Lilith sat on the bunk for a while longer.
Not thinking. Or trying not to think, which was a different thing entirely and considerably less successful. The question kept arriving whether she invited it or not, turning itself over in her head with the patient persistence of something that knew it wasn't going anywhere.
A fragment of the Emperor's soul.
Inside me.
How.
She pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes and breathed.
Don't, she told herself. Not right now. You don't have enough information to think usefully about this right now, and thinking about it without enough information is just going to be a spiral, and spirals are not helpful, and you have been very good about not spiraling for several months now and this is not the moment to start.
She lowered her hands.
The room was quiet. The ship hummed. The shutters were closed and whatever was outside them was outside them and not, currently, her problem.
Okay, she thought. Practical questions. Practical questions first.
The first practical question was whether to tell Ha'ken.
She sat with this for a moment and approached it from several angles, the way she approached most things she hadn't decided yet.
Ha'ken was trustworthy. She knew this now in the way she knew things she'd had to learn rather than assume — not because she'd always believed it but because she'd tested it, however unintentionally, and it had held. He'd kept his word. He'd been hurt when she'd broken his trust and had told her so honestly rather than just acting on it. He'd knelt in a medicae ward and meant it. He'd said the Emperor protects over a dead boy who had come back and processed it quietly rather than loudly, which was the mark of someone whose faith was real rather than performed.
She could tell him.
But telling him meant telling him why the figure had come to her. And telling him why the figure had come to her meant telling him what the figure had said. And telling him what the figure had said meant telling him she apparently carried a fragment of the Emperor's soul, which was — she couldn't predict what that meant for how he saw her. For how anyone in the Imperium saw her, if it got further than Ha'ken.
The figure didn't tell me to keep it secret, she thought. It didn't seem to care what I did with it. It asked its question and made its statement and left.
That was interesting in itself. Whatever it was, it hadn't felt the need to warn her. Hadn't felt the need to threaten her into silence or instruct her in any direction at all. It had simply done what it came to do and gone.
I'll tell him when we reach Nocturne, she decided. Not on the ship. When we're on the ground and there's time and a proper place, the same way Ha'ken always does things. I'll tell him then.
The decision settled in her chest and the spiral quieted down to a manageable level.
She got off the bunk.
She needed to find someone. She wasn't particular about who — Ha'ken or Eve or Lysander, any of them would do. She just needed to not be alone in a small room with a question she couldn't answer and a cold that had already left but that she could still feel at the back of her neck.
She went out into the corridor.
She found Eve and Lysander first.
They were in a wider corridor two sections forward, standing near a large bronze relief mounted on the wall — an Astartes figure rendered in profile, the detail work precise and old, the Salamanders insignia at the base. Lysander was examining it with the focused intensity of a scholar and the barely contained excitement of a six-year-old, explaining something to Eve in a low rapid voice. Eve was listening with the complete attention she gave things Lysander said, which had become, over the months, a genuinely engaged attention rather than a polite one.
Lilith stopped in the doorway of the corridor and looked at them.
Something in her chest unknotted.
She crossed to them and Eve turned before she was halfway there, because Eve always heard her coming.
She looked at Lilith's face. One quick, thorough look.
Then she moved slightly to one side, making room, and Lilith stepped into the space beside her and let her shoulder rest against Eve's and stayed there.
Lysander was still talking. "—and this one is different from the one in the book because the book shows the cloak going the other way but I think the book might be wrong actually because Sister Mercy said books could have mistakes in them sometimes and—"
"Lysander," Lilith said.
He looked at her. "Are you okay? You look a bit—" He searched for the word. "Thinky."
"I'm fine," Lilith said. "Keep going."
He accepted this immediately and turned back to the relief. "So the cloak goes this way, see, and the flames on the pauldron are—"
Lilith let the sound of his voice settle around her and looked at the bronze relief without really seeing it and breathed slowly and felt the knot in her chest continue to loosen by degrees.
Eve said nothing. She just stayed where she was, shoulder to shoulder, present in the uncomplicated way she was present when she'd assessed that presence was what was needed and nothing else was required.
That was enough.
Time passed differently in the Warp.
Lilith had been warned about this in passing — something Ha'ken had mentioned before they'd boarded the shuttle, practical and brief, the way he delivered information he considered necessary. Time in the Immaterium didn't run at the same rate as time outside it, and the exact differential was never entirely predictable. You entered, you traveled, you exited. The clocks aboard the ship kept their own time, but what that time corresponded to outside was something you found out when you arrived.
In practice what this meant was that the journey had its own rhythm, self-contained, the ship carrying them through something that was not space in any conventional sense while they ate and slept and moved through the corridors and did what people did when they were waiting to arrive somewhere.
Lysander adapted to shipboard life with the speed and enthusiasm he adapted to most things. He learned the names of every crew member he encountered within the first two days, which Lilith suspected was a record. He asked Ha'ken questions at every available opportunity with the focused dedication of someone who had a very long list and was working through it methodically, and Ha'ken answered him with the patient straightforwardness he seemed to extend to all sincere questions regardless of who was asking them.
Eve explored. Quietly, systematically, with the thorough attention she gave to new environments — learning the layout of the ship section by section, noting the crew's routines, understanding the space. Lilith watched her do this and thought that Eve had been built to be a weapon and was becoming something considerably more complicated, and felt something warm about that.
Lilith wrote in her journal.
She wrote about the orphanage, about Sister Marian's lessons, about the things she'd learned and observed and thought about. She wrote about Eve and Lysander with the care of someone documenting something important. She did not write about the figure in the quarters, or the cold, or the question she'd decided to set aside until Nocturne. Some things she was keeping for a specific conversation rather than a page.
She kept her left eye closed around the shutters.
She'd tested it once more, briefly, just to confirm what she'd felt wasn't a fluke. The gold eye saw through the shutters exactly as it had the first time, into the depth of the Warp, and it hurt exactly as quickly. She closed it again and didn't test it a third time. There was no useful information to be gained from repeating the experience, and she had a finite tolerance for that particular kind of pain.
The questions came back at night, when the quarters were dark and quiet and her brain had nothing else to do with itself. She let them come and then she let them sit and she didn't try to answer them, because she didn't have answers yet, and she'd gotten reasonably good at coexisting with questions she couldn't answer yet.
Tell Ha'ken at Nocturne, she reminded herself, on the third night, when it felt louder than usual. That's the plan. Stick to the plan.
She stuck to the plan.
On the fourth day Lysander found a crew member willing to show him the engine deck observation gallery, which was not a dangerous place but was a very loud one, and came back vibrating with so much information about plasma drives that Eve made him sit down and deliver it in organized sections rather than all at once.
On the fifth day Lilith sat with Ha'ken in a small mess room and drank something hot that was allegedly recaf and talked about Nocturne. Not about the figure or the fragment — not yet — but about what to expect. The terrain, the culture of the chapter serfs, what the twins' daily life would look like once they arrived. Ha'ken spoke about it with the particular quality he had when he talked about his home world. Still measured, still Ha'ken, but with something underneath the measure that was unmistakably warmth.
"Is it beautiful?" Lilith asked at one point.
Ha'ken considered the question with the seriousness he gave most questions. "It is dangerous," he said. "The volcanoes, the ashfields, the creatures. It tests everything it touches." A pause. "But yes. It is beautiful."
Lilith thought about that and found it didn't surprise her at all.
On the sixth day Eve asked Lilith to teach her another song. Not the one from the dream — Lilith kept that one private for reasons she couldn't entirely articulate — but something else, something simple, and Lilith taught her a melody she half-remembered from her previous life and half-invented in the spaces where memory failed. Eve learned it with the same careful precision she learned everything, and by the end of the day she could carry it cleanly without prompting.
Lysander asked if he could learn it too.
He was less precise about it but considerably more enthusiastic, and by the end of the second day there was a version of the melody that existed in the corridor outside their quarters whether anyone wanted it to or not.
Lilith found she didn't mind.
On the seventh day the shutters opened.
Not because they were back in realspace — they weren't, not yet. A crew member came through and released them manually, and the reason became apparent immediately: the viewing was part of the exit protocol, a visual confirmation check run before the Navigator brought them through.
The Warp outside was doing what it always did.
Lilith kept her left eye shut and looked at it with her right and found the churning colors as wrong and as present as the first time, and was grateful for the shutter that had been between her and it for the past week.
Then the ship shuddered.
Deep and full-body, felt through the floor and the walls simultaneously, and the colors outside the viewport went away and what replaced them was stars.
Real stars. Fixed and clear and not moving in impossible directions, just stars, doing what stars did, which was exist in places and shine.
Lilith looked at them and felt something she didn't immediately have a word for. Then she found the word.
Relief.
"We're through," Eve said, beside her.
"We're through," Lilith agreed.
Lysander pressed his face against the viewport with both hands framing his eyes to block the ambient light and stared at the stars with the expression of someone seeing something for the first time that he hadn't known he'd been waiting to see.
"There are so many," he said. Quietly, for Lysander.
Nobody disagreed.
Nocturne announced itself before they could see it properly.
The Ashen Covenant adjusted its approach and the planet came into the viewport by degrees — first as a suggestion, a darkness against the stars that was too consistent to be empty space, and then as a shape, and then as a world.
It was dark. That was the first thing. Not the darkness of a dead place but the darkness of a place that held fire underneath it, the surface broken in long irregular lines by the glow of active lava flows and volcanic vents, amber and red threading through the black like the planet was showing them its bones. The ash clouds that hung in the upper atmosphere caught the light of the system's star at the edges and turned it into something that moved between orange and gold depending on the angle.
Lilith looked at it and thought about Ha'ken's answer on the fifth day.
Dangerous, he'd said. But beautiful.
Both things, at once, without contradiction.
"That's it," Lysander breathed, his face still against the viewport. "That's actually it."
Ha'ken appeared at the doorway behind them. He looked at the planet through the viewport with the expression of someone looking at home, and for a moment the measure in his face wasn't present at all and what was underneath it was simply and completely visible.
Then he noticed them watching him and the measure came back, quiet and natural, and he said: "Prepare to descend. We transfer to the drop shuttle in twenty minutes."
Lysander pulled his face away from the viewport and turned around with bright eyes. "Twenty minutes," he said, to Lilith specifically, as though she might not have heard.
"I heard," Lilith said.
He went to get his bag at a speed that suggested twenty minutes was barely enough time.
Eve turned from the viewport and looked at Lilith.
"Are you okay?" she asked. Quiet and direct.
Lilith looked at the planet through the viewport. At the dark surface and the fire underneath it and the ash clouds catching the light at their edges.
She thought about everything she was carrying and everything she'd decided to set aside until they were on the ground and everything that was waiting on the other side of the descent.
She rested her head against Eve's shoulder.
"Ask me again when we land," she said.
Eve looked at the planet.
"Okay," she said.
The Ashen Covenant continued its approach, and Nocturne grew in the viewport, and the fire in its surface moved in the long slow patterns of something that had been moving for longer than any of them had been alive.