The orphanage never really went quiet at night.

  There was always something — the low groan of old pipes, the wind pushing through gaps in the stone walls, the distant rumble of Armageddon's manufactorums that never once stopped for something as trivial as nighttime. Most of the kids slept through it fine. It was just background noise. The sound of a hive city doing what hive cities did.

  Lilith lay on her back and stared at the ceiling.

  Sleep wasn't coming. She'd known it wouldn't, not really, but she'd closed her eyes and given it a fair chance and the ceiling had won.

  She turned her head.

  Eve was sleeping on her side, facing the wall, one hand tucked under her cheek. Her eyes were closed but even through the lids there was that faint red glow — like embers left alone to do their thing. Her breathing was slow and easy. She looked completely unbothered by the world, which was accurate, because Eve had nothing to be bothered about tonight.

  I thought I was protecting Eve by lying, Lilith thought. What was I thinking back then?

  Eve hadn't done anything wrong. Eve had done everything right. Eve had moved across a room in under two seconds and taken apart three daemons before anyone had fully processed what was happening, and then she'd stood in the wreckage and waited to be told what came next, calm as anything.

  Eve's part of tonight had been simple. Lilith's part had been the messy one.

  She turned back to the ceiling.

  Ha'ken's face.

  That was the thing she kept coming back to. Not his voice, not his words — his face. That quiet, careful look that wasn't quite anger and wasn't quite disappointment and was somehow worse than both. She'd seen it right at the end, when she'd finished confessing what she'd hidden about Eve. He'd gone still in that particular way of his, and then he'd looked at her, and she'd understood immediately that she hadn't just withheld information.

  She'd decided for him what he was going to do with it before he'd had the chance to do anything at all.

  I was scared, she admitted to the ceiling. I thought if he knew how strong Eve really was, he'd decide the risk wasn't worth it. That she was too dangerous to leave near a building full of kids and nuns. So I just — didn't tell him.

  Very smart.

  Very stupid.

  Because what she'd actually done was look at a Salamander — a Space Marine from the chapter that had somehow made a reputation in a universe full of horrible things by genuinely, stubbornly caring about people — and assume the worst of him before he'd done anything to deserve it. She'd run her little calculation and slotted him into it and never once stopped to think that he might surprise her.

  He'd knelt for them. She kept forgetting that part, and she needed to stop forgetting it, because it mattered. A Space Marine had knelt in front of two small girls in a medicae ward and meant it. That wasn't nothing. That was someone telling her who he was, and she hadn't listened.

  I am, she thought, with the kind of tired honesty that only came out this late at night, a mess.

  Not in a dramatic way. Just — factually. She had twenty-three years of being a normal person from a normal world sitting inside a five-year-old body in Warhammer 40,000, and survival had done things to how she thought about people. She planned around them. Modeled them. Figured out what they were going to do before they did it and positioned herself accordingly. It had kept her alive. It had also apparently become so automatic that she did it even to people who'd given her no reason to.

  Ha'ken had given her every reason not to.

  She looked at Eve one more time.

  I'll fix it, she decided. Tomorrow. I'll find him and I'll tell him the truth. All of it, everything I can tell him. I trust him. And I'll let him be angry because he's earned that.

  It wasn't much. But it was something to do, and having something to do was better than lying here cataloguing her own failures until sunrise.

  The pipes groaned somewhere in the wall. The manufactorum hum rolled on.

  Lilith closed her eyes, and eventually, sleep found her anyway.

  The hum of the manufactorum faded, replaced by a sound she hadn't heard since her last fever. Leaves rustling.

  It was always warm here — not hot, just comfortable in a way that had nothing to do with weather and everything to do with the feeling of the place. The light came through the trees in long, lazy shafts. The path was clear. Lilith walked it with her hands loose at her sides and her eyes open, taking it in.

  Back again, she thought.

  The path curved, and there was the temple.

  She stopped in front of it and looked up. Same old stone. Same golden statue watching from above the doors with that expression that could have been anything. The doors were slightly open, dark inside, not a sound coming from within.

  She stood there for a moment, genuinely thinking about it.

  What's in there?

  Her brain offered several possibilities, most of them bad. She was five years old in a dream that had already introduced her to at least one mysterious woman who enjoyed being vague and dropping unsettling implications without explaining them. Walking into a dark temple with no information and no ability to defend herself seemed like the kind of move that deserved more thought than she currently had.

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  Maybe next time, she decided, and turned away.

  There was a sound in the air that she hadn't noticed before. Coming from somewhere through the trees.

  Water.

  And something else — a voice, following the sound of water the way ivy followed stone, winding through the air so naturally that for a second she'd thought it was just part of the forest.

  She followed it.

  The path opened into a clearing.

  There was a waterfall — not a big one, just a steady pour of water into a calm pool, mist drifting up and catching the light. It was the kind of place that felt like it had always been here and would always be here, quietly doing its thing regardless of whether anyone was watching.

  There was a woman in the pool.

  Lilith stopped at the edge of the treeline.

  The woman was bathing and singing at the same time, which she was managing with a kind of effortless calm that suggested she did this regularly and found nothing unusual about it. Unlike the other woman Lilith had met in this forest — the one whose face she could never quite focus on — this one was completely, plainly there. Dark hair spread across the water. A real face. A real voice that was doing something to the air around it that Lilith didn't have the words for yet.

  She stood still and listened, and the sound of it moved through her chest like warmth.

  Oh, she thought.

  "How mysterious," she murmured.

  The singing stopped.

  The woman turned and found her immediately, and her face did something that wasn't surprise at all — more like the satisfied look of someone whose timing had been confirmed. She smiled.

  "You've come back," she said.

  Lilith frowned. "...Again?"

  "Again." The woman's voice was warm and a little amused. "You don't remember but you used to come here a lot."

  "Who are you?"

  The woman laughed — short and bright, not unkind. "I won't be answering that today." She tilted her head, looking at Lilith with something that felt like assessment. "I'll tell you this much: I won't help you this time. What you get here, you earn yourself." A small pause. "Did you come to learn to sing again? You were quite bad at it last time."

  Lilith blinked.

  Last time.

  She turned this over. The honest answer was that she had approximately twenty questions and the woman had already indicated she wasn't taking questions. But singing — that was something she could actually respond to. And there was something about the way the woman had said it, light and easy, that didn't feel like a trap.

  What's the worst that happens? she thought. I learn to sing?

  "Alright," she said. "Show me."

  Time didn't work normally in that place.

  The lesson wasn't long or short — it just was, the same way the forest was, complete in itself. The woman was patient in a way Lilith hadn't expected, correcting her gently and without making her feel stupid about it, which was an underrated skill in any teacher. She worked on breath first, then on the shape of sound in her chest, then on letting go of the part of Lilith's brain that wanted to monitor and correct everything in real time and just get in the way.

  Her voice was small. She was five. There were limits to what a five-year-old's body could physically do. But within those limits, something clicked.

  The woman watched it happen and looked genuinely pleased.

  They finished — or the lesson decided it was finished, Lilith couldn't have said which. She could feel the dream starting to thin at the edges the way dreams did before waking, the light getting a little less certain.

  She turned to go.

  "Be careful with your voice," the woman called after her, warm and a little amused. "You have more of it than you think."

  Lilith turned back to ask what that meant.

  She woke up.

  The morning bell was mid-sequence. She'd slept longer than usual.

  Lilith lay still for a moment, holding the dream carefully, running through the details before they faded. The waterfall. The woman's voice. The lesson. The parting words sitting in her head with the specific weight of things that meant something she hadn't figured out yet.

  Be careful with your voice.

  She filed it. Got up.

  Eve was already awake, which was normal. Eve woke before the bell like clockwork and seemed vaguely confused by people who didn't. She was at the washbasin when Lilith appeared, and glanced over once without stopping what she was doing.

  "You slept late," Eve said.

  "I was thinking."

  Eve made a small sound that covered several things at once and went back to washing her face.

  They moved through the morning routine the way they always did — around each other and alongside each other without having to think about it much, the kind of easy habit that came from sharing a small space for long enough. Washing, dressing, Lilith working through the knots in Eve's hair while Eve sat still and endured it with quiet patience.

  House arrest didn't change the morning, it turned out. The windows showed the same gray courtyard. The bells rang the same sequence. The orphanage smelled the same. Everything was the same except for the thing sitting in Lilith's chest that she was carrying toward the conversation she'd decided to have.

  They found Sister Mercy in the corridor near the kitchens, her coif slightly crooked, clearly mid-thought about three different things.

  "Sister Mercy." Lilith kept her voice steady. "I need to speak with Brother Ha'ken."

  Sister Mercy looked at her. Then at Eve. Then back at Lilith, with the kind of look that said she understood something important was happening even if she didn't know the details.

  "I'll pass the message along," she said. "To him or one of his brothers, whichever I find first."

  "Thank you."

  Sister Mercy nodded and moved on, and Lilith let out a quiet breath.

  They waited in the small sitting room off the second corridor — the one with the narrow window looking out over the side of the building rather than the main courtyard. Lilith had picked it specifically because it was quiet and out of the way. She wanted a conversation, not an audience.

  She sat in the chair by the window. Eve sat on the floor beside her, close enough that Lilith's hand could reach her shoulder without stretching, which was apparently where Eve had decided she needed to be and that was that.

  Lilith looked out the window at the gray hive-stone and thought about what she was going to say.

  Everything, she decided. Almost everything. Not the reincarnation — that's not something she could hand over safely, not in a universe where that kind of information had a way of traveling to people who would do bad things with it. But everything else. Eve's real numbers. The files. What she'd known and when. All of it, laid out, no more calculation.

  Let him be angry. He's earned it. Just tell him the truth and let him do what he does with it.

  She didn't notice she'd started humming.

  The tune was just there — the one from the dream, the one the woman at the waterfall had taught her, coming out of her soft and low without any particular decision behind it. She was staring out the window, turning her plans over, and the melody moved through the room like the light did, quiet and without any fuss.

  Eve turned her head.

  She didn't say anything. She just watched Lilith from her spot on the floor — red eyes steady, the rest of her perfectly still — and there was something in her expression that was different from her usual watchfulness. Not alert. Not waiting for a threat.

  Just — listening.

  Lilith hummed and looked out at the gray stone and thought about honesty and what it cost and why it was still worth it.

  Eve watched her, and didn't move, and didn't speak.

  The door opened.

  Lilith turned, expecting the broad, silhouette of Ha’ken to fill the frame.

  It wasn’t him.

  A woman stepped inside instead.

  Blonde hair straight, slightly messy bob. No veil. No rosarius. No Aquila.

  She wore black segmented carapace armor, close-fitted and practical — the kind issued to Inquisitorial storm troopers, but altered. The plates were sleeker, the joints reinforced with unfamiliar alloys. Thin brass housings ran along her forearms, inset with tiny rotating dials and recessed lenses that flickered with faint internal light. Cables disappeared beneath the plating at her wrists.

  No purity seals. No heraldry. Nothing to mark allegiance.

  Lilith had never seen armor like that before.

  The woman’s eyes swept the room once.

  They stopped on Lilith’s face.

  “Found you.”