The tomb world had no name worth using.

  It was on no Imperial chart, no Mechanicus survey, no record that anyone still living had filed. It was just rock and silence and the particular cold that came from a place that had been asleep for sixty million years and hadn't fully decided how it felt about being awake again. The stars above it were old. The surface was flat and grey and completely still.

  Amelia's ship came in low and quiet.

  Or rather, it came in the way it always came in. Stopping time. The defense systems on the surface didn't fire because as far as the defense systems were concerned, nothing was happening. Nothing had happened.

  The Eleventh Hour.

  She'd named it herself, which felt appropriate given that she'd stolen it herself. Ordo Chronos had kept it locked in a vault on a station that no longer existed, catalogued under a designation so long and bureaucratic that no one who worked there had ever bothered to memorize it. They'd known what it did. They'd known it was dangerous. They'd decided the best thing to do with a device that could locally suspend and resume time was to put it in a box and write very strongly worded documents about it.

  Amelia had decided the best thing to do with it was use it before she went rogue.

  That had been the beginning of her being wanted in numerous systems as Ordo Chronos started being one of several organizations that would very much like to know where she was.

  She'd found Trazyn not long after. Or he'd found her — with Trazyn it was genuinely hard to tell, and she'd stopped trying to work out who had been maneuvering whom because the answer was probably both and neither and she had more pressing things to think about.

  The deal was simple. She kept the Eleventh Hour until she was done with it. When she was done with it — when she was done, he’d claim it and even herself. He fixed it properly in exchange.

  Amelia found it hilarious that he wants her to be kept like an artifact. A human without augmentation who lived naturally for a thousand years seemed to interest Trazyn or perhaps he knows something she doesn’t know about herself. Though it didn’t matter because she already forgot. Using the Eleventh Hour has its own drawback, after all. That’s why she preferred accompanied by Holmes, an Abominable Intelligence or at least what people called it back then.

  She trusted Trazyn approximately as far as she could throw a Monolith, but the deal had held so far, and that was something.

  After all, she needed to find someone.

  The ship settled into the tomb's upper gallery with a sound like a sigh.

  Amelia stepped out, and the time she'd suspended around the defense grid resumed behind her with a quiet, seamless click that only she could feel. The gallery stretched around her — vast and dark and green-lit, the way Necron spaces always were, everything clean and geometric and carrying the faint sense that the architecture itself was watching.

  She'd been here enough times that it didn't bother her anymore.

  "Trazyn," she called.

  The silence answered first, the way it always did.

  Then, from somewhere above and to the left, a figure descended — not walking, just arriving, the Necron lord stepping out of the green dark like he'd been standing in it all along and had simply chosen now to be visible. His eyes were the usual gold-green. His expression was the usual unreadable.

  "Amelia Watson," he said, with the particular tone of someone who had decided that using a person's full name was its own kind of observation.

  Amelia reached into the pouch at her side and took out the Navigator's Eye.

  It sat in her palm — small and golden, catching the tomb's light in a way that normal eyes didn't. It looked, if you didn't know what it was, like a very unusual piece of jewelry. If you did know what it was, it looked like something that had absolutely no business being separated from the child it had come from.

  She tossed it to him. Underhand. Easy.

  "Do your part," she said.

  Trazyn caught it without looking, fingers closing around it with the automatic accuracy of someone who had caught many things across many millennia and had yet to drop one. He looked at it for exactly one moment. Then he turned away, and that was apparently the end of the conversation.

  Amelia watched him go.

  Then she moved to the wall, leaned against it, and let her head tip back against the cold metal.

  How long has it been? she thought, looking up at the green-dark ceiling. I’m forgetting what I’m doing again… I’ll need to ask Holmes again later.

  The answer moved through her like something she'd stopped being surprised by. Long enough. Long enough that the number had stopped feeling like a number and started feeling like a fact of life, like gravity, like the way certain doors always stuck in damp weather.

  She didn't say it out loud. She never did.

  The tomb hummed around her, quiet and ancient and completely indifferent to the question.

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  She just closed her eyes.

  The Warp.

  It shifted and moved and contradicted itself the way bad dreams did — but the gold was still there, the same warmth she'd felt before, sitting near her like it had always been there and had simply been waiting for her to show up and notice it again.

  Lilith stood in it and looked around.

  The not-ground under her feet. The not-sky above. The distant, formless shapes of things moving in the dark beyond, which she had learned to not look at directly because nothing good had ever come from looking at those directly.

  She took a breath.

  Well, she thought. My eye is gone.

  She waited for the rest of the reaction to arrive. The panic, maybe. The grief. The furious emotion of what this meant and what she needed to do about it and who had done it and why.

  It didn't come.

  She was just tired.

  My eye is gone, she thought again, in case the first time hadn't landed properly. A woman named Amelia walked into the orphanage and shot me and took my eye. My literal eye. Out of my face. While Eve was frozen somehow and couldn't stop it. I am currently floating in the Warp, which means I am either unconscious or dying, and the last coherent plan I had was to tell Ha'ken the truth and I didn't even get to do that.

  She looked at the gold light.

  Yep, she concluded. My life sucks. This universe sucks.

  It wasn't self-pity, exactly. More like a reasonable assessment of the evidence. She'd been reincarnated into what was arguably the worst universe in any fiction she'd ever encountered, as an experimental child in a body grown in a lab, and had since survived a Warp event, a crash landing, an Inquisitorial interrogation, a near-fatal fever, a daemon attack, house arrest, and now eye theft. By a blonde woman with time-stopping technology or power.

  In what world or rather, in what universe was that normal?

  This one, apparently, she thought. This is just Tuesday.

  She didn't feel like thinking about any of it. Not right now. The gold was warm and the Warp was quiet in this particular pocket of it and she was tired in a way that went past the body and into whatever part of her was older than five years old.

  She reached for the light.

  It wasn't a decision, really. More like the way you moved toward warmth when you were cold — automatic, honest, not complicated.

  Her hand touched it.

  The memories weren't hers.

  That was the first thing she understood, and she understood it clearly even as they hit her like a wave — clear and vivid and enormously, overwhelmingly much. They filled her the way water fills a space, finding every corner, and her own memory — perfect, total recall, the gift and the burden — held all of it with the same helpless completeness it held everything else.

  She saw Space Marines.

  Hundreds. Thousands. In some armor she didn't recognize, some she recognized though but not the chapter colors she'd learned in reddit or maybe there are more types of Space Marines that she wasn’t aware of.

  But, the fact that they were fighting each other is something she tried to remember if something like that happened.

  Brother against brother, in the most literal sense. The memories gave her the images but not the words, the way some dreams gave you faces without names. Just the fighting, and the fire, and the enormity of it, and underneath all of it something that felt like grief so large it had stopped feeling like grief and started feeling like weather.

  The memory ended.

  Lilith woke up like something had pushed her upright.

  She was in a bed. The medicae ward, probably — white ceiling, the smell of it. Her head was full of the memory that wasn't hers, still settling, and her hand went to her face automatically, finding the bandage, feeling the shape of it—

  Amelia, she thought. The woman. Amelia. She shot me and she took—

  She grabbed the edge of the bandage and pulled.

  It came away.

  She blinked.

  Light. From the left side.

  Lilith went very still.

  She turned her head slowly. The window across the room. The doorway. The chair beside the bed where Eve was — had been — was just now startling awake, head coming up sharply at the sound of Lilith's sudden movement.

  Lilith could see all of it.

  With both eyes.

  Eve was on her feet in one motion, sleep gone like it had never been there, and her eyes went straight to Lilith's face — to the left eye, the one that should have been gone, the empty socket, and instead—

  Eve stared.

  Lilith stared back, probably.

  Then Eve crossed the space between them and her arms went around Lilith tight, and she was — she was shaking, and there was something wet on Lilith's shoulder, and Lilith's brain took a second to catch up with all of this and then caught up all at once.

  Eve was crying.

  "Sorry," Eve said, into Lilith's shoulder. Her voice was wrong — rough, like it had forgotten how to be a voice. "I'm sorry. I was right there. I was right there and I didn't—"

  "Eve—"

  "I didn't protect you." The arms got tighter. "I'm sorry."

  Lilith sat with that for a moment — the weight of Eve holding on, the shaking, the completely unfamiliar sound of Eve's voice doing something she almost never did. She brought her arms up slowly and wrapped them around Eve's shoulders and pressed her cheek against the top of Eve's head.

  "I'm okay," she said. "I'm here. I'm okay."

  "You weren't," Eve said.

  "I know. But I am now."

  Eve was quiet for a moment. The shaking slowed.

  Then Eve pulled back — not all the way, just enough to look at Lilith's face. Her eyes were red and wet, and she looked at Lilith's left eye with the expression of someone checking that what they were seeing was real. She wiped her face with the back of her hand, one rough swipe, and stood up straighter.

  "I'll tell the others," she said. Her voice was already evening out — steadying itself, the way Eve's voice did when she'd made a decision. "They need to know you're awake."

  "Eve—"

  But Eve was already moving, already at the door, already gone.

  Lilith listened to her footsteps go down the corridor.

  Then she lay back.

  She raised her left arm in front of her face — just her arm, just to check — and looked at it with her left eye.

  She could see it. Clearly. Better than clearly, maybe, though it was hard to calibrate against what normal had been when normal had been blind.

  Her arm. The sleeve of the medicae gown. The thin light coming through the window.

  She turned her head and looked at the window across the room. Her reflection was faint in the glass — small, pale, sitting up in a bed too big for her.

  Two eyes looked back.

  The right one was red and glowing, the way it always had been, the one she'd grown used to seeing in mirrors.

  The left one was still gold.

  Just gold. Intact. Present. Sitting in her face exactly where an eye should sit, looking back at her in the glass with an expression that matched her own, which was the expression of someone who had expected to find an empty socket and had not found one and did not know what to do with that information yet.

  How, Lilith thought. Did it just grow back?

  She touched the edge of it carefully, fingertips against her own cheekbone, half-expecting the sensation to be wrong or absent.

  It wasn't. It felt like an eye. It felt like her eye.

  She looked at the reflection for a long moment.

  Amelia took it, she thought. I was awake. I felt it go. And now it's back, and I can see through it, and I couldn't before. I can understand if it grew but…

  She lowered her hand slowly.

  The gold eye in the reflection looked back at her, calm and quiet and full of a question she didn't have the answer to yet.

  Why can I see through it?