The lasgun was not built for Sister Mercy.
That was simply a fact — standard issue, built for a Steel Legion trooper, longer than comfortable, heavier than anything she usually carried in her daily life at the orphanage. The grip was worn smooth by hands considerably larger than hers.
She handled it like she'd been born with it.
Three shots, controlled bursts, and the Ork at the far end of the courtyard went down before the nearest trooper had fully raised his own weapon. The soldier beside her had gone very still when she'd first picked it up — the careful stillness of someone reassessing a situation — and had said nothing since, which was the correct response.
Sister Mercy was not, to outside appearances, a woman who belonged on a battlefield.
Sister Mercy had, in practice, spent enough time on enough of them that the Steel Legion troops around her had stopped treating her like a liability approximately four minutes into the engagement and started treating her like someone to stay near, which was considerably more accurate.
She moved efficiently and without wasted motion, staying low when low was right and moving fast when fast was right, reading the gaps in the Ork advance with the ease of someone who had done this before — not here, not on Armageddon, but in other places, in other years, in the life she'd had before the orphanage that she didn't discuss and no one asked her about. The Steel Legion sergeant two positions down had caught her eye at one point and given her a short nod, the kind of nod that didn't need words around it.
She'd nodded back and put down another Ork and kept moving.
But she was not straying from the orphanage.
That was the line she'd drawn for herself at the start and she kept it — she would help with the perimeter, she would add what she could, but the orphanage walls stayed in her sight at all times. The children were in the shelter. Eve and Lilith were somewhere inside. Sister Marian was somewhere inside.
She kept one eye on out here and one eye on in there and she did not move the line.
The fighting had pulled back from the immediate grounds — the perimeter clear now, the sounds of engagement pushing further down the outer district. The guns still going in the distance. The smoke still thick. But here, immediately here, a pause had settled.
Sister Mercy lowered the lasgun.
She turned toward the orphanage and saw Ha'ken near the outer gate, and she crossed to him.
"Brother Ha'ken." She inclined her head. "The children — are they safe?"
"In the shelter," he said. "Accounted for." A pause. "Eve and Lilith left the shelter before I reached them. They went inside to find the boy — Lysander."
Sister Mercy looked at him. "And now?"
"They are inside." He looked at the building. "I have not yet checked on them."
She followed his gaze.
She saw the east wall properly for the first time — sections of it punched through, stone rubble across the courtyard, the library wing's outer face partially collapsed. Several windows were nothing but dark holes now. Part of the roof had come down.
Her stomach moved and she kept it off her face.
The library, she thought. Lysander was in the library.
"Accompany me," Ha'ken said, already moving. "We check on them first. Then the shelter."
Sister Mercy fell into step beside him and said nothing about the east wall as they passed it, though she counted every breach.
Inside the library, the quiet had changed.
It had been a certain kind of quiet before — heavy and held, the quality of a room where something had just finished happening and no one had moved yet. Now it was still quiet, but different. The storm having passed through and left everything behind it flat and clear.
Lilith had stopped rocking.
She sat with Lysander in her arms, still, eyes open, the gold eye no longer glowing. The tears were drying on her face. Her expression had moved somewhere past the raw broken place it had been and settled into something quieter. Not better. Just stiller.
Eve had not moved from the doorway.
She was watching Lilith and she was trying to understand what was happening inside her own chest and she could not.
It was heavy. That was the only word she had for it — heavy — and it was not enough of a word, it didn't cover the whole of it, but it was the only one available so she kept returning to it.
Heavy.
Why.
She had been hurt before. She understood pain — the clean sharp kind, the kind that had a location and a cause. This was not that. This had no location. It was everywhere at once and it had no edges she could find and she couldn't push against it because there was nothing solid to push against.
What is this.
She didn't know.
Make it stop.
She didn't know how.
She looked at Lysander's face as she felt something pressed harder in her chest.
Don't like this, she thought. Plain and small and lost. Don't like this. Don't want this. Make it stop.
Nothing made it stop.
Lilith looked up.
Their eyes met, and the thing that had always existed between them — the understanding that didn't need words — moved between them now, and Lilith's hand came up toward her.
Eve crossed the room and knelt beside her without deciding to. Lilith's hand found the top of her head and stayed there, the familiar gentle weight that had always meant something Eve still didn't have a name for.
She stayed very still under it.
There, something said inside her. Quiet and very small. She's here. She's still here.
The heavy thing didn't leave. But it shifted. Changed into something that was still heavy but less impossible, the way a weight became less impossible when someone helped you carry it without saying anything about it.
Eve stayed very still and let Lilith's hand be there.
Lilith looked down at Lysander. At his face. Then she gathered him more fully into her arms and stood up — carefully, deliberately, with the steadiness of someone who had decided what they were doing and was doing it.
Sister Marian was watching her. Her eyes said several things. Her mouth said none of them. She nodded once, the nod of someone who understood and was simply waiting for Lilith to finish arriving at the same place.
Lilith looked at the floor.
At the picture book.
"Eve," she said. Rough and quiet and level all at once. "Get the book."
Eve looked where Lilith was looking.
She crossed to it and crouched down.
The cover was bent nearly in half. The pages were everywhere — torn, displaced, scattered by the chaos that had moved through the room. She gathered what she could reach. Then she picked up the cover.
To Lilith and Eve.
She stared at it.
His handwriting. Every letter given its own careful effort, each one sitting slightly different from the others the way handwriting did when someone was still learning how to make letters and was trying very hard. The drawing beneath — three stick figures, side by side, the middle one with yellow scribbled hair, the ones on either side with small red circles for eyes.
He made this, Eve thought.
He made this for us. For weeks.
She looked at the stick figures. At the way they were standing — close together, arms just touching, the way you drew people when you wanted to show that they were together without knowing the word for it yet.
Something pressed at the back of her eyes that she had only felt once before, in the medicae ward, when Lilith had been on the floor and she hadn't known why.
No, she thought, panicked and very small. No, not that. Not now.
She pressed her lips together hard.
He made this for us and now he's—
She stopped the thought before it finished because she didn't know what she would do if it finished and this was not the moment to find out.
She stood up slowly, and she held the torn cover against her chest without deciding to, because putting it down felt wrong and this was the only other option.
Lilith was watching her.
Lilith, Eve thought. Is this what you also feel?
Two people who had never lost anything because they had never had anything to lose until they came here, standing in a broken library, and no instructions for this anywhere.
Footsteps in the corridor.
The heavy unmistakable rhythm of power armor, and lighter steps beside it keeping pace. Eve turned.
Ha'ken came through the door first, his gaze sweeping the room immediately — the debris, the destroyed Ork twisted against the far wall, Sister Marian standing to one side, Eve with the torn picture book held against her chest.
And then Lilith.
And what Lilith was carrying.
Sister Mercy stepped in behind him, the lasgun still in her hands, her coif grey with dust on one side. Her eyes found Lilith and found Lysander and the hand holding the lasgun went very still.
Ha'ken said nothing.
His face stayed steady the way it stayed steady — but something moved behind his eyes that was very far from steady, and the steadiness itself became a different kind of thing, the kind that was being held rather than simply existing.
Sister Mercy's free hand came up to her mouth.
The library was very still.
Outside, the battle continued its slow retreat — the Steel Legion pushing the Orks back, the guns getting smaller and further away. The wind came through the broken wall and moved the loose pages across the floor, gentle and unhurried.
No one said anything.
There was nothing that needed to be said yet.