The first place I die is a rooftop.
Tin under my bare feet. Warm from the day’s sun. The hive wind tastes of rust and promethium.
I am eight. I have a name.
A shadow moves at the roof’s edge. Not a man. Not a thing. It is the absence of a thing, the shape left when your eye flinches away from something too bright.
Open, it whispers without sound.
I swallow. The stars tremble.
The shadow leans closer, and my eyeball twitches as if a hook has found purchase beneath the lid.
Something peels.
I fall, and the sky falls into me, and the rooftop is gone.
The second place I die is a chapel.
Candles gutter in rows like teeth, trailing fat curls of sweet tallow smoke. There’s an aquila above the altar, wings spread, and beneath it a man in a black hood with a bowl of salt water.
He takes my chin between thumb and forefinger as if inspecting livestock.
‘Look upon His light,’ the hood says.
I do not want to. I know what it costs.
But hands — many hands — press me to my knees. Manacles pinch my wrists. Someone sobs nearby, a thin and humiliating sound.
The hood lifts his other hand. His palm is inked with hexagrammic wards. The bowl’s water quivers, and for an instant I see my reflection in it: my face, young and hollow-eyed, and behind it a tall shadow, stretched long across the chapel.
Open, it says again.
The hood pushes me down, hard, into the bowl.
Salt floods my nose and mouth. It is cold, void. It is the space between thoughts. It is the Emperor, silent on His throne.
The shadow slides into the bowl like ink, and the wards on the hood’s hand flare — then go dark.
I try to scream and breathe brine and stars.
I drown, and the chapel is gone.
The third place I die is a corridor of brass and bone.
It stretches too far. Pipes run along the walls like veins. Somewhere deep beneath, engines thrum with the slow pulse of a sleeping god.
My palms are slick on the rifle stock. That’s wrong. I don’t carry a rifle. I’m not allowed to carry a rifle. My hands should be shackled.
But here, in this corridor, I am a soldier.
A red emergency lumen blinks. Blink. Blink. Blink. Heartbeats.
At the far end of the corridor, men in uniform come running. Their faces are wrong, like someone has tried to sculpt them from wax with wet fingers. Their mouths open in unison.
Open.
I fire. Lasbolts snap down the corridor, and where they strike, the men rupture into scraps of paper, into prayers in my own handwriting.
I realise the corridor walls are covered in text too — dense, endless. The same phrase repeated until it becomes a pattern, then a trap.
YOU ARE SAFE. YOU ARE SAFE. YOU ARE SAFE.
I hear the words like a hiss, static, a vox-unit tuned to dead air.
The red light becomes an eye.
It opens.
And the corridor folds like a book snapping shut.
The fourth place I die is a garden that should not exist.
Green. Real green. Fat leaves, bright petals, a little marble fountain.
I walk among flowers that smell like my mother’s hair oil.
My mother is here too, kneeling in the dirt. Her hands are stained. She looks up and smiles, and the relief is so sharp it’s pain.
‘There you are, love,’ she says.
That’s my mother’s voice. That’s my mother’s mouth.
She reaches out, and when her fingers brush my cheek, something in my skull clicks as if a lock has turned.
The garden trembles. The fountain water runs backwards.
‘Open,’ she says.
I slam my mental shutters down the way they trained me. I picture brass doors. I picture anoetic wards. I picture the Emperor’s face carved into stone, unblinking.
The thing in my mother’s shape laughs, delighted, and the laugh is the hiss of vox static.
‘You’ve built such a pretty home,’ it says. ‘Let me see inside.’
I feel it press against the inside of my mind like a thumb testing a bruise.
The fifth place I die is the one I’m actually in.
Metal under my spine. Cables sank into my scalp. The stink of sanctified oils and stale Navigator’s Thistle. A choir-vault, dim and oppressive, ceiling lost in smoke and hanging chains. Rows of thrones around me, each occupied by an astropath whose head lolls, bloody and limp.
Across the vault, behind a screen of brass bars, a robed adept is yelling into a voxhorn. His voice is a distant thing, muffled by the static inside my skull.
‘—contact! We’re losing the signal! The beacon—’
The beacon. The Astronomican. Felt but not seen.
And between that waning light and my mind: the shadow.
Here it is a pressure, a shape of thought trying to slide into the channel I have opened to scream our coordinates into the warp.
Open, it says, patient as corrosion.
The robed adept screams again. ‘In the Emperor’s name, hold!’
My lips are split. Blood runs down my chin in a slow, warm line. I can’t hold anymore, so I slam the door in my mind outward, at the thing waiting on the threshold.
I grasp at the light of that distant sun and drive it down the channel like a spear. The thing screams. It crawls through my memories.
I set them alight.
The rooftop — gone.
The chapel — gone.
My mother’s hair oil — gone.
My mother.
Gone.
Wherever it goes, I bring inferno.
When there is nowhere left to run, it hisses at me again.
You will be empty.
Then it is nothing.
I feel my own name — whatever it was — curl and blacken.
The robed adept is shouting numbers into the voxhorn, repeating them, repeating them, voice cracking with relief.
Coordinates.
Our message.
Sent.
Inside my skull, there is blessed quiet.
