“That’s two minutes off my previous time, eldest sister.”

      “Yes,” said the Lyctor, and you could imagine her focus behind the dark plex of her haz mask as she carefully drew another line on the graph she was plotting. “You’ve been improving rapidly. But you could take it down in four minutes, infant, and it would still be not really good enough.”

      Your tongue slurred in your mouth: “Because these are so different from the real Resurrection Beast?”

      “No,” said the Saint of Joy, and her voice took on the gossamer thinness of a razor blade, poisoned by being perfectly reasonable. “You could take it down in two. You could take it down in one. But what it boils down to, baby sister, is that you’ve got hypothermia and I don’t!”

Harrow the Ninth - Act Two, Chapter Twelve