The high, strangled noise Joy makes at marmite is a boiling kettle at the end of a noose. She looks at Waver as if she can very much believe what he has said to her, and simply cannot believe he would be so foolish as to have actually done it.

"Your magnanimity," she pronounces, chilly as a death sentence, "Does not go unnoted."

With that, she takes him up on his offer. She throws herself backwards into the Vileblood still pooled in her enormous popped blister with a thudding underliquid crack of skull against stone, her face almost disappearing under the clotting murk, filth lapping over eyes and mouth. She arches her back like metal buckling in a vice and lets loose a bubbling, choking howl. She slams her fists against the side of her vessel hard enough to collapse an edge, which drools further pollution onto the rocks, and digs her heels in like anchors as she gives voice to her gurgling outrage. The cloak floats over it all like a sodden apology.

She whips herself into sitting as abruptly as she immersed herself, a wide arcing splatter of gore around her, and glares up at Waver. When she opens her mouth to speak, blood gushes forth, her words sloshing with it.

"Well!" She snaps. "I hope you relish disappointment, as I have not the least intention of leaving this beach, and I have no interest! Whatsoever! In your news!!"