“ARE YOU NEARLY READY to go, my lord?” asked the pinch-faced plebeian lieutenant who had been sent to fetch me. Kurtz, I think he was called. “The shuttle is nearly ready.”

“In a moment, soldier,” I said, managing to keep my voice steady. Despite the infirmity in my left arm, I had managed to dress myself without help. Clothing had been left for me while I slept, before the Schiavona and all other Imperial personnel had been ejected from the Demiurge. They were the clothes I had worn down to the ground on Rustam. The same high black leather boots, the same black trousers with the red stripes, the same equally black tunic with its paisley liner that zipped up the right side. My shield-belt had been a struggle with my left arm as sluggish as it was, but I managed in the end, clicking my sword back into its magnetic clasp, checking my stunner and the control box.

I lingered a moment, transfixed by my own image reflected in the dark water of the aquarium. Almost it seemed some phantom surveyed me from the glass, gaunt and gray-faced. Unbidden, my right hand wandered up to my throat, feeling the place where my own sword had bit painlessly into me. I hadn’t even known I had died, hadn’t felt the blow until my head was tumbling from my shoulders. The memory of the vertigo I’d felt falling past my body stole over me, and I shut my eyes, let my hand fall.

It was still in my sabretache, right where I’d thought to find it. Not where I’d left it, you understand, but where I knew it was. I drew out the fragment of eggshell and held it in my fist. I squeezed, as though I meant to crush the thing. But whatever the substance it was made of, I could not crush it, nor cast it aside. It had been in the inside pocket of my coat, alongside my lost journal, when I’d nearly been caught in the explosion that felled Raine Smythe. How it had appeared in my sabretache I could not say. Perhaps it had traveled back with me out of the howling dark. Perhaps it had been what permitted my passage back in the first place. Or perhaps it had simply been moved when the Quiet interfered with causality to save my life—for surely that was what they had done.

I cradled it on my palm, a disc no larger than an Imperial hurasam, whiter than anything I’d ever seen, so white it seemed untouched by the blue cast of the light from the aquarium. I caught my reflection in the glass once more, pale and very far away. The same clothes. The same man. The same neat mane of ink-dark hair, the same old violet eyes, too old for the thirty-five-year-old I was. I had not changed, I still knew the face of the man looking back at me, perhaps knew him better than I had before.

I was myself, and nothing of what I’d been through had taken that from me. I had survived torment and imprisonment, betrayal and pain. Lost friends, protectors, teachers. I had spoken with gods—with the devil itself. I had survived war, survived Extrasolarians and xenobites alike—daimons and demons. I had even survived Death, and lost myself. Every piece of me had been stripped away and returned.

And I was alive.

For a moment, it seemed that other Hadrian looked out at me, the one I had met in the darkness, his hand pointing forward, back toward my life and my purpose. He had shown me myself. I said once that it is the purpose of the artist to see not what is or might be, but to see what must be. All creation is such. I had met the captain of my ship in all that darkness, had met myself as I knew I should be, and he had found me wanting. So be it. I had a long road ahead of me, and a long struggle. So be that, too. That other Hadrian gave me something to aim for.

My star.

I restored the fragment of shell to my sabretache and putting it there felt something I’d forgotten I had.

Prince Aranata’s ring.

It wasn’t silver as I’d thought, but of some darker cousin to it. Rhodium, I guessed, and fashioned in such a way that reminded me of fascia, of skinned muscle and bone. It was a horrible thing, organic in a way that called to mind the creatures in the tank through my window, all membrane and tentacle, the curves of its design embracing a single, egg-shaped garnet.

A garnet.

I had thought all the stones the Aeta owned were blue.

It felt like providence, that I should find a ring to replace the one I had lost. Perhaps it was.

I placed the ring upon my thumb in the place where my old burn scar once had been. My left hand trembled as I tried to close it into a fist.

Good enough.

“Ready, sir?” asked Lieutenant Kurtz when I stepped into the hall.

“Yes, lieutenant,” I replied. “Lead on.”

I half-expected Kharn Sagara to appear then. Some final word, some cutting remark, at least to inject some sense of vague unease. But I supposed the Undying need not appear to be present. His eyes—her eyes—were everywhere, watching as we went. I felt those eyes on me as four SOMs led the uneasy lieutenant and me to our shuttle.

As we sailed away, I watched the Demiurge begin to move, and knew then that Kharn Sagara had received the last of his payment. The ship slipped away like an empire moving, tower upon tower, battlement upon battlement, battery upon battery flowing into the night. The eyes of its legion of iron statues, angels and devils and gods, all weighed heavily upon my mind.

I did not think I would ever see them again, or that I would want to.

Strange, is it not? The paths we walk and that are chosen for us?

The Demiurge vanished. Like the Enigma of Hours before it, that massive Sojourner did not leap to warp with a snap and flash of lightning, nor push away on rockets slower than light. How it traveled I cannot guess. I am no scholiast. But travel it did.

It was a long time before I saw it again.