“I [i]will,[/i]” Redana growls. “I can feel it.” When she strikes her breastbone it is flinchingly hard. “Traitors! Backstabbers! Liars!” When she strikes the wall there is a sound like breaking glass. “Cowards! [i]Cowards![/i] You left her and did nothing! And what if she hates me? What if everything was lies? Do you think I can leave her?”

The tears are coming freely now. Her shoulders tremble. “She was so scared,” she groans. “In the box. I know that now. And then I thought she was happy. To be with me. And then she turned cruel, but now— how long did she hate me? Behind her smiles? And now, and now I’ll always know she died cold and alone and scared, curled up on some godsforsaken rusting wreck, and I can never apologize to her, and I can never ever try to make it right, I can’t fix any of it, and it’s [i]her[/i] fault for abandoning her and it’s [i]your[/i] fault for wasting our time and I’ll never know if we could have saved her if we’d just been faster and I’m going to [i]kill[/i] you, kill you [i]both,[/i] cowards and traitors and faithless and murderers—”

She reaches out into the air and the air becomes tainted with hot ozone and static. Perhaps it is because she is drunk; perhaps it is because Dionysus has its hand on the scales; but the change from girl to monster is not immediate. It is slow in the way that the final act of a tragedy is slow, and behind Redana are a thousand thousand doors, a thousand thousand green eyes, a thousand thousand could-have-beens and never-weres, shadows of shadows, gunslingers and pilots and generals, tyrants and matricides and maids, and through them all shoving them aside like a bull, the vast shadow rising of Redana Chrysopelex, who has both the strength and the will to tear everyone in the room apart and then half the crew for seconds. Redana’s fingers curl around the haft of something that might, in a moment, become an axe.

And Redana’s eyes are closed, and her face is contorted into a gross sob, and the tears flow freely as the Nemean looms over her. She is blind; she sees only Bella, curled up on a steel floor, cold and still. She is deaf; she hears only the hiss of Bella’s wounded words lashing against her, overflowing from old and hidden wounds. She is senseless; she feels only pain.

She will not return.

The Nemean will overthrow the Shah, perhaps, and turn the great wheeling ships of the Azura, bound to one fatal, grand and terrible will, against Tellus, and condemn humanity by turning it to silvered glass and steam. Or she will ride the ruin of the [i]Plousios[/i] into the tempest, laughing as she goes, and do battle there with the leviathans of the deep. She will, heartless, assume the hole in the world left by Redana Claudius, whose heart is pierced and who can no longer stand under the weight of it.