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i.
The processed air inside the shuttle makes her itch. This is Wake’s life now; unending discomfort. If she’s not barfing her spleen up or pissing herself or sweating or swollen, she’s itching or escaping or itching to escape.
And this—thing, it squirms inside her.
Jesus fuck, she’s not a homebody. She never read any books on what pregnancy is supposed to be like.
This isn’t, has never been, what she wanted for herself.
On her fouler days—which grow more frequent the longer she has to lug this monstrous cargo around for the good of the cause— she doesn’t know who she hates more; the Emperor, His treacherous Hands, or the ugly little mongrel, half-human half- something else, eating her from the inside out.
On one decent day, her last of very, very few, she gives it—what Wake gives it is not a name. To do so would be a moronic, unnecessary cruelty. But she does deign to give it the microscopic dignity of a title, a goal, a purpose.
Bomb.
ii.
It’s almost as if, Sister Cornelia observes, the Ninth House morgue has bloated. Ballooned. Fattened. Gorged itself on the rotten vacuum of the children’s wing until it swelled to fill the entire House, and its residents with it.
The crèche flu was over a year and five months ago, and the Ninth House has gone from a breathing—if somber—extension of the Kindly Prince, to a putrid, gangrenous passenger.
It’s blasphemy to think such things, she knows, but roaming the stone-silent corridors of the Ninth with her Sisters in tow—many of them grasping onto life with withered yellow fingernails because there are none to take their place when they finally expire—it’s hard not to feel like a wet gobbet of dead skin, clinging on desperately to what is, underneath, organs already liquefied.
There are three left of the Ninth’s next generation. The first being the infant Reverend Daughter, cradled—perhaps that would be a meager exaggeration, the more accurate term being brandished— in Lady Pelleamena’s arms, as Lord Priamhark gives the sermon. She is, as always, still and quiet and well-behaved during Mass. The utter picture of the Ninth; stygian black in hair and eyes, sallow in skin and expression.
(Sister Cornelia has always been under the impression that babies are supposed to be podgy and plump with potential. Harrowhark Nonagesimus is by no means emaciated—though she may already be showing some of that unavoidable sickliness that tends to dull necromancers—but it is a sliver unnerving, how much she looks like her parents, with that grim look on her tiny, whetted face.)
And the second hope of the Ninth, the second pair of shoulders on which the Ninth's future rests—
A hollering fills the chamber. Sister Cornelia tightens her grip on her knucklebone rosary, and knelt beside her, Sister Beatrix shuts her eyes.
Other than these nigh-imperceptible symptoms of chagrin, no one in the hall acknowledges the black-swathed toddler wiggling out of her own pew and racing down the nave as hell for leather as her chunky, teetering little legs will allow.
Out of respect, neither do they stare at Sister Guinevere, chasing down said toddler.
(One person does watch, dark eyes following the chaos with all the intensity of a situation involving life or death or life beyond death; no one, least of all Lord Priamhark and Lady Pelleamena, is particularly happy about Harrowhark’s fascination with the cuckoo child.
Though the opportunities are rare, given the chance, the Reverend Daughter will not hesitate in reaching out her small hand and make a solid attempt to rip out a clot of that ghastly ginger hair.)
(Harrowhark Nonagesimus, since birth, has been the Reverend Daughter, the blessing to the Ninth, their hope and future—but never, in their eyes, just a baby. The truth is relatively uncomplicated: in a House made up of char blacks and salt whites and vows of silence, something so warm and loud and orange is fascinating to a blurry infant brain who has never seen Dominicus, witnessing the next closest thing.)
Gideon Nav continues her clamouring as Sister Guinevere plucks her off the ground by the armpits. The shrieks are not of excitement or distress, but the hooting of a creature with large lungs who unfortunately very much likes to hear the sound of her own voice.
Sister Guinevere does not settle Nav on her hip, like she might have in the pre-flu times, but keeps the girl extended outwards at arms’ length. An outsider might presume this to be an attempt to dodge the flailing arms and still-pedalling legs, but the elders of the hall—making up everyone, bar three—know better.
Still, none in the congregation calls out their Sister for her distaste at touching the demon child. To do so would be hypocritical.
iii.
“Gid- ee -on.”
“...Griddle.”
“No! Not my name!”
“Griddle of the Ninth House. Griddle Nav. Griddle the Ninth.”
“I think you’re just not able to pronounce Gideon. Is it because you haven’t grown any adult teeth yet?”
“If I can pronounce Harrowhark Nonagesimus, I can pronounce your silly little name, Griddle. I just choose not to, because it’s not even a real name.”
“And Harrowhark is? I don’t know any other Harrowharks…”
“I was named for my father—!”
“—who was named for his mother, who was named for some musty old geezer, yeah-yeah, I got it the first four gazillion times—”
“You disrespectful—!”
iv.
Even through her gloves, Harrow’s fingers are prickling cold. Gideon would love nothing more than to attribute this to her glacier of a heart and ice-slush bloodstream, but alas, like most of the Ninth’s corpses and of Crux’s eternal shortness of breath, the greatest perpetrator is likely poor circulation.
Anyway, cold hands on her neck are a really bizarre feeling. Lodged right in the soft part of her throat, just between the tendons and the trachea cartilage. She can feel her own pulse clapping against Harrow’s fingers.
Harrow tilts her head, and manages to raise her eyebrows without unfurrowing them from her tragically chronic scowl. (Runs in the Nonagesimus family, of course.) She doesn’t speak, but Gideon can hear the are you ready in the faint twitch, almost-curl of her lip. His Celestial Kindliness forbid the Reverend Daughter should have to vocalize such a thing, what must be the height of vulnerability.
Gideon answers nevertheless, “I’m your battery, babycakes.”
“Don’t call—me that.”
Her necromancer steps back, turns, and surges through the barrier, and Gideon can think no more of questions or answers or Harrow’s cold little hands against her neck.
v.
“I’ve lived my whole wretched life at your mercy, yours alone, and God knows I deserve to die at your hand—”
Harrow’s knuckles are yellow-white where they’re fisted in the neck of Gideon’s shirt. The skin stretches painfully over them, as if her bones are threatening to snap from her skin, as if her very skeleton is attempting to cleave itself from the wretched tissue sac it’s encased in.
Even if not that, her flesh and osseous matter must be having some sort of quarrel, given how her heart and lungs assault her ribcage, heaving, walloping. Her hands would be shaking if they were not so tightly clenched as to be near-calcified.
“—You are my only friend. I am undone without you.”
vi.
In the rubble of a once-sacred once-loved twice-damned home, Harrowhark Nonagesimus reaches up and touches Gideon Nav’s grit-covered, blood-rimed face, splits a laugh like the world is ending, and calls her “the best of all of us,” and “triumph,” and “flower.”
+i.
“Gideon,” says Harrow, and again, more incoherently: “Gideon.”