The quarters were not large but they were solid and comfortable.
Dark stone walls, the same as everywhere else in Prometheus, with amber light from the wall-mounted luminator casting everything in warm tones. Three beds, properly sized, which was already an improvement over the orphanage arrangements. A narrow window that looked out over the ashfields, and through it the distant glow of a volcanic vent, slow and patient and completely indifferent to the people watching it.
The escort left without ceremony. The door closed. The three of them stood in the middle of the room with their bags and the quiet of a new place settling around them.
Lysander dropped his bag on the nearest bed, crossed to the window in four steps, and pressed both hands and his nose flat against the glass.
"There's fire outside," he said.
"There's always fire outside on Nocturne," Lilith said, setting her own bag down. "That's kind of the whole thing here."
"I know." He didn't move from the glass. "I just wanted to say it out loud and it looks cool."
Eve chose the bed nearest the door. She set her bag at the foot of it sat down, and looked at Lilith.
Lilith was standing in the middle of the room not quite doing anything.
She wasn't looking at the window or the beds or the ashfields outside. She was looking at her hand, held slightly out in front of her, palm up. Just looking at it.
Am I corrupted again?
The thought had been there since the ship. Since the cold and the hand on her neck and the voice that had come from somewhere without a location. She knew what corruption felt like from the inside now — the fog, the slow wrongness sitting on her thoughts, the way everything had been slightly dimmer before the golden flames burned it away. She reached inward carefully, feeling for it.
Nothing obvious. No fog. No slow wrongness.
But something had been in those quarters. Something ancient and cold had pressed its hand to her neck and spoken directly into her ear, and she didn't know what that left behind.
She looked at her palm and thought about the golden flames.
Could I call those flames deliberately? she wondered. Would that even work? Could I cleanse myself if something were there? Or what if that something isn't a corruption? That would be way worse.
She didn't know. Both times she'd used the Warp it had been reactive, driven by something urgent and emotional. The golden flames had come from Naic, not from her. Reaching for something she didn't understand in the quarters of a Salamanders fortress-monastery on her first night on Nocturne seemed like exactly the kind of decision she'd spent months trying to stop making.
She lowered her hand.
Not tonight, she decided. Tell Ha'ken first. That was the plan.
"Lilith."
She looked up.
Eve had moved from her bed and was standing directly beside her, close enough that their shoulders touched, red eyes steady on her face. Lilith hadn't heard her cross the room.
Lysander had turned from the window. His forehead was creased and he was chewing the inside of his cheek.
"You've been like this since the ship," Eve said.
"Like what?" Lilith said.
Eve looked at her and said nothing, which was its own answer.
"Thinky," Lysander said. "But the bad kind. Not the normal kind where you're just figuring something out. The kind where something is wrong and you haven't said it yet."
Lilith looked at them both.
Eve had not moved from her side. If anything she had gotten slightly closer, her shoulder a firm and deliberate pressure against Lilith's. She wasn't doing it obviously. She was just there, in the way she was there when she'd decided proximity was necessary and was not going to negotiate about it.
I could tell them, Lilith thought. Right now. They're here and they're worried. These kids are worried.
But she thought about Ha'ken. About doing things in the right order for once.
"I'm okay," she said.
Eve's shoulder pressed slightly firmer against hers.
"I promise I'm okay," Lilith said. "There's something I need to talk to Ha'ken about first. Tomorrow. And then I'll tell you everything. Both of you right after. I mean that."
Lysander looked at her with round, serious eyes. "Is it very bad?"
"I don't know yet," Lilith said honestly. "That's part of why I need to talk to Ha'ken first."
Lysander chewed his cheek a bit more. Then he nodded with the gravity of someone accepting terms he wasn't entirely happy about. "Okay. But after Ha'ken you have to tell us. I know I'm not strong like Eve but I will do my best to help."
"I promise. Right after," Lilith agreed.
He accepted this and turned back to the window, pressing his face against the glass again to look at the volcanic glow in the distance.
Eve did not move from Lilith's side. She stayed exactly where she was, shoulder to shoulder, and showed no intention of going anywhere.
Lilith looked at her.
Eve looked back and said nothing, which meant she had assessed the situation and decided this was where she was going to be and it was not a point of discussion.
Lilith let out a quiet breath and sat on her bed. Eve sat beside her, close enough that their arms touched.
"So," Lilith said, after a moment. "Nocturne."
Lysander spun around from the window immediately. "It's incredible," he said, at full volume, the worry apparently set aside in favor of something more pressing. "The rocks are enormous and everything is on fire and the fortress has the biggest corridors I've ever been in and there are Salamanders everywhere and the ceiling in the main hall was so high I couldn't see the top of it." He ran out of breath then took a new one. "It's exactly like the book except bigger and more on fire and the book was already really good."
"The book definitely undersold the fire," Lilith said.
"Everything is amazing," Lysander said, deeply satisfied. He turned back to the window. "Do you think we'll see a volcano erupt? A real one?"
"Probably not up close," Lilith said.
"What about medium close?"
"I don't think medium close is safe either."
Lysander considered this. "Brother Ha'ken would stand in it and be fine though."
"That's probably true."
"Because he's a Salamander."
"Because he's a Salamander," Lilith agreed. "Also, they are naturally attuned to fire so there's that."
Lysander nodded, thoroughly satisfied with this conclusion, and climbed onto his bed still facing the window. The Salamanders book appeared in his hands — Lilith hadn't seen him take it out, it was simply there, the way it always ended up being there. The metal Sentinel was placed on the shelf above the bed. He repositioned it once, then again, then left it at a slight angle facing the window.
"It should be able to see the fire too," he said, to no one in particular.
Lilith looked at Eve.
"You?" she said.
Eve was quiet for a moment. She was still sitting close, still with her arm against Lilith's. "The air is cleaner than Armageddon," she said.
"Very clean."
"It's louder though." She looked at the window. At the distant amber glow moving in its slow patterns. "I don't mind the loud."
"The planet is just always doing something," Lilith said.
"Yes." Eve looked at the glow for another moment. "It feels more honest than the manufactorum noise."
Lilith looked at her. That was a surprisingly precise thing to say and she turned it over and found it accurate. Armageddon's noise had been the noise of industry, of people forcing things to work. Nocturne's noise was just the planet being what it was.
She lay back on her bed and looked at the ceiling.
The stone above her was dark and old and had been here a long time before any of them and intended to be here long after. Outside, Nocturne breathed its volcanic breath and the wind moved across the ashfields.
Somewhere deep in the fortress something rang, low and resonant, marking the hour.
She looked at her hand again.
A fragment of the Emperor's soul.
She turned the words over and they kept being the same words. She still didn't have an answer. She was going to talk to Ha'ken tomorrow. That was the plan.
She closed her hand.
Tonight just sleep, she told herself. Don't think about anything else for now.
Eve lay down beside her.
Not on her own bed. On Lilith's, on top of the blanket, on her side facing Lilith with her back to the room. Close enough that Lilith could feel the warmth of her.
Lilith looked at her.
Eve looked back steadily and said nothing, which meant the decision had been made and it was not open for discussion.
Lilith decided not to discuss it.
From the other bed, Lysander's voice came soft and slightly muffled, already reading. "It says the Salamanders have been defending Nocturne for ten thousand years." A pause. "That's so long."
"It is," Lilith said.
"Do you think they ever get tired?"
"Probably not."
"I would get tired," Lysander said, with the honest certainty of someone who had thought about this seriously. "But I'd keep going anyway. Because I promised."
Lilith stared at the ceiling.
"I know you would," she said quietly.
The pages turned a few more times. Then they stopped. Lysander's breathing went slow and even, and the book was probably still open on his chest, and the metal Sentinel stood guard on the shelf above him facing the window and the fire outside.
Eve's breathing steadied beside Lilith. Still there. Still close.
Lilith lay in the dark of a fortress built into a volcanic mountain on a world she'd read about once in a damaged library on Armageddon, and she thought about golden flames and a cold hand and a question without an answer, and eventually Nocturne's distant rumble was heavier than all of it, and her eyes closed, and she slept.