. “I don’t want her to end up with another trauma disorder.”

“I’m willing to swear this idiot was the source of all our problems,” Erid said.

“It’s unlikely that the translator can get your body back into working condition fast enough to act,” Val said. “But you can manually pilot the exoskeleton.”

“Val,” the commander said warningly.

“If you might allow me to phrase it more diplomatically—” Pellonine tried.

“Who was she?” the Magistrate demanded.

“Couldn’t tell you, to be honest,” Erid said.

“I,” I groaned, “am not dead yet.”

“Here we go,” Markus sighed. In a flash of anger, I muted him.

“Split your intent,” Val said. “Project it to the exoskeleton.”

I visualized pushing myself up, the same way we talked over comms by projecting our intent to speak. It took a couple tries to get it right.

“This is not how that equipment is designed to be used,” Aulof said.

My voice was a ragged shriek. “I don’t care!”

“Funny,” Erid said. “Someone warned me she might be hard to kill.”

My vision whited out as she booted me in the side. I cried out and rolled over into the fetal position, my control over the exoskeleton faltering and awkward. Another kick hit my left shin with a frightening crack. With a snarl, I ordered my pain receptors shut down. All of them.

“Restrain her!” the Magistrate ordered. “Hear me now, Erid of Bulcephine: any hope of seeing those supplies rests solely on your enthusiastic and exacting adherence to decorum in the next minutes.”

My arms jerkily took the weight of my body. Even without pain receptors, the sensation of my gut bloating with arterial blood was disgusting and uncomfortable.

“Well done,” Val said.

“How is she still moving?” the Magistrate said. “Pellonine, do your people some credit and explain this circus.”

“She was in the habit of joking that she can’t be killed, your excellency,” Pellonine replied, horror seeping through diplomatic calm. “She had other unnatural abilities, but this…”

“We’re demonstrating too much of our advantage,” Aulof said.

“Are we?” Val said innocently. “I have a suspicion.”

“Faceless,” Erid spat. “Now that I think about it, there was a bit of an incident when someone invoked the Stranger in her presence.”

“Don’t!” I screamed, still on all fours.

“And that just confirms it,” Erid said with satisfaction.

I forced myself upright, staggering slightly. My body really did not feel like it was doing okay, but if I turned on the pain receptors I’d probably be too compromised to handle the situation. Everyone was more or less standing where they’d been before I went down, but Erid had two of the Magistrate’s guards holding her arms. I shot her a cocky grimace and turned to face the Magistrate, who was observing me a slight look of distaste. Behind her, Cloak Girl was staring at me like she’d seen a ghost.

“Well?” the Magistrate asked. “Are you one of the Faceless?”

I wiped some blood off my forehead. “You’re kidding, right? Does it look like I’m missing my face?”

“She was earlier,” Erid commented, which made Pellonine hiss at her to shut up.

“I got better,” I said defensively.

“Commander, permission to test a hypothesis,” Val said.

“After this stunt, I feel like I should deny you on general principles,” Aulof replied. “Fine. Granted.”

The Magistrate’s eyes narrowed, and she motioned three of her men to approach me. “Last chance. Who and what are you?”

“Call me Danou,” I said.

“Tell her you work for Kives,” Val said.

“Are we really throwing in with her?” I subvocalized.

“Yes. Go.”

“I’m not Faceless,” I said. “Wait, are those the guys that clawed their way back from the underworld because that bloody bitch—no one fucking say her name, okay?—won’t sponsor anyone past the Black Gate? Do I have that right?”

If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

The Magistrate’s eyes bored into mine. “You’re not a good liar.”

Her goons were still slowly advancing on me. I noted each of their positions, formulating a plan of action if it came to blows. Given the current state of my motor control, my best bet was “get beaten repeatedly and fall over.”

“Don’t need to lie,” I said, trying to appear in control. “Can’t come from the underworld if I never die, right? Besides.” I did not sigh. “I work for Kives, not the fucking shark tooth lady.”

That scribe, Ell, interjected. “What’s a shark?”

“God damn this fucking planet!” I shouted.

“Enough,” said the Magistrate. “Detain her.”

Her goons closed the distance, and I was barely standing up straight. I was not going to be able to win a fight if one started.

So I decided to win it before it started.

I shoved one hand into the pocket of my hakmir and gripped my hand amplifier. I had no time to craft the right emotional frequency—I just grabbed the first ideas that came to mind. Malice, terror, awe. I ramped up the output until the device hummed under my fingers.

“Touch me,” I said, “and I will kill everyone in this room.”

“Hm,” said the Magistrate. “Alcebios.”

Her teeth grew into knives, stabbing through her lips. Every light in the room began to bleed. It dripped down the walls. I felt the wound in my back reopen—steel scraping over bone, tugging through my flesh—I felt claws scrabbling all over my skin, heading for my eyes.

I realized with horror that one side of my face was starting to slough off—the side I’d replaced with the translated matter of a dead man.

Yeah, fuck this.

“I’ll be back,” I croaked, then threw myself under the cloak, reaching desperately for the inner stillness that would let me avoid Alcebios’s attention.

I cannot describe the utter horror that was the bloody fingers of a god pawing through etherspace, searching for me. For me. I cursed the Magistrate for saying that fucking name, and Erid for telling her about it, and Val for how, how godflaming awkward my cloak felt to use now. I hobbled toward the door as the room dissolved into worried chatter. The blood all over the room seemed to fade in and out with each step.

No one was screaming. That probably meant the horror show the Magistrate had spoken into existence was all in my head. That didn’t make it any less fucking creepy to hear my boots going shplorp through an inch and a half of what I somehow knew to be my own blood.

“Your excellency,” Pellonine said in a strangled tone, “you had no way of knowing what would happen if you said that.”

“Didn’t I?” the Magistrate replied, seemingly ignorant of the shredding blades portruding from her mouth, slashing her face with each syllable. “She seemed afraid that Erid would name the Stranger. Erid knows about the last incident, and she does not strike me as a suicidal woman. Would you rather I gamble on the creature from legend that was threatening to kill us all?”

“Gambling on the Stranger’s attention was a gutsy call,” said an older woman among the scribes. “We’ve already got Horcutio’s attention, may he turn his gaze away.”

“Quite, Eledameres,” the Magistrate said. “I have found that the affairs of the heavens are quite above our meager station, and it is meet to await their resolution with open-minded piety.”

I winced as a particularly lurching step set my insides sloshing. “Was that just the politics version of ‘let them fight,’ or am I imagining things?”

“What a marvelous opponent,” Val said, sounding quite happy about it.

“She said she had contacts on the island,” Erid interrupted. “One of them helped hide us from Horcutio’s harbinger on the way here.”

“Ah. I shall exfiltrate.”

“Back at the ship,” the commander ordered. “Both of you. Now.”

*

The commander was perfectly professional when we arrived, which is how I knew we were in deep shit. We stood at attention in the ship’s lounge, the commander staring both of us down with searching blue eyes. He had both hands in the pockets of his hakmir.

“Operative Lilith,” he said. “You cut comms contact with the team’s social officer during an emergency situation.”

“I couldn’t deal with him right then,” I said.

“I do not care,” the commander said. “Markus prefers a light touch, but he has medical authority over everyone on this ship. If he orders you to flash, that’s it. End of discussion. Pre-emptively muting him to avoid that order would be grounds for a dereliction charge, if he’d seen fit to give it. As things stand, I’m only issuing you a demerit for use of nonsecular language.”

I furrowed my brow. “Wait, what?”

“I believe the phrase was ‘god damn it,’” Aulof said, handling the words like some sort of dead rodent. “You’ve been warned about this, Lilith. Which god were you habitually invoking on an already complicated mission?”

“Look, it’s just a thing people say!” I said. “It doesn’t mean anything!”

“You’re a Velean, Lilith,” Aulof said with a hint of exasperation. “And a godslayer besides! You do not have the luxury of thinking that way! Every word has a meaning! Every act has a consequence! When you fail to control yourself, people will die.”

I felt heat in my chest and pressure in my throat.

“Like any of you give a shit about that,” I said. “You’re always going on about how everyone here is going to be gone in a couple centuries anyways.”

Aulof narrowed his eyes. “What’s going to happen to Dal Salim as a result of tonight’s disaster?”

My eyes went wide. “Shit. I have to—”

“Markus is already retrieving him,” he cut me off. “And by Eifni’s bleeding anus, Lilith, take him off mute!”

I glowered and started to say something, but Val cleared his throat.

Right. Things probably only got worse for me if I went down that road.

“You hurt his feelings,” Aulof added, which took the wind out of my sails completely.

I unmuted Markus.

“Hey, big guy,” I said ashamedly.

“Hey Lils,” he said gently. “Rough day, huh?”

I choked back a sob. “Yeah. Thanks for taking care of Dal Salim for me.”

“Mission-critical assets and all that,” he said with with the etheric equivalent of a wink. An American wink, I mean.

Meanwhile, it seemed Val’s little deflection had earned him the commander’s full attention. Aulof seemed to brace himself, as if for a fight.

“You,” said Aulof.

Val merely inclined his head, staring straight forward rather than meeting the commander’s eyes. Aulof sighed.

“How many times do I have to tell you, Val? You are not godflaming subtle.”

“Yes, sir,” he said.

“It is no secret to anyone that you think you are the smartest person in the room. We put up with it because we love you, and we love you because you are suspiciously careful to keep your antisocial behaviors within tolerances. Something tells me if that if I charted everything out, I’d discover that you’ve managed to stay just below everyone’s Eichmann-Tanif quotients, despite not having access to personnel files.”

“Natural talent, sir.”

The commander pursed his lips. “You’re an asshole savant, Val.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I understand that you’re going to hide behind the fig leaf of offering suggestions. But you just offered a suggestion calculated to appeal to Lilith’s fears in a vulnerable moment. Now she’s gone and torn up her already wounded body by trying to pilot a combat exoskeleton like it was a pylon harness.“

“I feel fine,” I interjected.

“You have a compound fracture,” the commander snapped.

I looked down to see my leg bending in a way it wasn’t supposed to.

“Oh.”

I threw up.

The commander ignored me and turned back to Val. “This is part of a pattern of manipulative behavior directed toward the primary field agent of a deicide operation. I could crypt you on those grounds. Give me a reason not to.”

The corner of Val’s mouth twitched up. “Because you won’t. At least not until the next operation.”

The commander narrowed his eyes, gesturing for him to continue.

“We were too busy dissecting Kives’s motives to draw inferences about other aspects of this mission,” Val said. “Where did she learn about the Luchenko Process? It’s possible that she stumbled on it blindly, as it’s modeled on ideological shifts in history. But I believe this speaks to a broader pattern. Kives’s communication is asynchronous. We have thus far operated under the assumption that it is asynchronous on her end and synchronous on ours—that is, Kives performs communication actions at arbitrary points on the timeline, such that they resolve to, essentially, a synchronous conversation. I now believe this assumption to be false; there’s a different moirological model operating under that assumption set.”

“That’s a minority view, isn’t it?” the commander asked neutrally.

“Of course,” Val said. “Obviously, if a communication action’s intended meaning is inaccessible except at a particular point in time, that renders the behavioral hermeneutics untenably complex. There’s no programmatic way to prove you’ve successfully interpreted the signal. Semantic derivations take a sign S and an etheric context C. You can do semantic calculus over multiple contexts C sub one, C sub two, and so on, but over the course of a lifetime? That’s an infinite series of arbitrary semantic permutations, each of which recursively includes all information from all previous calculations.”

“Obviously,” I said, nauseously hypnotized by the sight of my broken leg.

“I have Dal Salim,” Markus said. “We’re going to find a safehouse.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“Also, Lilith, he’s saying moirologists assume that Kives’s actions should be interpreted as meaning something when they happen and not later, because ‘later’ could happen at any time and that means you have to calculate the meaning for all possible times.”

“Oh,” I said. “Uh, guys, I should probably go to med bay.”

The commander shot my leg a glance. “You’ll keep. Val’s our best medical technician, and I am not letting him touch you until I’ve determined whether we can trust him. Get to the point, Val. Lilith needs treatment.”

“Fine.” Val stared off into space, as if reading a giant encyclopedia page on the wall. “I suspected something was up after Kives made a point of subverting our expectations about her use of lethal force. That produced Erid and her ship of pirate hunters, who are now a critical asset in a Luchenko operation. The fact that Kives knows the Luchenko process either proves that we continue working together after this operation or it demonstrates overlap between our methods. Perhaps both.”

The commander frowned. “Or another team survived, and they’re using it.”

“In which case, she’s cooperating with them,” Val said. “She would need to see the process through to its end to have knowledge of it now. Other instances of coincidence—we have encountered specific assets in the form of Roel, Cades, and Dal Salim, whose circumstances and personalities lent themselves to the successful conclusion of the mission. I believe Kives’s behavior is intended to provide both material assistance and the assurance of cooperation to our cause.”

He finally met the commander’s glare. Something unspoken passed between them, something bearing the weight of their centennial history together.

“I am leaning,” the commander said, tension on his face, “toward the conclusion that you are indoctrinated.”

“I am proposing the opposite,” Val said calmly. “I believe that we now have the opportunity for, and will eventually accomplish the indoctrination of Kives.”

The commander’s hand was on his pistol. “Please, do explain how that helps us kill her.”

“Ah,” Val said. There was mild regret in his tone. “About that.”