That person was not Ha'ken.

  Lilith registered that in the first half-second. This woman just walked through it like a normal person — medium height, practical, moving with the kind of ease that came from someone who knew exactly where they were going and had already decided what happened next.

  Blonde hair. Short, slightly messy bob. No veil. No rosarius. No symbol of any allegiance Lilith could read.

  The armor was wrong too. It looked like Inquisitorial carapace at first glance — close-fitted, black, segmented — but it wasn't quite. The plates were different. Sleeker. The joints were reinforced with something Lilith didn't recognize, and along both forearms there were thin brass housings with tiny dials and lenses that flickered with a faint light from somewhere inside. Cables disappeared under the plating at her wrists.

  The woman's eyes moved across the room once and then stopped on Lilith's face.

  "You are very hard to track."

  Lilith's first instinct was to look at Eve.

  Her eyes went wide.

  Eve was frozen.

  Not still the way Eve went still when she was watching something. Frozen. Sitting on the floor exactly as she had been a moment ago, red eyes open, hand resting on her knee, not breathing, not blinking — like someone had reached into the world and pressed pause on her specifically. Her expression was caught mid-focus, still aimed at the spot where Lilith had been humming, and she wasn't moving at all.

  What—

  What did she do to Eve—

  Lilith's thoughts lurched. She stood up from the chair without deciding to, putting herself between the woman and Eve's frozen form, which was a completely useless thing to do physically and she knew it but her body did it anyway.

  Her hands were shaking.

  Okay, she thought, fast and sharp and a little frantic. Okay. Think. What do you have? What can you actually do right now?

  The answer was: not much. Her powers had never been something she could call on anytime and she hasn’t any idea on how to even manifest it. The one time her eye had opened it had been an accident that killed everyone on a ship. She had no weapon. She had no backup. She was a five-year-old with one working eye with an enhanced memory, and across the room was a woman in armor that didn't belong to any faction Lilith could identify who had somehow frozen Eve without touching her.

  Right, she thought. Great. Fantastic.

  She gritted her teeth.

  Fine. If I'm going down, I'm going down asking questions.

  "Who are you," Lilith said. Her voice came out steadier than she expected. Her hands did not cooperate with the steadiness. "And what do you want."

  The woman looked at her.

  There was a pause — not a threatening one, more the pause of someone deciding how much to bother explaining. Then she said, simply: "Amelia."

  Just the one name. Said like that was enough.

  It isn't, Lilith thought, but sure.

  Amelia tilted her head slightly, and something in her expression shifted — not softer, exactly, but more like it’s ‘nothing personal’. Like she'd just noticed something mildly interesting. "I'll be honest," she said, "getting onto this planet was a pain. Armageddon's orbital defenses are not what I'd call welcoming." She paused. "An escape pod, though. That's what got you through." It wasn't quite a question. "How does an escape pod make it through Armageddon's guns without being shot down?"

  Lilith's froze.

  How did she know about that?

  Lilith’s mouth was dry. "I don't know," she said, which was true.

  Amelia looked at her for a moment. The look said she wasn't entirely convinced.

  The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  "Right," Amelia said. Then she took a small breath and the slight curiosity in her expression closed back down into something more like business. "Here's where we are. I'm here for your Navigator's Eye." She nodded at Lilith's left eye. "The gold one. You can give it to me, or I take it. Either way, it's coming with me."

  She took a step forward.

  Lilith held her ground, which was either brave or idiotic and she genuinely couldn't tell which.

  Then Amelia stopped.

  She went still though not the frozen stillness she'd put Eve in, just the stillness of someone receiving information through a channel Lilith couldn't see. Her eyes went slightly distant. She was quiet for a moment, listening to something.

  "...Fine," she said, to the air.

  She reached to her side and drew a sidearm. It didn't look like any gun Lilith recognized from 40K. Compact, unusual shape, a faint blue charge running along the barrel.

  Lilith took a breath.

  Well, she thought, I tried—

  The shot was quiet. A soft, sharp crack, and then everything went sideways. She can’t say if it’s painful though it is just sudden that the ground coming up faster than made sense, her legs already gone before she'd registered falling. The chair was behind her somewhere. The floor was cold against her cheek.

  Eve, she thought, the word dissolving as her vision went gray at the edges.

  Ha'ken—

  The light in the room got very soft.

  I need to tell him everything, she thought, faintly, at no one in particular. That was the plan. Tell him everything.

  Then there was nothing.

  Amelia crouched down.

  She worked quickly and carefully, gloved fingers moving to Lilith's left eye with the practiced precision of someone who had done difficult things before and had made peace with it, or at least how she felt about it. She quickly done her job and it’s done.

  She held the eye up. Examined it once. Then closed her hand around it.

  A robotic voice spoke in her ear through whatever device was running along her forearm.

  Acquisition confirmed. Clean work.

  "Didn’t think that I would track a child," Amelia said. “The records of that Magos I eliminated proved true.”

  This is the optimal route.

  "I know." She stood up. Looked down at Lilith's small, unconscious form — the blood beginning to seep from the empty socket. Her expression was hard to read. "I know. But what’s important is she’ll live. If those records were real, then her regeneration will keep her alive."

  Trazyn will be pleased.

  “I’m still not sure whether I’ll give that information,” She whispered as she turns around. “Probably not.”

  That too, is fine.

  She crossed the room. Stepped into the corridor. Made it through the orphanage and out the other side without anyone seeing her.

  Then she was gone.

  And time resumed.

  Eve blinked.

  She had been watching Lilith hum. The sound had been — she didn't have the word for it yet, was still building the vocabulary for things that made her feel something unexpected in her chest — and she'd been perfectly still, just watching, and Lilith had been looking out the window, and—

  Eve's eyes dropped to the floor.

  Lilith was on the floor.

  Eve stared.

  The chair was pushed back. Lilith was on her side, eyes closed, not moving — not asleep, Eve knew the difference, and this wasn't it — and from her left eye, the blind one, blood was running down her face in a slow, dark line.

  Eve's mind processed this in pieces, each one landing separately and wrong. She had been sitting right here. She had been watching. She had not looked away. Lilith had been humming, and now she was on the floor, and the time between those two things was — wasn't — Eve couldn't—

  How.

  She was on her feet without knowing she'd moved. She was beside Lilith, hands hovering, not quite touching, and her chest was doing something she didn't have a name for yet — loud and tight and wrong.

  "Lilith," she said.

  No answer.

  "Lilith."

  The blood kept moving. Slow, patient and terrible.

  Her strength, the speed that had dismantled daemons—it meant nothing. The air had simply skipped a beat, and in that missing second, she had failed. The silence of the room was louder than any bolter blast. She can fight what she can see. But this was different. This is not like the fever. Someone did this to her and she didn’t even see a thing.

  Lilith still lay on the floor not answering, and Eve's hands were shaking.

  The door.

  Ha'ken.

  The thought arrived with the clarity of the only thing that mattered. She crossed to the door in two steps and pulled it open hard enough that it hit the wall, and he was right there — right there in the corridor, just arrived, red eyes taking in the doorway and then Eve's face and then whatever was in Eve's face, because he moved past her into the room immediately without a word.

  He saw Lilith.

  He was already moving, already calling back through the corridor, his voice loud and flat and carrying the specific weight of a Space Marine issuing an order he expected to be followed instantly.

  "Medicae. Now."

  He crossed the room in two strides and crouched beside Lilith, one massive hand hovering just above her face, his eyes moving over her with fast, trained focus — checking breathing, checking the wound, checking things Lilith had taught Eve the names of but that Eve couldn't think of right now because her hands were still shaking and she was standing in the doorway watching Ha'ken work and she did not know what to do with her hands.

  "She's breathing," Ha'ken said to Eve. "She's breathing."

  Eve's chest did something complicated. A mix of relief and fear.

  "What happened?" he asked, still not looking up.

  Eve opened her mouth.

  Closed it.

  She didn't know. That was the true and impossible answer. She had been sitting right there and she did not know. Something had come and gone and taken Lilith's eye and left her on the floor and Eve had not seen it, had not stopped it, had not known it was happening — and the weight of that sat in her like something very cold.

  "I don't know," Eve said her expression still shocked but tears are starting to form in her eyes. “I was looking at Lilith. Then. Then…”

  Ha'ken looked up at her then. Just for a moment. His expression was unreadable in the way it got when he was thinking fast and keeping it off his face. Without another word, Ha’ken carries the unconscious Lilith.

  Eve followed behind.

  Lilith. I’m sorry.

  I'm still gonna take those vacation days though but i just don't know when. I'm literally restless (i'm working with another novel that i'll use to make money through WebNovel). I'll announce it though.