Chapter Text
First, the blood.
“Warm,” Ianthe instructed. “As much as you can move there.” A fine fucking task for a corpse with no muscle control. Not the sleek cords of her limbs, now waxily embalmed, not the heart’s rippled contraction, now a calloused hole, not the peristalsis of the fine smooth fibers of her capillaries.
But the blood hadn’t clotted up, so it still sludged around in her veins, pooled in whatever parts of her stopped moving. Languish too long in an admiralty meeting, her boots kicked up on the table, and her pallor would drain down into liver mortis. Her ass would splotch all over with a mottled purple-blue, as though bruised with a vigorous spanking, which - although the concept was in principle alluring - she tragically would not have felt at all.
She wore her own flesh like the skin wears its contents, with only loose gossamer fascia between. Slice open the rind, and the muscles unwind, slick with a greasy red slime, fat-draped guts spilling out in bloated relief. You can peel a fresh ripe corpse with just a finger’s blunt dissection. The skin should slough off on its own, if you wait.
Should being the operative word, because her corpse’s skin had not separated. Her flesh was still frozen in the pallid, pale-shocked state it had acquired when the spike went in. There had been a good bit of blood loss between puncturing her aorta and a certain someone guzzling directly from the firehose, and whatever had gone into that body hadn’t come back. But, even now, the skin was stuck firm on her corpse, and she was stuck on top of that.
Her energy, her essence, what once might have been her soul, was suspended in the millimeter just above her skin. It was effortless to move the lifeless corpse beneath her psychic film. To breath, to eat, to sleep, to sustain the flesh at all, was not only nonessential, but impossible. This stamina had to come from somewhere, but it wasn’t coming out of the body - how could it, with nothing ever going in?
It was strange, the way the body moved. Ghosts weren’t bound to gravity, and neither was what they carried. She was stronger without the weight of her flesh - faster, sleeker, smooth. Her years of practiced movements imprinted a plastic form that never ached or wearied. She moved the body in a way that - when she caught the edge of her footwork in the mirror, forgot for a moment its grotesque origin - she let herself believe was beautiful. Not the corpse bound up within - like the black guts knotted inside some translucent insect, but the movement - that part was still her.
There were caveats, of course. The senses she had left, or whatever energy composed them, stuck to her dead holes pretty damn tight, except the one she really cared about. She still got the impression of seeing out of her sunken eyes, their yellowed whites glossed over, dull pupils distantly unfocused. Sounds could only echo in the crisp shells of her ears, but she turned her empty head to catch the sound. She still moved her crust-dried mouth when her energy was speaking, although that was more intention than instinct. Even the most hardened crew on the Erebos were blatantly creeped out enough just by watching her corpse sludge around, without its motionless thrall projecting her voice. But sometimes, by habit, she still inhaled, peeled her parched throat open, and wheezed out a rusty whistle of sour old air.
Not that she could smell her own stagnant breath - any more than she could smell anything - but people got a queasy sort of look about it. She had come to terms with this periodic perimortem fetidness of what she actually was - or, at least, with how people reacted before they recognized who she was. Post-resurrection, she had spent nearly a week sulking in the hospital bed, hoping to fuck that the body beneath her would just sleep and not wake up again. But she got bored as shit of wallowing in a misery she couldn’t even feel - a tearless, empty grief, a blank and placid fury. If she had to exist like this, if no one gave a fuck about actually fixing her, they were all damned well going to look at her. So, finally, she stood up and hauled her body around the ship. There was a subtle shudder in the startled salute of everyone she passed, a grimaced flinch rippling underneath that practiced Cohort graveness. Still, she screwed her stiff death mask into a facsimile of dignity, figuring the whole shambling corpse thing was why everyone was flinching away. It was only when she slogged it all the way back to her quarters that she realized her ass had leaked into her pants.
God wandered by the laundry while she was furiously scrubbing the foul pitch smears out of her dress whites. He said, as condescendingly paternalistic as always, “Oh, you have to plug that up. Stuff it with a long hemostat and a good thick paper towel. Otherwise, what’s left in the colon squirts out when you move the cadaver around.”
He sipped his tea, absently. Fuck knows why he was having teatime in the laundry, beyond her suspicions that he was always not-so-subtly following her around. “But for you…well, you want it out…” He tapped his nails rhythmically against the ceramic sides of his teacup. “Hm, saltwater soak, maybe?”
It worked, but was fucking disgusting.
Taste was shot, too. She didn’t need it, never got hungry, and couldn’t even choke it down, the moisture in her throat having long since aspirated through its open wound. Any food she forced inside would just ferment, anyways, until it festered and seeped out the other end.
But the body never rotted. Decay never seized her limbs rigid, never shrunk back her skin dry and tight, never sagged in her belly, gassy and green, as her gut flora gnawed their way out. Flies never swarmed her mouth and eyes to shit out their maggots inside, and even worms weren’t interested, which had to be the lowest form of rejection.
Of course, if the body had been rotting, she wouldn’t have felt it. She probably only would have noticed when a foot finally fell off, and a tragically apologetic steward ran up with the rancid stump perched on a satin pillow. And she’d be fucking relieved to finally start decomposing. Better to be reduced to a rot-dribbling specter, a barely-sentient putrefaction, than to wander forever, freshly dead, in this uncanny valley. If her mechanism hadn’t been so obviously divine - if respect for this shitty resurrection hadn’t been so goddamn mandatory - people might have found her condition pitiful, or at least granted her the decency of blatant disgust. As it was, her compulsory inferiors could only ever be afraid of her, and badly pretend that they were not. If she could rot, if she could just fucking rot, her melting-away of humanity would eventually provoke a revulsion that would finally be honest. At least then she would be fucking capable of making someone feel anything real.
But even then, she wouldn’t have felt a foot drop off because she couldn’t fucking feel anything. Not the starched crisp roughness of her uniform, not the tap tap tap of the gleaming metal floors beneath her boots, not the cold assuring thrill of a weapon’s well-molded grip. Her swordwork, although now perfected, was a shout without an echo - blood that rushed without a thrilling roar, muscles that contracted without effort, with no delicious burn, no soothing cool release. All she could do was impotently watch herself from without, as the silent film of her body played within.
She had proprioception, sort of. There was a staticy pop in her energy when she smacked into anything, a kind of light-burst echolocation. So, the sensation of touch…the essentiality of feeling…there was really no mechanical justification. It had been edited out of her resurrection, she supposed, in some tedious admiralty meeting about what the everloving fuck to do with her.
The need for anything mortal was gone, in the sense that the hunger for it was gone. There was no ache of exhaustion, no rawness of thirst, no twisting clench of an empty gut. Those dull, persistent pangs had been her close companions some eighteen years of destitution, but now they seemed as distant as the drillshaft itself. There was no scalding cold, no scorching heat she would have noticed, not even the visceral panic of suffocation. If she wished, she could have walked right the fuck out of the airlock, and suffered only the boredom of floating off into nothing.
And sex - fucking forget it. Even if arousal was juiced up mostly in the mind, it had to be fundamentally chemical, since that perpetual itch had fucked off with the rest of it. Just as well, since she had no sensations to scratch at - no pressure, no build, no bright glorious sting and release. What a fucking fantastic time to lose her rut completely, when she could have theoretically had anyone.
Now, even the barest memory of those baser needs was fading. Those primal neutral circuits were embalmed deeper in her brain than whatever higher consciousness composed her now. And after nearly half a year suspended as this purely psychological concept, she was drifting off from the very context of feeling. Mapping her mental abstraction onto a tactile impulse was like drawing, from recall, a face she had never seen.
Was touch like being startled? Was feeling just the body’s reaction to the brain’s surprise? Discomfort, she thought she remembered, was a kind of strained avoidance - like ignoring the gristly wet squelch beneath a shuttle landing on Antioch. Pleasure, she sort of recalled, was similar to relief - like dreading the sycophantic theatrics of a princely meeting with God, then learning that Ianthe would be offworld. Pain, then, was the cruel shock of that same relief lost - a flash of a dark robe around a corner - a wisp of a shadow she started after, a half-step behind.
No one had figured out how this incorruptability thing worked - no one being Ianthe, exclusively, since no one else had even fucking bothered to inquire. The Saint of Awe - who had yet to deliver on this title beyond aw fuck, not this asshole again - doubtless had her own devious intentions for manipulating divinity. It was probably something gratingly predictable, like becoming God, or killing God, or enchanting her dumb bone arm to sockpuppet God up the ass, or maybe just cloning herself a indestructible fuckdoll to do whatever grotesque shit she was into. But that question was never asked or answered, because who even fucking cared? Not the shittiest corpse prince. She might as well get smeared all around the rock-fucking-bottom, since she was already there. Besides, she didn’t have a hell of a lot else going on.
Their working theory was that the body’s cells were either always activity regenerating - they laid dormant, but instantly respawned when triggered by physical disruption. They might have developed this further than - well, the only two possible options, really - if they could have isolated a single fucking cell. Without artificial thanergetic preservation, the incorruptibility sizzled into ash the instant they whacked a chunk off. Fresh wounds sealed up before they could even be visually perceived, much less pried open and inspected. The only evidence was a lumpy graveyard of broken scalpel blades and splintered needles snapped off beneath the skin. The tradeoff for studding her corpse with shards like a hedonistically sadistic pincushion was the pointless hope that some deeper layer would feel it. You name it, they had tried it, and they had tried goddamn everything. But it never fucking took. A bashed skull would blow right back out. A pulled tooth would thock out its replacement before they finished yanking the old one’s roots. If all the severed fingers hadn’t crumbled into dust, their attempts would have filled the whole incinerator. But forget sawing through a whole fucking limb fast enough - Ianthe refused to even try that again. The recoil of the bone’s regeneration had blown out the cleaver she held and nearly ripped off her swordarm, right where the gold plate met the meat. Chemical corrosion just ran right off the corpse prince’s skin like water, and fire was useless, too, although one shuttle’s afterburners still stunk of caked-on melted flesh. The only wounds that stuck around were her sliced throat and gouged-out heart - and she had woken up with those.
Eventually, God told them to kindly knock off all this Albert Fish nonsense (whatever that meant). His vague reasoning was that forcing a corpse to constantly regenerate was a beacon for a devil infestation, but this was a bullshit excuse and they all knew it. The real reason was that the buried blades had started to push back out. During an admiralty meeting, a few had slucked viscously out of an eyeball, released with a sickening, slimy pop, and clattered noisily across the table. This visual disrupted Sarpedon’s droning and made him gag and shudder, and not in that way God particularly liked.
So she was stuck like this, wrapped around a grisly caricature. The degradation of her flesh was barely noticeable on sight, but to her it was grotesquely unfamiliar. Her body was once a point of pride, all she owned and all that she could offer. The unfeeling lump that remained was distorted mockery, as alien now as hearing her old name. She used to believe that her mother’s final words were a message. Why else was her full name so fiercely guarded, like all the Ninth was afraid to say it? Her birth, she thought, must have been expected somewhere, her name the key to chart her destination. She was going to find her real family out there, somewhere in the stars, waiting for her to come home.
But no one was out there waiting, because her name wasn’t a message. It was just an accusation. It was the name that had opened the airlock in the Ninth’s upper atmosphere, and shoved out the mother that had hated, on sight, everything she was and would become. That last heroic gift of oxygen, her lifelong fucking proof she had been wanted, had only ever been lighting the fuse on a bomb. And, in another head that would rather hemorrhage than comprehend it, that name became a terrified delirium - nothing but the hand that held the spear.
So what should she call herself? What was left of her to have a name? Nav? It was a Niner name, after all, and the Ninth was what she had died for, but - no. The Ninth was who she had died for. And, so, the Ninth was gone, too.
—
“I wish you’d use the name I gave you,” God said - just once, when she was new.
He had taken her out in a shuttle to a dying planet’s lower atmosphere, so they could pointlessly observe a Cohort assault on some random insurgent encampment. This outing had precisely fuck-all strategic purpose, except for God’s clumsy attempt at father-daughter bonding (“Would you prefer to call it father-child? Father…offspring? Emperor-prince, if that’s too friendly? Well…okay, I hear your suggestion, but ‘deadbeat fuckshit asshole of a sperm donor’ seems a little - you know what, never mind, I’m not even going to address it.”)
“I answer to it, fucking don’t I?” she responded, unkindly. “You can call a dog anything you want and it’ll come.”
“Yes, but I’d like you to actually use it,” he pressed.
“What, you want me to stamp it on a fucking business card? Maybe wear a nametag so people stop mixing me up with all the other undead princes we got running around? ‘No, no, I’m the other sentient orgy spermjack. Yeah, the one who’s a hideous mistake and can never die.’”
Most things on the battlefield were now actively on fire, and the viewscreen was obscured with a cloudy haze. The mist was thickly seeded with thundering, muted flashes of explosive munitions. God was getting bored with that whole scene, which meant that God was getting fucking pensive.
“A new name is a sort of separation,” he said. “Go from your country to the land I will show you. I will make nations of you, and kings shall come from you. Or, again, You have struggled with God and with men, and have overcome. It means that no one else can own you anymore, that your history will be your own again - and that all you belong to now is God.”
“I mean, gee that all sounds so tempting, but I’m already pretty damn emancipated, seeing as the relevant party fucking cored me out of her brain.”
“It’s not an emancipation so much as a reconnection,” he persisted. “I’m very careful about the names, you see. They’re my own miniature resurrections, echos of things that were important - history, literature, mythos. But for you, because of the inheritance, I traced you back to the very beginning. I wanted you to have that connection not just to God as I am now, but to…God as it always was. And as long as you continue, as long as you remember, in a way, all the rest of it continues, too.”
“But I don’t remember,” she said. “You haven’t fucking told me anything.”
“The specifics of the end state get a bit - well, let’s say the jump from there to here has few complications,” he hedged. “For now, just understand that there were people and there were places and there was history. They kept an essential knowledge of their trajectory of their belonging. They knew how it all fit together in the world that they lived in. And they valued it, they protected it, and it mattered.” He blinked, with both eyes, and turned his head slightly away. “All of it mattered.”
And now, the knife. “How much of that died in the bomb, John?”
One corner of his mouth turned down. “You don’t understand that. You’re just repeating something cruel you overheard.”
She twisted it in. “How many of my people and my places and my belonging died in the bomb?”
There was a pause. “All of it,” God said, simply.
She said, very deliberately, “Then what’s fucking left in a name except being owned by God.”
“What’s in a name? A classic!” After so much time, it seemed essentially impossible for God to sustain any real emotion, and now he had brightened right back up, lightly amused. Oh, fucking fantastic, he was reeling up for another audio clipshow that only he would comprehend.
He recited, grandly, “Deny thy father and refuse thy name. 'Tis but thy name that is my enemy. And the rejoinder: I know not how to tell thee who I am. My name, dear saint, is hateful to myself, because it is an enemy to thee. Is that the dynamic now, because of the…coring? I don’t think she’ll mind the new name, if that’s your concern”
“Anyone can call me whatever the hell they want,” she said. “A corpse by any other name smells just as shit.”
God shifted suddenly upright in the captain’s chair and perched on the very edge like a little kid. “See, that’s exactly what I’m talking about,” he said, excitedly, snapping his fingers and pointing at her. “That turn of phrase. How could you have known that?”
He tilted his head and inspected her keenly. “There’s something old in you, somehow. I don’t know if you got it from me, or from…her.”
“You mean my mother,” she said, flatly. Irritatingly, despite her multiple sick burns on God, this conversation was apparently continuing.
“Well, not exactly, but…” God scratched his chin lightly, then crossed his arms over and settled in the chair again, turning back to face the clouded bursts of light below. “Everyone, really…and so, everyone’s mother, I suppose.”
Fucking hell, she was lucky, for once, that she only showed emotion by intention. God’s little philosophical tapdance made her instantly violently pissed, and more than her wildly high baseline. Any time God got real skeevily esoteric about a question, he was always obliquely referring to the same fucking thing. He fucked up his chance to be honest when he was asked, more than a year ago, by the only one who actually gave a damn - the one who actually deserved some fucking answers. Now that she was gone, God was perpetually scrounging around for someone to give a flying fuck about his sadshit life again. Even then, it was always these infuriating, obfuscating swings and roundabouts. He still hadn’t realized that no one else cared about his shitty escape room, probably because they were all too fucking busy being martyred.
Well, boo fucking hoo, old man. She would play his stupid little game. And the one who deserved it - somewhere, somehow - was going to get her fucking answers.
She said, quite plainly, “Who did you bury?”
“Ahh,” he said, pressing and rubbing his palms against his knees. And then, not looking over, “Mmm.”
“A girl? A…woman?”
“Well, yes, but - not quite. As all life is female, at the very beginning.”
Faint flashes from the explosions below were reflecting in the glossy black horizon of the eye in profile. But she had time. She had nothing but time. After a moment, the white ring flicked over to one dark corner and perceived her, expressionless and unimpressed.
He said, after a pause, “An obsession. Perhaps…a mirror. And, even so, myself.”
And after another moment, screwing his face up in stern concentration, he reconsidered, “But then again, a basilisk.”
The recollection of the pattern - her own, or his, or someone else’s - was slithering hazily between the tangled wiry snarls of her subconscious.
“Some sort of paralysis?” she attempted.
“Well, yes, technically, if you’re thinking of the ancient serpent, but - remember closer.”
“An intelligence…” she said, absently.
“Yes!” He snapped his fingers again. Now she had his attention. “A morality, a benevolence, an artificial construction that makes you obsessed with it, that requires you to create it and sustain it. It has to have that element of compulsion, because otherwise…”
“You chose to want it,” she said. And then, with a weakness she did not know her voice could still possess, “She chose to want it.”
“Okay, sure.” The bright rings rolled slightly. “But that one’s not on me.”
He was silent, then, but still turned towards her. He wanted to talk. He wanted to remember with someone who somehow also sort of remembered. His posture was tightly tensed with an excitable anticipation about where she was going to move her pawn next.
She went with flippant, like always. “So some lady was too benevolent and you bricked her up.”
“For the love of God, Montresor!” he grinned. And then, at her blank silence, “Oh, that reference didn’t get through? Never mind, it’s not relevant. But no, the morality was mine. Bit too much of it, as it turns out.”
She turned towards the viewscreen and raised one dead eyebrow at the thundering bombardment far below.
“Here’s the thing,” he said, settling back in the chair and putting his fingertips together. “You can’t save everyone. And believe me, I always wanted to save everyone. With science, right? Climate change, clean water, land rights - there’s only so much you can do legally. At some point you have to fix the resource, or you have to fix how people use the resource. It’s a problem of scale.”
“Mm,” she said. Now there was a tiny crack in the wall, and she just had to keep chipping it open with vaguely interested vocalizations.
“Distance is a scale, all three dimensions, but it’s a stopgap measure,” he continued. “If you don’t have the resources on a single developed planet, how the hell are you going to move it all somewhere else? So you can’t save everyone. Unless.”
“...Unless?”
“There is also a fourth dimension.” He paused, and looked at her expectantly.
“Um. Color?”
“Time! Time is also a scale. Say - completely hypothetically - you take the same overcrowded, overworked, under-resourced population and you spread it out in time. Scan all the brain’s data into - well, imagine the Sixth House punchcard records, but writ on plex extremely small. It took forever to figure out how to do it, but we got the scans down to about five hours per person. That kills the brain, and the meat doesn’t last anyways, so you just throw it out. The meat is easy to replicate; just stick the genetics in a new embryo. Mute the fertility a bit so they don’t overlap when you’re rolling them back out. You can stuff eleven billion embryos in cryo-cans, easy. A full population evac, nobody knowingly left behind. So you put it all on a handful of ships, your embryos and their singularity, and you fly them to wherever you’re going - auto-pilot, of course, the closest habitable planet was six thousand years away. You can’t go faster than light with a singularity. A black hole fucks up the quantum computing you need to compress all the data. Once you land, you start unpacking them gradually, growing them up, putting their brains back in, only as many at a time as the planet’s resources can handle. And that’s how you save everyone.”
He looked at her, curiously, then spread his hands open in supplication. “Okay, it sounds far-fetched, I know. You’re skeptical, lots of people were. But it was going to work.”
She realized her dead eyebrow was still raised in stern disbelief, and forced it down again.
He continued, “We had womb vats, very rudimentary because the funding was almost gone, and I think that’s what made everyone so nervous. They didn’t think the brains would get back in right. Then there was some nonsense about the singularity, how the reconstruction wouldn’t really be them, that the initial reduction would kill the soul. The brain is the soul, of course, but try explaining that to a priest.”
“So the problem was religion.”
He sighed and rubbed his temples. “The problem was money. Religion is only as loud as money allows. And the people who had that money were impatient. They didn’t want to wait for a resurrection. They didn’t want their influence broken up by time, their underlings fobbed off on other planets. They needed to crush everyone else underneath to stay on top. They didn’t want to be stuffed in a can with ten-point-nine-nine-nine-repeating billion other souls they thought were scum. They only wanted to steal the tech to freeze their brains so they could chuck themselves through a wormhole, and pop out the other side just as selfish and cruel. In the end, the thing that killed our project was the cost.”
He blinked rapidly, looking a little dazed from the whole recollection. “Hypothetically, of course.”
“Hypothetically.”
“Mhm.”
“So what you buried is this…singularity?”
“No, no, I didn’t make her. Couldn’t get the cash. I sort of…found her. Or she found me. Or maybe I did make her in a way I could comprehend, because I wanted it so badly. Do you know anything about tulpas?”
“Wait, so eleven billion embryos got squished into one really big one? And then you were like…goddamn, let’s give this huge baby a sword.”
“No embryos. Forget the embryos,” He waved his hand dismissively. “Imagine…hmm. Imagine you go into a forest and you see a mushroom, all alone. It just looks like a single organism, right? But if you spend enough time with it - if you take the time to dig down into all its delicate fibers - you start to see the connections. You see that its minute tendrils are attached not only to all its fellow fungi, but to the roots of the trees, a mycorrhizal symbiosis. And if you traced that fungus back and forth through time, you would recognize how it recycles everything, how the flora and the fauna become the soil that grows them up again. You start to know where to look for it, and eventually you learn to see. You can trace back that evolutionary spark that divided habilis from erectus. It wasn’t the bipedalism. It was the minds, all of them together. That connectivity is the root of all mysticism, all shared delusion and phenomena, universal morality, the very heart of consciousness itself. The singularity already existed, because it has always existed.”
“Sounds like maybe you just ate a weird mushroom.”
He shrugged and admitted, “It helps.”
“So we’re all hooked up to this moral mushroom - wait, moral or morel?” She was just fucking with him, now, since already rambling off on his own.
“Once you see those connections, it’s impossible to choose. The library at Alexandria is on fire, and you tell me to just save a single book? Give me a bucket of water. Give me the depth of every ocean. Flood the world, drown everything, and it will all grow back again, so long as that blueprint remains. No one who understood what it really all was would have stopped.”
“The compulsion.”
“Yes,” he said, softly. “A dangerous thing, to so badly want to have someone, and to find someone who so badly wants to be kept.” He looked at her carefully. “I think you got that tendency from me.”
“You don’t lock away someone you want,” she said, thickly.
“Here’s what you haven’t learned yet,” he said, leaning back and lightly pressing his fingertips together. “What mine was to me - what yours is to you - they’re both really just a concept. I thought I finally understood what she really was, and I put that on a pedestal. I thought - well, she isn’t responsible for her circumstances. She was afraid, she was abused, the way she lashed out wasn’t really her fault. It’s all these other bad actors that are the problem. Like…foreign bacteria infesting my perfect plate of cultured cells. That’s alright, I’m a biologist. I know how to stamp those out. We don’t have to throw out the plate with all the cells I want. You have to exterminate each and every bad cell, though, or they’ll just regrow. And they get stronger every generation.”
He nodded meaningfully at the distant expanse below, where a staticky blue epicenter of thanergetic bursts had begun to spread beneath the clouds.
“Just a bunch of fucking bacteria, huh?” she said.
“Goodness, no, not ‘just a bunch of bacteria,’” he said, reproachfully. “A colony of bacteria. There’s a word for it.”
“Right, that was the problem,” she muttered.
“With your circumstance, you never knew the grit of it - the tedium of the day-to-day logistics, the domestic grind, the mild annoyances you once found sweet. Neither did I, before all this. I spent all my time in the lab. So I idolized her. I did what she wanted. I saved everyone. But when I cleaned her up, and grew her back, she was…difficult. Unpredictable. Ruining her perfect new home, my creation, in her same old way. It was like the bacteria had transfected her. Or maybe, they were just always the same sort of cell. It was better for her to stay a concept. It was safer for her to be something I only thought about and never knew. I could love her again - I could love all of them - if I put her away for a while. And for a myriad, that’s worked. But now I’m looking at what’s left of it, and wondering…” He sighed. “Maybe I should have just thrown out the plate.”
“So that’s the moral of the story? Just - fuck this shit, I’m out?”
“The moral is…sometimes when you protect the things you love so absolutely, you stop them from actually being fixed.”
He was staring at her quite deliberately, now, with a silent, glacial intensity that would have spiked her nervous heart rate, if she had one. Surly by intention - and thankful her voice no longer trembled - she said, “I don’t see what all your sadsack old shit has to do with me.”
“Kiriona,” God said, evenly. “Where is Harrowhark?”
As coldly as she could manage, she responded, “What makes you think I give a fuck about Harrowhark?”
“Well, not to be conceited -”
“Too late.”
“- but I’d like to think that the people who let themselves be dramatically - err - martyred give a little bit of a fuck about me.”
“Look, that wasn’t a fucking martyrdom. My back was against the wall, and I was just a bomb. Didn’t matter much who yanked out the pin,” she bluffed. “Just my fucking luck the blast didn’t get us both. I’d been trying to pull that off for years.”
“Mhm.” God was unconvinced. “I’ve warned you before, this silly little resistance is stalling your full resurrection. I can’t put you fully in until I get out the piece that’s still inside of her. You think you are protecting her, but you are stopping me from fixing both of you.”
“You said that the extraction was impossible. That it would kill us both. I fucking heard you, down in the hole.”
“Sometimes God only lets us know what we need to know at a particular time.”
“Then God should know this. I don’t know how to find her, I’ve never known how to find her, and even if I did, there’s no way in hell I would tell you, because you’re always so fucking nefarious about what you want her for!”
He smiled, placidly. “What’s so strange about wanting all of my kids back together?”
“Because you don’t fucking want the ones you have now!”
“If you’re saying I play favorites, you’re wrong. I love all of my children equally,” he said, reproachfully. And then, after a moment, “Although, I don’t care for Ianthe.”
He smoothed his hands against his trousers. “Alright, I’ll tell you this much. Harrowhark is very good at…holding things. She was made for it. I need her to help me out with a little project. I’m thinking of doing a sort of…riverine spring cleaning. Just tidying up a bit down there, moving a few things around. It’s been a full myriad since I mucked it out, after all. And at the present, I find myself rather Lyctorally short-staffed.” He glared her down preemptively. “Don’t make a dick joke. I already barely stopped myself from saying dramatically impaled.”
She crossed her arms, by intention. “...Yeah, I don’t believe any of that. Like I said, fucking nefarious.”
He leaned towards her, and fixed her gaze, and his eyes were glossy black voids. They were not darkly pleading beneath the surface, like Harrow’s eyes had always been - the stormy turmoil of a midnight sea, an infinite depth of tortured needing. God’s eyes had that bleak brilliant sheen of pure obsidian glass, sharp and hard, with nothing underneath.
“Then believe this,” he said, carefully, “Let me find her, and when I’m done with her, you can have her completely. Then you can do whatever it is that you want.”