Chapter 7: Epilogue
The ship's shrine was small and cold and smelled of candle tallow and old stone, which Kiri suspected was intentional. She knelt on the bare floor, took the book from her coat and placed it on the floor, and then lowered her forehead onto it.
Her knees began to ache. A sharp pain started shooting through her back.
The physical pain was a welcome distraction from the disquiet she’d felt in her soul ever since they’d crossed that threshold under the warehouse. A low static wrongness, the sense of having been looked at by something that didn't have eyes still gripped her.
She thought about the daemonettes. About the pull of them, the first instinct that had been horror and something else simultaneously, the way both things had been true at once.
She thought about the gouge in the book's cover.
She thought about Seraya. About Seraya stopping. Seraya healing her. Seraya turning back to the daemon and not seeing the blade coming. The outcome had been fine — they'd all walked out, that was what mattered — but outcomes didn't close the ledger. Not for her.
Seraya wouldn't want to be thanked. Would find it faintly insulting. That was fine. This wasn’t about Seraya.
It’s about me. My honour. And her honour knew she had a debt. One that she would need to repay.
And she thought about the Emperor. She didn't pray, exactly. She wasn't sure she knew how to do that honestly nor could she remember any of the proscribed prayers her tutors had tried to drill into her. But she stayed still, and she breathed, and she asked the God-Emperor for his forgiveness.
And eventually the disquiet loosened its grip and smoothed out into something less unsettling.
She stood up slowly. Her knees were unhappy about it. Her back ached like she was decades older. She filed that away, made the sign of the aquila, and moved on.
The training bay had a range at the far end. She borrowed a laspistol from the rack — the inferno pistol was not a weapon you fired indoors unless you wanted to explain a hole in the hull — and started working through it.
Not drills. Something more specific.
She closed her eyes between shots and ran the fight back. The daemonettes closing faster than she could track them. Kael walking off the altar. The daemon's shape unfolding from what had been a man. Her first shot at Kael going wide. Her second. The inferno pistol finally connecting only when she was close enough that missing would have been harder than hitting.
She was a decent shot, and she knew it. Which meant she could see clearly where decent wasn't going to be sufficient.
Kiri modified her stance. Moved her feet. Fired.
She ran it again. Found the moments she'd hesitated and not trusted her intuition — and fired through it.
Again. And again.
She kept going until the shots were landing where she meant them to.
Exhausted and sweaty, Kiri was heading straight to the ablution chamber when the ship shuddered.
Controlled. A translation. Realspace, early.
The vox clicked on before she'd finished processing it. The Seneschal's voice: All operatives to the briefing room. Immediately.
She looked down at herself. Still in training clothes. Still carrying the last several hours in her bones.
She turned around and went to find the others.