The bunk was comfortable enough.
That was a low bar, technically. Lilith had slept on orphanage beds for months and before that an escape pod and before that a glass tube, so her reference points for comfortable were not particularly demanding. But the bunk was fine. The ship hummed around her with the steady deep rhythm of engines working far below, and the quarters were quiet, and she was tired in the particular way of someone who had been carrying a significant emotional weight since early morning and had only just set it down.
She closed her eyes.
Rest, she told herself. Eve and Lysander are fine. They're exploring. Nothing is on fire. Nothing is currently trying to kill anyone. Rest.
She breathed slowly.
The ship hummed.
She was somewhere between awake and not when she heard it.
Not a whisper. Not the quiet, close voice she'd heard before — the one that had warned her about the Changelings, the one that had told her Lysander was outside during the Ork attack. That voice had always been careful. Deliberate. Whatever it was, it had always felt like something leaning in to tell her something it wanted her to know.
This was different.
This was a sound that came from somewhere that did not have a location. Low and resonant and wrong in a way that bypassed the ears and registered somewhere older than hearing. Like breathing. Like something very large breathing very close, close enough that she should have been able to feel the heat of it, except there was no heat. Just the sound, and the wrongness of it, and the immediate total animal certainty that something was in the room with her.
Lilith's eyes opened.
The quarters were empty.
Three bunks, a shelf, Lysander's Salamanders book sitting where he'd left it, the metal Sentinel standing guard beside it. The closed shutters. The single low luminator casting its pale flat light across everything.
Nothing.
She sat up slowly.
It was nothing, she told herself. You were half asleep. It was a dream starting early. The ship makes sounds. It's a ship, ships make sounds.
She got off the bunk.
She checked the space between the bunks and the wall. She checked the corner near the door. She checked behind the shelf, which was a small shelf and not capable of concealing anything, but she checked it anyway because her brain needed the confirmation.
Nothing.
She stood in the middle of the room and breathed and felt faintly ridiculous and was about to get back on the bunk when she felt it.
A hand.
On the back of her neck.
Not painful. Not gripping. Just there. The weight and temperature of a hand placed with complete deliberateness on the nape of her neck, and the total immediate certainty that whatever the hand belonged to was standing directly behind her.
The temperature in the room dropped.
Not gradually. Between one breath and the next the air went from the mild recycled warmth of ship quarters to something that had no business existing on a vessel with functioning life support. Cold that had edges to it. Cold that felt intentional.
A voice said, directly beside her ear:
"Why do you carry a fragment of the Emperor's soul?"
Lilith's whole body went very still.
The voice was not loud. That was the thing — it wasn't loud at all, it was almost quiet, but it had a quality to it that made quiet irrelevant. The kind of voice that could have filled the entire ship and chosen not to. Ancient in a way that the word ancient didn't cover. The kind of old that made everything else feel recent by comparison.
"I—" Lilith started. Stopped. Started again. "What are you talking about?"
The hand on her neck didn't move.
"A fragment," the voice said again. Patient. Certain. The certainty of something that had spent a very long time learning to be certain about exactly this kind of thing. "Small. But present. Inside you." A pause that felt geological in its weight. "How."
"I don't know what you mean," Lilith said. Her voice was admirably steady, she thought, for someone whose body temperature had dropped two degrees in the last ten seconds and who had a hand on their neck that belonged to something she couldn't see. "I don't — how could I have — that doesn't make any sense. How could I possibly have something like that?"
Silence.
The hand was still there.
The cold was still there.
Lilith did not move. Some very old and very sensible part of her brain had communicated clearly that moving was not the right response to this particular situation and she was listening to it with complete attention.
Then the hand lifted.
Gone, between one moment and the next. The weight and presence of it simply absent. The cold began pulling back by degrees the way cold did when whatever had been generating it had decided to stop.
"I will be watching you," the voice said. Still quiet. Still carrying that quality she didn't have a word for. "Carefully."
Lilith opened her mouth.
"My venture in the Warp is finished," the voice said. Not quite to her — or not entirely to her. More like something being said aloud that had already been decided. A conclusion spoken into the air, the closing of something that had taken a very long time. "For now."
And then the presence was gone.
Not gradually. Just gone, the way a sound was gone when it stopped. Completely, between one moment and the next, leaving the room exactly as it had been before except for the fact that the room felt different now in a way she couldn't point to directly.
The temperature came back. Slowly, the recycled ship warmth returning. The luminator light was exactly what it had always been. The metal Sentinel stood on the shelf where Lysander had left it. The shutters were closed. Everything was exactly as it had been.
Lilith stood in the middle of the room.
She was breathing harder than she should have been. She noticed this from a slight distance, the way she noticed things when her brain had briefly stepped back from the immediate situation to process it from a safer vantage point. She made a conscious effort to slow it down.
Okay, she thought.
Okay.
She sat on the edge of the bunk. Put both hands on her knees. Looked at the floor between her feet.
A fragment of the Emperor's soul, she thought. That's what it said. Inside me. A small fragment.
She turned this over.
The Emperor of Mankind. The God-Emperor, as the Ecclesiarchy called him. The Master of Mankind, sitting in the Golden Throne for ten thousand years, dead and not dead, sustaining the Astronomican through sheer psychic will. The most powerful human psyker who had ever existed and possibly the most powerful psychic entity in the material universe.
A fragment of that.
Inside her.
That's not possible, she thought. That's categorically not possible. Souls don't fragment and lodge themselves in experimental gene-seed children for no reason. That's not how any of this works. That's not how anything works.
She thought about Naic. I brought you here on a whim. She thought about the golden flames in the medicae ward. She thought about the golden light in the Warp that had filled her with memories of Astartes killing each other. She thought about the woman in the forest temple. She thought about the beach and the gold cup and Lysander coming back.
She thought about the voice just now, and the certainty in it, and the fact that it had asked how rather than whether. Which meant it hadn't been asking if the fragment was there.
It had been asking why.
How could it be, she thought. How could I possibly—
She didn't have an answer.
She sat on the bunk in the quiet ship quarters with the Warp moving silently outside the closed shutters and the luminator casting its pale light across everything, and she turned the question over and over and it kept being the same question from every angle.
A fragment of the Emperor's soul.
Inside me.
How.
The ship hummed around her. The engines ran deep and steady far below. Somewhere in the corridors outside she could hear the faint distant sound of Lysander asking someone an enthusiastic question about something, which meant he was alive and fine and completely unbothered by the universe, which was its own kind of comfort.
Lilith looked at her hands.
She didn't have an answer.
She wasn't sure she was ready for one.