The days moved differently when you were counting them.
Lilith had noticed this before — back on the Magos's ship, in the escape pod, in the early weeks at the orphanage when every day had felt like a negotiation with survival. Time behaved differently when there was a fixed point ahead of it. It moved both faster and slower at the same time, which shouldn't have been possible but it was.
Three days left.
Then two.
The orphanage continued around them the way orphanages continued — bells and meals and chores and the low background hum of children existing in proximity to each other, the rhythms of the place going on regardless of who was staying and who was leaving. The Ork threat hadn't disappeared. The outer districts were still being cleared, the Steel Legion still moving through the hive in organized sweeps, the sirens still going at irregular intervals. But it had pulled back far enough that the orphanage had settled into something resembling ordinary life, and ordinary life had its own momentum.
Ha'ken had spoken to Sister Prudence two days after the attack. Brief and direct, the way Ha'ken communicated when the decision had already been made and the conversation was informational rather than deliberative. Lilith hadn't been present for it. She'd found out afterward from Sister Prudence herself, delivered with the same even tone Sister Prudence used for everything, as though she were reporting the weather.
"Lysander will be accompanying you," Sister Prudence had said. "Brother Ha'ken will be notifying the relevant parties. I'll speak to the boy."
That had been that.
The medicae ward was quiet in the mornings.
It was Lilith's favorite time to be in it. The light came in at a low angle through the narrow windows, the building hadn't yet accumulated the noise of the day, and Sister Marian moved through the space with the unhurried efficiency of someone completely at home in their own domain. She never wasted words in the mornings. She taught by doing and by pointing and by occasionally saying something precise and waiting for Lilith to apply it.
Lilith had been learning here for months now. Wound treatment, basic anatomy, infection and its signs, the properties of the medicines Sister Marian kept in the locked cabinet and dispensed with careful record-keeping. Her memory held all of it with the same completeness it held everything, and Sister Marian had noticed this early and adjusted accordingly. She taught faster with Lilith than she did with anyone else, covering more ground, going deeper, treating her less like a student being introduced to concepts and more like a colleague being briefed.
It was, Lilith had realized some weeks ago, one of the few times in this life that she felt genuinely like herself.
She was at the small desk in the corner, reviewing notes she'd made on the properties of counterseptic compounds, when the door opened.
Sister Mercy came in with a smile that was doing its best not to announce itself too early.
Lilith looked up.
Sister Mercy crossed to the supply shelf, reached behind something, and produced an object she set on the desk in front of Lilith with the particular care of someone delivering something that mattered.
A book. Small, plain, the cover a deep worn brown. Empty. Every page blank and waiting.
Lilith looked at it.
Then Sister Mercy reached into the pocket of her habit and placed something beside it. Thin, cylindrical, a small metal clip at the top.
A pen.
Lilith picked it up and turned it over in her hands. It was heavier than she expected. Solid, the casing a dull grey metal with fine machined ridges along the grip and a small Imperial aquila pressed into the clip. Not the kind of thing you found in a general supply pile. Someone had gone and found this specifically.
Do pens exist in 40K? she thought, genuinely uncertain for a moment. I assumed quills. Or styluses. Or — I don't actually know what people write with here on a day to day basis and I've been here long enough that I should probably know that.
She turned it over again and tested it on the corner of her notes. A clean dark line, consistent, the ink sealed inside the casing.
Huh.
"Sister Mercy is very resourceful," Sister Marian said, from across the room, with the dry satisfaction of someone acknowledging a fact. "When she decides she wants something, she always get it."
Sister Mercy looked pleased with this assessment.
"It's for everything," Sister Marian continued, nodding at the book. "What you learn here, what you observe, what you think is worth keeping. Medical knowledge, yes. But not only that." She paused. "You may have a good memory but writing things down is different from remembering them. Writing forces you to decide what something means. Not just that it happened, but what it was."
Lilith looked at the blank first page.
A journal, she thought. Or a diary.
She ran her thumb along the edge of the pages.
"You're leaving soon," Sister Marian said. It came out plainly. "The months you've been here — you have been, without question, one of the most memorable children to come through this place."
"I came through it fairly dramatically," Lilith said.
"You did," Sister Marian agreed. "But that isn't what I mean."
Lilith looked at her.
Sister Marian held her gaze with the direct calm of someone who had decided to say a thing and was saying it properly. "You came here scared yet look how much you grown. You taught your sister how to be a person. You learned medicine faster than anyone I've taught and used it when it mattered. You even made a friend." She paused. "Those things are yours. Whatever happens next, those are yours."
The medicae ward was quiet.
Lilith looked down at the book in her hands and did not say anything for a moment, because the things that came to mind felt either too large or not large enough and she hadn't decided which.
"Thank you," she said finally.
Sister Marian nodded once, turned back to her work, and said nothing more. Which was also the right size.
Sister Mercy, who had been watching all of this with bright eyes and pressed lips, suddenly straightened up. "I need to — I have things — for Eve, and just in case—" She was already moving toward the door, habit swishing, the sentence not quite finished. "I'll be back. Or you'll see me. One of those."
She was gone before the door finished opening.
Sister Marian watched the door settle closed.
"She's been planning these for two weeks," she said, without looking up from what she was doing. "Don't tell her I told you that."
Lilith looked at the pen in her hand and the blank book on the desk and thought about the months between the escape pod and this quiet morning in a medicae ward on Hive Armageddon, and opened to the first page.
It was blank but somehow, she already knew what to write.
Eve was in the small courtyard when Sister Mercy found her.
She was sitting on the low stone ledge that ran along the east wall, the one that had survived the Ork attack intact while everything around it had needed work. She wasn't doing anything in particular. Just sitting, which was something she'd gotten better at over the months. The ability to simply be somewhere without it feeling like waiting for something.
Sister Mercy sat down beside her.
Eve looked at her.
"I have something for you," Sister Mercy said. She opened her hand.
A locket. Small, silver, oval-shaped, hinged along one side. Eve took it and turned it over. Simple and plain, the kind of thing that didn't announce itself. It opened when she pressed the edge — a small latch, releasing to reveal two facing surfaces inside, one of them fitted with a thin transparent panel.
"I wanted to get a pict-recorder," Sister Mercy said, with the particular expression of someone reporting a defeat they hadn't accepted gracefully. "To take a pict-capture for you. Something to keep inside it." She looked at the locket in Eve's hands. "I couldn't find one to borrow. I tried everywhere." A small pause. "But if you ever find one, or stumble across one somewhere, you can take a pict-capture yourself and put it in there. Keep it with you."
Eve looked at the inside of the locket.
"A pict-capture," she said.
"Yes," Sister Mercy said. "Of something important. Something you want to carry."
Eve looked at it for a moment.
She didn't ask what a pict-recorder was, because that question and all its details were secondary. The question underneath it was simpler and had already answered itself completely.
"I know what I want," she said.
Her mind had gone, without hesitation or detour, directly to Lilith. It always did.
Sister Mercy smiled. "I thought you might."
Eve closed the locket carefully. Her hand closed around it with the particular care she gave things she'd decided mattered, and she held it there for a moment.
She didn't say anything else. She didn't need to. Sister Mercy sat beside her in the easy quiet that had developed between them over months of proximity, the quiet of two people who had learned each other's rhythms well enough to not fill all the space.
Then Sister Mercy stood, smoothed her habit, and said: "One more stop."
Sister Prudence was finishing her conversation with Lysander in the corridor near the main hall when Sister Mercy appeared.
The conversation had been, by all appearances, a serious one. Lysander had the expression he got when he'd been talked to about something important and was processing the full weight of it, which was different from his usual processing face in that it involved considerably less movement and noise. Sister Prudence had the expression she always had, though with something around the eyes that might have been the equivalent, for Sister Prudence, of warmth.
Sister Mercy waited until there was a natural pause.
Then she took out the book.
It was small and colorful by the orphanage's general standards. A pict-illustrated volume, the cover showing the unmistakable green of Salamanders armor, a Space Marine rendered in the simplified heroic style of materials made for young readers. The title pressed into the cover in bold Gothic script: The Sons of Vulkan: Guardians of the Flame.
Lysander stared at it.
"It's a copy," Sister Mercy said. "I know the other one — I know what happened to the one in the library. I found this in the archive room. It's been there for years." She held it out. "I thought you should have one that's yours."
Lysander took it with both hands.
He looked at the cover for a long moment. At the Space Marine, at the green armor, at the title. His face did the thing it did when something landed in the part of him that cared about things fully and without reservation. He didn't say anything immediately, which was unusual for Lysander in a way that made the silence carry weight.
Then he looked up at Sister Mercy.
"Thank you," he said with a huge childish smile. "I'll treasure this!"
Sister Mercy smiled back at him.
"You're welcome, Lysander," she said.
He tucked the book under his arm with the care of someone storing something important, and went to find Eve.
Sister Prudence watched him go.
Then she looked at Sister Mercy, who was watching Lysander's retreating figure with that expression. The one she wore when she'd done something for someone and was quietly pleased about it and trying not to look like it.
Sister Prudence let out a breath.
It wasn't quite a sigh. It was the breath of someone who had been watching a person be exactly who they were for a long time and had made their peace with it completely.
Sister Mercy had always been like this.
She was not, objectively speaking, the most orderly of the sisters. She bent rules when she felt the situation warranted it, and she had a definition of warranted that was considerably more generous than the one in the official guidelines. She had left the orphanage without permission in the middle of a dangerous night to find a Space Marine for a sick child. She had stood in a destroyed library holding a lasgun she'd apparently known exactly how to use. She spent two weeks procuring gifts for children who were leaving because it mattered to her that they had something to take with them.
She was very difficult to be appropriately stern with.
Sister Prudence had managed it, over the years. She had handed out penance with full consistency and zero personal feeling and meant both things simultaneously, because rules were rules and Sister Mercy understood rules the same way she understood everything. Completely, and from her own angle, and with the absolute conviction that love was a reason and not an excuse.
That was the thing. The thing that made the sternness and the genuine regard coexist without contradiction. Sister Mercy upheld what she believed the same way Sister Prudence upheld what she believed, and there was no real argument to be made against that. You could correct the method. You couldn't fault the foundation.
Sister Mercy turned and found Sister Prudence looking at her.
She blinked. "What?"
"Nothing," Sister Prudence said.
Sister Mercy looked uncertain, the way she always looked when Sister Prudence said nothing in that particular tone. "Are you going to assign me penance for sneaking out?"
"Not today," Sister Prudence said.
Sister Mercy's expression shifted into something that was trying not to be relieved and not quite managing it.
Sister Prudence looked back down the corridor where Lysander had gone. The two of them stood together in the quiet of the orphanage and let the day continue around them.