The morning of leaving felt like any other morning.
That was the strange part. The bell rang at the same time. The gray light came through the window at the same angle. The orphanage smelled the same — old stone and lye soap and the faint underlayer of whatever Sister Mercy had started cooking in the kitchen before anyone else was awake. Everything was exactly as it had always been, and they were leaving it, and those two facts sat side by side without resolving into anything comfortable.
Lilith packed her things.
It didn't take long. That was the other strange part — how little there was. The journal Sister Marian had given her, the pen tucked into the spine. The book about Nocturne that Lysander had brought her weeks ago, worn soft at the corners now. The small walking stick Sister Marian had given her for her depth perception, which she didn't need anymore but was keeping anyway. A spare set of the orphanage grays, folded. That was essentially it.
Twenty-three years of a life, she thought, and now five years of another one, and it all fits in one bag.
She sat on the edge of the bed with the bag in her lap and looked at the room.
Eve was already packed. She was standing near the window with her own bag at her feet, the locket around her neck, looking out at the gray courtyard below with the particular quality of attention she gave to things she was committing to memory.
Lysander was attempting to pack.
The Salamanders book went in first, handled with great care and placed flat so the cover wouldn't bend. Then a change of clothes, stuffed in with considerably less care. Then the metal Sentinel, which he held up and examined seriously before placing it on top of everything else with the deliberateness of someone making an executive decision. Then he looked at the bag, looked at the Sentinel, looked at the bag again, and took the Sentinel back out and put it in his pocket instead.
"I'm ready," he announced.
Lilith looked at him. "You didn't close the bag."
He looked at the bag. "Oh." He closed it. "Now I'm ready."
Eve turned from the window. She looked at both of them, and then she looked at the room — the beds, the small desk, the window — and something moved across her face that was there and gone before it fully formed.
Lilith stood up.
"Alright," she said. Quietly, to the room, to no one in particular. "Alright."
The corridor outside was empty.
Most of the orphanage was still in morning routine — the younger children at breakfast, the older ones at chores, the building doing what it always did at this hour. The three of them moved through it carrying their bags, and the familiarity of the route made it stranger. Every turn was a turn Lilith had made a hundred times. Every door was a door she knew the particular sound of when it opened.
She didn't let herself slow down.
They came out into the main hall and found the three sisters waiting.
Sister Mercy saw them first. Her face did several things in quick succession before settling on something that was warm and bright and not entirely steady. She was holding herself together with visible effort and visible awareness that she was doing so, which was very Sister Mercy.
Sister Marian stood beside her, hands folded, expression composed. The composure had a quality to it that Lilith recognized now after months of watching her work. The composure of someone who had decided how they were going to carry something difficult and was carrying it that way.
Sister Prudence stood slightly apart from the other two in the way she always stood, contained and upright, her eyes moving across the three children with the thoroughness of someone doing a final accounting.
Nobody spoke for a moment.
Then Lysander, who was not built for long silences, said: "We're ready."
Sister Mercy made a sound that was almost a laugh and crossed the hall and crouched down and pulled him into a hug that he accepted with the complete naturalness of someone who had always expected hugs from Sister Mercy and found this one no different and also somewhat expected given the circumstances.
"You be careful," she said into his hair. "You look after yourself."
"I'm going to protect Lilith," he said, muffled against her shoulder.
"I know you are." She pulled back and looked at his face, both hands on his cheeks. "But you also have to look after yourself. Both things, yes?"
He considered this with appropriate seriousness. "Both things," he agreed.
She hugged him once more, quickly, and then let him go and stood up and looked at Eve.
Eve looked back at her.
Sister Mercy opened her arms.
Eve stepped into the hug with the slight stiffness she always had with physical contact from anyone who wasn't Lilith, but she didn't pull away. She stayed in it, her arms coming up after a moment, and Sister Mercy held on with the straightforward completeness of someone who wasn't going to do this halfway.
"The locket," Sister Mercy said quietly, close to her ear. "Don't lose it."
"I won't," Eve said.
"And if you ever find a pict-recorder—"
"I'll use it," Eve said.
Sister Mercy pulled back and looked at her face. Eve looked back steadily, and something passed between them that didn't need words around it.
"Good," Sister Mercy said softly.
Then she turned to Lilith.
Lilith had been watching all of this and feeling the slow accumulation of something in her chest that she'd been managing successfully right up until Sister Mercy turned to look at her, at which point the management became considerably more difficult.
Sister Mercy looked at her for a moment without saying anything. Then she said: "You came here as the most unusual child I have ever met in twenty years of this work."
"I'll take that as a compliment," Lilith said.
"It is one." Sister Mercy's voice was doing the not-quite-steady thing again. "You are going somewhere extraordinary. And you are going to do extraordinary things." She paused. "Write them down. In the book Sister Marian gave you. Write all of it down."
"I will," Lilith said.
Sister Mercy hugged her. Tight, unhesitating, the full weight of it. Lilith's bag bumped awkwardly between them and neither of them moved it.
"Thank you," Lilith said, into her shoulder. "For the night you went to find Ha'ken. For everything before that and after it. Thank you."
Sister Mercy didn't say anything. She just held on for another moment.
Then she stepped back and pressed her lips together and looked at the ceiling briefly, which was the move of someone recollecting themselves, and turned away to compose her face, and that was that.
Sister Marian stepped forward.
She looked at Lysander first. "You'll need to eat properly," she said. "Don't let enthusiasm substitute for meals. Growing children need both."
Lysander nodded with great seriousness. "Both," he confirmed.
"Good." She looked at Eve. "You know your own strength better than anyone. Use that knowledge." A pause. "And eat properly as well."
Eve nodded.
Sister Marian looked at Lilith.
"The journal," she said.
"I already started it this morning," Lilith said.
Something shifted in Sister Marian's expression. Just briefly. "Good," she said. Then, quieter: "You have everything you need. You have had it for some time. Trust that."
Lilith looked at her. At the lined, practical face that had leaned over her in a medicae ward when she was burning with fever and had been in that ward every morning since, showing her how to clean wounds and read symptoms and think clearly under pressure.
"I'll miss the lessons," Lilith said.
"The lessons don't stop," Sister Marian said simply. "They just change location."
She put one hand briefly on Lilith's head — light and quick, not sentimental, just there — and then withdrew it and stepped back.
Then Sister Prudence.
She looked at the three of them for a moment without preamble. Her expression was the one she always wore, composed and direct, but it had that quality around it again. The warmth that Sister Prudence expressed not through softness but through the careful, serious attention she gave to things she actually cared about.
She looked at Lysander first.
"You are going somewhere you've wanted to go since the first week I met you," she said. "Don't waste the opportunity by being careless."
"I won't be careless," Lysander said. Then he added, with complete sincerity: "I've been practicing being careful."
The corner of Sister Prudence's mouth moved. Barely. But it moved. "See that you continue," she said.
She looked at Eve.
"You have learned a great deal in a short time," she said. "More than you know. More than you show." She held Eve's gaze. "That is a strength. Use it carefully."
Eve nodded once, the measured nod of someone receiving information they intended to keep.
Sister Prudence looked at Lilith.
A pause.
"I never believed the amnesia story," she said.
Lilith blinked.
"I want you to know that," Sister Prudence continued, evenly. "Not to make you uncomfortable. But because I made a choice, when you arrived, to observe rather than press. And I want you to know that choice was deliberate." She looked at Lilith steadily. "You are not what you appeared to be. You are considerably more than what you appeared to be. And I believe, having watched you for these months, that you will handle that correctly."
Lilith looked at her.
"I'll try," she said.
"I know you will," Sister Prudence said. "That is why I'm saying it."
She looked at all three of them one more time.
"Go," she said. "Don't be late. Ha'ken is not a man who appreciates tardiness."
He was waiting in the courtyard with two other Salamanders.
Lilith didn't know their names yet. They were younger than Ha'ken in the way Space Marines were younger — which meant they looked exactly the same to the untrained eye but carried themselves with slightly less settled weight, the weight of fewer decades. Both in full green armor, both watching the three children approach with the same careful assessment Ha'ken had given them on his first day in the medicae ward.
Ha'ken looked at them. "You have everything?"
"Yes," Lilith said.
He nodded. "Then we move."
Lysander was looking at the two other Salamanders with eyes that were doing their best to be respectful and professional and were mostly just very wide. He looked at Ha'ken. Then at the other two. Then at Ha'ken again.
"Brother Ha'ken," he said.
Ha'ken looked at him.
"There are three of you," Lysander said. With the tone of someone confirming something wonderful.
"There are," Ha'ken said.
Lysander pressed his lips together very firmly. This was clearly taking significant effort.
Ha'ken looked at him for a moment. Then he turned and began walking, and the small group fell in around him, and the courtyard gate opened, and they moved out into the hive.
Lilith did not look back.
She had decided this earlier, somewhere around the second day of the countdown, that she was not going to look back at the orphanage as they left. Not because looking back was wrong, but because she knew herself well enough to know that if she looked back she would stop moving, and she couldn't stop moving.
She kept her eyes forward.
Armageddon went past around them — the gray hive streets, the permanent overcast, the distant industrial roar that was the planet's constant background conversation with itself. Steel Legion patrols at intersections, checking credentials, waving Ha'ken's group through with the speed of people who knew what green Astartes armor meant and had no interest in creating delays. Civilians moving in the purposeful way of hive city residents who had long since accepted that the street was something you moved through, not something you occupied.
Eve walked beside Lilith, close enough that their arms almost touched.
Lysander walked on Lilith's other side, the Salamanders book under one arm and the metal Sentinel in the opposite hand, making it walk along the top of his bag in a way he clearly thought no one was noticing.
They reached the landing pad.
A shuttle was waiting — smaller than Lilith had expected, utilitarian, the kind of craft built for moving people between places rather than impressing them. It bore the Salamanders livery on its hull, green and understated. The two other Salamanders were already aboard. Ha'ken waited at the base of the ramp, watching the three children take it in.
Lilith looked at it.
This is real, she thought. This is actually happening. We are getting on that shuttle and leaving Armageddon and none of the things I know about this universe have fully prepared me for the part where we actually leave.
"Lilith," Eve said quietly, beside her.
"I know," Lilith said.
"We're going."
"I know."
Eve looked at her. "Are you ready?"
Lilith thought about it honestly, which she generally found more useful than thinking about it hopefully.
"No," she said. "But that's fine."
Eve considered this. Then she nodded, as though no but that's fine was a perfectly reasonable operational status, which for them it probably was.
Lysander had already started up the ramp.
He stopped halfway and turned around, looking down at them with the expression of someone who had been waiting for this moment his entire life and was now in it and was doing his absolute best with the magnitude of it.
"Come on," he said.
Lilith picked up her bag.
She went up the ramp.
The shuttle docked with the ship in orbit.
Lilith felt the transition more than she saw it — the subtle shift in gravity, the clunk of docking clamps, the change in the quality of the air from shuttle-small to something larger and older. When they were led through the docking collar and into the ship proper the scale of it announced itself immediately. Wide corridors of dark metal, the low constant thrum of engines running somewhere deep in the hull, the smell of machine oil and recycled air and something faintly chemical she didn't have a name for yet.
A frigate, Ha'ken had told them before boarding the shuttle. The Ashen Covenant. Around a kilometre and a half of void-capable warship, currently holding low orbit above Armageddon and waiting with the patient indifference of something that had been waiting in various orbits for a very long time and had no strong feelings about one more.
Lysander walked through the corridors with his head on a constant slow swivel, taking everything in with wide eyes and the focused silence of someone storing everything for later detailed review. This was, Lilith noted, one of the longest stretches of quiet she had ever witnessed from him.
They were shown to their quarters — small, functional, three bunks and a shelf and not much else, which was fine because none of them had much else. Lilith set her bag down and looked around the room and felt the ship move beneath her feet, a barely perceptible shift, and understood they were repositioning.
Then the shutters came down.
Heavy reinforced panels, sliding across every viewport in one smooth coordinated motion, sealing out the outside with a sound like finality. Lilith watched them close and understood instinctively what it meant before anyone said anything.
"Warp transit," a crew member said, passing in the corridor outside without stopping.
Lilith sat on the edge of her bunk.
Her hands were not shaking. She was fairly pleased about this.
Something is going to happen, she thought. Something always happens. It'll be the dreams, or the Warp reaching in, or another mysterious voice, or another entity with a cryptic agenda that takes three chapters to resolve.
She waited.
The ship shuddered once — deep and full-body, felt through the bunk and the floor and the walls simultaneously — and then steadied.
They were in the Warp.
Nothing reached in. Nothing whispered. The ship moved with the patient purpose of a vessel that had made this journey before and would make it again.
Lilith waited a little longer.
Still nothing.
She let out a slow breath.
Oh, she thought, with the particular relief of someone who had been braced for impact and found none. Oh, maybe this one is just fine. Maybe this is just a trip.
She looked at Eve, who was sitting cross-legged on the opposite bunk watching the closed shutters with the alert focus she gave anything that might require a response.
"It's quiet," Lilith said.
"Yes," Eve said. Still watching.
"That's good."
"Yes," Eve said. She paused. "Probably."
Lilith looked at the closed shutters.
And then she noticed it.
With her right eye, the shutters were exactly what they were — solid, reinforced, completely opaque, doing their job. The standard view. The one that kept everyone aboard sane and functional and not looking at something that the human mind was not equipped to process.
With her left eye they weren't there at all.
The gold eye saw through them the way it had seen through other things it wasn't supposed to see through, past the metal and the reinforcement and the Geller field membrane, and what it showed her was the Warp in a way the Warp was not supposed to be seen. Not the churning surface of it but the depth. The layers beneath the layers, things moving in the deep that had mass and intention and had been moving for longer than the Imperium had existed. Shapes that were not shapes. Distances that were not distances. The whole vast interior architecture of a dimension that was not built for human eyes and was absolutely not built for a five-year-old sitting on a bunk in small Astartes quarters.
It was extraordinary.
It also hurt.
The pain started as pressure — behind the eye, around it, the particular sharp insistence of something being asked to do more than it was ready for. It built quickly into something that made her breath catch. She raised her hand to her face automatically, pressing her fingers against her cheek, and it didn't help.
She closed the gold eye.
The pain eased immediately. Slowly at first, then more completely, settling back down to a dull reminder and then fading to nothing.
Lilith sat with her left eye closed and her right eye open and looked at the closed shutters and breathed carefully for a moment.
Right, she thought. So. That's a thing. The shutters don't stop it. Of course they don't.
She looked at Eve.
Eve was already looking at her, because Eve always noticed.
"Your eye," Eve said.
"I know," Lilith said.
"What did you see?"
Lilith thought about how to answer that. The layers. The depth. The shapes that were not shapes. The Warp on the other side of solid reinforced metal that her gold eye had looked through like it wasn't there.
"Too much," she said.
Eve looked at the shutters. Then back at Lilith. She didn't press further, which was one of the things about Eve that Lilith had always been grateful for.
Lysander was already asleep on the third bunk, the Salamanders book open on his chest, the metal Sentinel standing upright on the small shelf above his head where he'd placed it with great deliberateness before deciding that sleep was happening now.
The Warp moved outside, vast and indifferent and not, for the moment, doing anything about them beyond the one thing it had just done, which was enough.
Probably, Lilith thought, looking at the closed shutters with one eye.
She lay back and looked at the ceiling and let probably be enough.