Dessa had been reading the Inquisitor for six hours.

She knew his name before he told her. Pulled it from the irritated flutter at the back of his mind like a thread from loose weave. Vorlan. She knew he’d skipped his morning meal, that he was running a secondary interrogation two corridors down and was already bored with this one. She knew he believed he had more patience than he did. She had built her survival around that exact miscalculation.

The cell was small and cold. The walls sweated. Overhead, a single lumen strip cast everything in the colour of old teeth. Dessa sat in the chair they’d chained her to – the chains were unnecessary; she was no combat psyker, couldn’t have overpowered a moderately determined child – and let her sense run soft and easy, mapping the room’s psychic weather the way a tongue finds a sore tooth: compulsively, without deciding to.

Vorlan’s suspicion was a tight red knot behind his sternum. The guard by the door harboured a low domestic misery: his wife, a missed anniversary, cold silence over a dinner neither of them ate. She was simply a receiver, and the room was full of signals.

She answered nothing. She had answered nothing for six hours, because she knew, reading the mild telltale tension in Vorlan’s jaw, that he would ask one more question before he changed tactics. She was waiting for the change.

His jaw tightened. He looked at the door.

Dessa reached ahead with her sense before she’d consciously decided to. She reached toward whatever he was expecting and found nothing.

Not a shielded mind. Not resistance of any kind. She reached, and there was simply no surface to find, her sense extending into nothing, the psychic equivalent of leaning hard into a door that was not there.

She thought, for one fractured moment, that something had broken in her.

Then the door opened, and the nothing walked in.

The woman was tall, her Vratine armour burnished gold in the lumen strip’s thin light. The fur mantle sat heavy at her collar. A red top-knot rose from her crown, shaved clean on either side, not a stray hair conceding anything to the recycled air. The portcullis gorget sat alone across the lower half of her face, each vertical bar a locked syllable, nothing above it but two quiet eyes that regarded Dessa with the flat, assessing calm of something that had long since stopped needing to pretend. The rest of her sense registered an absence so complete it had weight.

She pushed harder. Every mind left something. Even the most disciplined leaked warmth into the Warp, some faint thermal trace. Everything left something.

The woman left a hole.

A wound in the room’s psychic fabric that did not bleed, did not close, simply was. Moving. Pulling back a chair and sitting with unhurried precision. Dessa’s sense slid off her, around her, and returned without having contacted anything. Like light bending around a perfect black.

The woman’s hands rested flat on the table. She simply waited.

There was no mind here.

So the current turned.

It was not like remembering. Remembering had a handle on it, a frame, a distance she could manage. This was the frame coming off. Her mother’s hands first, wringing a cloth in cold water, and the smell of the kitchen she had not thought about in eleven years arrived with the full sensory weight of standing in it. Then the alley in Sump Ward Seven, promethium and sweet rot, the way the drain had sounded.

The man she had killed.

Not the killing. She had looked at the killing many times, turned it over, and kept its useful parts. What arrived now was the moment before, when he had put his hand on her, and she had been afraid. Not the capable fear she had dressed it in since. The real fear, the small animal kind, the kind that had no pride in it. She felt it in her sternum the way she had felt it then, and the eleven years between collapsed to nothing, and she understood, suddenly and without mercy, that she had never stopped being afraid. That everything since had been the story she told on top of it.

Her hands were shaking. She noticed this from a distance.

She tried to hold.

There was one mind in the room, and it was hers, and it was the one she had spent twenty-three years not reading.

Her throat was already moving.

She told them everything. Names. The sub-void channel beneath the Ministorum quarter, the loose grating three maintenance hatches east of the transit shrine, the face of the man who had recruited her. She told them, and somewhere in the middle of it, she began to cry, and the telling and the crying were both happening without her permission, and she could not have said which was worse. The last thing in the room that still belonged to her left with the final syllable, and there was nothing after it.

The woman stood. Crossed to the door without haste. The absence retreated with her, the hole in the room’s fabric shrank and sealed, and Dessa’s sense flooded back like feeling returning to a limb that had not merely been numb but had been gone, and the rush of it was nauseating. The guard’s dull misery struck her like a wall. Vorlan’s satisfaction was quieter. Almost kind.

She was already weeping. She had been for some time.

From habit, she reached one final time.

Only the closed door.

She sat with what remained and understood, in the silence the woman had left behind, what it was to be unreadable. What a person had to give up to become a thing that could not be known.

It did not make her grateful.

But it made her quiet, in a way that had nothing to do with chains.