“ARE YOU ALL RIGHT?” Valka asked when I came in through the umbilical alone. She could tell I’d been crying, but did not press, did not ask where Switch had gone. She knew. They all knew.

Without speaking, I wrapped my good arm around her and pulled her close, screwing my eyes shut, as if I might crush out all light by doing so. We stood there a long moment, neither of us moving, entirely alone. When at last I’d pulled myself back together, I drew back and asked, “Where are the others?”

The lights in the vestibule were low, the walls bare stainless steel. Through the door behind, the hall stretched black and golden, strangely warm for a military ship. When Valka spoke, her voice was soft, as concerned as ever I had heard it. “I sent them on. Told them you needed a moment.”

“What did I do to deserve you?”

“Aren’t we presumptuous?” she said, echoing that time on Vorgossos. She smiled, broke into brief but rippling laughter. “You don’t deserve me, anyway.”

Very serious, I said, “I know that.”

She kissed me again. “Good.” Her eyes shone in the dimness, sparkling up at me, yellow as a cat’s. “I still can’t believe you’re alive. I saw you . . .” Her voice trailed away to naught, and I held her more tightly.

“I know,” I said softly, “I know.”

“You really think it was the Quiet?”

“Do you doubt it?”

She shook her head. “I don’t have any other explanation, but ’tis . . .’tis mad. They’re supposed to be extinct, Hadrian. A dead race. I’m an archaeologist. I’m not . . .”

“A witch?”

She made a face, and for a moment I thought she might swat me again, but she restrained herself. Valka drew away, examining me up and down, as though she suspected something. “’Tis really you, not some clone of Sagara’s?”

I froze. That thought had not occurred to me. “No,” I decided, “it’s me. Kharn Sagara would not have wasted time interrogating me if I were his creature.” I could see the fever in the reborn Kharn’s eyes.

If I die, what happens to me?

“Besides,” I said, “there’s this.” I drew out the shell fragment and held it up for Valka to see. “I left it in my coat in the hangar after . . . after we lost Smythe. When I . . . came back, when I returned . . . I had it with me.” Valka did not state the obvious, which was that I had received it from Brethren, who was Kharn’s creature. But I knew, the city I had seen in my vision—that crumbling landscape and the sound of the infant wailing. I had seen much the same thing in Calagah on Emesh.

Valka took the bit of shell from my palm.

“I still don’t know what this is,” she said.

“I bet if you studied it, you’d find it looks exactly like the stones in Calagah,” I said, not knowing where the words came from, but almost certain I was right.

“Just black . . .” Valka quoted, referring to the stones of the Quiet ruins, which had no molecular structure to speak of, were only a single piece of solid black.

“A kind of highmatter?”

“Maybe,” she said, eyes shining again with that mania only her love of ancient things could kindle. “I’ll have to take a look at it.” She smiled up at me. “I’ll let you know if you’re right!”

“What’s that?” A new voice slashed across our conversation, shattering our moment alone.

Valka closed her hand over the shard, smiling at Bassander Lin, who stood framed in the door to the vestibule, his face in shadow. She spoke before I could. “Jewelry,” she said, stepping forward in such a way that half put her between Bassander and myself. “A trifle.”

The Mandari captain stepped out of the hall light, face coming into focus as his brows rose. “Ah.” His black eyes searched for something in my face. What that something was, and if he found it there, was anybody’s guess. The man stepped forward, chin thrust out, shoulders squared and back. I thought he might strike me—thought I might strike him. But he stopped a few paces from me, taking in the racked vacuum suits where they hung in their wall niches, the rubberized floor, the white, joyless lighting. “Every time I see you standing there, I see you cut down,” he said, and blessed himself, touching fingers to forehead, lips, and chest. “By Earth, in all my years, I never thought . . .” His words ran down to nothing, jaw gone slack. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

And then he did something incredible: he thrust out his hand. Not to shake mine, I realized, but to touch me—as though I were the hem of some nobile’s robe as he rode through the crowd in triumph. I recoiled, shocked, but Bassander did not drop his hand, only held it out as in benediction.

“I didn’t do anything, Bassander,” I said, moving past him toward the hall, Valka following on behind. There was no reason to deny it, not with someone who was there. “I know what you saw, what you think you saw, but I don’t understand it.”

A little embarrassed perhaps, Lin closed his hand into a fist. “Then it really is a miracle.”

I froze on the threshold. Bassander Lin had never struck me as a religious man, but then, I had been born a palatine, and it is said that palatines go to the sanctum only to be seen, that it is the peasantry who light all the candles. I have always considered myself agnostic, but there are few of that effete class amongst the soldiery. Soldiers, someone told me, do not have the luxury of disbelief.

Still, this new dimension to Bassander Lin surprised me, and though I stood now fully in the hallway I turned. The stoic captain I had known was gone, and gone the line of fire between us. If he had been my rival, he was no longer. That Captain Lin was gone, transfigured by what he had seen: my death and . . . return. The Lin that stood before me was something else. Something smaller—so it seemed—for it seemed that I looked down upon him, though we stood on level ground, him in darkness, me in light. Or no, that wasn’t it. I did not look down on him—though I hated him still for the role he’d played in all this—rather he was looking up at me, as one looks upon the face of a mountain, as I’d looked up and seen myself pointing in the Dark.

“A miracle,” Bassander Lin repeated. I took a couple of steps backward, edging out not—as I’d expected—onto a hallway, but onto a catwalk that overlooked the very cargo bay from which I’d led our desperate charge into the helium fog. Bassander followed me, with Valka now close behind, watching me carefully. I was suddenly, painfully aware of the crowd milling about beneath us, soldiers and mercenaries, technicians and medical personnel alike, busying themselves with the sorting and securing of cargo. The din of laughing voices and barked commands rose all around us, muffled before by some static field in the door to the airlock vestibule.

Bassander stepped out with me, so that we stood opposite one another as we had on the Balmung so long ago. And then he did the second incredible thing he’d done in a matter of moments. He knelt. Perhaps not so incredible: he was a soldier of the Empire, and I a palatine lord and cousin of the blood imperial. But this was Bassander Lin, and I was Hadrian Marlowe.

“I don’t know what any of it means,” he said. “This thing you can do.”

Valka was standing behind the man, smiling in wry bemusement. I tried not to look at her, terrified that I might laugh, might sneer.

I heard a hush go through the crowd below. Then someone’s upraised voice. “Hey! Look, the captain!” The quiet deepened.

The captain did not seem to notice. He did not raise his eyes. “Maybe the Earth has sent you, I don’t know. But you died, Marlowe. I saw you die.”

“So did I!” one soldier called.

“And me!”

“A miracle!” The cry went up. “A miracle!”

I’ve lost control, I remember thinking. Somewhere in all this, I lost control. We are not always the authors of our own stories. Some of us never are. I think that is what we struggle for: the command of our own lives. We struggle against our families, against the state, against nature, against our own weakness. All that we might choose for ourselves, if only for a moment.

If only once.

But Bassander Lin had chosen for me, and set my feet upon the path. Turning, I looked down upon the sea of faces on the level below me: rough mercenaries beside shave-pated legionnaires in black fatigues and the officers in their long coats. There was Lieutenant Cartier, overseeing the final preparations. And beside her stood Otavia Corvo and Bastien Durand. And there were Pallino, Elara, and Siran. And there—not far—were Ilex and Crim, forever inseparable—and Tor Varro, of all people, standing near the rear among medical personnel in their white habits. All of them watching, all of them seeing.

I was uncharacteristically speechless, and stood clutching my useless arm, eyes moving from Bassander to the crowd—back to Bassander, who said, “Maybe you’re the one. The one who will bring an end to all this . . .” He shook his head. His transformation was so complete that it astonished me. Perhaps that was why I could not speak, so horrified was I by this display, by his reduction. Before, he had been a proud soldier—perhaps he was one still—but the man kneeling on the catwalk at my feet seemed more a creature, my creature, than a man. I heard the echo of Brethren’s words in what he said, and I shivered.

The man to end it all.

“You don’t know that,” I said, and made a weak gesture that Bassander should rise. The embarrassment ran thick over me as crude oil. I wanted desperately to be away. To be anywhere else.

“You’re immortal,” Bassander said. “That’s proof. That’s a sign.”

“He’s half mortal!” someone interjected. Was it Crim?

“Half mortal?” someone echoed, quieter than the first.

And then it began for true. “Halfmortal!” someone repeated, and made of the joke a cry. A declaration. A name. “Hadrian Halfmortal! He died! We all saw it! Halfmortal!”

“Halfmortal!”

“Halfmortal!”

Half-dead, I thought, and turned from Bassander to face the people below. In doing so, I turned and stepped onto the path Bassander’s newfound awe and piety had marked out for me. They all looked up at me, hands raised, fists thrust in the air. Most of them had seen me perish, and those who did not knew at least that I had been the one to slay the prince. They cheered for me, and shouts of “Halfmortal! Hadrian Halfmortal!” were mingled with cries of “Had! Had! Had!” from those few myrmidons who had come up with me out of Emesh.

“Halfmortal!”

It was the name Brethren had given me, whispered by unseen mouths above the waters of a sunless sea, spoken again by chance or fortune by the lips of some unknown soldier. Halfmortal. For all the light of that shining instant, I felt a shadow move beneath me. Pale, bloated hands seized on my heart. I am old now, and have known enough of time to see the patterns of it, to see the path—like a river—at my feet beginning to carry me away. I did not know then where it led, or that the light that smiled upon us in that livid instant was only an echo, a foretaste of that final fire.

I did not know it, but I had taken my first steps—forward, down—toward Gododdin.

Toward the end.

Toward light and fire.

But I was young! And I was alive! And hailed by all who knew me. I had gone into darkness and deep water and come out again. Changed—as we always are by such experiences—but alive. My new arm hung at my side, part of me but not a part. I tried to close the new fist, but it would not go—and though it would grow strong in time and the horror of it would fade, it would serve as a constant reminder of the horrors of Vorgossos and the people and the life I had lost there. I turned and looked past Bassander toward Valka, gestured that she might come and stand beside me. Smiling, she shook her head, remaining in the shadow of the doorway behind the still-kneeling Bassander Lin.

Cries of “Halfmortal!” still rose up from below. Fists raised in triumph. Hands in praise.

I raised my strong right hand in answer.

There are endings, Reader, and this is one. Some endings are beginnings. Such is this. As the Phoenix is reborn from its ashes, as new gods are ever born from the bodies of the old, so too was I reborn by that lakeside beneath that glassed-in sky. I left much of what I was by those waters: my scars from Emesh, my dreams of peace. Most of life consists of such transformations. If what I have done disturbs you, Reader, I do not blame you. If you would read no further, I understand. You have the luxury of foresight. You know where this ends.

I shall go on alone.