It grabs to stretches of phrase, small images and bursts of emotion, independent of language. Like a child snatching for blocks, without any set pattern to disrupt. Perhaps it would be interesting, if it weren't playing inside her own damn skull.

It's singing and she wants to shudder; an old song, a dull pang of memory for those days when her mother sang. When they spoke at all. Its sweetness jars against the pulse of her heart, the burnt melody of her veins.

It never even occurs that she could simply ask it to stop.

"When?" The lower levels were old, the Veil thin. Torn by another death, anything might have invited itself in. "When did they forget him?"

Maker help her, she thinks it may be speaking literally. The names rush free, unbidden: check themselves against a catalogue of faces, and habits; and what must once have been affection — replaced by the bitter resignation of grief.

Not Joane, not Werner, (be still) never Arnault. Averie? No, she could tell whenever he was up to his bullshit,

(be still)

Not one of her men. She would have had it from them, one way or another. They would have shared such a horror.