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you’re the one. Pay attention!” Another shot came through the door. They assumed he’d somehow thrown the dead bolt and were trying to shoot the doorknob off. Nomad jumped up onto the control panel and slammed his shoulder into the windshield, completely breaking it free of the frame. Together he fell with it outside, where he rolled to his feet and ran across the deck. Rebeke found her wits and scrambled out after him. To his vast relief, he found the cycle where he’d left it. Yes, they’d docked it and chained it in place, but they didn’t seem to have sabotaged it. Auxiliary, as a crowbar, let him pop the chain from where it had been mounted to the deck. Rebeke climbed behind the controls and unlatched it from the side of the ship. Nomad leaped onto the seat behind her. The Cinder King strode out of his cab, pistol in hand, firing wantonly—and Nomad blocked with a shield. A second later, Rebeke dove the cycle toward the ground, nearly tossing him off with the sudden acceleration. He managed to hang on with his knees and grip her around the waist with one arm, keeping his shield up and intercepting a few more shots as they descended. “This is going to get awkward,” he remarked in Alethi, “if they start shooting at the cycle and not me. Can you get a little bigger and protect the whole thing?” You are at just over ten percent Skip capacity, the hero warns. I’ll need some of that to grow. If we drop below ten percent, we won’t be able to make new Connections, though you’ll maintain the ones you made before. “Do it,” Nomad said, feeling Auxiliary grow weightier in his hand—feeding off the Investiture they’d gathered. He expanded to about five feet across, just in time to block more shots. That size increase wouldn’t be permanent, and would continue to leech Investiture from Nomad while he remained that size. Rebeke continued to dive, and he realized she was going for the other hovercycle. He could see the edge of it peeking out into the ringlight from the stone overhang below. Apparently the officers who had grabbed her had left it. “Rebeke!” he shouted. “We need to get away!” “These are one of the only sets of cycles we have!” she shouted back, turning her head so he could hear over the wind. “I’m not going to abandon one.” Nomad looked up. The Cinder King appeared at the edge of the deck above, his glowing eyes like the coals at the heart of a campfire. He held something else in his hand. The key? The fake key. He slammed it and his pistol to the deck in obvious fury, then held out his hand to the side, where someone handed him a rifle. He took aim, and blast after blast hit the shield. “Rebeke!” he yelled. “You might be low on cycles, but if you stop down there, he is going to pick us off from above. Do you understand?” A moment passed,
the cycle still screaming toward the ground. Then, with obvious frustration, she pulled up and shot them along the ground—leaving the other cycle behind, abandoned. The Cinder King took no further shots. Indeed, Nomad thought he saw the man stalk back to his cabin, though the distance was now too great to be sure. He has figured out, the knight conjectures, that the Beaconites replaced his key and are hunting for the doorway. “You think?” Nomad grumbled in Alethi, dismissing the Investiture-draining shield, then called to Rebeke, “Trade me places.” “What?” He forced her to slow, now that they were out of range, and let him take the driver’s seat. There was barely enough room on the cycle for that, and as he got her on the back portion, she refused to hold him around the waist. He frowned at her. “We don’t…touch,” she said. “It’s not comfortable for us.” “Even through clothing?” he demanded. She looked away. “It just feels strange to—” “Yeah, whatever. I don’t care.” He locked her in place by the legs with an improvised variation of Auxiliary’s door blocker. Then he tore off toward the main body of Beaconites and fired up the radio. “Contemplation,” he said, “we have a problem.” “Alas, my news is of a similar nature,” she replied. “We’ve gone over the region twice and found nothing.” “He’s been lying to you,” he said, “about the location of the doorway. Obscuring it by making a big show of stopping in this region.” “As I explained previously, some of us have seen it.” “And how precise is their memory of the exact location? Did they memorize the positions of the stars? There are no persistent landmarks on this world. So—” “So,” she admitted, “those who saw the door could have been in a different location entirely. And it is reasonable, I admit that the coordinates we’re relying upon could be a lie meant to confuse people, in case this very situation arose.” “Exactly,” he said, leaning low against the wind. “I just had a chat with him. He’s a tyrant, but fortunately for us, he’s a stupid tyrant—with more ego than brains.” “Pardon, but you chatted with him?” “Yeah. Long story.” It’s really not, the knight observes. He stopped by. You flew up. “That’s not the long part of it,” he said in Alethi. “The long part would be explaining why I flew up there.” He continued in the local tongue. “Contemplation, he knows. He’s figured out you swapped the keys.” “Not to offend unduly, Sunlit—but did you tip him off to it by accident?” “Think that if it makes you feel better,” he said, “but he didn’t need any help from me. I watched him piece it together—all he needed was the information that Beacon was searching this area and that you’d brought everyone from your city. He isn’t as smart as I first thought him, but even he could put two and two together.” Contemplation was quiet over the line. “Look,” Nomad said. “He’s gathering his forces and will be upon you soon.
It’s time to pull out and retreat to the darkness.” “If we retreat,” Contemplation said, “we will be dead before we can rotate to this position again.” “If you don’t retreat, you’ll be dead a lot sooner. Doesn’t seem like a difficult decision to me.” She sighed. “I’m just…so tired of running.” “Lady,” he replied, “you have no idea how well I understand that.” “I shall speak to the rest of the Greater Good,” she said, “and we shall decide. You have young Rebeke with you still, I hope.” “I’ve got her,” he said. “She’s a tad stormy because I made her leave a cycle behind, but she’s in one piece—and has no extra holes in her.” “It is well,” Contemplation said. “She may not be our Lodestar, but she is a symbol to this people now that her siblings are gone. I offer this request: endeavor not to get her killed. At least, not before the rest of us fall.” She cut off, and Nomad was left to worry that they wouldn’t heed his warning. Fortunately, by the time he got back to the main body, they were organizing as he’d wished and moving back toward the darkness—which had moved pretty far off by that point. The horizon was growing brighter. Probably still an hour or so from full daylight, but he dipped his cycle lower anyway, to be deeper in the planet’s shadow. Down here, the plants were growing. Not as quickly as they’d been just on the edge of dawn, but the growth was perceptible. The landscape he’d left behind had been barren, full of mud and crags. This one was overgrown with life, moss on virtually every surface, grass waving in the winds, and it even bore small thickets of trees, their branches reaching toward the rings. It felt like an entirely different place; landmarks he’d noticed before leaving were now obscured by the foliage and deep greenery. How did seeds survive the cataclysmic heat of the day? Storms. The plants on this world must be something extraordinary. And the animals? As he zoomed past, he startled a group of gazelle-like creatures, who leaped up from feeding and bounded toward the darkness. Their eyes glowed faintly golden. Invested in some way. He found the quadcycle’s central fuselage where they’d left it, the other jets keeping it aloft. After locking the smaller one into place—and releasing Rebeke, who took over driving—they joined the rest of the ships, flying away from the sun in their ceaseless trek. For a time, Nomad thought maybe they’d actually escaped. Then they reached the rim of the cloud cover, where even reflected sunlight didn’t reach—and he saw something in the darkness beyond. A multitude of burning red lights. Seconds later, several dozen enemy ships zoomed out, on the attack. “THEY WERE SEARCHING for us,” Rebeke said. “While we were out here, they were in there, hunting for Beacon!” She was right. The ships coming out of the darkness veered to the sides in surprise. They’d gotten orders to fly back to stop Beacon but
hadn’t expected to run into it so soon. For a few confusing minutes, chaos reigned. Both groups of ships broke up, swarming in all directions. Nomad’s stomach tried to crawl up his esophagus as Rebeke dove toward the ground. The radio became a barking frenzy of questions and orders. “To the east!” Contemplation’s voice cut through it all. “Gather to the east. Make into the darkness and follow the Beacon!” Rebeke veered that way, their engines burning a strip of ash through the plants beneath them, which whipped at Nomad’s legs. He craned his neck, expecting to see weapon fire above. But there was practically none. Just a sharpshooter blast here and there. He reminded himself that they didn’t have guns mounted on their ships. Instead he saw a couple of enemy vessels bracket a blue-striped Beaconite ship and lock on either side, like they were docking. Soldiers leaped from the Cinder King’s ships, rushing the Beaconite’s cockpit. Before he’d found his Torment, he’d lived on a world without firearms. Back there, they’d engaged in a more personal, brutal kind of combat—the kind where you were forced to watch the other fellow die as you found the most efficient way of separating his blood from his body. This conflict felt more like naval warfare on his homeworld: no cannons, no artillery, just ramming and boarding. It was cumbersome, but it made sense here, since capturing a ship was among the most constructive things you could do, simultaneously shrinking the enemy force and enlarging your own. In addition, the Cinder King’s military strength relied on the Charred, who were most effective in close-up combat. Nomad, the knight says, look up, fifty degrees to your left. He followed the directions to a ship bobbing in the air, beleaguered by a large enemy ship locked onto it—and that enemy ship was boosting away from the darkness at full thrust. Like many of the Beaconite ships, the captured one was more a flying house than a military vessel, and it couldn’t counter the enemy ship’s greater power. It was being towed away. That’s the one that we met the Greater Good in, the knight notes to the squire’s confused lack of understanding. “Damnation. You sure?” Unfortunately. “Don’t suppose these people know to separate their command staff on different vessels, do they?” Seems like the sort of thing you only learn from sad experience… He sighed as Rebeke wove and dodged. The enemy ships ignored him; they were after larger prey, bearing more people. Well? “Thinking,” Nomad said, “on whether or not it’s too late to go back to the Cinder King and take him up on his offer.” I’m glaring at you right now. “You don’t have eyes.” Which is why I have to explain it. Nomad sighed, then tapped Rebeke on the shoulder and pointed at the ship in question. She looked in time to see two Charred leaping onto it, their open-fronted robes rippling as they soared. He lost what Rebeke said next to the wind, but her expression was horrified. “Get me close!”
Nomad shouted. “And be ready to pull me out in case I need it. Try not to get captured this time!” She nodded, pulling up in another jarring maneuver. Unfortunately a fleeing Beaconite vessel roared across their vector. Many of them were doing a good job of avoiding capture—that was something they had experience with. Still, Rebeke had to bank sharply left and then right to get back on track toward the Greater Good’s ship. He noted another vessel coming up to their right—between him and the command ship. “This is your fault, Aux,” he muttered. Rebeke belatedly saw she was on a collision course and veered to the side. He used the momentum to launch himself straight off the back of the cycle, hitting hard on the ship coming their direction. He glimpsed confused people in the cockpit as he rolled across their deck, then barely got purchase and threw himself out over an expanse, almost missing the side of the Greater Good’s ship as it was towed in the other direction. He heaved himself up onto its deck, which was maybe ten feet across. The enemy ship was still docked on the other side, hijacking the command ship’s own thrust, piloted by one of the white-coated officers. The woman saw him, eyes going wide. She frantically fumbled with her rifle. Her ill preparation gave him a chance, so he dashed across the deck and tried to tackle her—but of course, his Torment decided that would be too easy. It froze his muscles, sending him tripping in an embarrassing mess on the deck. “That is storming annoying,” he muttered, barely getting Aux up as a shield in time to block the rifle shots. Didn’t you have an idea to deal with that? “Yes, but it will take time to put together,” he said, backing away from the rifle fire. He eventually got even with the command ship’s front window—but that had been covered by a blast shield. As the officer stopped to reload, he formed Auxiliary as a crowbar and got the cover off in a single heave, sending the metal panel clanging to the deck. Then he threw himself shoulder first at the window behind it. And bounced off. “What is it with these people and their windows!” he said, this time throwing Auxiliary through first as a large barbell. Don’t know, the knight replies as he smashes through the window with ease. Must be you. Nomad grunted as bullets blasted the wall beside him, then hurled himself through and came up in a roll to his feet, out of sight of the riflewoman. Inside here, though, the two Charred from earlier were terrorizing the three Greater Good, who had pulled back to the far side of the room behind an overturned table. He saw their wizened heads peeking out as he stood up dramatically before the broken window. And wished to Damnation itself that he had any idea what to do next. At least now the Charred turned their focus on him. They came in together, armed with batons.
Fortunately the Cinder King took people captive so he could use them to make sunhearts, which explained his preference for batons instead of swords. Unfortunately there were two of them, and they were fast. They descended upon him in a flurry of blows and growls, forcing him to block with a shield in a series of quick exchanges. He couldn’t even try to force them back without being frozen by his own stupid soul, so he went full defensive—never a good way to win a fight. He had to ignore when they overextended their attacks, and he couldn’t punish their frenzied barrage, which otherwise would have left them open to counterstrikes. Instead he took hits on the arm, then the side, then a devilish crack on the head that sent him stumbling into the corner, vision swimming. The knight hopes that his beleaguered squire has a plan. “I’ve got one,” he muttered, blocking another set of blows, then barely shoving himself out of the corner to escape being pinned there. “I jump back out the window. Maybe the Beaconites don’t really need the help of these old ladies.” Of course, the knight says. Leave them without leadership and without supplies. That will work out well, I’m sure. The two Charred—fueled by their Investiture, thus needing no pause for breathers—backed him into the other corner, beating him with relentless attacks. Nomad? Auxiliary’s voice was the same monotone as always. He couldn’t manage anything else. Yet Nomad thought he could sense his friend’s concern by the lack of a quip. This is going to require a lot of healing. I’m barely keeping your body moving… A moment later the door slammed open, and the enemy pilot—the woman with the white coat—came in to help the Charred, rifle held at the ready. Well. That would do. Nomad took another mean hit to the shoulder as he forced his way out of the corner. That left him open, though, and one of the Charred rushed him from behind, slamming him into the pilot. It wasn’t his fault, therefore, that the collision sent her tumbling—and the Torment liked it when he kicked her gun away. No need for that. From there, he made certain to keep the attention of the Charred, giving them a challenging smile—but swaying on his feet, tempting them with his weakness. In return, they redoubled their efforts, pounding on him, getting around his shield—all too easy in a fight of two against one. They hit him with a series of blows that caused him to lower the shield and expose his face to— One of the Charred’s heads exploded. The other froze, then spun as Contemplation—standing in front of the table—unloaded shot after shot into his chest. She strode forward, black-dyed hair tumbling around her stocky figure, firing until she dropped the second Charred in a mess of smoldering embers and burned flesh. Nomad dropped to his knees, gasping for breath as Contemplation pointed her rifle at the pilot, who raised her hands in response. “Glad you can shoot,” Nomad muttered. “Did my
share of hunting as a youth,” the old woman replied. “Haven’t held a rifle in years. Why did you kick it to me instead of grabbing it yourself?” “Personal challenge,” he said, flopping back onto the ground, eyes squeezed closed at the cumulative pain of his wounds. “I hate hogging the glory. Maybe one of you could get out there and shut down the ship pulling us the wrong way?” He lost track of the next part. He didn’t fall completely unconscious, but he retreated into himself as his body healed. He sensed they’d done as he’d asked because the ship started moving the right way again. He dragged himself to the corner and convalesced quietly there. Over the next hour, he listened with half an ear as Confidence—the tall, spindly one—directed the escape operation from the radio. Auxiliary healed him, but quietly warned that he was under nine percent Skip capacity. Sometime in there, Rebeke joined them. The light through the broken window grew dark as they fled. He bore the pain with closed eyes. His body could take a great deal of punishment, thanks to the Torment’s gifts. But even he needed a breather now and then. Especially after taking a beating that would have killed anyone else. Still, he paid enough attention to hear worry in Confidence’s voice as she directed the others. It seemed many of the Beaconites had escaped—and with their Beacon itself, they could guide everyone. But they were pressed and harried by the Cinder King’s forces, who made them veer away from the path they wanted to take. From what he gathered, they were forced to swerve to the south, entering a different “corridor” entirely. That was, so far as he understood, the local way of talking about certain latitudes. Each band of latitude was a corridor, with no actual geographic features to distinguish them—except that going too far north or south was dangerous. Well, at least they had escaped. At least they were alive. Who cared if they were in another corridor? It couldn’t be that bad. Could it? THEY DIDN’T DISTURB him lying there on the floor—as they reformed Beacon and took casualty reports. Fifteen people captured. Ten percent of their population dragged off, to be left for the sun. Eventually more officials arrived. He knew the three members of the Greater Good, along with Zeal—the little person who was, as best Nomad could determine, their approximation of a field commander or special ops planner. Also in attendance was Jeffrey Jeffrey—the man with the bushy black beard. As a sort of city steward or administrator, he had served under various incarnations of the Greater Good, offering continuity to a leadership trio that was usually made up of three old men or women in the months before they were turned into power sources. Five other people joined in that he didn’t know. Together, they convened to take stock after the disastrous attempt to find their legendary Refuge. Auxiliary found it hilarious that they just left Nomad there. Lying on the floor, dozing. Like he
was a sleeping dragon, dangerous to disturb. Look how they arrange their chairs, the hero exclaims. Look, see it, Nomad. They don’t dare scoot back, lest they bump you. Why don’t they hold the meeting in another location? Or…you know…move you to a bed? Nomad probably had one of his faces on. The one that said, “Don’t touch me. I’m thinking about who to murder next, and I’m accepting volunteers.” Eventually the group started to discuss the real issue. “We’re dead,” Confidence said, rising to speak. He could identify the tallest of the Greater Good from her voice, and pictured the spindly woman glaring at them all. “It is time to make our peace with Adonalsium.” “Pardon my brusqueness,” a man Nomad hadn’t met said, “but you are supposed to be the optimistic one! If it pleases you, give us hope.” “My title is Confidence,” she replied. “My duty is to express what I know to be true with utmost energy of heart. It is not my duty to lie. I see no way out.” “We’ve been forced into an untenable corridor,” Compassion agreed quietly. “This region has seen mountains for the last five years. We will soon encounter the heights. Beyond that, we haven’t enough heat in our sunhearts to fly for much longer. We’ve divided them, shared them, and stretched the limits of our rationing.” “Even if we all gathered onto a few ships,” Confidence said, “we won’t last another rotation. We’ve gone too long without harvesting. After being driven off from one attempt, then abandoning the next, we’re running on cold souls.” “Must we…surrender to the Cinder King?” Jeffrey Jeffrey asked softly. Zeal pounded the table. “I’d rather die a cold death and leave my soul to light only the mud than give myself to him. Our souls would just further enforce his tyranny.” “Then what?” Compassion asked. The entire room seemed to look toward Contemplation. Nomad cracked an eye to study her. With no hat and her hair back up in a black bun, she stood out even in a room full of people in similar clothing. “Contemplation?” Compassion asked again. “You have a plan, surely?” “I…can think of no plan,” Contemplation admitted, “other than to die with pride, knowing we separated ourselves from that monster and fought him until the end. Elegy would be…proud to know that we never folded.” The room fell absolutely silent. Nomad decided it was time to make his entrance. Er, his, already-here-ance. He planned one of his master’s grand speeches, the type that really roused people. But before he could rise and make it, the people in the room started standing. “We go on,” one said. “We go on,” another replied. Nomad sat up, watching them each stand, gathering strength from the others. They didn’t need his speech, he realized. This group was tough as carapace. They didn’t need something to rally or galvanize them. And today…they didn’t even need a soldier. They needed something he had once been. They needed someone who could fix problems. Storms. Could he be that man
for them? Did it matter? Even if he somehow got them to the entrance…it wouldn’t save them. Still, he found their air of defiance more intoxicating than the Cinder King’s liquor. And if there was something left of the man he’d been, it was a severe loathing for bullies—particularly those who picked on the defenseless. So he stood up, joining them all. They turned, looking up at him, making way for him to approach the Greater Good’s table. There, he pressed his hands down flat on the wood. “That bastard,” he said, “broke his oath to me.” The three gawked at him. “…And?” Contemplation said. “He’s a murderer and a tyrant. Of course he is an oath breaker too.” “I don’t really care about the rest,” Nomad said. “But the Cinder King made it personal…so I’m going to kill him. I’d prefer to topple his kingdom before I go—as a parting gift.” “We would love to hand you that opportunity,” Confidence said. “But I don’t think you understand the seriousness of our problem. We’ve been forced into an untenable corridor—one with blockages preventing forward motion.” “We fly back out,” Nomad said. “Hide in the darkness again.” “We’ve sent scouts,” Zeal said from behind. “The Cinder King has posted guards and scouts all along our northern flank—he must have called up all of his subjects to send him ships! If we try to go back to the north, he will catch us.” “We’re trapped here,” Compassion whispered. “Enemies to the north, and mountains to the south and to the east.” “Mountains?” Nomad frowned. “Rebeke said something about this…but remind me. I thought the landscape rearranged each rotation. How are there mountains?” “Some larger features remain,” Zeal explained. “There are always mountains at the poles, and those regions cannot be traveled. Sometimes they form in other places—and the ones in this region have been here for years now.” He looked to the others, and his voice softened. “When they first rose, two entire cities were destroyed. I’ve scouted and tried to get through several times—to no avail. Originally Elegy thought that maybe if we could make this corridor tenable, we’d be able to escape the Cinder King.” “The mountains do melt and reform,” Contemplation added. “But I offer this truth, Sunlit. Something about the core of our planet creates highlands here, and they are utterly impassable.” “I mean, we have flying ships,” Nomad said. “We could go over them.” “Oh, over them!” Zeal said, smacking his forehead. “Why didn’t I think of that?” “I offer this explanation to your ignorance,” Contemplation said. “Our engines cut out if we go too high. They roar and try, but we do not move—and then they die. Beyond that, people go unconscious if they spend more than a few minutes in the heights.” “Wait, how tall are these mountains?” Nomad asked. “Tall,” Zeal said. “At least a thousand feet.” A thousand feet? Like a single thousand? At first, he assumed that the Connection had stopped working, and he hadn’t interpreted those words correctly. These people were stymied by
a set of “mountains” that would barely be considered hills on his homeworld? He’d lived in a city at over fifteen thousand feet elevation, back there. And yet he wouldn’t call them fools. Naive, maybe, but not idiots… I’m lost, the knight says with an air of bafflement, commensurate with his solemn, dignity-ravaging intelligence. Am I understanding this right? What’s going on? “Math,” Nomad realized. “Math is going on.” He switched to their tongue. “Someone get me a pad of paper and something to write with.” When they resisted, he glared at them until someone who had been taking notes proffered the implements. A woman brought him a chair, and he settled down, rubbing his forehead. Writing came easily to him these days—strange to think that ability had once been considered unseemly to some back home. He sketched out some equations, dredging far, far back—to a person he used to be. He thought through the way the hovercycles worked, picturing their engines. His best guess was that the engine mechanism somehow used Investiture from these sunhearts to superheat the air, then sent it out those jets on the bottoms, providing upward thrust. Essentially their hovercraft relied on downward-pointing jet engines rather than lift from wings. “Propellant,” he muttered. “That’s the problem. Up above, the air gets too thin to act as a propellant for your ships. Remarkable…” The people slowly gathered around, and if they seemed shocked to see complex mathematics produced by their “Sunlit Man,” a killer with a sour attitude…well, he didn’t blame them one bit. “What does this all mean?” Contemplation asked softly as he wrote. “Your planet is really small,” he said. “Like, almost comically small. It takes how long to complete a rotation again?” “Around twenty hours,” Contemplation said. “Hmm. Give me a clock.” They provided one, and he was able—using his own internal sense of time—to do some vague reckoning. Their hours were shorter than his by roughly half. Factoring it in…yeah, that gave him something to work with. He guessed their day was maybe ten hours galactic standard. The planet was small, and turned slowly enough that people could keep up in ordinary aircraft. He figured it was possible to fly all the way around in just four hours. Except you couldn’t. You had to wait for the planet to turn, because if you got too far ahead, you ran straight into the sunlight. Calculating that—with some measurements he demanded from the others—he arrived at the planet’s diameter. From there, the answers lined up. He’d been fooled at first, since the gravity felt roughly similar to what he knew back home. Less than most worlds, but still within common ranges. He could test that with a few dropped objects. Regardless, that initial gut impression had given him a false sense that he understood the physics of the world. In reality, he had been way off. “Most worlds with this kind of gravity,” he explained, “are much bigger. You’ve got something dense at your core—Invested, I’d say, since no natural element could create this kind of
a gravitational pull and leave the planet livable. “Your atmosphere also seems to thin at an alarming rate. From my estimation, a thousand feet up, and you’re well into the death zone. No wonder you only hover your ships thirty or forty feet in the air.” He looked up to a circle of blank faces. I’m raising my hand, the knight says. You can’t see it, but I am. Call on me. “Okay…” Nomad said in Alethi. Can I go take an art class instead, teacher? “Auxiliary, you’re literally a living manifestation of physical forces—sharing substance with the concepts of gravitation and the interaxial force. You should know about this stuff.” Uh, right. And just because you’re made of meat and various strange liquids, every human is born knowing all about primate anatomy. “Well, it would be a good idea to pay attention anyway,” Nomad said, though admittedly he felt foolish saying it. If he’d paid better attention himself, he’d have figured this out earlier. The curvature of the planet, the low air pressure at ground level…these things were blazing signals of the planet’s size. He switched back to the local language. “Look. It makes perfect sense that your engines give out as they try to cross mountains. These ships move via the displacement of air.” “If it pleases you to be contradicted,” Contemplation said, “they fly using sunhearts.” “Yes and no,” he said. “You fly using engines powered by sunhearts as a fuel source—you could be running on coal and stay aloft, if you could somehow compensate for the weight of such a large furnace and heavy fuel. What makes ships like this move, though, is propellant and not fuel. You know, pushing something out to give you thrust upward? Air in this case? No?” They gave him blank stares. “How,” he said, “can you fly advanced ships like these and have no grasp of basic aviation science? Fluid dynamics? The law of motion and countermotion?” More blank stares. Except for one woman at the side. A few looked to her. A mechanic or an engineer, he guessed. She dressed like the others, but had oil stains on her gloves. “I can grasp some of this, Sunlit,” she said, staring at the numbers he’d written. “But you’ve got to understand. We’re refugees among refugees. The Cinder King has scientists who might be able to understand what you’re saying, but even they focus on keeping the cities moving. “We don’t have the time, the resources, the lives to waste in theorizing. We use what works. We can keep it running, replicate it, but…” She shrugged. “We just can’t afford to think lofty thoughts when mortality looms on the horizon.” He could respect that. Storms, he felt it himself. How much time had he had for dreaming since he’d been on the run? “All of this,” Confidence said, waving at the equations he’d written out, “confirms what we already knew—that if we go too high, the engines stop working and we suffocate?” You should tell her, the knight interjects, that is basically the
entire point of math. Explaining stuff everyone already knows. Some days he wished he’d bonded a Cryptic. “Indeed, it tells us what we know, Confidence,” he said. “But more usefully it tells us why. Which is the first step to fixing any problem.” “And can you fix this one?” Contemplation said. “In less than ten hours? Because that’s when we’re going to encounter those highlands.” Ten of their hours. Could he fix a problem like this in that amount of time? Impossible. “Absolutely,” he said. “I’ll need some things, not the least of which being access to whatever fabrication machines you have. Rebeke said you can make new ship parts from raw materials?” “Yes,” Jeffrey Jeffrey said. “We can.” “Good. I need access to that, a quiet room, some tools, and…the Charred we captured. Rebeke’s sister. For certain tests of a relevant nature.” They didn’t question him. Good. He was still working on a way to escape his Torment, and he wanted a test subject to try out his theories on. Smart scientists did not experiment on themselves. “Wait,” Confidence said. “Even if a miracle occurs and we get over the mountain, we’re still as good as dead. What about our dwindling power supply?” “We’ll find a way to get more,” Nomad said. “And the Cinder King?” she demanded. “The overwhelming forces we’re facing? The fact that we keep losing people to his attacks, day after day? What is our objective here? What are you trying to accomplish, other than kill him? What is our final objective?” “That’s up to you,” Nomad said. “I want to find that door. I’ll do what I can to get you over those mountains, then get power to keep you going another day. Then we’ll be back in this area and we can search again.” He shrugged. “That again?” Confidence said. “You yourself said that door wouldn’t help us.” “I…” He trailed off. She had a point. “Peace, Confidence,” Compassion said. The old woman, with ebony skin and tight curls of white hair, seemed so frail in her seat. She needed help to walk, and her voice wavered as she spoke. And yet there was a strength to her. The strength of someone who had bowed to the years, but not yet surrendered to them. A strength he understood, and respected. “We were just,” Compassion continued, “making our affirmations to die rather than return to the Cinder King. Is this not at least a tiny hope more than that? Our ancestors came to this land and survived against all reason and possibility. Do we not owe it to them to attempt whatever survival we can imagine, no matter how dim?” “We searched the entire region,” Confidence said, “and didn’t find the door.” “It’s near the place we looked,” Compassion said. “It must be. We will find out where, and search there instead.” “And if the Refuge truly is just a myth?” Confidence asked. “If it’s not real and never has been, as this man implies?” The others fell silent. “We need a miracle,” Zeal whispered, standing
up from his chair. “And I live for those, Greater Good. Even without the mountains…even if we had sunhearts…our path would be one of death without a dream. Without a dream, he will wear us down eventually and destroy us, no matter what we do. So yes, I’d prefer to trust a myth, Confidence. Instead of just stopping and embracing the sun.” Others nodded, and Nomad’s stomach twisted. He looked down. Earlier, he’d been bolstered by their confidence, but now he found it strangely condemning. Of him, and the false opportunity his presence offered. Try to believe, he thought to himself, like they do. Try to pretend, at least, there is a hope for them. Who knows? You’ve been wrong before. “We’re going to do it,” he promised them, looking up. “We’re going to cross those mountains and fly all the way around this cursed planet. We’re going to loop back to where we started. And this time, we’re going to open that doorway. It’s better than lying down and dying.” “It is,” Contemplation agreed. “Is that why you keep running?” “So far,” he said. Confidence sat and nodded to herself. And he realized that perhaps she’d been playing a role. Expressing her true feelings, yes, but also offering the argument that needed to be made—so it could be refuted. Pushing them to a solution by vocalizing the fears they all felt, giving them shape, and letting them be neutralized. “We’ll do it,” Compassion whispered. “For our children. For our families. For ourselves.” Great. Now he just had to reengineer the basis of their aviation technology—retrofitting the engines of an entire city to work in a near-vacuum environment—in just a few hours. He’d rather get beaten up again, because this would require the old him. The one who had failed so many times. THEY GAVE HIM a little room near the center of the city. He found it…comfortably small. Like a workshop, with a wall for pinning notes above a utilitarian desk and a pull-out cot in the corner. Though hardly grand, there was a pleasant lived-in quality to the space that he liked. They soon brought him a small engine, taken from one of the hovercycles, and placed it on the workbench. It was only the size of a large melon. After that, they brought Elegy, dragging her by her arms, which were chained together at the wrists. He hadn’t seen the Charred since helping “rescue” her during that initial escape. A group of six men worked to chain her to the wall as she struggled. He studied her in more detail, seated at his desk. She appeared to be in her late thirties. There was one ember mark glowing on her left cheek, and her silvery black hair was cut short. Like her sister, she had light green eyes, and she gave him plenty of opportunities to see them as she raged against her captors. The men finally left, several nursing wounds from being kneed or elbowed. Even in chains, this woman was dangerous. Her ember—glowing from the ashen cavity
of her chest, where her heart should have been—flared dramatically as she fought against the chains. If she hadn’t been so Invested—the power reinforcing her very skin and muscles—she would have injured herself in her furious attempts to rip free. “This was her room, once,” Contemplation said from the doorway. “I had hoped it might spark some kind of memory…” From the way Elegy resisted, he doubted it was doing anything. Still, the fact that it had been her place indicated he’d have liked this woman, had she not been burned until only the ashes of her soul remained. “Why do you want her?” Contemplation asked. “I need to understand your power sources,” Nomad said. “These sunhearts…they aren’t quite like anything I’ve seen on any other planet.” He nodded to Elegy. “She has one right in her core. I want to run a few tests.” “Will they hurt her?” “I can’t promise either way,” he said. “But I don’t expect them to.” Contemplation nodded thoughtfully, her dark hair smoothed into a beehive, making her seem taller than she was. “There are those among us,” she finally said, “who will be mightily upset with you if anything unfortunate happens to Elegy.” He nodded. “You’re not one of those, though?” “I knew Elegy well,” Contemplation said. “I spoke for her many times during the months she encouraged our rebellion. Once I was named to the Greater Good, I voted to name her to the position of Lodestar. An appointed position, the one who navigates a city along its route. For us, it was more than just that—it was a person to offer plans. We are the city’s leaders, but she was its heart. We followed her vision.” She nodded toward the woman chained to the wall. “That thing isn’t Elegy. You can’t hurt her, Sunlit. She’s already dead.” Then Contemplation stepped toward him, removed the glove from her hand, and held it up, palm forward. She seemed to expect something from him. Hesitant, he put his hand up before hers—but did not touch. “You draw nothing?” she said. “I’m led to believe,” he said, “that it’s not good etiquette to take heat from others.” “Unless it’s offered,” Contemplation said, nodding to her hand. “This is an act of thanks for us, Sunlit. A display of vulnerability and willingness to trust. You saved my life, through great pain and risk. Thank you.” So with that explanation, he pressed his palm to hers. “Your Breath become mine,” he whispered, trying a Command to see if he could draw out her heat. It didn’t work, of course. But it had been worth a shot, and besides, the ceremony meant something to her. She grew teary-eyed. “When you burst through that window,” she said, “I knew you were him. A Sunlit Man of the stories. I knew it again when you offered us hope to continue our eternal pilgrimage.” “I’m not what you think, Contemplation,” he said. “I’m really not. But right now, if it will keep you all moving, then you can call me whatever you storming
want.” The elderly woman smiled. “I’m pleased I got to see you.” She retreated then, leaving him alone with a glowing madwoman. Well, that and his semifunctional conscience. Do you really think you can do this? the hero asks, dubious but curious. Nomad settled down at the desk, but continued watching Elegy, who had stopped thrashing and instead devoted herself to glaring at him. “I think,” he said to Auxiliary, “that I don’t have any other options. Fortunately they have the difficult part solved.” They do? He opened a blank notebook. “Sure. They have a compact, powerful, renewable energy source. Something most developing societies can only dream about. That’s difficult. Travel has always been about the power supply. Creating energy—well, releasing it—is easy. Just throw a match into a pile of dried-out wood and you’ll see that. But harnessing it? Making it portable? That’s the problem.” If it’s so easy, Auxiliary replied as Nomad started writing and sketching, then what happens when they get into those mountains? Why do their engines stop working? “The engines don’t stop working,” he said. “They keep right on releasing energy, but there’s nothing for them to do with it. Most conventional travel involves one basic principle: equal and opposite reactions. From jet engines to horse-drawn carriages, it’s all about the primary laws of motion.” And a jet engine needs air to provide thrust? “Yes,” he said. “It’s more complicated, but in general, a jet engine works by forcing air through a small nozzle. In most cases, it’s superheated air that has passed through a turbine, and the resulting thrust is what moves the ship. Air shooting out the back of the engine.” So…no more air…no more thrust? “Exactly,” he said, pointing at the small engine. “I suspect these sides here are air intakes. They draw in a great deal of it, then the sunheart superheats it in this structure here—some kind of compressor—maybe even generates plasma, which would be wild. Look at this. See these nozzles in here? That’s where the superheated air—and perhaps even some Investiture turned to raw energy—bursts out. That gives us the lift and the fiery glow we see.” And what about space flight, where there is no air? How do other ships do it? That was still relatively new. Well, the science was old, depending on which parts of the cosmere you visited. But few had ever experimented with it until the last hundred years or so. Why take all the effort to travel the void of space when there were easier ways to travel between planets? Trick was, most of those were slow, usually involving months or even years of walking through another dimension. You could fly there too, but could only get out at specific points. Faster methods that could go anywhere were just starting to be explored, but they were proportionally more difficult in their own ways. Either that, or they had some storming terrible side effects. His own experience proved that. Even so, more and more people in the cosmere inched toward understanding the difficult, but plausible,
methods that had been out of reach until scientific practicality matched theoretical dreaming. “For space flight,” he said to Aux’s question, “you usually bring your own propellant. A rocket engine will often mix a fuel and an oxidizer—but the point is that the mass of those two is ejected from the back of the engine at high speed. Mass and energy expelled out the back makes you go forward. These sunheart-powered engines don’t carry fuel with them.” So we do that. “How much liquid oxygen you got handy?” he asked. “How about kerosene? Rocket fuel is not common stuff, Aux. I doubt we could put anything together in time, and I know of no sources of zephyr aether on this planet. Do you?” Then…we’re ruined? “No,” he said, beginning work on a diagram. “They’ve got plenty of one thing: water. It’s pounding on the rooftop right now. Plus they have, as I said, the hard part in hand: supercompact, energy-rich fuel. It can heat things without needing oxygen. So if we get a boiler working and steam jets coming out the bottom…” Wait. You’re going to power space flight with a steam engine? “I guess I am,” he said. “Though I’d call it high-atmosphere flight rather than proper space flight. Anyway, you’d be surprised how many modern sources of energy rely on the same principle. The problem with traditional steam engines—well, one of the big ones—has always been the fact that the fuel is outrageously bulky and heavy. Not practical for much beyond a large-scale engine on rails with a lot of towing capacity. I’m telling you, though, this is how all motion works.” All motion? the knight asks hesitantly. What about when we’d fly together in the past? Nomad froze. That had been different. He’d misspoken, of course. Not all motion was due to the factors he’d indicated. There were other kinds, like fundamental laws of attraction. One body to another. Forces that held all matter together, at the level of the axon. “That was different,” he admitted. I used to love that, Aux said. Before… Nomad breathed out heavily, squeezing his eyes shut. It wasn’t your fault. “I said yes to Hoid. And I bonded you.” You didn’t know what either would do. “I let the Dawnshard consume us, Auxiliary. I let it feed on you.” I salvaged a little. This bit of my mind. The last fragment of my soul. Wit’s fault as much as it was Nomad’s. Done ostensibly to protect the cosmere. Wit had asked him to carry something known as a Dawnshard, a well of unimaginable Investiture designed as a weapon. Nomad didn’t know the specifics. Only that the result of trying to help was a dead friend—reduced to a voice in his head—and entire armies trying to hunt him. He’d accepted that terrible weapon to hide it, and that power had warped his soul. Worse, he hadn’t known, hadn’t realized, that bonding Auxiliary would lead to such a tragedy. They’d spent years together with the potential lurking there, unseen. Then, in a moment of need,
he’d unconsciously reached out for any energy source he could access. The Dawnshard had found Auxiliary, a being of Investiture. It had turned Aux’s very substance into power to fuel Nomad’s abilities. The Dawnshard—the weapon—protected itself. No matter what. No matter who it killed. Nomad had barely been able to stop himself before burning the entirety of Auxiliary’s soul away in a moment of supercharged power. This is not the time for regret, the knight chides softly. You have some very large problems to solve. He was right. Nomad opened his eyes and fished in his pocket, bringing out the drained sunheart that had been left after he’d ingested the Investiture. It felt like glass in his fingers—a small cylindrical lump of smokestone eight inches tall and a few in diameter. The surface was marked with ridges and a kind of grain, like melted wax. It was random, of course, but he could swear that one section looked like a screaming face… Rebeke said this thing had been able to power a ship for months. That kind of power wasn’t part of most souls, not even Threnodite souls. Something else was happening. Power was being drawn from another place, with the soul acting as a kind of seed or starter. But why had the Rosharan sunheart the Cinder King showed him been so small? Why hadn’t it acted as a similar seed? He stared at the notebooks and felt a building dread. This was the sort of thing he’d run from, even before the chase truly began. Failures that wrapped his heart like barbed wire, stretching back to his childhood. But it was either this or go crawling to the Cinder King and take his offer of employment. Nomad intended to consider that only if the Night Brigade itself were at the door. So he accepted his lot. And started drawing up schematics. TWO HOURS LATER, he had fully drawn schematics, though he had no idea if they would work. The plan wasn’t to fabricate all-new engines, but to modify the ones they had to intake water, superheat it to steam, and use it for propellant instead. It was a slapdash fix. Hopefully it would work. There were some changes he knew he’d need to make, but his brain was growing numb. He needed a break, at least from that problem. He ignored the cot for now, though he was as tired as ever. Best he could tell, the people of Beacon didn’t sleep on regular schedules—indeed, it seemed like the entire planet lived on a strange “take hour-long naps when you feel like it” system. Rebeke had been baffled by his explanation that where he came from, people all generally slept at the same time—and for some eight hours at that. Anyway, he didn’t want to sleep yet. He washed up at a basin they’d given him and checked himself in the little hand mirror. He had a faint patina of stubble on his chin, and his hair had fully regrown—his body, as always, eventually adapted to match how he’d looked
when he first took the Dawnshard all those years ago. He tossed the mirror aside, straightening the buttoned shirt they’d given him, and pulled his chair over to Elegy, who was still chained to the wall. It’s not just me, right? the knight asks. It is bizarre that you have a woman chained to your wall, isn’t it? “It is admittedly bizarre.” And you want her…why? “I think her condition and mine might be similar,” he said, narrowing his eyes at Elegy. “When I adopted the Dawnshard from Wit, it created my Torment. Too much Investiture, taken in too quickly, warping my very being.” Why didn’t it warp Wit? “I think it did. He just hides it well. Either way, when I gave away the Dawnshard, it left me changed. With a kind of scar tissue on my soul. That’s the Torment. The strange Connection I have to all places at once, the ability to feed on Investiture, the ability to Skip from location to location—but also the curse of not being able to fight back. “A Dawnshard is one of the primal forces of creation, and the one we carried is diametrically opposed to the concept of violence and harm. The scar tissue on my soul has that same Intent, that same requirement of its host: that I be unable to harm anyone at all for any reason.” It’s ironic, you know, the hero says. Because of the way the Dawnshards were used… “To kill God. Yes, I know.” He sat back, thoughtful, meeting Elegy’s glare. “She’s got something similar, I’m guessing. A canker on her soul. The Cinder King’s fire burned away her memories and personality, but there’s no reason that should make her so violent, so enraged. I can’t figure out how he controls creatures like her. It has to do with some kind of Connection or…well, scar tissue.” On the soul. That makes her violent, where yours makes you the opposite. “Basically yes,” he said. When you were following your oaths, your natural need to follow them pushed through the scar tissue, though. “It did, for a time,” he said. “But now I feel like the scar is getting worse, Aux. I need to do something to stop that growth or, better, make it recede. Enough that I can fight, but not so far that I’m unable to Skip away from this planet.” Ideally he’d eventually clear it all away, severing his lingering Connection to the Dawnshard. So long as he retained that Connection, he was a link to whoever held it now. And so long as he could locate one of the most powerful weapons in all the cosmere, people would hunt him. That was too big a problem to deal with at the moment. For now, he’d settle for any kind of therapy that suppressed his symptoms. He’d love to be able to fight back the next time a Charred tried to kill him. He brought out the drained sunheart again, turned it over in his fingers. “These people,” he said, “can transfer Investiture to one
another through touch. And their highly Invested souls become these power sources when bombarded long enough by the sun. I’m hoping that I can find a way to siphon a little of my soul into this drained sunheart, taking some of the scar tissue with it. Follow?” Vaguely, yes. It will be like lancing a boil. “Yes, but not so gross.” Everything about mortals is gross. But siphoning off your soul…won’t that, I don’t know, hurt? “Not if it’s a very small amount,” he said. “Plus, it will regrow, as will the scar. Human souls are resilient things, Aux. Like our bodies, they self-repair.” It was different for beings like Auxiliary. His essence had been burned away during the tragedy, leaving only this last, limited remnant. So…you’re going to use that rock to try to siphon off whatever soul sickness is making Elegy act so angry. If it works, you’re going to try it on yourself, hoping you can cure your own soul sickness. Is that about the short of it? “Indeed.” Rebeke probably wouldn’t appreciate you experimenting on her sister like that. “Probably not.” That might be why she is hiding outside your door, eh? Listening in? He paused. “She is?” Ah! Didn’t you notice? I mean, someone is making small noises out there. I’ll admit, I’m only guessing it is her. Powerful though I am, clairvoyance isn’t on my list of abilities. But it does seem like it would be her, considering how the person keeps pressing against the door—as if trying to hear. Yeah, Auxiliary was probably right. I really thought you’d noticed, the knight says loftily, otherwise I’d have said something. “Don’t lie,” he said with a smile. “You like showing off.” I love showing off, the knight exclaims. It feels so good. Why do mortals have taboos against it? “We have taboos against everything that is fun,” he said, still toying with the drained sunheart. If he was right, then everyone on this world had this same strange Connection to one another, allowing the ability to transfer parts of themselves. And this empty power source had held a distilled version of someone’s soul, so it should work too, right? However, when he tried touching the object to Elegy, nothing happened. Even when he braced himself, reached in, and touched it to her ember. She railed at him, and he heard a thump at the door as Rebeke shifted. He pulled back, making a note in his book. He hadn’t actually expected it to be that easy. Investiture responded to human thought. It wasn’t technically energy or matter—but it could become either. Investiture, energy, and matter were all one, as per Khriss’s Second Law. It couldn’t be created or destroyed; it could only change from one state to another. However, Investiture responded differently from energy or matter. You could Command it. More precisely, the mindset you reached by speaking those Commands enabled you to enforce your will upon it. That was common across many of the flavors and varieties of power around the cosmere. Commands, oaths, incantations…any way
to focus your will, your Intent, and project it to the Investiture. Like the Command he’d tried with Contemplation earlier, which came from the planet Nalthis to make Investiture flow between bodies. Today he tried almost all the ones he knew, in a variety of styles, as he pressed the sunheart against Elegy’s exposed arm and ordered it to drain her heat. Nothing happened, and each failure was frustrating, suggesting that he didn’t really know what he was doing. He slumped down in his seat, tapping his head against the backrest. There was power locked away inside of Elegy, power that made her stronger, faster, more resilient. How to get at it? After some thought, he decided he probably didn’t know the right Commands. There were methods using tones and vibrations that might work, but he didn’t have that equipment—and he knew that heat, at least, transferred naturally between people here. That gave him his best clue to the mechanism of moving Investiture on this planet. If this theory was even viable—which he couldn’t say for certain—success would depend on using the local ways that people here invoked or evoked their power. So he’d need something familiar to this people, their particular way of organizing thoughts and will. But what would the local variety of that be? Not oaths, but… The moment it occurred to him, it seemed obvious. “Rebeke!” he shouted in their tongue. “Would you come in here a moment? I need to ask you something.” The soft sounds at the door stopped. Then a sheepish Rebeke opened the door and stepped in. Pretend, the knight says, I have a very smug expression on right now. Rebeke glanced at her sister, looking relieved to find her unharmed. She then turned to Nomad, clearly expecting a scolding, which he didn’t offer. He’d probably have listened in too, in her situation. Nomad pointed to Elegy. “Didn’t you mention that your people have some kind of ritual prayer they say before sharing heat with another person or, more importantly, before taking it?” “There…are several,” she said. “Why?” “Tell me the situations.” “Well, there’s one said between a husband and wife,” she said, “before…intimacy.” Wow. Ritual prayers before sex. Sounds…fun? “Anything else?” “Prayer before first touching a loved one,” she said. “Prayer of thanks before offering heat to one who has protected or served you. Prayer when with the dying, to take their heat before it fades away—” He sat straighter in his chair. “We only do it if someone is dying for certain!” she exclaimed. “And only for one who desperately needs the heat, to help them with a sickness or weakness!” That’s cute, the knight says. She thinks you care about their social customs. How endearing. “Tell it to me,” he said. “Um… Blessed Adonalsium, accept this soul and reward them for their heat given. Bold one on the threshold of death, give me your dying heat that I may bless those who still live.” Perfect. A forced removal of Investiture, ritualized with a formal Command. He snatched the sunheart off the
table and pressed it to Elegy’s arm, drawing another growl. He said the words exactly as Rebeke had. Nothing happened. “You’re trying to transfer her heat to the sunheart?” Rebeke said. “It won’t work like you think. We’ve tried, and while we can store some heat in a depleted sunheart, it doesn’t give enough power to fly ships.” Confirmation, the knight muses, that their souls aren’t powerful enough to make sunhearts on their own. It’s not just a congealed soul—the bombardment of sunlight is required to supercharge the thing, creating the power source. “How do you do it?” Nomad asked her. “Transfer heat into a sunheart?” “I’m not sure,” she said. “It’s not often used.” He thought a moment, then tried again, changing the words. “Bold one on the threshold of death, give this sunheart your heat, that it may bless those who still live.” The tweak might be enough to… No. Again, nothing happened. “Why are you trying this?” Rebeke said. “I don’t understand. There’s really no use in transferring heat to a sunheart—it’s not alive, so it can’t appreciate the gift.” “Cosmereologically,” he said, “you’d be surprised at the wide range of definitions of ‘alive’ and ‘dead.’ Regardless, I need to know how to transfer a bit of someone’s soul into a sunheart.” “Why?” Rebeke demanded. “What are you trying to do?” “Explore the nature of your power sources,” he said. But unfortunately he was at a dead end here. And they were several hours closer to death on the slopes of an approaching mountain. He took the notebooks with his schematics from the table and held them up. “I need to build a prototype of my engine design. Quickly. You told me your people could fabricate parts.” “We can’t fabricate for you,” she said. “But our ancestors can.” He paused. “So…wait. You can’t do it anymore?” “No, we never could,” she said. “But our ancestors can.” She looked to him. “I suppose it’s time to introduce you to the ghosts.” THEY WERE KEPT on Beacon’s largest ship, a cylindrical vessel that served as a central hub. Nomad had learned that Beacon didn’t always assemble in the exact same way; ships would hook together and spread out organically. Metal sheets placed over holes made it look more cohesive than it was. Some general rules were followed, however. Larger ships in the middle. Smaller, faster ships on the outside. And this hub structure at the very center. He’d taken it for a large meeting room, but as they stepped inside, he realized it held something far different: an enclosure for the dead. They had configured it like an aquarium. An enormous glass drum, twenty feet tall and twice that wide, dominated the room, leaving only a narrow circle around it for observation. They’d filled the central column with smoke. A shifting white mist, like— Like leaking souls, he thought, walking up to the glass, hands in the pockets of his long brown leather coat. He was accompanied by Rebeke and Zeal—who had gotten permission from the Greater Good to bring him
to this hallowed ground. A rack on one wall, opposite the large aquarium, held depleted sunhearts. “Have you ever,” he asked, glancing at the tens of lifeless sunhearts, “left those out again in the sunlight?” “Of course we have,” Rebeke said. “They don’t recharge. We can’t even find them afterward most of the time, but the few we’ve recovered were as dull as when we left them.” Damnation. That made sense, though. They’d of course tried that—probably one of the first things they had tried. He looked back at the aquarium—they called the enclosure itself the Reliquary. He found that name oddly inappropriate. These weren’t relics. Those were usually the bodies or body parts of holy ones whose souls had departed. This was presumably the opposite. He didn’t see them at first. He only saw that shifting mist. It was light and effulgent, but thick. If the dead existed inside that chamber, he couldn’t— A face formed from the mists and pressed up against the glass, eyes glowing red, hands—made of smoke—slamming against the barrier. It had a gaunt face with a drooping jaw and sunken cheeks. Nomad jumped despite himself. Even though he’d been expecting it, seeing a shade was unnerving. When he’d been on Threnody, these things had been incredibly dangerous. Society contorted around their existence, living by strict rules to avoid angering them. When the eyes went red, these things were deadly, seeking to kill. Yet here, the people of Beacon kept them like…pets? “We fled the Evil,” the ghost said in a whispering voice, like rustling papers. Another appeared over its shoulder, just a vague, smoky outline of a person with red eyes. “Then we fled Threnody. We are your Chorus. We remember. We came here, to the land of the twilight rings, to make our own world. Do not forget. Adonalsium will claim us eventually. Live. And remember.” Well, the knight says, at least we know how they keep their lore straight through the generations. “On your homeworld,” Nomad said, “these things kill people.” “They’d kill us,” Zeal said, “if we went into the Reliquary.” “Are they self-aware?” Nomad asked. “I sustain an uncertainty in that regard,” he replied. “They’ll answer questions sometimes. Other times they give no answers, only recitations.” “They mostly only talk about the past, though,” Rebeke said. She’d stepped up beside him and watched intently through the glass. “About lore, history. Almost nothing about themselves. Each member might as well be interchangeable. We don’t know if they remember their individual lives. They’re like…living history books.” “‘Living’ being a loose term,” Zeal added. Nomad nodded, thoughtful. “That’s far more than what I’d expect from them, knowing the shades of Threnody.” “We were the first who died on Canticle,” a shade whispered to him. “The first to live in this land and devise the designs of flight—based on the ships that brought us here. But then we died and rose as shades. Remembering.” “Shades do not remember,” another said. “We are not shades. We are the Chorus of the people.” “But others,” another said, pressing
against the glass, “must be given to the sun. This is the sun’s land.” “Do this not,” the first said, “and shades will overrun the world. Such a small planet. They will take everything. They would rip and destroy you.” “As we would,” another added, “if allowed. To taste the flesh of the living. To drink their heat.” “So sweet,” another said. “So sweet,” the first agreed. “They…do that too,” Zeal added. “Talk about killing us. It’s rather unnerving.” Such invigorating places you take me, Nomad. “There!” Rebeke said, pointing. “There, it’s him.” “You don’t know that, Rebeke,” Zeal said softly. “What?” Nomad asked, noting the way she stood so close to the glass, peering into the mist. “Him?” It took him only a moment to realize. “Your brother?” “I saw his face among them,” Rebeke said. “We think that maybe,” Zeal said, “people who die without being given to the sun are drawn to join the Chorus. They say that shades will rise from those who die and don’t become sunhearts, but we rarely experience that—instead, sometimes after a death, we see mist gather and move to the Reliquary.” “It was him,” Rebeke said. She seemed to be trying to convince herself. “Though he spoke like the others, as if he’d been there from the beginning…” Nomad didn’t have much reason to care either way. “What does this have to do with my engine designs?” “Show them the schematics,” Zeal said. “The ghosts,” he said flatly, “are engineers.” “No,” Zeal said. “They’re… Well, you’ll see.” Nomad sighed and pressed his designs against the glass. The red eyes gathered around, faces crowding to see, mouths moving as they whispered—but they didn’t say anything intelligible. They inspected all seven pages, one at a time, as he held them up. Then they faded back into the mists. Zeal waved to the side, where a man stood on watch. A worker? A guard? A clergyman? Some combination of the three? He engaged some machinery and lowered a piece of unrefined metal from storage. The chunk was wide and flat, with dirt still stuck to the bottom. It looked like it had pooled on the surface of the ground when it was liquid, then hardened there. More such followed. Some copper, he thought, and a variety of other metals—while that first and largest piece had been mostly iron. It all entered the mists from the top, and Nomad realized with discomfort that there was no lid on this enclosure. Inside, the mist churned and grew brighter. “What are they doing?” he asked Rebeke quietly. “Building your machinery.” “How, though?” “We don’t know. You put in resources. You show them detailed instructions, and you get out the thing you want.” “When a new settlement is founded,” Zeal said, “we always take some of the smoke. We’re not sure how far we can divide it—but it’s worked so far. You can transport it in special containment devices. We took some of it from Union, along with an older containment unit acquired by absorbing a smaller community.” “How long
will the fabrication take?” Nomad asked. If they were building something, why was the enclosure so silent? “Depends,” Zeal said. “For something like this, under an hour. They’re faster when it’s something they’ve done before, though.” Under an hour to fabricate complicated machinery? He wasn’t going to complain—though even if it was true, their deadline was going to be very tight. I think they’re building it like I build things from myself, Auxiliary said. You’ve seen this before. You use it every day, Nomad. “You don’t absorb raw materials and spit out permanent devices,” he said. Yes, but isn’t that actually more reasonable than what we do? Well…maybe it was. He’d grown so accustomed to Auxiliary that he sometimes didn’t consciously appreciate how extraordinary the spren was, using up only a minimal amount of Investiture from Nomad for each manifestation. That said, this did explain why so few on this planet had acted shocked by what Auxiliary could do. He supposed if your entire society was based on arcane mists materializing objects at your whims, Aux fit right in. “Would you like something to eat while you wait, Sunlit?” Zeal asked. “Sure. The spicier the better.” “Spicy?” Zeal asked, as if the word were unfamiliar. “Just bring me anything,” Nomad said with a sigh. Zeal nodded, leaving Nomad and Rebeke standing beside the glass, watching the shifting mists inside. Someone out there in the cosmere would probably be fascinated by this. Threnodite shades who were somewhat self-aware? And who could rearrange the structure of metal as if it were Investiture to be sculpted? Maybe that was why the Scadrians were here, in their secretive research station beneath the ground. Thinking of that, of course, reminded him of how much he had yet to do. Even if the modified engine worked—which it wouldn’t, not on the first try—he had to find a way to get this people enough power to survive the rotation. And even if they did that, they needed a way to find the opening to the Scadrian base. How could they manage that? Presumably the only ones who really knew its location were living in it. No. The Cinder King knows… he thought. So how do we get the information out of him… “You don’t like it, do you?” Rebeke said from beside him. He frowned, not following her. “Being called Sunlit,” she said. “You grimaced when Zeal said the name. And earlier you asked us to call you Nomad.” “No, I don’t care for Sunlit,” he said. “You’re right.” “Why? It’s a title of honor, of great respect.” “Anyone Invested to the level I am could have survived a few seconds in the sunlight. Even if the term is one of honor—which I can understand—I don’t think it means anything. I like to earn my titles, and I don’t feel I did anything particularly interesting in this case.” She nodded slowly at that. “But earlier you told Contemplation you didn’t mind if she called you that. Why say such a thing if it bothers you?” “Because,” he said, “sometimes
it’s not about you individually. Sometimes it’s about being a symbol. Sometimes you just adopt the name you’re given because it inspires people. I’ve seen it happen. Didn’t think it would happen to me.” Zeal returned with some snacks, and they continued waiting. Eventually, after about forty-five minutes, the glow in the enclosure faded. The worker operated the simple crane to bring from the mists a realization of Nomad’s schematics: parts to modify their engines. “Now what?” Rebeke asked, sounding excited. “Now,” Nomad replied, “we install this on an engine and watch it explode.” IT WAS A FINE explosion. Lit up the darkness with a flare of orange and yellow as the housing for the engine gave out. He probably hadn’t made it thick enough; he’d worried about that. They stood at the edge of Beacon as it flew, looking out over the darkness. With some help, he’d installed the parts on a small hovercycle engine, then used another hovercycle to take it out and test it. They’d activated the prototype engine a short distance away via remote. It had soared up, and then… The flash of its failure washed over the group and made several of them jump, even though Nomad had warned them to expect it. “So that’s it,” Compassion said. The frail woman had been provided a seat from which to watch the experiment. “Our deaths are sealed.” “Hardly,” Nomad said. “I told you it would explode.” “If we strap those to our ships, we’ll be strapping ourselves to bombs!” “We’re not going to use those engines,” Nomad said. “You expect the first one to fail. We iterate now. Build another prototype, a better one, and see what happens to it. And so forth.” “And so forth?” Contemplation said, arms folded. Lit only by the running lights of the ships forming the city, her pale skin took on a spectral quality. “How long do you expect ‘and so forth’ to take, Sunlit?” It was, he had to admit, a valid question. He’d already expended more than three of their hours on this work, leaving less than seven until they reached the highlands. How quickly could he revise and improve this design? How quickly could he experiment enough to find an engine that worked? A master engineer could have done it, undoubtedly. Here, though, he was lacking. That wasn’t false humility; he’d always been interested in these kinds of things, but he’d chosen the path of a soldier instead. Well, he’d been thrust upon that path, and then he’d chosen to walk it. Most of what he knew about engineering came from the first few years of his exile, when he’d fallen in with some scholars and really had a chance to learn. Fortunately he had a hope for help. Nearby, the slender woman who was head of repairs and engineering in Beacon had gathered her team, and they were looking over his schematics. He strode over to them, right near the edge of Beacon, with a drop into darkness beyond. He squatted down, and the lead engineer looked at
him. Tan skinned with long black hair, she could almost have been Alethi—if not for her strikingly Threnodite name that he’d learned during the fabrication: Solemnity Divine. “This is genius,” she whispered, hand on the schematics. “Thanks,” he said. “But I think the boiler housing was too thin.” Solemnity Divine nodded. “Dirge thinks so too, but I think it’s your seals here and here. But with tweaks, I think it will work.” “The propellant will run out quickly,” another of the engineers warned. “We have three large water tanks for watering crops, but that’s not much to lift the entire city.” “And if we pare down our ships?” Nomad asked. “Shrink Beacon to only the essential vessels?” The engineers shared a look. “Maybe possible,” Solemnity Divine said. “Even with that, I doubt we’d have much flight time. Maybe…two hours? Depending on how low we can get the city’s weight?” “Long enough?” Nomad asked. “We just have to crest the peaks and start down the other side.” “Should be,” she said. “Should be. It will be close, anyway…” “You think you all can improve on this?” he asked, gesturing. “Get it right? There’s not a lot of time.” “We can try,” she said. She sounded uncertain, but she was already making notes on his schematic. That’s convenient, the hero notes as he watches them fix Nomad’s terrible first attempt. “Not convenient,” he said. “Expected. It takes a lot of skill and knowledge to keep a city like this flying; this lot are far more competent than they give themselves credit for. They simply needed a nudge. My design takes them ninety percent of the way there. I had the inspiration; now their expertise can fill in the gaps in my practical knowledge.” Unlike most of the others, the engineers seemed very interested in the way he occasionally spoke in a foreign tongue. To distract them from that, he leaned in close. “You have work crews, I assume? People who maintain the city?” “I’ve got a good fifteen people for the task,” Solemnity Divine said. “Why?” “Because while your top people are working on the engines, I need the others doing something else: making a number of your larger living spaces airtight.” The five engineers in the huddle frowned, and he realized—for all their experience with flying—they had little understanding of what was going to happen atop those mountains. “We’re going to a place where the atmosphere gets very thin,” he explained. “Practically nonexistent. No air. No breathing. Fortunately we won’t be there long. Your ships have thick metal hulls, and can probably maintain pressure if we seal them right.” “We can do that,” she said. “But won’t we suffocate?” “It’s only for a few hours,” Nomad said. “And we only have to support a hundred and thirty-five people. We’ll pick ten of the largest ships by air volume, divide the people up, and put them inside. We lock those ten ships together, and I’ll fly them. I don’t need to breathe.” Solemnity Divine blinked. “You…what?” “I don’t need to breathe,” he said. “Quirk
of my heritage. I mean, I like breathing. Feels normal, lets me talk. Better to use natural processes to oxygenate the blood when possible. But I don’t strictly need it. And I can take a vacuum without much trouble. Been doing that for decades.” Sure enough, several of them muttered about the powers of the Sunlit Man. He doubted their lore actually ascribed such specific powers to the hero—these kinds of legends tended to be vague. Too many places had them. And too many, to his chagrin, had been created—either by intent or accident—by his master. Wit had a habit of…starting conversations. Regardless, Nomad allowed the engineers their assumptions. Explaining the nature of a highly Invested body, and the ways the Spiritual template and Cognitive perception could maintain a body’s status in the face of extreme conditions, seemed like a waste of breath right now. “I’ll get people working on it,” Solemnity Divine said. “I don’t think this will be a problem, like I said. We’ll prepare these new engines as well as ten ships with airtight compartments, then lock the modified ships around the hub bearing the Chorus, and you’ll guide it from the main deck. All this, we will do, except… I respectfully venture to request that you tell the Greater Good about the necessity of abandoning most of our ships.” He gave her a grim, tight-lipped nod in return. Most of Beacon would have to be left behind. He’d see to it that the city leaders understood. “Awful trade,” he muttered, but nodded to her. He left them with his schematics and trotted back to the others, where the Greater Good were talking with Zeal and several assistants. Rebeke hovered at the perimeter of the conversation, seeming uncertain if she were welcome or not. They all turned to Nomad as he approached, seeming to brace themselves. They knew too, didn’t they? “We’ll have to leave most of Beacon behind,” he said. They obviously needed someone to voice it. “The engineers will pick your ten largest ships, by volume of living space, and prepare those. We’ll dump everything else.” “To be devoured by the sun,” Compassion said, head bowed. “Our grand city of freedom, Elegy’s vision…” “It will be a small miracle to get even part of this city to safety,” he said. “You know that. And if we find the Refuge, you’d be abandoning Beacon anyway.” “That doesn’t mean,” Confidence said, “that doing it won’t hurt.” “How are we going to find the opening to the Refuge?” Contemplation asked. “If we bring only the largest of the ships, then we’ll be leaving the prospectors behind—meaning no scanning devices.” “Let’s bring one prospector, then,” Nomad said. “Just in case.” “We can leave the farming equipment behind,” Contemplation said. “The gatherers that harvest metal from the melted fields…” “We’ll have meeting halls,” Compassion said, “dining rooms, cargo holds, and places of worship. That’s it. If we don’t find the opening, we’re doomed.” “We were doomed anyway,” Confidence said. “We chose this because it offered a slim chance.” She fixed her eyes
on Nomad. “You can find that doorway? Have you figured out how?” “I will,” he promised. “You’ll have to rely on me to figure something out.” “We’re relying on you for a lot,” Confidence said, arms folded. “I wouldn’t want to depend on me so much either,” he agreed. “But your options are all pretty terrible right now. So this is where we are.” He shrugged. Aren’t you supposed to be good with people? the knight asks. You seem to forget that fairly often. Well, he was right, so what did it matter? Besides, his gut told him that this frankness was what these people needed. Auxiliary might not have been able to see it, but this was being “good” with people. In this situation. It was a stark time for a stern people living on a harsh world. They didn’t want sugar coatings. They nodded and sent someone to confirm to the engineers that they’d agreed with his plan. He turned to go, but Confidence spoke, stepping toward him. “Sunlit,” she said. “I want you to know that you are appreciated.” He paused. He hadn’t expected that. This tall woman with severe features was the one who had been most resistant to his ideas. “We know,” she said, the other two nodding, “that you were likely offered a deal by the Cinder King. It is his way. He enjoys having power over people and will do whatever is required—even pay them, though he hates it—to achieve that end. You could have thrown in with him. You did not.” “He broke his oath,” Nomad said. “Regardless, you have our thanks. Do not mistake my skepticism for hostility. We appreciate you. And if we do manage to crest those mountains and find the Refuge, I will be the first to offer you my warmth in thanks.” He nodded, and a bit of actual gratitude—real, genuine emotion—cut through his grungy patina of cynicism and exhaustion. It was nice to be appreciated. “I don’t need that warmth you offer,” he said. “But maybe you could tell me something. Rebeke says there’s a way to give heat to a sunheart, like it was a person?” “Yes,” Contemplation said. “But this is useless. It barely charges the sunheart at all—a person could give their entire soul to it, and it would only keep a ship in the air for a short time.” Because they only have one BEU of Investiture, Auxiliary mused. Yes, interesting. “I need to know how anyway,” Nomad said. “For my experiments. I tried it earlier with a sunheart, and nothing happened.” “Was it a drained sunheart?” Contemplation asked. “Well, yes.” “That won’t work,” she said. “You can’t give your soul to a corpse. You need someone living. Or a—” “A charged sunheart,” he said, smacking his forehead. “Damnation. Obviously.” There were ways to put Investiture into inanimate objects, but it tended to be much harder. And much more dangerous. Sunhearts were considered alive by the reckoning of Investiture. At least, charged ones were. Storms. He was an idiot. He needed to try again
with Elegy. HE LEFT THEM to divide the people among the chosen buildings while he went to test his realization. They’d harvest the sunhearts of the other ships, then leave the surplus hulks behind. As he’d suggested, they did keep one scout ship with a prospecting device—they picked one where he’d been living, the one that had belonged to Elegy—and the hovercycles. He rushed away, Rebeke close behind. Before going to his quarters, he asked Rebeke for permission, then stopped beside her hovercycle and pulled out its sunheart. Hmmm… Aux said. I’d guess around two hundred BEUs in this one. Far less than what powers a full ship. Still, on a lot of planets, that would be a wealth of Investiture. Enough to reach the Second Heightening, and here it’s used for simple locomotion. “At a steep cost,” Nomad said, heading toward his quarters, Rebeke still trailing behind. Even on highly Invested worlds, a person’s soul isn’t more than three BEUs, Aux replied. You are right about this Investiture coming from somewhere. Keeping this city flying, though it’s much smaller than Union, must require sunhearts worth tens of thousands. He’d considered that. He considered it again, then continued on his original path. Back at his room, Elegy was still chained to the wall—and yes, that was still uncomfortably strange. Stormfather help him if his master ever found out about this situation. Wit’s delight at the potential jokes—most relating to Nomad’s methods of getting a woman to stay near him—would be able to power small cities. Nomad held up the sunheart, which glowed with a simmering deep red light. Yes, it made sense. For the Commands he’d been using, you needed people, or things, with life in them. In essence, he had been trying to command a dead hound to do tricks. This time, he held up the living sunheart to Elegy. It glowed with the power of the soul that formed it. And when he spoke the words of the prayer Rebeke had taught him, their mother’s soul knew what to do. It drew forth some of the life from Elegy in the form of radiant smoke that glowed a luminescent red. Perfect. Now they were getting somewhere. He grinned, pulling back and digging out another notebook. “I still don’t understand the point of this,” Rebeke said as Elegy, as usual, snarled and growled. “Humor me,” Nomad said. “Tell me. There’s something different about the sunhearts that make the Charred, right? You all handle these ones without problems—but touch one of those, and they burn away the body and create a monster. Why?” “We…don’t know,” Rebeke admitted. “You’re right that the Cinder King has access to strange sunhearts with terrible powers—we call them cinderhearts. They glow with a harsher light and consume anyone who touches them. We don’t know where he got them, but they are how he rules. First, with the one in his own chest, giving him the ability to feed on thousands of souls. Second, with the ones he uses to make his Charred, who serve him.” There’s some
Connection going on there, I suspect, Auxiliary said. Looking at his cinderheart and those of the Charred, his glows even more brightly. And they seem to react to his mental commands. Have you noticed? He hadn’t, but he trusted Aux, who picked up on things he didn’t. “I still want to know what you’re doing to my sister,” Rebeke said. “And why you’re doing it.” “I’m learning,” Nomad said, making some notes. “I’ve done nothing harmful to her, just siphoned off a little of her Investiture. But this isn’t enough. Otherwise, those bracers would be enough. Or, storms, having one of you touch her would be enough. I have to get at the core of the soul and remove the residue cankering it…” “For what?” Rebeke said. “I barely understand what you’re saying, but I do not see how this helps us build engines.” He ignored her. If he was going to figure out how to use this process to remove the Torment from his soul, he needed a stronger transfer. Maybe he needed to press the sunheart into her skin? When the Cinder King created one of his warriors, he jammed the cinderhearts in deep. He held up the sunheart next to the cinderheart at Elegy’s core and found hers was a darker shade. “Auxiliary,” he said, stepping as close as he dared to examine it. “That’s not anti-Investiture, is it?” Doesn’t feel like it, Auxiliary said back. But I’m not the best at spotting that. “It seems corrupted—overlaid with some kind of…membrane or coating. Like the skin of a fruit.” He thought for a moment, then said to Rebeke, “It’s important that we both understand that my next action isn’t intended to hurt her in any way.” “That sounds ominous,” Rebeke said, stepping toward him. “Why do you say it that way?” “Because I need to believe it,” he said. He held up the glowing sunheart—then touched it to Elegy’s cinderheart and spoke the proper prayer. “Bold one on the threshold of death, give this sunheart your dying heat that it may bless those who still live.” Elegy started screaming. Rebeke grabbed his arm, trying to pull him away. She threw her entire weight at him, which wasn’t a ton, considering her size. He remained steady, watching the darkness on Elegy’s cinderheart drain away. Just like, he hoped, the canker on his own soul would. It was working. Finally Rebeke grabbed onto his arm and hung there, her entire five-foot-tall frame dragging down on his muscles. That was enough to make him budge, and he was forced to pull back and push Rebeke off. “I told you,” he snapped, “I wasn’t intending to hurt her!” “Intent or not,” Rebeke shouted, “that’s what you did! She’s helpless! I want you to remand her to the care of our authorities. I won’t stand for her to be your pawn.” He stepped toward Elegy again, but Rebeke threw herself between them, frantic. Until, behind her, a new voice spoke. “Who are you?” Elegy said, throat obviously raw, her words ragged—like from an engine
too long without oil. “Let me go.” Rebeke froze, then spun, gasping. Elegy sneered at them and shook her chained arms, but the motions lacked the wild ferocity of moments earlier. More remarkably, she could speak. He’d never heard one of these Charred speak before. Her cinderheart continued to glow, but now in a purer, vibrant shade. Like magma at the heart of a crater. “Let me go!” she said, louder. “Elegy?” Rebeke said, stepping forward, reaching out with gloved fingers. “Let. Me. GO!” “Well,” Nomad said, tossing the glowing sunheart onto the table, “that worked.” He began making notes. “You were trying to cure her?” Rebeke said, spinning back to him. “Why didn’t you say that?” Cure her? Oh right. Well, that was the side effect. He paused, then said, “I didn’t know if it would work, and didn’t want to get your hopes up.” Storms, the younger woman began to cry. She took him by the arm, then struggled to get her glove off, to press her skin to his in thanks. “You have earned heat today,” she whispered, “and I misjudged you. You are a wonderful, wonderful man. Thank you.” Cute, the knight says. How long has it been since anyone looked at you with true admiration? Did it matter? He pushed her back firmly. She let him, then looked to Elegy, who watched them with a deep frown. “Tell me who you are,” Elegy demanded. “And why I’m in these chains. What happened to the voice?” “The voice?” Nomad asked, stepping forward. “The one who gives commands,” she said, “in my head. Everything was so clear just a moment ago. Now…now I’m confused. Restore the voice!” “The Cinder King,” Nomad mused. “As you suspected, he has a way of controlling them. A direct Connection.” Her soul is terribly compromised, the hero notes. That usually makes it easier to control or infiltrate a mind, doesn’t it? “It does indeed.” The corrupted sunhearts gave the Cinder King some control over his Charred—but Nomad had removed that control, letting Elegy’s natural personality reemerge. “It’s her voice,” Rebeke said, “but she doesn’t seem to recognize me. How do we get her to remember?” Nomad didn’t have a good response. He’d seen cases like this before. Elegy’s memories had almost certainly been burned away by the process that had infected her soul. This wasn’t a case of a little confusion after hitting her head. Her soul had literally been shredded, her mind enslaved. In his experience, the way forward wouldn’t be to restore her memories, but to help her make new ones. He narrowed his eyes as she rattled the heavy chains, still supernaturally strong. “The cinderheart’s Investiture remains,” he said. “That comes from the source, not the sludge we drew off. Storms. She can probably feel it in there, driving her.” A human body, crammed with that much power, would be electric with the need to move, to act. One would feel a virtually irresistible urge to use the power, to satisfy its demand to become kinetic. In his case, it drove
him to constant motion, to avoid sleep, to push himself to keep running. In Elegy, it was clearly of a more aggressive nature. The frenzied way these Charred acted, always attacking and enjoying the fight…that might not be the command of the Cinder King. He probably just pointed them in certain directions, kept them working for him, channeling their violent energies. Nomad took some further notes. How could he apply this to the sludge on his soul? Maybe fashion a knife from the sunheart, then stab himself? That might work, but he feared a Connection problem. These people could all share power, and souls, because of where they were from. Still, it was the logical next step. He borrowed a knife from Rebeke, who was trying to get Elegy to talk to her. He was able to use it to shave off a piece of the sunheart, something he’d heard them describe. It was less like glass and more like resin. The new fragment continued to glow with the same living light. He positioned the knife to cut into his own skin. He’d make a small incision on his left arm, then shove the piece of sunheart in. For many uses of Investiture, touching the blood was necessary. Ingesting the piece might have worked, but he wanted to be certain—besides, this would be easier to undo if something went wrong. Um, Nomad, the knight says, hesitant. This seems kind of stupid. “And?” And so maybe don’t do it? Choose something not stupid instead? “I have to try something, Aux,” he said. “The Night Brigade could be upon us at any time—and I need to be able to fight if that happens.” Still. Are you certain you want to be this brash? “What about me makes you think that I’d do anything else?” The knight gives a long-suffering sigh, but is forced to admit the truth. Nomad is at the very least consistent in his stupidity. Nomad made a small incision on his forearm. He made a fist and stuck the sliver of sunheart into the wound. He said the prayer, with proper Intent, that had worked on Elegy—then pressed a cloth against the wound to stanch the blood. Nothing happened. He said the words again, trying to maintain the proper frame of mind. He also said them a little differently several times, using variations of oaths from his homeworld, then other Investiture-transferring incantations he’d learned. None seemed to do anything. Sharing Investiture was much more difficult when you didn’t have Connections to the power or the people who’d created it. Perhaps that was the problem here. Or maybe it was working, but he just couldn’t feel any— Click. He looked up with a sharp intake of breath to see Rebeke undoing the manacles on her sister’s feet. The ones on her arms already dangled free. Damnation. Elegy met his eyes, then leaped at him with a howl of determined anger. REBEKE SCREAMED AS the Charred shoved aside the table and went for Nomad’s throat. He got his own hands up, grabbing her
wrists before her nails dug into his flesh, but her momentum took them both to the floor in a writhing heap. He grunted, rolling them to the side, trying to get the upper hand. This should have been easy. He’d trained extensively in grappling over the years, while she fought with an unskilled frenzy, eyes wide and teeth clenched. But every time he got close to putting her into a secure hold, she shoved free, breaking his grip with a burst of raw strength. He found himself struggling to keep control. She moved in unexpected ways, kneeing him, biting at him as they rolled. He finally tried to cuff her across the face to stun her, but that direct an attack made his body freeze, and he involuntarily let her go. Her movements a blur, she grabbed the sides of his head, then slammed his skull against the steel floor, making him see stars. Luckily his dazed state was quickly remedied by his healing, and he managed to seize her hands again, acting more by touch than sight. Elegy was so focused on beating him senseless, she didn’t notice as he summoned Auxiliary as cuffs and a chain and snapped them into place. When Rebeke—belatedly—tried to stop her sister, the distraction gave him a chance to roll away and lock Elegy back to the wall. As Elegy started toward him again, he had Auxiliary shorten the chain, then he scrambled out of range of her grasp at last. Then he lay on the ground, groaning, his vision swimming. Just over eight percent Skip capacity remaining, Auxiliary whispered as his vision and head healed. A part of Nomad hated hearing the notations like that. He hated feeling like a machine with a power source. Life had felt so much more…vibrant when he’d just drawn in power and sensed a general impression of what he had left. He sat up, his back against the wall. Rebeke knelt next to him, looking horrified. Her sister wasn’t completely locked back in place. Instead of being manacled both hand and foot to the wall, she was just locked there by her wrists, with almost two feet of slack. She wasn’t using it, but instead crouched on her toes, like a feral beast, glaring and growling at him. “I’m sorry,” Rebeke whispered. “I thought… She seemed to be recovering, and I thought…I…” “Yeah,” Nomad said. “Well, next time you do something that insane, could you at least give me a heads-up so I can start running?” You all right? Auxiliary asked. Voice flat as ever, but the way he asked it—without pretense or affectation—implied real concern. Nomad rubbed his head. “Yeah,” he muttered. “I think.” “Elegy,” Rebeke said, standing. “Why did you do that?” “You have me chained,” the Charred hissed. “We were unchaining you!” Rebeke said. “I fight,” Elegy said simply. “It’s what I do.” “I’m your sister!” Rebeke said. “This man helped me save you from our enemies. You are home. You don’t need to fight any longer.” Elegy didn’t respond, so Rebeke spun on Nomad.
“She’s not fully cured! Do what you did before, only more.” “Won’t help,” he said. “Any more of that might kill her. I’ve drawn off the part that was letting the Cinder King control her; what you see now is everything left of your sister.” Nomad moved over to his desk and cut out the sliver of sunheart in his arm, which had healed over, then wiped off the blood with a rag. He was even more frustrated than before, though. He’d locked up during the fighting—proof that the process hadn’t worked on him as it had on Elegy. So what could he do? Was there a path forward? Rebeke was standing by the wall, softly crying. Best to give her something to do, so he asked her to fetch Zeal, who had the controls to activate the bracers that Elegy still wore. That would freeze her and let them lock her up fully again. As Rebeke ran off, he took a few deep breaths. Then, wanting to keep moving, he began sketching out a new set of schematics. He found that if he rapidly jumped between his problems, he worked better. A little here, a little there, always trying to make progress on something. In this case, he came up with some ideas to deal with the Cinder King’s forces after cresting the mountain. “Is she really my sister?” Elegy asked from behind, interrupting him. He glanced toward her. She’d settled into a seated position, hands bound by the chains over her head. She seemed…tired. Exhausted. He knew that feeling. “Yes,” he said. “You had a brother too. He died rescuing you.” “From what?” “That voice in your head?” Nomad said, making a few more notes. “That’s the Cinder King. He took you, put that cinderheart in your chest, and burned away your previous life.” “Why should I believe you?” “Why shouldn’t you?” “Maybe you want to control me.” “You already let that voice do that,” he said. “So why care if we control you or not? Why care if we’re lying or not?” She fell silent, letting him work a little longer. “I don’t belong here,” Elegy finally said. “I can feel that is true. That other one, she expects something from me. But I’m not that person she sees when she looks at me.” “What person are you?” “One on fire,” Elegy said softly. “Burning with the fight. I…can’t explain.” “Your entire body feels alert, tense, on the edge of panic. Something inside of you rages, like a storm, pushing you into motion. To action. Sitting still is agony. You need to move, to fight, to be running or struggling in some way.” “…Yes.” He looked up from his notes, meeting her eyes. “You’re right,” he said. “You aren’t the person she thinks you are. You probably can’t ever be that person again. You’re going to have to find a new way, both of you.” “Let me free.” He raised an eyebrow at her. “Will you attack me again?” “Probably,” she admitted. “But you feel it too. You described
it. We could fight. You and I. Struggle. Move. Be alive.” “Not interested. Thanks.” She’s charming, the knight says. Rebeke soon returned with Zeal in tow. Using his device, they knocked Elegy unconscious and reset her chains. Zeal watched with curiosity as Nomad dismissed Auxiliary. “How,” he asked, “do you control that shade? Shouldn’t it try to kill you?” “Auxiliary,” he replied, “is a little different from your shades. He doesn’t attack with glowing eyes or a deadly touch. He uses sarcasm instead, and it’s far more painful.” Excuse me, the hero interjects with a voice not the least bit sarcastic. I state facts. How you take them is purely up to you. Zeal nodded to Elegy. “You sure you don’t want me to take her back to the prison?” “He’s helping her,” Rebeke explained. “Zeal, she spoke to us, like I told you.” “Never heard a Charred do that before,” Zeal admitted. “Well, all right. I guess I’ll leave this here.” He set the control device on the desk. “Appreciate it,” Nomad said. “What’s that?” Zeal asked, nodding to his notes. He leaned in closer. “Guns? On the ships?” He whistled softly, picking out the scale. Nomad nodded. “I’ve got a little more experience with weapons than I do with boilers.” “Do they need to be that big?” Rebeke said. “We’ve picked the biggest, bulkiest ships to ascend over the mountains,” Nomad explained. “It’s what we need to carry all your people. But it means that once we emerge from the darkness and try to open the way to the Refuge, we’re going to be easy prey for the Cinder King.” “Unless…” Zeal said. “Unless we bring some serious firepower,” Nomad said. “And hit him with something he’s never seen before.” He sat back, holding up his notebook. “If your ancestors really can fabricate anything, given raw materials and schematics, then I see no reason not to go big. These should work with sunhearts as power.” He closed the notebook. “But they’re irrelevant for now. Unless we get over those mountains, nothing else is going to matter.” “What are our chances of doing that?” Zeal asked. “If you had to guess?” “No idea,” Nomad said. “But better than zero, which is what we’ll have if we stop moving.” Further discussion was interrupted by a sound echoing through the city. A horn being blown. That was unusual, since the Beaconites typically tried to keep the flying town as silent and invisible as they could. He looked to the other two for explanation. “Call to gather,” Zeal said, reading the horns, which were bleating out a pattern. “The people have been warned already to gather essential clothing and items in one bag each and leave the rest. This is the final warning. We’re going to start dumping the other ships to conserve power.” “Already?” Nomad said. “Your people move quickly.” As soon as he said it, he knew he’d opened himself up for— Gosh, you think? The knight gives a pointed roll of his eyes—the ones he’d totally have if Nomad hadn’t killed
him. They move fast? Really? The people who spend their lives outracing the sun, always one step from being vaporized in a wave of burning light? They move fast? Well, damn. Who would have thought? “You really don’t think that’s sarcasm?” Nomad said in Alethi. It’s just being extra clear. “I think maybe you go a little far.” Well, you don’t have a valet who likes to stab himself with bits of unknown power sources for fun. You’ve got to be very deliberate with that sort of person, you know. Nomad grunted, sliding his notebook into his coat pocket. “Come on,” he said to Rebeke. “I want to check on the engineers and watch their new version explode.” IT TURNED OUT that Beacon’s little engineering team was packed with overachievers. They hadn’t made one new prototype, but three, each using parts of his design to modify a small engine. Only two of these exploded. The third went soaring up into the air, visible only by its blinking light in the darkness—which let some people on a quadcycle with nets zip out and catch it once it fell. The ascent left the crowd in awe. Most of the people of Beacon had gathered here to watch as they were being evacuated from their homes to the larger central ships. “It ascended so high,” one of them said. “Far past where a ship can normally go…” “This might work,” another said. “It actually might work!” You are so lucky, the hero says, that one of them flew. “Agreed,” Nomad whispered. If all three of those tests had exploded, he might be facing a riot. The engineers gathered around him as the engine was retrieved. They looked up at him like children, anticipating praise. Storms, he always felt awkward in this sort of situation. Still, he’d been trained in the right words to say. “Excellent job. You just saved this city.” He nodded toward the engine. “Flew higher and faster than you thought, eh?” “It was supposed to hover,” Solemnity Divine said. “That’s what your design said, at least. It’s working too well, rocketing into the sky. We’ll do another design run on that. But there’s one other thing I wanted to talk to you about.” She pointed to several large ships near the center of the city, each dominated by a cylindrical structure three stories high. The water towers. They were like the enclosure for the Chorus, but more industrial. People were being moved into the other ships that had been chosen for the ascent, including the central hub. But not these three. “Those should contain just enough to get us up the mountains and then let us control our descent,” she said. “We’ll put them at the edges of the city, uninhabited, and let you be ready to drop those entire ships off once they are empty. But we were hoping for some help on how to insulate and heat them. Against the cold, you know? We’ll crash quickly if our propellant freezes once we get past atmosphere.” “You don’t know a lot
about space or vacuums, do you?” he guessed. “Uh, shades, no,” she said. “Why would we?” “You don’t need to insulate against the cold,” he said. “Though do install some heat sinks—particularly on the piping near the engines. We should be fine, as we’ll be dumping heat prodigiously. That’s kind of the point of all this. But I would still worry about those pipes.” “Heat,” she said flatly. “You’re worried about too much heat? Up that high?” “Trust me,” he said. “If we enter a true vacuum—which we might not actually do—the only way to lose heat is through ejection of matter or through infrared radiation, which is extremely slow. There’s no convection. No air to conduct heat away. I suggest some fins, if you have time, exposed as much as you can and ready to radiate heat. But my guess is it won’t be relevant.” She nodded, taking his word on it, and went off with the others to begin creating new designs. As he stood, watching the people be sorted into the ships, he was surprised to see a break in the clouds above—that was supposedly rare on this side of the sunrise—which let the city pass into the light of the rings again. They illuminated a landscape of jagged and craggy highlands. Rainwater ran down the rugged stone hills in a thousand little waterfalls. That’s a sight, the knight says with awe. Just water and stones, but on such a scale as to be beautiful. Amazing. Why is it we hate traveling these worlds again? “Because we’re being hunted?” Right, of course, yes. But…I do wish we could pause a little more often and just enjoy the view. Enjoying views was for someone who didn’t have a gun to his head. Off to his right, one of the ships broke away from the main bulk of the city and fell off, smashing to the ground below and interrupting the waterfalls. A work crew moved on, having recovered the sunheart from that ship. They entered the next one in the outer ring, and soon it detached and dropped off as well. Then a third. They were inanimate masses of metal, yet in this situation they seemed somehow forlorn, even tragic. Gravestones for the city that was no more. As he watched, he was joined by Contemplation, walking with a cane—her hair wet, despite the protection of a wide-brimmed hat that had been pinned to it. Surprisingly she shaded her eyes against the light of the rings. As if even that dim light bothered her. “We are getting uncomfortably close to those mountains, Sunlit,” she said. “At least that engine of yours seems to be working.” “We should still do a test run,” he said. “When we’re closer to the peaks, we should take one ship out and let it fly up high to confirm that the engine works as intended.” “We could, perhaps, use the one assigned to you.” She nodded to the side, where he could pick out his home on Beacon—a ship with only a few small rooms
in it, a wide deck, and a bulbous cab near the back. “It was Elegy’s ship, named the Dawnchaser. She had it reinforced, so she could try to push into the great maelstrom at the edge of night, drawing ever closer to the sun.” “Why would she want that?” “It was one of her ideas for survival,” Contemplation said. “The Cinder King leaves people to die in the sunlight, then keeps a force of ships patrolling the edge of the great maelstrom—ready to snatch those sunhearts from the ground the moment it is safe to do so. Elegy wondered if there was some way to travel the great maelstrom itself—that boundary between the rain and the sunlight—and get them before the Cinder King could.” She shook her head. “It proved impossible. Even if we could make a ship survive long enough, there was no way to leave the ship and recover the sunhearts.” “The more I hear about Elegy,” he noted, “the more I like her.” “Because of failed ideas?” “Failed ideas lead to successful ones, Contemplation. They’re the only thing that does.” She nodded, thoughtful, looking along the slopes, toward that great maelstrom. A place not in the sunlight, but dealing with the effects of its passing. He still hadn’t figured out the mechanics of this place. Why that tempest didn’t lead to planetwide unlivable weather patterns. Why the sunlight even burned on the level it did in the first place. “Elegy always did seek the light,” Contemplation said. “Then one day the Cinder King rammed it right into her chest…” Yet another ship collapsed, joining the trail of broken heaps they left behind. “You know,” he said, “in my homeland, we have a story about someone who got too close to the sun. It’s a common enough theme across cultures and worlds. It never ends well.” “If it pleases you to reassure me,” Contemplation said, hands on her cane, “then you are failing. Since that’s essentially what we’re going to be doing in a few short hours. But…what is this story you reference?” He hesitated. Go on, the knight whispers, it’s all right. I want to hear it. Give in a little. “They came from the east,” Nomad said in the local tongue so Contemplation could understand. “Giants, in armor forged of the deepest metals. A horde of death and destruction that ate the land, consumed villages like insects swarming the crops. Ripping. Smashing. “My ancestors fought them, because what else could you do? Submit to a force that only wanted to devour you and the civilization you stood for? We waited in ranks, each of us smaller than the invaders, but strong as a whole. Walls of honor and training, the only possible way to stem that tide of destruction. They called themselves the Alethi, but we knew them as the Tagarut. The breakers, it means. Those who leave only death. “It was during the fourth invasion of our Ulutu Dynasty, the dates so old that no scholars can agree on them, but it is generally thought to have
happened during the days of our fifteenth emperor. The Tagarut came again, as they were like the storm itself. Regular. Every generation. Another warlord. Another invasion.” “Giants, you say?” Contemplation said, looking up at him. “Compared to you?” “Yes,” he whispered as another part of the city fell. “I’ve stood among them. Called some friends. They stand closer to the sky than any people I’ve ever known, Contemplation.” “How do you befriend something so terrible?” He smiled. “Legend says a change happened during that final invasion of the Ulutu Dynasty. The breakers—tired of falling to our armies—decided to try a new tactic. They decided to conquer the sun. “‘What a lofty place,’ they thought. ‘It must glow with riches to shine so brightly.’ The Tagarut found the highest mountain and began to build scaffolding. They brought their greatest war machines, their towers for taking cities, their ropes, and their Shardbearers. And they climbed up to the sun itself, intent on destroying whatever people lived there, despoiling their land.” “They climbed to the sun. So it’s a fanciful story.” She sounded disappointed. “Truth and fancy intermingle in almost all stories, Contemplation,” he said. “Especially the old ones. You cannot abandon fancy without gutting the truth. But in this story, yes, the central idea is fancy—for they reached the sun, eager to find weapons and tools they could use to finally claim my homeland. “But the sunlight was too bright. The riches of the vault of the Almighty itself glowed with an intense heat. The Tagarut could not carry the gemstones they found, for they shone so bright as to destroy a man. The proud giants, the terrible warriors, were forced to flee—beaten not by spears or shields, but by the very treasure they sought to claim. “From that day it was said that their eyes had been bleached by the intense light, like clay cooked too long. Instead of normal dark browns, many Alethi have watery blue or other light eyes. The brilliance of the heavens—where Yaezir himself sits upon his throne—had destroyed their ability to see as common people do. Though they now saw the world washed-out, the gleam of treasure also faded because of this. “After their loss, the Tagarut began to act like people. No longer lusting only for treasure, they learned to speak. Never to write, but still, a measure of civilization came to them. And that is why, to this day, the eyes of their leaders are light-colored. And why you can finally have a conversation with one—instead of only running for your life.” He looked to Contemplation and found her smiling. She stared forward, watching her city fall to pieces, an ideal abandoned like so many needed to be. “I had not expected to find a storyteller in you, Sunlit.” “I had not expected to become one.” “If it pleases you to say, is that the end? Where is the moral?” “There is none. It’s just a whimsical story.” “Curious. Our stories are never like that. There’s always some message. Usually rather heavy-handed, if my bluntness is
not too shocking. For some reason, many involve children who get eaten by shades.” “My master likes those kinds of stories,” Nomad said. “The kinds with points. It’s gotten so he lies and tells people there isn’t a point to anything he says, all to keep them from drifting off and ignoring him for preaching to them. But I’ve found I prefer the ones that are just…stories. No point other than to be interesting.” Contemplation nodded as the building he’d met her in, the one that had been her home here on Beacon, broke away and fell off. “I should like,” she whispered, “to live my remaining days in a place where we could afford to tell such stories. A place with no running. A place of peace and…whimsy.” “I understand,” he said. Contemplation and Nomad were forced to retreat from their edge of the city as those ships were dropped off next. They mingled with the many people who stood closer to the center, watching their city be dissected—pieces cut free, like fingers removed to save the arm from gangrene. Next to him, a child holding her mother’s hand pointed at the sky. “Look, Mommy. A new star.” “How would you know, Deborah-James?” her mother asked. “We study the stars in school,” the girl replied. “So we can know where we are. Look, it’s new.” Nomad froze, then turned and searched the sky. He found it almost immediately, up and to the right, near the rings. Glowing brightly in reflected sunlight. Well, storms, the knight whispers. Party is over. “Huh,” Contemplation said, following his gaze. “It is a new star. Or…a new part of the ring, maybe? A good sign. A sign, maybe, that Adonalsium blesses our journey?” “Yeah, no,” Nomad said. “That’s not a new star or an asteroid, Contemplation. That’s a massive warship in low orbit around the planet. They’re called the Night Brigade. Distant cousins of yours, actually. They’re here to kill me.” “THEY HAVE A SHIP,” Contemplation said, “for traveling the stars?” She turned to him and finally seemed to see him for who he was. “Yes,” he said. “Those ships are getting more and more common these days.” “Then perchance…perchance we could ask them for help against the Cinder King? Or we could get passage on their ship or… You’re looking at me with an expression that says I’ve said something insane.” “The Night Brigade commands armies of the dead,” he said. “They’re largely a mercenary force, known for their brutal efficiency. They’re the only army I know that makes you keep on fighting after you’ve died. They are not sympathetic to the problems of local people. To put it mildly.” “Very well,” she said. “Then what do we do?” “Get back under cloud cover,” he said, striding toward the hub of Beacon. “Run dark, as you’re so good at doing. They won’t know immediately where to find me and will need time to survey the planet. I hoped it would take them longer to follow me to this system, but we’ve still got time.” “Fine,”
Contemplation said, barely keeping up. “But let me offer this reminder: you recognize the limited nature of that very time, correct? We are approaching the mountains at a frightening rate.” “We’re close to being on schedule,” he said. “Two more hours for fabrication and installation.” “An incredible pace.” “But doable,” he said, “now that we have a working engine prototype. We don’t need to swap out most of your equipment; I designed this to work with the ship structures you have. The hardest part is getting the boilers in place, but those are the simplest parts to fabricate—and should go quickly.” “Another hour or two up the slope,” Contemplation continued. “Again, doable,” Nomad said. “Yes, but the higher you go, the closer to sunrise you get us. And the more likely we are to be killed by it.” She pointed at the horizon. “At this point, we flirt with getting so high, we no longer have the shadow of the planet’s protection.” It was true. But it should work. If they kept the timeline. If nothing went wrong. He ignored the part of him that whispered that something always went wrong. He found the engineers—who had set up under a tent on the deck, as all the buildings were either being jettisoned or filled with people. “Time is tight,” Nomad said to them. “We need to start fabricating the boilers.” “We aren’t ready,” Solemnity Divine said. “We need another iteration.” “Not enough time,” he said. “Instead of a new engine, we just modify the one we know works.” He summoned Auxiliary as a rough model of a ship, then turned it over on the bottom. His modifications put a boiler near the engine, hanging off the bottom of the ship. It was the only way to install one quickly, since the tops of these ships were living spaces and they didn’t have time to cut through. The water towers were on the tops of the vessels, so his design ran large water lines down to the boilers, which superheated the water using sunhearts, then injected it into the engine proper. That, modified by his schematics, spit the steam and heat out the bottom and generated thrust. Not the most efficient engine ever, but the concentrated power source made it viable. “Look,” he said, pointing at the water line. “Just put an inhibitor right here. Less water in means less water out, and therefore less thrust. Make this inhibitor variable and wire it into the ship controls, so we can increase or decrease thrust at will.” Solemnity Divine looked at his design, then smacked her forehead. “Right. Of course. Such an easy fix.” It was a time-tested adage in engineering. Why redesign when you could patch the old model? That led to short-term fixes, but that was all they needed. “We must do more tests,” another engineer said. “A stress test at least! We don’t know if this design will last longer than a five-minute burn!” “Install this all on my hovercycle. I’ll take it up the mountain, perform a stress test, and
make sure it works. While I’m gone, you get these modifications installed on the remaining ships. Don’t forget lateral thrusting ability—we’ll need to be able to go forward, not just up.” He left them in a buzz and stepped back over to Contemplation, who watched the sky and that blazing light of a warship. He wondered how much load it put on their shields to withstand the power of that sunlight. It seemed like what he’d felt should overwhelm most shields. Again, his mind itched with the worry that something wasn’t adding up. “How dangerous are they?” she asked. “I know of no force more dangerous. They have been known to leave entire planets desolate. Fortunately the Night Brigade aren’t mindless pillagers. They’re a precision force and will do whatever their contract—or in this case, their goal—demands.” “Then…they could destroy us all.” “If they wished,” Nomad said. “Thing is, though…destroying a planet? That takes work, Contemplation. Work they’re not getting paid for. They should leave you mostly alone.” He paused, then glanced toward the hub. “Hopefully they won’t want your shades. They have a thing for ghosts.” She looked to him, pale, worried. “What kind of mercenary force,” she said, “can control shades well enough to use them as soldiers?” “If they get close, I’ll leave,” he said. “You’ll be better for it. Tell the Night Brigade everything—all about me, everything they ask you to tell them. Don’t try to hide anything. Playing dumb won’t drive them away. Comply with everything they ask you to do; make it easier for them to leave you alive than kill you. It’s the only way to escape from them with your limbs—and soul—still attached.” She nodded. “I will tell the others. Adonalsium—or whatever god you follow—bless your flight, Sunlit.” “I’ll settle,” he said, “for no gods intentionally thwarting me for once.” She seemed troubled by that statement—as well she should. He worked frantically with the engineers. And a short time later, on the back of a small, battery-powered hovercycle, he raced into the shadows. POWERFUL FLOODLIGHTS ON the front of the cycle let him see where he was going. A barren rocky mountainside, pocked by holes where trapped gases had blown out. The surfaces were smooth, even glassy, but the jagged edges were unweathered and razor sharp. As he flew upward, he realized that this was the first time on this planet he’d been truly alone. Even when he’d worked on the schematics, Elegy had been in the room. Now it was just him, Auxiliary, and the darkness. Shaded from the sunlight by a shield that was—by definition—on a planetary scale. He pushed the cycle up the slope and soon encountered snow. His body’s protections had already started to come into play, warming him from within, so he didn’t notice the air temperature. The snow was his first sign that they were getting to dangerously high elevations. So, the knight says, is this a good time to ask you what we’re going to do if this works? How do we find the hidden Refuge? We
spent the better part of a day searching earlier, and that was when the Cinder King didn’t know what we were up to. It’s going to be far more difficult this time. “Perhaps,” Nomad said, his breath misting. “Perhaps not. Cities keep to relatively strict latitudes here. I confirmed it with their navigation team. The Cinder King flies Union around the planet in a straight line.” Okay, so? “So that greatly narrows down the area we have to search,” Nomad said. Sorry, my dutiful valet, the knight intones. I still don’t follow your scattered logic. Is the elevation getting to you? “Right, let me explain it this way,” Nomad said, swerving around a large rock formation. “The Cinder King made no regular excursions—he wasn’t flying out somewhere to study the entrance. Someone would have noticed if, each rotation, he mysteriously left the city. “Yet we know that the Cinder King has been trying to get into the Refuge for years. Everyone agrees it was an obsession of his, and some few have even seen the door. So he had to study it in the normal course of their journey, during one of their regular stops to grow crops. “Since Union always flies in a straight line around the planet, the entrance is somewhere in that specific latitude. In the direct path of the city. A place he can periodically land and study with his closest and most trusted officials, while everyone else grows food.” Right, then. So…that’s still a huge area. Somewhere on a long line rounding the planet? It’s a small planet, yes, but that’s too much ground to search while being chased. We need to know where on that line the entrance can be found. “Actually we don’t need to know that,” he said. “Not right now. Because the Cinder King knows it.” Alas, the knight thinks, my sleep-deprived squire has finally lost his mind and is speaking complete gibberish. “Trust me on this one,” Nomad said. “Finding the Refuge isn’t going to be difficult. Neither is opening it. Those will be two of the easiest parts of our task.” Then what is the hard part? Nomad didn’t reply. He leaned down over his cycle, checking the time. By everyone’s best guesses, he should be over halfway up his climb. Indeed, his speed was decreasing as the conventional engine slowly lost the ability to propel him. He left a melted trail behind him in the ice as he dipped lower, but he waited to engage the new engine. He needed to get as far as he could with the regular one to conserve propellant for the new one. So…let’s assume we get over the mountain, the knight muses. We somehow don’t run Beacon out of energy. You work whatever magic you’re planning, and we locate the door and get it open. What then? What happens when Rebeke and the rest discover that the gate the Cinder King has been trying to open doesn’t lead to some mythical, idyllic cavern and utopia of sun-free living? What happens when instead they discover
it leads to some small, offworlder research facility? “Congratulations. You’ve identified the hard part.” Ah. Right. “I said I’d get Beacon’s leadership through that door,” he said. “That was my oath. I never said I’d solve their problem with the Cinder King or their bigger problem—the sad fact that it’s unlikely their planet has any true refuge from the sun. I warned them. They’re committed anyway. So it’s not my problem.” That doesn’t make you sad? “I can’t help everyone. I can barely deal with my own issues. I just have to keep moving forward.” Yes, but…isn’t there another way? More we can do? Once, instead of questions, Auxiliary would have given him a lecture. They’d both been through a lot since those days. Nomad sensed no condemnation in those words. Just sorrow. He made no response, because the air was well and truly giving out now, and he doubted he could fill his lungs sufficiently. Instead he exhaled and let his body do what it did, protecting him with a little bubble of invisible pressure, a leftover from his old powers. He’d use up Investiture, but this wasn’t a major drain. Beneath him, the engine labored, but the cycle barely stayed in the air—and his progress up the slope had slowed to a crawl. So he engaged the new engine—really just a complement to the old system. It worked perfectly, shooting down a jet of superheated steam and lifting him a good ten feet higher above the frozen landscape. He’d gotten above the perpetual cloud cover here, so he could finally see the stars. He took a moment to admire the rings—which, unless he was remembering wrong, were another oddity. The few other planets he’d visited with rings always had them at the equator, but not these. Strange rings, strange gravity, strange sunlight. What a bizarre planet. Unfortunately, the rings reminded him of the ship up there, newly arrived. No. He couldn’t think about how close the Night Brigade was right now. He focused instead on the path. His eyes adjusted, and he dimmed the floodlight. The snow had fallen away also—not enough atmosphere. Now it was just him and the grey stone, like a ramp up toward the cosmere itself. These scattered peaks weren’t high, around a thousand feet, despite their steep incline. But just because this peak was relatively low didn’t mean it wasn’t worth climbing, and he still felt proud as he neared the top. He cut the engine at the summit, settling down gently. His feet were silent as they touched the stone. There was no appreciable atmosphere here to carry the sound waves. He enjoyed the moment, parked at the very top of the world, surveying the curvature of the small planet and looking out over the smoldering clouds. The sun was still a ways off, not even illuminating the horizon. Higher mountains rose to either side of him. He couldn’t spot a lower pass the city could sneak through. The fugitives would have to come all the way up this slope. On the back side,
the slope was even steeper—cutting downward in a way that would have been improbable in a normal mountain range. Weathering below would not have needed long to collapse this higher section. But here, the peaks only had to last a day until they were remade. He turned toward the stars again. They’d always seemed so friendly to him. So full of stories. How many of those stars had he visited now? Just a fraction of them, and yet the cosmere had begun to feel like a small place. Instinctively he tried to find Taln’s Scar, but the patch of red wasn’t visible from this angle. Do you remember, the knight asks, when you first realized the Night Brigade was chasing you? Nomad sent annoyance through the bond. Ah, that’s right, the hero realizes. You can’t speak up here. How special…how delightful. I can talk, and you can’t interrupt? You know, for a lowly valet, you certainly do monopolize a great deal of the speaking opportunities. More annoyance. So much annoyance. Lovely! Well, I’m going to assume you remember. It’s not a thing one forgets lightly. You walked right up to them and essentially turned yourself in. Nomad had mistakenly assumed that they wouldn’t be interested in him because he no longer held the Dawnshard. He thought he’d send them on their way, misunderstanding cleared up. Storms, he’d been a fool. It was a similar attitude that had originally landed him in the army on Roshar, carrying siege equipment. Do you ever miss the way you were back then? Indifference. No, that naivete had almost gotten him killed so many times. In the case of the Night Brigade, he’d completely missed the danger. He’d soon learned that, with their twisted arts, they could kill him and fashion a spike from his soul that would lead them to the person he had given the Dawnshard. To them, Nomad was a crucial link in a very important chain. And he was far more useful dead than alive. Yeah, I thought you wouldn’t want to go back to the person you’d been. And you know, I don’t miss those days either. This surprised him, and he sent that emotion. He thought for sure that Auxiliary regretted what he’d become. What’s life about, if not growth? I don’t like the person I was back on Roshar either, before we knew each other. I like change, Nomad. My kind were too static for too long, particularly we highspren. And sometimes the way you talk makes me think you believe, or can pretend, that you are an entirely different person now. But you aren’t. You’re still that man. The capacity for what you’ve become was always there. I guess that sounds depressing or negative, but I don’t mean it so. If we pretend that we’re a different person each day, then what good does it do? It implies we can’t truly change. That we don’t learn. We just turn into another being. Does that make sense? Barely. I just want to say…I’m glad to be here. Seeing this all
with you. Even with the cost, I’m glad to be here. Something about that twisted Nomad up inside. Auxiliary was barely there, a fragment of the being he’d once been, so brilliant and capable. What kind of damaged individual would be glad to have gone through what he had? But then again, the view from atop the world…looking out over infinite clouds, with stars overhead… Storms. Nomad couldn’t be proud of who he was now. He was a man who couldn’t ever go home—not because of the army that chased him, but because…because he would never be able to face his friends as the person he’d become. No, he wasn’t someone different. He was, indeed, still himself. That was what made it painful. Auxiliary always had been the perceptive one. But he also often misunderstood people. And that was certainly the case with Nomad just then. He activated the steam jet again, turned, and drove back down into the atmosphere until he could change the engine over to its regular configuration. By the time he arrived at Beacon, they were ready, excess weight jettisoned, new engine components in place. He’d be going back up that mountain again, this time with a hundred and thirty-five people relying on him not to doom them to a silent death. “THROTTLE IS RIGHT here,” Jeffrey Jeffrey said, scratching at his beard as he moved down the control panel, explaining it to Nomad. “And here, this will let you rotate the city. We only have one primary thruster set to move you laterally. The engineers said that should be enough.” “We don’t have to move far forward,” Nomad agreed. “Most of the distance we need to cover is vertical.” The two of them stood in the cab of his ship, a smaller room off the main chamber where he’d done his research earlier. They’d positioned his ship in a strange location—locked right on top of the hub, above the Chorus. Underneath his feet, through the metal, those shades were now accompanied by tens of people packed into the space surrounding the Reliquary. Through the windshield, he could see a forlorn, reduced version of Beacon. A mere twelve ships, arrayed in a circle around the hub—three of them being the giant water-container ships at the outside. He’d imagined it as a flying disc when they’d been assembling it, but “disc” misleadingly evoked a shape too elegant, too smooth, too intentional. No, this was more like a flying barge made of bulky, warehouse-like ships. It was vaguely circular, with a central bump one story taller than the rest of it. And he was at the top, such as it was. Jeffrey Jeffrey showed him how to rotate his ship in place, which was handy. He could turn the windshield to look back toward the horizon, or keep his eyes forward, aimed at the mountains. A little white-and-green radar screen showed him their proximity to the mountain. “Here are the controls to drop the water ships once they’re empty,” Jeffrey Jeffrey said, indicating a control panel that was newly wired
in place. “That should be everything.” “What are those controls?” he asked, gesturing to a group on the left of the panel. “Those control the prospector device underneath your ship,” Jeffrey Jeffrey explained. “Not relevant now.” Right. Elegy, before becoming a Charred, had been an explorer. A woman who pushed the limits, both socially and physically. She’d struck out into the shadows with an entire city relying on her. Her ship had been a prospector, intended to help her find signs of Investiture in the great maelstrom between the sun and the darkened land they now flew through. “Thank you,” Nomad said. “You should run along now and get someplace safe.” “I could stay,” Jeffrey Jeffrey said. “We had time, so we sealed your room as well—best we could. It will leak more since we made your door able to open easily. But there should be enough air in here the entire flight…” “Too dangerous,” Nomad said. “I can handle this.” “And her?” Jeffrey Jeffrey nodded back to the main chamber of the ship, where Elegy was still chained in place. At least now she could sit down in the corner, rather than being held flat against the wall. There was no other good place to keep her. They’d jettisoned the ship that had doubled as a jail. He didn’t like the idea of letting her stay in a room with innocents. “She’ll be fine there,” Nomad said. “Her Investiture should let her survive without oxygen for a while, if it comes to that.” “All right,” Jeffrey Jeffrey said. He lingered, looking out through the window—all other windows on the other ships had been covered with steel, welded into place, out of concern that the seals at the corners of the windows wouldn’t hold the pressure. So this was Jeffrey Jeffrey’s last sight of the outside world until, hopefully, they touched down on the other side of the mountains. “Adonalsium’s fortune gaze upon you,” the man said to Nomad. “And…may you always outrun the sun. In a very present and immediate way, Sunlit.” He left, and a few seconds later, Nomad saw him enter one of the other ships. The door closed, but they’d leave the intakes open until Nomad indicated they needed to seal themselves in. The city had become a ghost town. A black, huddled collection of structures, lit only by emergency lights. Occupied only by the silent and the dead. He took the controls and started Beacon upward in the darkness. In the shadow as they were, there wasn’t much to see of the mountain, but the radar gave him enough to fly by. He mostly just went up. There was no need to hug the slope. This feels…more boring than it should. “Good,” Nomad said, watching the throttle—keeping them flying on regular engines at close to full power. “We want this all to be as boring as possible.” How long has it been, the knight asks, since you’ve been in command of this many people? “Command? Don’t call it that. I’m flying a ship.” You’re in charge right
now, which makes you captain of this ship. That’s a command position. “Not the same thing.” It isn’t your fault, you know, what happened. Events were largely outside your control. “Never said they weren’t.” You still carry that burden. “It’s a small one.” And yet you’ve always avoided being put into a leadership position again. “Seems best for everyone that way,” he said, nudging the ship a little farther along to the east, up the slope, away from the sun. Still climbing. He waited to see what kind of issue Auxiliary would raise next. Instead a voice came from behind him. “You have someone in your head too, don’t you?” Elegy asked. He glanced over his shoulder at her, sitting cross-legged, wrists chained together and hooked to the wall. Her cinderheart glowed a soft red-orange. “I can see it in you,” she said. “The others say you’re praying. But you’re not. You’re talking to someone in your head. You can hear them, like I used to.” “Yes,” Nomad agreed. “It’s similar, I guess.” “Does the voice tell you who to kill?” “He’s told me to jump off a cliff a few times,” Nomad said with a smile. She obviously didn’t get the joke. “No, Elegy. The voice is my friend. The tool I summon on occasion? That’s his body.” “Why is he in your head too?” “It’s complicated. These days, though, he calls me his squire or his valet.” At her confusion, he explained further. “Auxiliary—my friend—has a body, but he can’t control it…directly. Instead he sits in my mind, like a passenger. So he jokes that I’m his valet—his palanquin carrier, you might say—to move him wherever he wants to go.” And you’re a very ineffective one, I must say. Rarely ever do what I tell you. Maybe we should get you one of those cinderhearts. Then perhaps you’d be more pliant. “Why don’t you fight?” Elegy asked. “Who?” “Everyone,” she said. “The voice held me back, most of the time, then let me loose when there was someone to fight. Now…I want to fight everyone. You said you feel it. I can see you feel it. So why don’t you fight?” “I choose my fights,” Nomad replied. Outside, the air was thinning. He didn’t need to check the pressure gauge when the engines were so obviously laboring. He gave the order, and the people sealed themselves into their cabins, closing the vents. He had about two hours, from this point, until they started to run out of oxygen. “I don’t understand,” Elegy said. “Choose what fights? How?” Can’t you just explain to her that there’s more than fighting, the hero asks. He could. But if there was one thing his master had taught him, it was how to lead a conversation. He still did it as naturally as he performed a spear kata. “I don’t want to fight the people here,” Nomad said. “There’s no challenge to it, for one thing. For another, I want nothing from them.” “I want the fight from them,” Elegy said. “If you let me
free, there would be nothing for me to choose. I would fight you. I’d fight everyone on this ship.” “And then what?” “And then…” She trailed off. “Then you’d die up here in the cold,” Nomad said. “Alone. Great. What have you earned? What have you accomplished?” “I…” “You’re going to have to learn to find something else to live for, Elegy.” “Something…else…?” “A reason,” Nomad said. “A purpose. Once you have that, you’ll know when to fight, and why. You’ll fight for something.” He met her eyes again. “You aren’t going to be able to recover who you once were. I’m reasonably certain she is gone, like a book burned to ashes. “But you can’t merely be what you are now. If you keep on this way, you’ll end up dead. Probably fast. You’ll howl in rage to the sun, unsatisfied, because the fight was short and pointless. But that fire inside of you isn’t going to go away either. So find something to care about, a reason to channel it. That’s my best advice to you.” “Then what is your purpose? Why do you live?” Damnation. He’d walked right into that. Perhaps he hadn’t digested Wit’s lessons as well as he’d thought. “I used to live for my friends,” Nomad said softly. “But those days are gone. Then I lived to protect the cosmere—for a brief time harboring one of its most dangerous secrets. Now…now I live to run.” She frowned. “And that’s…satisfying, why?” “It isn’t,” he admitted. “I guess I’m still trying to learn the same lesson.” “So that’s why you understand,” she said and settled back, closing her eyes. “I see. Yes, I see. Thank you.” Storming woman. He had the sense that, before all of this, she’d probably been outrageously self-righteous. Her memories might not have survived, but some of that attitude did. I’m embarrassed, the knight admits, how much better she just did my job than I have lately. “Your job?” he asked in Alethi. “Since when has it been your job to moralize at me?” Since forever, Nomad. You threw out your conscience years ago, I know, though I never had a chance to meet her. That left the position vacant, regardless, so I appointed myself to fill it. I’d ask how I’m doing, but…well, you are clear evidence of how much of a rookie I still am. Nomad grunted, smiling despite himself, and checked the elevation. They were barely moving now. So he took a deep breath and engaged the new engines. The entire city jolted as if it had been struck by a giant hammer. Then it started upward again. He released his breath, and he, Elegy, and Auxiliary flew for a time in silence. He felt oddly at peace as they did. He was still running, of course, still being hunted. Yet he could pretend this was a lull, with nothing to do but climb. After a half hour or so of this, however, he noticed their elevation wasn’t matching up to projections. They were moving more slowly than he’d anticipated. He
pushed the engines to full power, and though they started moving a little faster, the acceleration soon tapered off. Around them, the cloud cover was falling away, the mountainside coming into full view. Ringlight bathed the landscape. Are we even moving? “We are, but slowly,” he said, checking other readings. He silently urged the ship to rise. And it did, with increasing slowness. He’d miscalculated somewhere. Theoretically they should be going faster with each passing moment, as they burned away more water and ejected it from the ship. Instead they were slowing. Not rapidly, but enough that he doubted they’d make the summit before their water ran out. Nomad? Auxiliary asked. What’s wrong? “I don’t know,” he admitted, checking the throttle controls to make sure they weren’t jammed or something. “It could be any number of tens of things. Maybe the seals we used don’t work in extreme low pressure and are starting to leak. Maybe this method puts too much strain on the engines, making them overheat. Usually you discover these kinds of quirks through stress tests and numerous prototypes. But…we didn’t have time for any of that.” He watched the ominous horizon in the rear distance. Light started to stain it, the sun creeping from its den, hungry. He felt like the worst of the ten fools in that moment. He’d led these people to their deaths, and he didn’t even know where his miscalculation was. He knew from sad experience in engineering that these kinds of little problems were numerous—and when one cropped up in an early test, you usually had to use the wreckage to work out what had gone wrong… Then a wave of relief hit him as he remembered that he’d built in a failsafe for this. He reached over, hitting the button to jettison the first empty water-carrying ship. It tumbled free, and the larger collection of ships jolted at the sudden loss of mass. Beacon’s gyroscopes accounted for the sudden change in the ship’s shape and mass, keeping them level as their speed increased. Not quickly enough. He checked the water gauges and found that the second container ship was also basically empty. He hit the button to eject that one. Nothing happened. He hit it again. Nomad? “The unlocking mechanism is jammed on that second ship,” he said, peering through his windshield to see it still latched in place. “We need to jettison it immediately and hope that drops enough weight to speed us up.” Okay. But…how? Can you hotwire the system? Nomad took a deep breath. “No. We’re going to have to go out and do it by hand.” “THIS COULD BE dangerous for you,” he said to Elegy, moving through the main cab. “I’m sorry. I’ll try to close the door quickly and not lose too much of your air.” “Why do you care…about me?” she asked, frowning. He stopped by the door. “Human beings have a natural sense of decency, Elegy. Yours might have been burned away. I know a little of what that’s like, but it’s not how we’re
meant to be.” “You said you used to live for your friends,” she said. “To fight for them. Because of decency?” “That and so much more,” he said. “Aux, I’m not going to be able to speak out there. You’ll have to do your best to interpret my emotions.” Understood, trusty valet. Once upon a time, their bond had been close enough for Nomad to speak his thoughts directly back to Auxiliary. That ability, like several others they’d enjoyed, vanished when Auxiliary had mostly died. Nomad threw open the door. Of course, that resulted in rapid decompression—but he was prepared. His long coat whipped around him as he jumped out, then threw his weight against the door, slamming it closed and doing up the lock. He wasn’t certain how much air he’d retained for Elegy. Hopefully it—plus her natural Investiture—would be enough. For the time being, he had to worry about the entire city. He ran to the side of the city-ship and reached the empty water vessel. Slow-moving, weighty, intended to move through fields and water the crops—it now hung tipped to the side, deadweight. He immediately figured out the problem. Ice. They had moved up through the same icy snow he’d noticed during his solo flight—but had spent much more time in it. The deck was crusted in ice, and the locking mechanisms that held the ships together obviously weren’t designed for such cold environments. They had frozen over, and many refused to unlatch when activated. He summoned Aux as a crowbar and found one that hadn’t unlatched, ramming Aux in place and throwing his weight against the tool. With some work, he got that lock and the next one undone. The ship didn’t fall, though all of the latches on the deck were now uncoupled. Storms. The locks underneath the vessel, connecting it to the main body of the ship, must also be iced over. That’s…bad, isn’t it? There was only one solution. He had to find a way to undo the latches on the underside of Beacon. While flying. He dismissed Auxiliary and ran to his cycle at the edge of the city-ship. They hadn’t refilled the water compartment. Damnation. Damnation, Auxiliary said. What do we do? He popped the seat on his cycle, getting out the towline he’d seen Rebeke use earlier. He threw the coil of reinforced metallic rope over his shoulder, formed Auxiliary as a hook and chain, then stepped up to the side of the ship, standing on a portion that wasn’t part of the water ship, just in case it broke free. He gazed down at the ringlit mountainside. Oh boy, the knight says in a joyless monotone. This is going to be fun. He hooked Auxiliary in place, then swung down over the side of the ship, descending until he found a secure handhold. He grabbed it, holding on to the metal, then reformed Auxiliary, this time with a knob replacing the hook. He wedged that into a gap nearby in the metal and reformed Auxiliary to fit exactly so that it
couldn’t just pull free. That gave Nomad a secure anchor to climb down farther, until he dangled just below Beacon. He looked out across the underside of the composite ship, where eight jets had been spaced equidistantly around the larger one underneath the hub. The tenth ship was being used for lateral motion, its jet tilted up and firing toward the horizon. When he’d hit the release button, the water ship’s engine had disengaged. So it had become an even bigger deadweight, now not contributing thrust to the flight. He hung there for a moment, peering past the brilliant red-orange engines spitting superheated steam in geyseral jets, thinking about the careful balancing of thrusters that was required to get all these engines working in concert. Too much thrust on one side would have flipped the city, but the Beaconite machinery compensated for that distribution instinctively. Zeal had mentioned, when he’d asked, that the Chorus helped somehow. Did they have something like a rudimentary Awakened difference engine doing these calculations? Fashioned by a shade? That would be… He shook out of it. No time for such thoughts. If he didn’t break that deadweight free, the entire city would slam into the mountain—leaving them all stranded until they were engulfed in a deluge of sunlight that would melt the city-ship to slag. He would have to reach those locks, which meant traversing across the bottom of Beacon until he reached the proper location. It was mostly flat, though it had plenty of nooks for him to lock in Auxiliary’s hooks. However, moving around down here would take him uncomfortably close to at least one of those scalding jets. At least he wasn’t deafened by their roar. It was barely there in this thin air. The near vacuum would also insulate him from the worst of the heat, as long as he avoided direct contact, which was another small comfort. He grabbed the bottom lip of the side of Beacon, then dismissed Auxiliary, hanging by one hand—for a few heart-pounding moments—above a drop of hundreds of feet. By now, the people of Beacon might be getting light-headed from the lack of oxygen. Some might be slipping into unconsciousness already. So if he fell here, they’d never wake up. And his long run would be stopped not by the Night Brigade, but by the day’s deadly sunlight. He reformed Auxiliary into a chain with hooks on both ends, then swung under the ship and hooked Auxiliary on a valve. Then he took the other end of the chain and used that to swing by one arm to latch that hook into another location. Each time he swung, he would make the end fuzz to indeterminacy and then reform, locked into place in an indentation on the bottom of the ship. It was eerie, doing this in silence, Investiture helping his body compensate for the low pressure and lack of oxygen. He couldn’t do that indefinitely, as his stores would eventually run out, but he had plenty for this task. Keeping him alive, renewing his muscles so
they didn’t fatigue and drop him. He used this arm-under-arm swing to maneuver slowly around the nearest of the jets—a blinding column of superheated steam and light, violent and powerful, that could be felt as infrared radiation in the vacuum. The fact that he felt anything from this jet was an indication of just how much energy was pouring out of it. He rounded it and reached the place where the deadweight ship was locked onto the rest of Beacon. There, he hung for a moment to gather his wits. Once, he’d found it difficult during moments like this not to gasp for air, but his training had often required him to hold his breath. The power that had fed him during his youth escaped when he breathed, so he learned to hold it in, even during frantic moments of battle. He started forward again, eyes on the first lock just ahead. He undid his left-hand hook and swung out—but his right-hand hook had not been latched in as well as he’d thought. In a moment of visceral terror, he felt it slip. Storms! In a panic, he seized the chain with both hands as it went taut. He jolted, clinging to the tenuous chain, the sweat on his skin instantly vaporizing in the low-pressure environment and boiling away. The chain ground on the steel above him, slipped, then caught again—but that second jolt made him drop a little farther, his fingers barely clinging to the end of the chain. Damnation, Auxiliary said. Nomad. Hang on. Please. Nomad tried to stabilize the hook, mentally commanding it to grow wider—but his mistake had been placing it on a little rim that Auxiliary couldn’t easily form around to get a proper grip. Beneath him, the bleak slope of the mountain was getting ever closer. And in the distance, the very first lights of false dawn grew on the horizon. Nomad, Auxiliary said. It may be time to do something drastic. I have…strength left. You could fly again. Only a little, but perhaps enough to— No. NO! He thought it forcefully. They both knew this truth, but had never said it out loud. In the past, he’d burned away Auxiliary in a moment of power, ignorant of what he’d been doing—of what he’d been capable of doing. His body had sought whatever energy it could find, and his friend—made of pure energy—had been too convenient a source. All these years, Auxiliary had existed as a mere remnant of what he’d once been. But it was the most important fragment—Auxiliary’s personality and mind—that remained. Fuel, if needed. Never, Nomad thought. I can’t let you die, Auxiliary said. I can’t let the city crash. If you could fly— In response, Nomad started climbing. Hand over hand, determined, feverish. With cracked, dry hands, trembling at the thought of…of again… Auxiliary fell silent, but Nomad knew what his friend would do if the chain slipped. The unspoken horror. NEVER AGAIN, Nomad thought, reaching the bottom of the ship and slamming the other end of the chain into a more
secure position. He dangled there as sweat beaded on his face and instantly vanished, fleeting kisses of cool. Thank you, Auxiliary said, for caring. Nomad tried to send an impression of anger—of insistence that Auxiliary never bring up this topic again. He swung once more to reach the proper lock, then unwound the tow cable. It looked like all four of the locks on the bottom side had frozen closed. But hopefully he wouldn’t need to undo them all before the weight of the ship snapped the others. Now what? the hero asks hesitantly. In response, Nomad used the tow cable to tie himself into place. He gave the line a little slack, so he hung down four feet beneath the ship. Then he formed Auxiliary into a large metal pole with a flat end. Nomad wedged the flat end into the lock, then heaved, putting his entire weight on the bar. Auxiliary’s physical form was literally deific—and wouldn’t break or bend under any natural circumstances. But the Beaconite engineers had done their jobs well, and this was not a good angle from which to pry open the mechanism. Worse, friction was working against him. Above, the locks had popped free easily, but that was because the angle of the ship detaching had helped pull them free. That same angle was putting weight on these locks, making them difficult to wedge apart. Nomad. The mountain. He didn’t need to look. Yes, they were close—and drifting closer. Only a few dozen yards from collision. Moving slowly, but inevitably. He heaved harder, but nothing happened. And he worried he’d made a miscalculation again. These ships, when they locked into place, probably had mechanisms at the sides—not just the top and bottom. The latches he was trying to open, they might not even be the most important part of what kept the ships together. Too flimsy. There might be reinforced clamps or docking mechanisms he couldn’t see. If that were true… He tried again, angling the long crowbar differently. Nothing. He needed something better. Storms. The people. They needed him. But he couldn’t…he couldn’t make a weapon. He… Not a weapon, Auxiliary seemed to whisper. Just another tool. To protect the city, Nomad. The end of the crowbar sharpened. In that second, he held something he’d not held in quite some time. A symbol from Nomad’s past. The implement of a warrior, practiced in secret, then displayed in grandeur. Sharp enough to slice through metal. He rammed it upward into the gap, slashing free the lock and something above, a bar or mechanism locking the ships together. That was enough. The ship lurched, then broke free and crashed to the barren stone beneath, tumbling along the mountainside, ripping up stone as it went. Nomad hung on as Beacon shook, its primary engine roaring and spraying heat in a column of light and fury. He felt the ship rise faster, though it was almost imperceptible from his vantage. Heart pounding, Nomad unhooked himself and used Auxiliary to reach the perimeter of the ship. Soon after, he
climbed onto the metal deck. He stood tall, looking toward that terrible horizon. Sunlight trying to break free as the ship rose to meet it. Higher. Higher. The right side of the ship ground against stone, sending tremors through the entire structure. Nomad fell to his knees, still looking west at that terrible light. The grinding stopped as the ship finally, barely, crested the top of the mountain. We did it, the knight rejoices. Nomad, we did it. But we’re still rising. Storms. Nomad turned and scrambled for the control building, terrified that they’d get this close to their goal, only to end up rising so high that— Sunlight bathed him as the ship left the shadow of the planet. Calm, warm, ordinary sunlight. What the hell? He stood there for a long moment, suspended above the mountaintop, but nothing happened to him or Beacon. He’d noticed earlier that the Night Brigade ship had approached without its shield being overwhelmed. What was going on? Why could they hang there, in the light, and not be destroyed? Damnation. He hated working on so little information. If the solar strength was extremely high, it would have ripped away the atmosphere of this planet, so far as he understood. And why were there always mountains at the poles? Shouldn’t the planet, constantly being melted, form a sphere? Or was it naturally an oval, with gravity pulling more air to the equator, making it seem like there were mountains at the poles when, in reality, those were just the edges of the oval sticking out of the atmosphere? Was that even possible? As he pondered, Beacon stopped vibrating. He frowned at the strange stillness. The engines had cut out. What did that mean? Why would they… They were out of water. No more propellant. With a sickening twist deep in his core, he felt the entire Beacon complex begin to fall down the back side of the mountains—with no engines to slow its descent. THIS WAS BAD. It was also great, because the ship had managed to cross over the tip of the mountain before running out. So as they plummeted, they slipped into the mountain’s shadowed shelter. He was not ready for an uncontrolled descent, though. Storms. They’d run out of water far faster than he’d planned. Everything he and the engineers had done involved enormous amounts of guesswork. That considered, they were lucky it had gone as well as it had. In growing darkness, he crossed the deck of the ship. At least up here he didn’t have to worry about being swept off by the wind. He fell at the same speed as the ship, and though he had to use Auxiliary at some points to give him handholds, he eventually made it back to the hub and climbed up to reach the Dawnchaser’s door. He’d anticipated hitting the mountain on the way down, but so far, nothing. The steep, craterlike cliff on this side was a tiny blessing. He hauled himself through the door, noticing Elegy unconscious—hopefully just unconscious—in the corner. In
his absence, the cabin had depressurized completely. He pulled himself through the room, now fully in free fall, gravity meaningless for the next few moments. Engines. He had to get the regular engines going. He was starting to hear wind whistling outside the still-open door. Once they got back into thicker air, the regular engines should work again. Only, once he reached the control panel, he found them stalled completely. Running out of water—which had also been acting as a coolant—had caused them to lock up. Storms. He looked at the button that Jeffrey Jeffrey had explained, in passing, was for reigniting the system. It all came down to this? After all his effort, it was about pushing a button? That, and waiting. The engines wouldn’t start if he pushed it too soon. Storms, they might not start anyway. Running out of coolant while superheated in a vacuum…that was the sort of thing that completely destroyed machinery. He resisted the urge to pound that button repeatedly. Warning lights indicating overheating flashed all across the panel. Air. They needed air. That would cool the engines as they fell. Allow the heat to dissipate. Nomad, the knight asks with marked hesitance, what are you doing? Push the button. He waited, watching the readouts, his feet hooked under the chair to hold him to the seat. He tried to explain, but there wasn’t enough air yet. So he waited. Excruciatingly he waited. Nomad, I really think you should push the stupid button. Outside the window, he could see the dark slope of the mountain moving faster and faster as their descent accelerated. That was air rushing outside. Nomad. Please. He took a deep breath of actual air—and spoke. “Not yet.” When? He watched the indicators on the dials crawl from the red toward the orange for a few seconds. As soon as they hit the line, he slammed down on the button. Four of the ten remaining engines fired up. With blasts that made his teeth rattle, they strained to slow the ship. And then Beacon crashed into the ground. HE SLAMMED THE emergency release button, which would unseal the doors of every room holding the people of Beacon. They could open the doors from the inside, but there was a good chance many of them were unconscious. It depended on how well the rooms had been sealed and how much the occupants had hyperventilated. One of the great ironies of life was that people running out of air often worried so much, they used it up faster. That done, he checked Elegy—still alive. At least, the cinderheart was still glowing, and he thought she was breathing. No heartbeat, of course. No heart. He wasn’t sure how that worked for her—there were different ways an Invested body made sure its cells were being sustained. Time to see how much damage had been done to the ships. He stumbled to the door, but then immediately realized a danger he hadn’t yet considered. He was standing on top of a containment unit housing extremely volatile, incorporeal Invested
beings. Ghosts. Shades. Whatever one wanted to call them, they were among the most dangerous entities in the cosmere. He’d just crashed their enclosure to the ground, then hit the door release button without a second thought. He hesitated on the threshold of his ship, wondering if he’d have time to get the vessel disengaged and flying on its own before they came for him, eyes red, hungry. Fortunately he soon saw a few unsteady figures stumble out of the main hub ship just below. They didn’t look like they’d been eaten. He descended, passing the majority who chose to quickly settle down on the deck. Inside, the ghost enclosure looked solid, not even cracked. Wisely they had built it out of their strongest stuff. He checked to make sure all the other doors had opened, and found that two of the ten had leaked badly. The people inside had fared worse than the others, but there were no dead—just a few unconscious people, a lot of bumps, several broken limbs. At his suggestion, the Greater Good had been separated across three different ships, and all had survived the landing basically intact. Rebeke emerged from a different ship, helping an older man Nomad didn’t know. The man looked up at the stars, tears in his eyes, and began a quiet prayer of thanks. Noticing Nomad, Rebeke stepped over, clearly still dazed. “It worked,” she whispered. “I…I doubted you. I thought it wouldn’t work. Why didn’t I believe?” “Because you’re smart,” Nomad replied. “It was a crazy plan.” “It was your plan.” “And I’m an expert on how risky my ideas get,” he said. “I’m amazed we’re both standing here right now.” The knight doesn’t understand why Rebeke is glaring. After all, this is exactly the sort of stupid thing Nomad says all the time. “Well,” Rebeke finally said, “we’re alive.” “Agreed,” he said, looking over the gathering group of sore, partially suffocated, emotionally battered people. “For now. Let’s go find the engineers. We’re going to want to find out how badly I’ve wrecked your city.” “YOU WANT TO KNOW how bad it is?” Solemnity Divine asked. “I’d offer that we’re somewhere between ‘Oh, shades, what a mess’ and ‘I didn’t even know that part could come off!’” They stood inside the hall surrounding the Chorus’s mist-filled enclosure that had blessedly remained intact. The usual team. Jeffrey Jeffrey, Zeal, Rebeke, and the Greater Good. Compassion sat on the ground, wrapped in a blanket, while the others stood. Having jettisoned the previous building they’d used for meetings, they had picked this one for some insane reason. Perhaps it was seen as official or something. Or maybe it had just been the first of the chambers to be evacuated following the wreck. “Lay it out straight, if it pleases you, Solemnity Divine,” Confidence said. “How dire is our current situation?” “Six engines locked up completely and will need a full injector replacement,” she said. “Mud rammed into all the downward-facing jets. Smashed-up intakes on three junction points, and some of the clasping mounts were broken
by the crash. I’d suggest we fly separately from here on out, as I can’t guarantee the integrity of the whole.” “That’s not…too bad,” Jeffrey Jeffrey said. “Is it?” “Depends,” Solemnity Divine said, spreading her hands wide. “My team can fix this. We might even be able to do it before the sun rises.” “We have extra time,” Contemplation agreed. “Because of the mountains. Though we’ll need a corridor of shadow from the sun to escape—so we can’t hide here forever.” “Two and a half hours, maybe a little more,” Zeal said. “That’s what the navigators told me. Any longer than that, and we’d have to cross a field of fire to get back into the dusk.” Two and a half of their hours. Those mountains were extremely tall for the size of the planet, giving quite a shadow to shelter Beacon. Particularly with the slow rotation of the planet, he could understand where that much time came from. It was still a frighteningly small amount of time to solve their problems. “I already have the Chorus fabricating parts,” Solemnity Divine said. Indeed, sounds came softly from the center of the enclosure. More unnervingly though, Nomad was sure he heard someone whisper an echo to her words each time she spoke. “And in the time remaining, I might be able to get the ships into flying shape. Except they won’t move, even once they’re repaired.” “Sunhearts,” Nomad guessed. “We’re out of power.” “The engines burned hotter—but less efficiently—than we’d hoped,” she said, nodding in agreement. “We’ve got almost nothing left. It’s a miracle we landed—only four of the engines fired, and with many that didn’t, it was because their sunhearts were depleted.” “So,” Compassion said from her seated position, “we’re stopped. Frozen.” The word seemed to carry more weight for them, burdened with context that Nomad could guess at. This was a world where being frozen, being stopped, was death. “We’re going to have to steal some souls,” Zeal said with a firm nod. “If it pleases all, I shall gather my team. Do we have enough power to fly one ship on a raid, then back?” “Yes,” Solemnity Divine said. “But…who are you going to raid?” “You can’t go south, Zeal,” Jeffrey Jeffrey said. “Not unless we want to try to cross even more highlands.” “North is the Cinder King,” Rebeke said softly, from where she stood just outside their circle. As if she weren’t sure she was wanted or not. “He’s got plenty of sunhearts to spare,” Nomad said, “after feeding your captive friends to the sun. Won’t those be coming up soon? The sunhearts that were made the first time I stood in the sunlight?” “First time?” Rebeke asked. Nomad nodded upward with his chin. “Up there, the sunlight struck me on the deck of Beacon, but didn’t do anything. I’m still trying to figure out why…” They all regarded him with reverence. “It wasn’t me being Sunlit,” he said. “The ship didn’t melt either.” That didn’t help their looks of amazement. As if they thought he had protected
the entire ship—as if he had the power to shield them all from the sunlight somehow. You know, the knight says with a wry sense of amusement, you always complain about the legends you start. Then you say things like this… “Regardless,” Nomad said, forging forward, “the Cinder King created a whole big group of new sunhearts yesterday—and the spot where he did should be just ahead of us.” “The souls of our friends, left in the sunlight,” Zeal said with a solemn nod. “We know the longitude. If we use the prospector, we could find them.” “The Cinder King always guards the border between the great maelstrom and the shadow,” Confidence said. “He doesn’t want anyone else to claim the sunhearts there.” “Explain this to me again,” Nomad said, frowning, trying to form a mental image. “The day side of the planet is incinerating heat and melted rock. I understand that. But there’s also a…storm you call the great maelstrom? Is this storm more violent than the one we flew through in the darkness?” “Yes,” Compassion whispered. “The great maelstrom follows the sunset, when the planet first passes into night. It’s a raging tempest of incredible violence. When the land finally cools and the storm dissipates, the shadow begins—the cloud cover we hide in. That line is where sunhearts are collected.” “We raid him right there, then,” Nomad said. “Attack at the collection point and steal some. How far away is that?” “For a fast ship?” Zeal said. “It can be as little as an hour’s flight from near-dawn to the great maelstrom.” Again Nomad was struck by the tiny size of this planet. Around two hundred miles at most in diameter, by his quick calculations. Amazing. “So there’s a chance,” he said. “We have two and a half hours. We fly in, we steal sunhearts, we get back here.” “It won’t work,” Confidence said, folding her bony arms. “We raided him just recently. He’s not going to be taken unaware again.” “Perchance,” Zeal said. “But if I may offer a counterargument, he can’t have expected us to survive that ascent, right? So far as he presumes, we were destroyed and he is the victor. Perhaps we can steal a Union scout ship, so that nobody realizes it’s us, and get in close enough to steal some sunhearts right out of his vessels.” “Steal one of their ships?” Contemplation said. “In time? Yes, your words have merit, and he might assume we are dead. But I cannot imagine stealing a ship and executing such a plan in the span we have. I agree with Confidence, Zeal. We had weeks to plan the previous raid and were blessed by your device that could freeze his Charred.” “I can do it,” Zeal promised. “Please. Let me try to save our people.” “Or,” Nomad said, “we could try something else.” He thumbed upward. “That’s Elegy’s Dawnchaser, right? A reinforced prospector?” “And?” Contemplation said. “And, as you’ve explained, the Cinder King always collects his sunhearts after the maelstrom has passed. What if we didn’t wait?
What if we were to fly ahead of him and steal them right out of the ground before he gets to them? Inside the storm?” Collectively they gaped at him. All right, the knight says, that’s fun. I like the way you make their brains melt. It’s cute. Confidence sputtered. “Survive the great maelstrom? It’s impossible.” “Nobody goes into the maelstrom,” Contemplation said. “It’s madness.” “Same is said of the storm on my homeworld,” Nomad said. “But I know someone who survived it, then inspired a whole host of us to do the same.” He pointed at Elegy’s ship again. “You told me that was reinforced for flying into the maelstrom.” “It never managed to go fully into the storm!” Solemnity Divine said. “I helped reinforce it, but the sensors always told her she’d die. She always backed down.” “She never actually flew into the great maelstrom?” Nomad asked. “No,” Rebeke said. “Because she’s not insane.” Nomad gestured to the sides, indicating the entire ship below them. One that had just climbed a mountain. “It’s a day for insanity, folks. A day for risks.” They were all silent. “I’m in,” Zeal said. “Let’s do it, Sunlit. Let’s steal from the sun itself.” THEY WERE OFF in under ten minutes—the amount of time it took to unlock Elegy’s ship and gather Zeal’s team. The four people were more rough-and-tumble than the rest of the Beaconites he’d met—with thick work gloves, overalls of coarse cloth, and long coats. When they spoke, there was less sugar in their language and a lot more spice. He’d begun to think of these people as monolithic, but that was never true. Even two siblings would reflect their culture and upbringing in different ways. Nomad tasked Rebeke with the actual flying, and they lifted off, skimming the muddy ground, leaving Beacon—what was left of it—huddled in the mountain’s shadow, helpless before the advancing sun. Nomad wished the Dawnchaser were more dynamic—and a little less like some kind of bulbous insect. “So let me get this straight,” said one of Zeal’s team—a beefy guy swathed in so much leather that Nomad wondered if he’d depopulated an entire corridor of beasts to make the outfit. “We are flying into the blessed maelstrom itself.” “Indeed,” Zeal said, standing on one of the seats by the wall, leaning back, arms folded. “Then,” the guy continued, “we are going to get out of the ship—still in the great maelstrom, mind you—and find the blessed sunhearts?” “Yup,” Zeal said. “Well, you’ll be getting out of the ship to harvest them, Hardy. I’ll be running operations from the comfort of the cab, probably munching on some tea cakes. Oh, and we dumped all our harvesting machinery, so you’ll have to dig them out by hand.” The group chuckled. From what Nomad had gathered, this was how they ran operations—Zeal organized and maintained the team, but he relied on the others to do most of the fieldwork. “You blessed fool,” Hardy said. “We’re all a group of blessed fools.” Wait, the knight says. Is that fellow using
the word “blessed” as…as a curse? “It’s a conservative religious society,” Nomad said in Alethi. “You use the tools you’re given.” Then, before any of the others could interject, he spoke in their language. “I’ll be going out into the storm, not any of you. We brought you because Zeal insisted that I have you here for backup.” All four stared at him, then they nodded as one. “Well, that’s good enough for me, then,” Hardy said, settling back. “Wake me when we get there.” “You’ll know,” Zeal said with a grin. “Oh, you’ll know.” He looked to Nomad. “We’re behind you, Sunlit. It’s enough for me that you think this will work.” “I appreciate it,” Nomad said with a nod. In the corner, Elegy began to stir, finally. They’d brought her because, as before, there was really no other place to put her. He supposed they could have locked her to a random part of Beacon’s deck, but in the frenzy of motion getting ready to leave, he honestly hadn’t thought about that. She blinked awake, then pulled back against the corner, glaring with primal confusion at the assembled group. Until her eyes settled on Nomad. Recognizing him, she seemed to relax. He turned and climbed into the cab with Rebeke, wanting to keep his eyes forward. Always running. Always watching for the next chasm to jump. Are you worried, the hero muses, about how much those people back there trust you? “Not if it helps us all keep moving,” Nomad said. Would they tell you, though, if this were a terrible idea? “They did tell me.” And went along with it anyway. “Because it’s going to work,” Nomad said. He settled into the copilot’s seat next to Rebeke. On the dash next to her was a small glowing fragment of sunheart. It didn’t have much of a charge, but he was still surprised to see it. He thought they’d gathered all those up and bundled them together for this ship to use as a power source. “Thank you,” she said to him, “for letting me come along. The others always treat me as some kind of…memento or figurehead or…” “Mascot,” Nomad said. “I don’t know that word.” “Kind of like a good-luck charm.” “Because they followed my sister, their great Lodestar, and to a lesser extent my brother,” she said. Her voice caught a little when she mentioned him. “They don’t follow me, though.” “You’re young,” Nomad said. “People underestimate the young.” “Can you…” She took a deep breath, steeling herself, gloved hands on the controls. “Can you teach me to be a killer?” “I’m not so good at it myself these days.” “What do you mean?” she said. “I’ve seen you resist. I know you’re a killer.” He smiled. If she thought this shell of what he’d once been was a killer… “I don’t have time to teach you, Rebeke. Give me a few weeks and maybe I could train you in some combat skills. But that’s merely learning to fight. Learning to kill…it’s something else.” “They’re different?” “One
requires skill. The other…” “No conscience?” she asked softly. “It’s the existence of a conscience that makes it difficult. Combat training is about preparing you to act regardless of conscience—usually via repetition. We make it so that your body knows what to do before you actively consider what it will mean. Or what it will cost you.” “That sounds horrible,” she whispered. “You’re the one who asked.” She gripped the control wheel tighter, eyes forward—though the landscape had grown dark. They’d entered the shadow of cloud cover, and rain sprayed the windshield. “You don’t need to be a killer,” he said, “to get people to respect you, Rebeke.” “Then how?” “Keep following your gut. Keep doing what needs to be done. You’ll get there.” “When?” “Can’t say,” he replied. “But don’t be so eager. There are burdens to being in charge that you’re not considering. I guarantee it.” She glanced at him. “Is that what happened to you?” “Let’s just say that leadership didn’t agree with me.” That’s not true, Nomad. You were a good leader. “Aux, ‘good’ isn’t enough. Life, like measurements in science, often depends entirely on your frame of reference.” Then, to keep Rebeke from brooding, he reverted to her language. “I think Elegy is getting better.” “She remembered something?” Rebeke said, eager. “No,” he said. “But earlier she didn’t seem quite so feral, quite so eager to kill everyone around her. We had a conversation before we went up the mountain. I think it might have gotten through to her.” “Thank you,” Rebeke said, “for caring about her.” “I have empathy for abandoned soldiers,” Nomad said. “Being one myself.” He nodded toward the sliver of sunheart—just a fragment, smaller than a person’s pinkie finger. “What’s that?” She glanced at it. “Mother’s soul,” she said softly. “The main core was drained almost entirely in the escape. Solemnity Divine cut me off this small piece, as she thought I might want to keep it close on this mission.” “Do you?” “I don’t know,” she said. “I’m starting to wonder if I fixate too much on the dead and not enough on living.” Strange words, the knight notes, for a woman who lives in a society that is powered by the dead. Nomad picked it up off the dash. He still needed a way to tweak his own soul, to make it so he could fight—actually fight—if he needed to. “Mind if I take it, then?” “Go ahead,” she replied. “I thought that if I kept her sunheart close, I’d feel her. But I never have.” He mused on that, turning the sliver of sunheart over in his fingers. Then he sat back, closing his eyes. “I’m an idiot,” he muttered. Now, now, the knight says. You’re not an idiot, Nomad. An idiot is someone without knowledge or ability. You’re something else: a person with knowledge or ability who misuses it. That makes you a fool instead. “And you got those definitions from…” Wit, naturally. “Of course.” So what are you being a fool about? “These sunhearts,” he said, tapping the
sliver with his fingernail, “worked on Elegy because everyone on this planet is Connected. I’m not sure how or why, but their souls see one another as the same. They can share heat with one another. It’s become deeply embedded in their culture. But they couldn’t do it with me, even when I wanted to. So…” So this sunheart can’t draw strength from your soul, because it’s from this planet, and you aren’t. “Exactly. Linguistic Connection isn’t enough. I’d need something more to be able to draw upon this.” He could feed off their power, like he could almost all forms of Investiture. But the sunhearts refused to let him put anything back in, to lance his soul, because they didn’t accept him as one of them. It’s useless to you, then? “I could maybe hack it with some rare devices,” he said. “Which I don’t have access to here.” With a sigh, he heaved himself from the seat. He had been so very close to escaping the Torment in some small way. Realizing it was impossible felt like hitting a wall. He wanted to be moving. Physically, not just in a vehicle. He entered the back room, but there wasn’t a lot of space here for pacing. Zeal and his team—except Hardy, who was napping by the wall—had huddled together and were munching on some rations, laughing. How do they take such joy? the knight wonders. They’re right on the edge of destruction. “They’ve always lived on the edge of destruction,” Nomad replied. “I suppose they learned to find happiness in the moments between disasters.” Then…what’s wrong with you? Why can’t you do that? Auxiliary asked it without malicious intent; Nomad knew him well enough to tell that, even without vocal inflections. It still felt like a dagger to the gut. He closed his eyes to the laughing people and settled down on a bench near the wall. “They know me too,” Elegy whispered. He glanced to where she sat, chained. He knew some women caretakers had helped her with physical needs earlier, but he felt a stab of shame for the raw skin at the sides of the manacles and the way her outfit—that long open-fronted robe and trousers—hadn’t been changed since they’d pulled her out of the mud. She was focused on Zeal and his team, her eyes…confused? Her expressions were tough to read. “They keep looking at me,” she continued, “as if expecting to see a spark of familiarity. Like…I don’t know. I used to have words to describe such things. I no longer do.” “They did know you,” he said. “Everyone in Beacon did.” “I don’t remember them, yet they all remember me,” she said. “Yes…they remember me, but they don’t know me. Not anymore.” “There are some,” he said, “who would find that liberating. You’re completely free from who you used to be, Elegy. You can make of yourself whatever you want. There are many who would like to abandon the burdens of their pasts.” “You?” “No. Not me.” He looked up at the ceiling, wishing
he could see the stars. “I don’t particularly like who I am, but I cherish what I’ve learned about myself. It lets me trust in certain truths.” “I don’t know what to trust or believe,” she said. “The voice in my head was so confident…” “Do you think it knew you?” he asked. “Who will you follow, Elegy? The person who demands you kill? Or the person you used to be?” “I don’t know that person.” He nodded toward the others. “That person you used to be, she inspired all of this. Everything these people have done to be free? That was her, the old Elegy.” He shrugged. “You can’t be her, but you can trust that she knew what she was doing. By the ideals and community she helped create.” She slunk down, lowering her eyes. “The voice,” she said, “might come back. I feel it building, whispering at the edges of my mind. It might corrupt my heart again.” “Then use this,” he said, taking out the sliver of sunheart Rebeke had given him. He pressed it into her chained fingers. “Keep that. If the voice returns, speak the words: ‘Bold one on the threshold of death, give this sunheart my heat that it may bless those who still live.’” She repeated the words softly. “Why those words?” “It will siphon off a smidge of your soul and put it into the sunheart. Not enough to power the thing, unfortunately, but your soul will naturally abandon the pieces that are less…less you, I guess. Either way, it should help keep you sane. That’s how I helped make you become more aware.” He nodded at her encouragingly, then unlocked one of the manacles. She looked at him hungrily, a certain savagery still lurking within. He smiled at her, but pointedly left the other manacle on. One hand free was the most he was comfortable giving her right now. He left her studying that sliver of her mother’s soul. Hopefully he hadn’t somehow just handed her the power she needed to energize herself and break free in order to destroy him. Storms, he thought he’d gotten past trusting people who were that dangerous. He walked away with a sense of dread. But—as he’d grown proficient at doing—he ignored it for now. Instead he returned to the cab because he heard thunder. He arrived just in time to see the great maelstrom through the windshield as it broke the darkness ahead. It was on fire. THE SUDDEN BRIGHTNESS made him blink, his eyes watering. He kept forgetting that the Beaconites kept their lights uncommonly low, even indoors. At first, the landscape ahead looked like a mess of undulating oranges and yellows—an abstract painting, like the Nalthians loved. Slowly, as his eyes adjusted, he made out the nuances. Most of the burning portions were below, but swirling whirlwinds of flame rose from the ground in churning, fiery vortexes. The light glowed primarily from the center of these cyclones, but where each hit the clouds, bright bursts set the very sky afire. “It’s on fire?”
Nomad said. “Why is it on fire?” “It’s the great maelstrom beyond sunset!” Zeal said, crowding up into the cabin beside him. “You said you’d been in one before.” “Storms shouldn’t be on fire!” Nomad exclaimed. “They’re wet! Full of wind and rain.” “You suggested this plan,” Rebeke said, frowning, “and you didn’t know it would be on fire?” He gaped at the inferno. They were still on the dark side of the planet, in night, but dangerously close to the day—now just on this side of sunset. Maybe that should have told him what he’d find, but storms. He’d heard tens of different descriptions of hell from tens of different cultures and lores. His own planet’s Damnation was a cold place, but so many others talked of eternal fire. A place where flames lashed the soul and heat melted the very fat under the flesh. He’d never thought he’d look upon such a place. The ship turned and curved along the perimeter, flying at a slight angle to trail the storm—which retreated before them, chasing the setting sun. At least, at ground level, there didn’t seem to be many open magma vents. Indeed, he noticed something. The ground grew cool with unusual speed. Almost like… “Something is drawing the heat away,” he whispered. “Like your bodies can draw it from one another…” They gave him blank stares, but this seemed a likely explanation. Something about the core of the planet was odd. It created far more gravity than it should have for its size—so either it was incredibly dense or incredibly Invested. He suspected the latter. And now that core was drawing out that heat, cooling the ground. That unnaturally fast cooling cracked and shattered the landscape. Releasing… “Gases,” he guessed. “Flammable gases, as a by-product of the sun blasting the landscape. But how… Normally methane is released by decomposition, which certainly isn’t happening here…” “We’re getting close to the border of the corridor,” Rebeke said, tapping a few dials that were tracking their progress. “We made good time. Beacon has maybe an hour and forty-five minutes until sunlight reaches it.” Nomad nodded, checking the time. “We’ll soon encounter the Cinder King’s scouts,” she continued, “unless we duck into the storm. You sure you want to do that?” “Can this ship handle it?” he asked as a cyclone of fire sprang up beside them—a whirlwind of smoke and ash snaking down from above, then bursting aflame. “Maybe?” Zeal said. “It has as much insulation as we could stuff in it, and some cooling mechanisms as well. That, plus the armor…well, maybe?” “The clock is ticking,” Nomad said, and Zeal nodded. The clock, for Nomad, was always ticking. “Take us in.” Rebeke flicked a switch—bringing up the thick blast shield to protect the windshield. She flew them in via instruments, something Nomad had never been good at doing. He much preferred flying with his hair in the wind, throttle in his fingers. He’d foolishly anticipated a storm like at home. A darkness thick with chaos, occasionally sliced by lightning. He’d anticipated rain—which
always reminded him of Roshar in the best ways. There was something comforting about the sound of water on metal or stone; it had a primal, rhythmic quality. The sound of a world’s heartbeat, racing fast with excitement. His friends from back then had loved the wind, and he couldn’t blame them. But for Nomad, the rain had become his favorite manifestation of a storm. He loved stepping out in it, feeling it wash him clean. He’d assumed, if it was raining, he could survive any storm. But here he experienced something different. The ship was buffeted and tossed, but without that comforting sound of water on the roof. This maelstrom was wrong. Like a breakdown with no tears, where you curled in the corner and struggled to contain your emotions, but somehow—despite the pain filling you to bursting—couldn’t get any of it to come out. Dials on the dash went wild. Zeal pointed out two heat gauges—one indicating the temperature of the hull and a smaller one indicating the temperature inside of the ship. Both were rising steadily. “We’re going to need to be quick,” Rebeke said. “I wish we could see out there,” Nomad replied, leaning low as a whirlwind shook the ship. “We could dodge the firespouts.” “Instruments are better,” Rebeke said. “I’m cutting us right into the Cinder King’s corridor—and the line he always makes Union follow. I’ll get us to the proper longitude, then we can use the prospector to search the region until we find something. Hopefully we can do all that before we cook ourselves.” Nomad nodded, finding the sudden scents of scorched stone and ashen brimstone overpowering. Along with Zeal and the rest of his crew, though, he could only stand there, anxiously watching the dials rise as Rebeke flew them farther and farther into the terrible firestorm. “Into hell itself,” he whispered. “Hell is a forest,” Zeal mumbled back. “Full of quiet trees and unquiet dead.” By the time Rebeke reached the proper location, the chamber was hot enough that even Nomad started to feel uncomfortable. The others must have found it torturous. Still, none of them complained. Rebeke swung low, using radar to judge the landscape and keep them from crashing. She skimmed the newborn ground with the prospecting gear—like a metal detector on the bottom of the ship, designed to find Investiture—hunting for sunhearts hidden in the earth. At least in this case, she could avoid the worst of the cracked portions of the ground—as manifested on the radar screen. That might let them avoid the worst of the gas emissions. What if those were toxic? Nomad, with an abundance of caution, stopped breathing—but the others wouldn’t have that luxury. There, Auxiliary said. A ping just came from the prospector controls. “Go back,” Nomad said, trusting in Auxiliary. Even though he used Nomad’s ears, he used them better. “Rebeke? Turn back. I heard something.” She glanced at him, face pouring with sweat, then nodded. Nomad glanced at the heat dials. All well into the red. Storms. She’d probably been retreating as
fast as she could toward the cooler air of the shadow. Mission, in the sudden suffocating heat, forgotten. Still, she swerved the ship back. As they hovered over a certain spot, the faintest of pings came from the dash—nearly inaudible over the sounds of the tempest outside and the groaning of the ship’s hull. “Shades,” Zeal said. “How did you hear that?” Nomad ignored him, rushing to the door. “I’m going out. Stay close.” He steeled himself, then opened the door and slipped out, slamming it shut behind him. The sudden light of the burning sky blinded him. Fortunately no spiraling infernos were directly nearby, but his skin—despite his body’s protections—immediately started to burn. And it hurt. Damnation! Auxiliary forming as a spade in his hand, Nomad leaped free of the deck and toward the ground below. He hit hard, falling to his knees in what appeared to be loamy earth—but his eyes just saw a vague brownness as the heat dried them out. He glanced upward as a gust of flaming wind blew across him. He managed to blink his eyes once, and the ship was gone. What had happened to the ship? Had it landed? Flown away? Swept farther into the storm? He couldn’t tell, because right then, everything went black—his eyes failing. Storms, Nomad. This heat is using up your strength with extreme speed. We’re dropping Investiture at a frantic rate. Below five percent Skip capacity already. Nomad grunted and started digging, pushing through the pain—which proved easier once it started to fade. That was a bad sign. It meant his skin had been burned deeply enough that the nerves were giving out. His body would draw upon its stored Investiture to stay alive—but in the face of the terrible damage being done, it focused on preserving his core systems and had given up on less essential things like nerve endings and sight. I think, the hero says softly, this was a really, really bad idea. Still, the ground seemed cooler than the air. Nomad gave up hunting for the sunhearts, deciding he just needed to get down and protect himself. He felt his skin flaking off, his hair burning away again. He got down as low as he could manage, then formed Auxiliary as a large shield and positioned it between him and the sky. It was hard to tell without nerves, but he hoped that the damage to his body had been stopped. Hoped that he was no longer being actively burned to death. As long as his core organs and brain were able to keep going… Under three percent Skip capacity. Nomad sent a sense of quietude to Auxiliary, an indication to leave it be. He didn’t need reports. Either he would live or he wouldn’t. The wind grew stronger, and he felt dirt and soil hitting his shield from above. His mind grew fuzzy, his thoughts rambling. The endless fatigue of never sleeping, of running just in front of his problems—which prowled behind him, always on the hunt and smelling blood. Exhaustion threatened to send
him into a thoughtless abyss that—in his current state—might be the end. He fought it by forcing himself to analyze the land around him. He focused, thinking, not letting himself fade away. As always, that questioning brain—that mind that had driven him to always ask, that cursed part of him that had led him to become Hoid’s apprentice in the first place—wondered. The ground was drawing in the heat. He was sure of it, as with the last flutters of his nerves, he could feel…something trying to draw his Investiture away into the depths of the planet. It couldn’t claim his, but it tried. The core of the planet fed on Investiture like he did. Was that a clue to how all of this worked? It helped explain how the dark side of the planet could exist. The weather patterns he’d expected to consume everything were somehow quieted and stilled by this rapid cooling, creating a barrier between the dark side and the light…maybe? But why was the sunlight so hot, and yet he’d been able to step into it on the deck of Beacon? Was…was Nomad what they thought he was? Storms? Was he…somehow… No. He was no mythological hero. He’d failed these people by bullishly going forward with this plan to enter the maelstrom. The signs had been there. Auxiliary’s hesitance, the others’ overeager deference to his ideas. He’d already done something they’d considered impossible in cresting the mountains. But there, he’d taken the time to get the facts, the science, the data. He’d tested their engines; he’d flown a scouting mission; he’d used the knowledge of the engineers. That plan had been hasty, but double-checked and based on a solid scientific foundation. This time, he’d picked a direction, spouted off an idea, and started running. That had been his problem for a while. He was the man who ran. Now entombed in rock, with no way to run from himself, he confronted it. He had failed. Experience, in this case, had served him poorly. He’d learned from wise battle commanders that in times of tension, someone making any decision was often better than standing around. But there was a caveat to that lesson. Pithy though it sounded, the leaders who said it were the ones who had lived long enough to pass it on. They were the ones, in the heated moments, who didn’t just make decisions. They made the right decisions. Their advice was good, assuming you were the type of person who judged wisely in tense situations. He did sometimes. This time, he’d jumped in too quickly. And he’d led the Beaconites to destruction. He tried to feel shame at that. He really did. Instead he simply felt…numb. As if…as if he’d known this was coming, and a part of him had accepted long ago that his failures would finally catch up to him. Pain started to prickle across his arms and legs. He was so low on Investiture, it took longer than normal to heal. Fortunately these were the easy kind of wounds to survive with
his particular talents. Terrible burns didn’t directly impact his core organs or his skeletal structure. The body knew what to do, and his warped soul—for all he hated the part that prevented him from defending himself—fed on Investiture to restore him, bit by bit. His master, who had held the Dawnshard far longer, could never die. Nomad was far from that level. But today, despite excruciating pain, his body healed the burns. And as the pain receded—and he blinked restored eyes in the darkness—he realized he could hear the rain. Honor Almighty. He could hear the rain. “Aux?” he managed to say. “Time?” You’ve been buried for around fifteen minutes. There is just under an hour and a half until Beacon falls. Nomad…you have essentially no Investiture left. Maybe I can use the dregs to transform, but you have no more healing, no enhancements. Yes, but he was back in the shadow. The planet had rotated. And the Cinder King’s forces would soon arrive to harvest their sunhearts. They would bring ships he could steal. They would find the power sources, and he could take them. He could still save Beacon. Assuming he could get back to them before the sunrise. The race was not finished. He wasn’t done running yet. Nomad shifted, heaving upward on the shield, and broke out of the earth—healed, naked, determined. HIS FIRST GOAL was to find a hiding place. A nearby stone arch, lit by occasional flashes of lightning from above, provided that. A place he could tuck himself away and listen to the rain whisper. He couldn’t spare much time. They’d arrived in forty-five minutes, flying Elegy’s relatively slow ship. He needed to be fast to return. Unfortunately all he could do was wait. It was the most excruciating of activities. The opposite of his personal mandate. Even when he was going backward, he was at least moving. But right now there was nothing else he could do, so he tried to let the rain comfort him. Envelop him. Others might hate or even fear it. But beneath its veil, he found his strength returning. It only took two minutes. Lights appeared, bringing hope. The prospecting team who protected the Cinder King’s riches. At least a dozen ships. They skimmed the area, then eventually settled down right where he’d dug himself out. They didn’t seem to notice his grave for what it was, and instead had a machine start digging into the soil. So slow. Too slow. He watched, pained. Ember-red light seeped from the ground, granting him an unexpected sight. Many of those present, watching the process, were Charred. Indeed, wasn’t that the Cinder King’s ship over there, landed in the mud? He was shocked to see the tyrant himself walk across the landscape, eschewing an umbrella as he approached the dig site. Nomad doubted the king usually went on retrievals like this. He seemed wary—indeed, as his people dug out several sunhearts, the Cinder King watched the sky, looking about expectantly. Why is he here, though? the knight asks. Why would he come
out into the rain? “He knows I’ll try something,” Nomad whispered. “He’s expecting a fight.” How? How would he know? Well, perhaps “know” was the wrong word. But the Cinder King obviously anticipated the worst. In this case, that meant making sure that Nomad—the wild card from another world—wasn’t coming for these sunhearts. The presence of this many troops—and the king himself—changed Nomad’s plans. He couldn’t fight; he still didn’t know how to lance the boil on his soul. He might never figure it out. He was too much of an outsider for their local arcana to work on him. So he needed a way to grab those sunhearts that didn’t involve confrontation. A possible plan formed as a ship landed nearby, engine scorching the ground and throwing up hissing steam that made the air smell of dried mud. It was a ponderous vehicle with a large, vault-style door on the back. A worker opened it, then trotted over toward the dig, where a fourth and fifth sunheart had been laid out. Nomad couldn’t grab those, but what if he waited for them to be handed to him? Slinking through the darkness, he snuck up to the vault. Inside were several large cabinets bolted to the walls. He found room at the back to hide between them. So…what are the chances this plan is stupid? “Pretty good,” Nomad admitted, but in this case, what planning or preparation could he do? Sometimes you really did just need to improvise, commit, and then hope. He did a cursory check of the drawers—empty. He huddled down near the back, where he found an old sack with which to make a serviceable version of an Iriali wrap. Now somewhat clothed, he was able to form Auxiliary into a pretty good approximation of the front and top of one of the long cabinets—a prop, like a false front to a building used in films at Silverlight. Holding this in front of himself created the illusion that he wasn’t there. Anyone glancing toward the back would just see an extra-long cabinet. He hoped the extra row of drawers wouldn’t be too suspicious in the darkness. All right, the knight admits, I like this plan. It might actually work. Nomad said nothing, waiting—again—and listening to the rain on the roof. Counting the seconds. He saw through the thin spaces in his false cabinet front when workers approached carrying bright sunhearts. “Don’t see why he’s here looking over our shoulders,” one of the workers hissed. “And with Charred too. Does he think we’re suddenly going to start stealing from him?” “Best not to question,” another voice said. “Don’t give him any reason to pay attention to you. We’re going to run out of captives soon, now that Beacon is gone.” The lights vanished one by one as they were put into drawers. Storms. They’d better not try to open one of his drawers. They’d fill the ones at the front first, right? That’s what they did. Storing the sunhearts, then retreating—their voices suddenly cut off as a loud thump shook
the chamber. Nomad stood up from his hiding place and dismissed Auxiliary. That thump had been the vault door closing. He rushed to the drawers, and though they were locked individually, a crowbar made quick work of that. The sunhearts were inside. One per drawer. He collected all he could find—five in total. That would be enough for Beacon, wouldn’t it? Feeling relieved, he tucked them into another sack, then went to the vault door. Which was locked. He stared at it, feeling foolish. Uh, I don’t think a crowbar will help with that, Nomad. “We might need something sharper,” Nomad said, holding his hand to the side. I…don’t think I can do that. “You did it before,” he said. “When we were underneath the city. You severed the bolts.” You did that, Nomad. It’s not my soul that is cankered, not my oaths that have been broken. You are the one who can’t harm anyone. You are the one who can’t form a weapon meant only for killing. This wouldn’t be only for killing. He just needed to slice through the metal of this door. He tried to recreate the mental state he’d been in when he’d cut those latches. Surely this moment was equally urgent. But he was tired. And uncertain of himself. Beyond that, he could feel the canker on his soul growing stronger. Pushing against it was as futile as trying to break down this vault door with his fists. He struggled for a few minutes, then leaned forward, eyes squeezed closed, forehead against the door. What was he doing? If he escaped the vault with these sunhearts, then what? Did he really think he was going to be able to steal a ship without getting into a fight? And even if he did, could he find his way back to Beacon on his own? He’d only flown ships from the city, which had the proper authentication devices. If he stole a Union ship, he’d be as blind as they were. He…didn’t know anymore. He was stuck. Not just in his running. He’d…he’d been stopped for some time. Stagnant. Always focused on the run, but never focused on the greater issues. The ones deep inside him. He was frozen. His soul. His self. Running farther wasn’t going to fix that. Regardless of what he told himself. Click. The vault door? For a moment, he thought his introspection had somehow influenced that. Then, with a panicked spike of alarm, he realized that someone was opening it from the outside. He scrambled back to restore his camouflage but was too late. The door swung open. Revealing Zeal, standing alone in the mud. ZEAL? Zeal! The small man was muddy up to his thighs, but he’d apparently survived the storm unscathed. He tucked away a set of lockpicks, glanced behind himself, started at a sound, then moved to climb into the vault. It’s Zeal, the knight says with unabating enthusiasm. Storms, I don’t think I’ve ever been this happy to see someone breaking and entering. “Zeal!” Nomad said, causing the man
to stop in place, squint—then let out a huge sigh of relief. “Sunlit?” he asked. “You blessed man. You survived?” “I did,” Nomad said, stepping forward with the sack of sunhearts. “Looks like you and I had the same plan.” Zeal peered into the sack, then up at Nomad with a grin on his face. “I…I can’t believe you.” He put a muddy hand to his head. “And here I thought I was saving the city. You had it all in hand, even after we abandoned you.” “I doubt you had a choice.” “We didn’t, but—” He froze, hearing voices outside. He nodded to the side. “Maybe we catch up later? We’ve got about an hour left to save Beacon—which is going to be tight, with a forty-five-minute flight back at best, depending on the wind.” Nomad nodded, jumping out into the mud. An argument was going on in the near distance, where several of the Cinder King’s officials were growing increasingly agitated. Apparently one thought that twelve people had been left here as tribute to the sun, while the other thought there had only been eleven. Nomad followed Zeal out to the right, into the darkness. “Did you actually steal one of their scout ships?” he whispered. “No,” Zeal said. “Didn’t have the wherewithal for that. I grabbed the controls after Rebeke collapsed from heat exhaustion; I barely got us back to the shadow before we all burned up. Rest of the team is out—either unconscious or throwing up all over the cab. Once we get back, I’d hold my breath if I were you. “I was the only one still hale, though Rebeke seemed to be recovering faster than the others. Still…well, I decided there was only one option. I had to grab the sunhearts myself. With fresh ones for power, we can maybe push the ship faster going back. It’s a hope, at least. “So I landed and watched for lights in the darkness. I followed them while running dark, then snuck out and prayed to Adonalsium that I’d be able to manage on my own.” He shook his head, the movement made barely visible by the rolling lightning in the clouds. “And there you were. Already in the vault. I doubted you, Sunlit. I’m sorry.” “No, Zeal,” he said. “I—” Nomad. Someone’s following us. He stopped in place, turning. Two burning eyes pierced the darkness behind them, illuminating the smiling face of a man walking at an even pace. “Run, Zeal,” Nomad said. The other man gasped, then obeyed. Nomad stayed in place, meeting those eyes. “Guards!” the Cinder King shouted. “Charred! They are here! Come, stop them!” The shout was accompanied by thunder. But the man didn’t seem too alarmed, despite his shout. He stepped forward, toward Nomad, and spoke in a calmer voice. “I knew you’d come,” the man said. “Call it…faith. That the true killer could not be defeated so easily. You wouldn’t fall with a whimper in a city trapped on the slopes. You’re meant to die in battle, offworlder. In battle with me.”
Nomad stepped forward, as if to face off with the Cinder King right there. And he really wished he could. He’d stuff those burning eyes into the muddy water until they went out. Instead he tried to keep the man talking, figure out his fatal flaw—something Nomad could use against him. Charred rushed by on both sides, chasing poor Zeal. Nomad kept his attention on their lord. “You like being strong,” Nomad said. “You like having power over others.” “All life,” the man said, “is about having power over others. Wealth? It’s about making others do the work you don’t want to do. Strength? It’s the ability to push back harder than those who would push you. Religion?” His smile deepened. “Do men from your world really become gods?” “You are fixated on me,” Nomad said, stepping forward. “You need to know if you are stronger than I am. Why? You already killed an offworlder…” Nomad narrowed his eyes. “No, you lied, didn’t you? You found that other offworlder as a corpse. And you’ve wondered ever since, were they stronger than you?” “Of course I am the stronger one,” the Cinder King said, putting his hands out to the sides. “I’m alive. I didn’t lie; I found your kin—sick, not dead—but I’m stronger. After all, they’re now ashes. I have the sunheart to prove it.” Sunheart. Damnation. Nomad really was an idiot. He got close enough to the Cinder King that the other man slid a sword from the sheath at his side, grinning at the prospect of a duel. Then Nomad started running. Right past the man, who cried out and gave chase—but Nomad was faster. He dashed through the mud and lightning, rain spraying against his face, wind whipping at the makeshift garment he’d tied at his waist. He sped straight for the Cinder King’s ship, then leaped up to grab the cold metal lip of the deck. He pulled himself up and shoved into the cab of the ship, racing through it to the cabin filled with trophies. “Face me!” the Cinder King shouted behind him. “I am giving you the honor of doing so!” Ignoring him, Nomad smashed through the glass on the display case and seized the tiny sunheart on the shelf there. It was the size of a pebble and glowing very faintly. When he’d first talked to the Cinder King in this room, he’d been shown the book carried by the person whose soul now lay in his hand. A person from Nomad’s homeworld. This soul…he shared a bond with it. Would that be enough? He whispered the words of the prayer in Alethi. “Bold soul past the threshold of death, take into you my heat, that I may bless those who still live. Please.” He felt a sudden cooling in his palm. Heat being pulled from within him. It’s working? Auxiliary asked. Storms, it’s working. Nomad turned as the Cinder King stumbled into the doorway. He thought of punching the man, and his body started to lock up. The sunheart might be working as
he’d hoped, but he wasn’t ready yet. So Nomad gave the king a grin, then leaped back into the pilot’s cab and smashed out the front windshield—recently replaced from his last escape. Fortunately for him, they had done a poor job of it. “Fine!” the Cinder King shouted at him. “A coward, then? If my Charred kill you, that will still prove what needs to be proven. You hear me, offworlder?” Nomad vaulted off the deck, then went scrambling through the mud back the way he had come. Lightning in the darkness showed him a worrisome sight—the ship, Elegy’s ship, still in the mud in the distance. Zeal hadn’t taken off yet, and Charred—tens of them—were climbing all over the thing. Like most of the ships he’d seen here, this one was shaped kind of like an old naval boat—with a cab at back and a wide deck at the front. Railings rimmed the entire thing, and the Charred were crawling up the sides, onto the deck, assaulting the bulbous structure at the back. Nomad arrived and, with a powerful bound, hauled himself up onto the front deck. He glanced toward the cab and found that the blast shield was hanging off, melted and warped. Through the window beyond, he saw Zeal and Rebeke desperately holding the back door closed against a group of Charred on the other side. On the deck with Nomad, a familiar Charred—the one with the streaks across his face, like a fire poker had been taken to his cheeks—turned away from where he’d cracked the windshield with his truncheon. He saw Nomad and smiled broadly. He stepped forward, perhaps anticipating another easy fight. With a concerted effort, Nomad formed a fist around the small, offworld sunheart—feeling it leech away heat from him. It tore at the crust on his soul. The Torment gave him some boons, and he wouldn’t want to be completely rid of it. But a little skimming off the top and… The Charred rushed him. And Nomad—crashing through the numbness that tried to stop him—slammed his fist into the creature’s gut. The Charred let out an oof as Nomad tossed him back against the ship’s windshield. Almost as one, the Charred who had been climbing or trying to break in turned toward him, rainwater dripping from their pale skin, their stone hearts glowing. Lightning splintered the sky as Nomad raised that glorious fist before himself. Wit would have appreciated the dramatic moment. Nomad just grinned. “Storms, yes,” he whispered. “Finally.” THE CHARRED CLAMBERING onto the deck howled and shouted at him, which served—beautifully—to draw the attention of the ones inside the ship. They left the door to the cockpit that Zeal and Rebeke had been defending, and piled out to join their fellows on the deck—as they had just found a far more engaging fight. Nomad tried to form a spear but felt resistance in the action—his soul was still being lanced, and some remnants of the canker remained. Instead he held his hands forward and formed a simple bo staff—a length of silvery
metal six feet long. For some reason, leaving the spearhead off made it work, and he cocked a smile—remembering a similar story told to him by a friend from long ago. He made a hole in the haft the proper size, then slid the offworlder’s sunheart inside so he could touch it while holding the weapon. As he did, Auxiliary oohed—which was distinctively amusing in his monotone. I can feel the power of that sunheart growing, the knight says. I…I might be able to draw upon the Investiture you are putting into it. Why? I can’t use the power of the canker on your soul. “Filtered and purified, maybe,” he said, raising his staff. “Not really the time to ponder it.” This will give you a few hundred BEUs. Use them well. He’d need to. Some twenty Charred—crawling up over the side of the ship or scrambling out from inside the cab—surrounded him. Even the one he’d punched earlier stood up, his cinderheart flaring with passion. Twenty to one. Bad odds, even for one such as him. Still, he launched into the first group of them, determined to keep as much open space around himself as possible. His worst danger here was getting pulled down, smothered, overwhelmed. Hopefully they’d underestimate him. Either way, to win against such superior numbers, his best option was to hit quickly, hit repeatedly, and keep the enemy uncertain. Fortunately, if there was one lesson he’d learned well over the years, it was how to keep moving. He crashed among the Charred, throwing several of them back. Glowing cinderhearts lit the deck like a fading midnight campfire—washed out occasionally by white lightning from above. Three swung batons, which Nomad expertly deflected, his muscles—and soul—as eager for this as he was. He slammed one behind the knee with the bottom of his staff—sending her sliding to the deck in the rain—then shoved aside another before stepping back and swinging the end of the staff up with the force of a man who had been held back too long. Lightning flashed as he hooked the third Charred under the chin with enough power to send him into the air—teeth exploding from his mouth when lower jaw met top. Nomad spun directly into the next batch, rainwater spraying from his arms as he swept around—dropping the staff and dismissing it while snatching the sunheart out of the air—and formed a shield that blocked the next three attacks. He heaved forward—hurling them back—then dropped the shield just in time to form another staff and come in swinging at the woman he’d tripped earlier. He hit her with the force of a thunderclap, sending her soaring off the deck, spraying water. Another swing sent a Charred to the deck, skull cracking against the steel. His next attack dropped three at once with a sweep to the legs. The next broke an arm, forcing the Charred to drop her weapon and howl in pain as Nomad sent the woman into a pile of her companions with a swift kick. He was the rain, suddenly
freed from the cloud and cast into the sky. He was the lightning, so eager to move that it jumped through empty space with frenzied splintering. He was the thunder that hit when you weren’t expecting it, warping the air with its rhythms. He was the storm. Falling on foreign lands, but still the same as it had always been. He threw Charred aside like dolls. He shattered bones, dropped people off the side into the mud, flung them out in the rain. On this world, they were elite warriors—but this was a planet where men did not train for battle, and it had never seen anything like him before. The cab, Nomad, Auxiliary said—watching out for him, even as Nomad was using his carcass as a weapon. One Charred, sneakier than the rest, had slipped through to the cockpit while Zeal and Rebeke watched Nomad fight. As the creature reared up behind them—the glow from its chest bloodying the chamber—Nomad skidded up outside. Then—with a firm demand—he gave the order. Spear! A glittering spearhead etched with patterns from his homeland formed from mist on the end of the staff just as he rammed it right through the windshield, sending the spear into the cinderheart of the Charred inside. The cinderheart cracked. The light went out. The creature’s eyes burned, each giving off a puff of dark smoke as the body collapsed backward. The Charred who had been battling on the deck all froze. That gave Nomad enough of a breather to see the stunned Rebeke and Zeal gaping at him. They belatedly turned toward the dead Charred behind them, then looked back at him with expressions that were somehow even more amazed. Nomad, Auxiliary said, you’re flirting with low levels of Investiture. You haven’t had a chance to fully regain your enhanced strength and endurance. You can’t defeat all of these creatures. Unfortunately there was truth to that. The Charred, now wary, were getting up. Gathering themselves and healing. They might not be trained, but they were strongly Invested, while he was running on fumes. Their next assault wouldn’t underestimate him so soundly. Nomad reached in and whipped the spear back, then raised his hands—one holding the spear—toward Zeal in a gesture that Nomad considered the universal symbol for, “What the hell?” He then waved his hand upward, to indicate they should take off. Zeal cringed and nodded, going for the controls. Nomad turned toward the remaining Charred, gathered hesitantly at the bow of the small deck. Their caution told him they could still feel fear. The Cinder King’s control wasn’t absolute. It does make me feel guilty, the knight notes, that we have to treat them like this. They’re victims too. It was truth, but one that Nomad had long ago made peace with. You didn’t always get to fight the right people. In fact, you often had to fight the wrong ones—at least until you could stop the men and women who gave the orders. Perhaps there was another option today. He fell into a stance, spear at the
ready. Then, to the beat of thunder and the applause of lightning, he began spinning and twisting, moving his spear through an intimidating set of training maneuvers. They called it the Chasm Kata. The very first he’d ever seen, and he knew firsthand how intimidating it looked. Stepping forward with each twist of the spear, each foot hitting like a drumbeat—solid and firm despite the slick surface. The spear spun so fast, it reflected nearby cinderhearts almost like a mirror. Battering back the rain, an extension of himself—flipping, spinning, then lunging for a split second. Like frozen lightning. Then motion again, ever advancing, step after inevitable step. Forward toward the watching Charred, who—with unconscious alarm—pulled back. They huddled against the railing of the bow, and behind them—hovering close on his own ship—Nomad saw a pair of glowing eyes in the darkness. The Cinder King, watching. Awed. Maybe even scared. Yes… Nomad could see it was true, for the Cinder King’s terror was manifest on the horrified faces of the Charred to whom he was linked. The man was realizing how lucky he was that Nomad hadn’t agreed to duel him. He was realizing exactly how dead he would be if the fight had come to him. Nomad came to the final spin and step, planting his feet, spear fully extended so that it nearly touched the closest Charred. Then he swept backward into a standing position, dismissing the spear and catching the little offworlder sunheart in one hand. He arranged his arms in a cross pattern, wrists touching, and softly mouthed the words. “Bridge Four.” They couldn’t know the weight those words had for him. But the entire display—with the dead Charred behind him in the cab and the ship finally taking off—was enough. The surviving Charred scrambled off the ship, fleeing before him, dropping to the mud below. He suspected they’d never have broken like that if the Cinder King hadn’t been there, watching and realizing with horror what he’d almost encountered. Or perhaps Nomad was just projecting emotions onto the man. He was too distant now to make out his expression. Regardless, as they fled into the night with the sunhearts, no one gave pursuit. THEY CALLED HER ELEGY. The captive Charred continued to mull over that name as the ship soared back toward Beacon. She’d watched the killer’s display on the deck, though her view had been partially obstructed. She’d had to lean to the side, look out through the open door between rooms, past the two people at the controls, through the windshield, into the darkness. She’d watched him fight, and had hungered. That. She wanted that. She could not be Elegy again. She did like the name; the part of her that knew words understood what it meant. A song for the dead. And she was dead. It fit. Elegy. She would be Elegy. Not the same Elegy, but different people could have the same name. The killer stepped through the door and closed it behind him, soaking wet, bare-chested. She felt as if he should have
a cinderheart glowing there. It was wrong that he didn’t. One did not fight as he did without a cinderheart. Yet he had. And far, far better than the Charred. She wanted that. He had told her she should live for something. She had just seen that he was right. The rest of the Charred, they’d fought like children, like bullies with no training. He had fought with the grace of the wind itself, fully in control, channeling his anger and his frenzy into his smooth motions. A weapon was far, far more dangerous when the tip was sharp. When you could put all your force into that single point. And her anger, her desire to fight and move and do and act and kill and strain and struggle… All of that would be far more dangerous if she could channel it into a single point as well. That was why he’d won. The Charred were bludgeoning weapons, while he was a spear. The woman stepped out of the cab. The one they called Rebeke, Elegy’s sister. She met the killer, then pulled back, as if before a bonfire. She clasped her gloved hands before her and stood in place. “That was incredible,” Rebeke whispered. “It was also terrible. So terrible.” “The art and butchery of the spear,” he said. “I know. Zeal, you should call in that we’re on our way!” “Already raising them,” he called. “We had to escape the bubble of the Cinder King’s ships. They had a radio jammer in place.” Rebeke went to help care for the four others, who had been knocked out in the heat and were only now recovering. They were weaker than Elegy was. So she didn’t bother with them. A moment later, a voice came from the cockpit. Elegy tilted her head back—as if not alive with constant energy trying to make her move—and listened. She had to learn to listen. Had to learn to control it. Only then could she fight as he had. “Zeal?” a woman’s voice said over the radio. One of the old ones who led. “Oh, praise Adonalsium. Did you get them?” “Five sunhearts,” he said. “They’re sitting in a sack right next to me, Confidence. We’re on our way.” “How long?” The old woman sounded scared. Elegy hadn’t understood fear until just now, when she’d felt it along with the other Charred. Because she’d lied to the killer. Though she no longer heard the voice, she could still feel the Cinder King. His emotions, which had—just now—included fear. “I beg a moment as I calculate our course,” Zeal said. “How…how are you all?” “The sun continues to advance, and our opportunities to outrun it diminish. There is a corridor of darkness, the peak of the mountains touching the shadow. Alas, it vanishes quickly. Two of our ships are beyond repair. We’ve moved everyone onto the remaining eight, but there is not room for them all inside, so some sit upon the decks. Waiting.” “We’ll have the sunhearts divided into parts by the time we arrive,” Zeal
said. “Have everyone ready to go. We’ll be there in…a little over half an hour. Hopefully.” “May you outrun the sun, Zeal,” the old woman whispered. Rebeke took out her knife to divide the sunhearts, and the killer stepped up to her. “Can you spare one of those for me?” he asked. She stared at him, then at the stolen sunhearts, clearly mentally calculating what Beacon would need. She met his eyes and nodded, handing a full sunheart to the killer. He walked away, holding it up near his face. Then the light of it faded, and his eyes seemed to glow for a moment. He did have his own cinderheart inside. It simply wasn’t visible. “I watched you fight,” Elegy whispered as he settled down nearby. He glanced at her. “I want that,” she said. “I want to do what you did. I want to be able to kill like you killed.” He thought for a bit before speaking. “I’d hoped,” he said, “that spending time with your sister, with this people, would make you start to want the things they have. Not the things I do. The old Elegy—” “I’m not her,” Elegy cut in. “I can never be her. I want to learn battle like you do it. You said that I need to focus on something, deliberately. I have chosen.” “You’ll need control,” he said, “for my kind of fighting.” “I figured that out already,” she said. “I know it. But how? How did you learn?” “Slowly,” he said, leaning back against the wall, eyes closed. “Step by step, Elegy.” “I don’t understand.” “When I was first given a spear,” he said, “I didn’t know how to hold it. I didn’t even know how to stand. Each time I sparred, I had to dedicate all my thoughts to standing correctly. The more I did it, the more natural that stance became. It’s like…I didn’t just learn the lesson, I internalized it. That left my conscious mind free to think about something else. Since my body now stood properly on its own, I could wonder about how I held the spear. “Then that grip became natural, so I could focus on thrusting with precision. I could learn to change my grip, resetting my stance so that I was oriented toward the enemy. Each of these things slowly became instinct. Through deliberate practice—to learn that specific thing. And each time, once internalized, that left my mind free to try something else. To be honest, though, I had a huge advantage over most people on this path.” “You had teachers?” she asked. “No. I could survive mistakes.” Looking weary, he opened his eyes. “I got Invested, like you. It came to me via some oaths I made and a bond to a being of pure Investiture. Like that rock at your core, but with a worse sense of humor.” She thought she heard something then, as she sometimes did around him. A different voice that seemed to say…a joke? “My Investiture let me survive wounds I shouldn’t have,” he continued, “and
learn from my mistakes in a way that is exceptionally difficult to do as a soldier. Normally you end up dead, and all your learning evaporates like rainwater in the sunlight. “But I could learn, keep growing, until…” He held his hands out to the sides. “Until I became what you see. A mess of a man sometimes, but one with instincts for battle honed over decades.” “I want it,” she whispered. “I suppose that will do,” he said, then reached up—as if to let her out of her last manacle. She immediately felt her eagerness growing. The heat from inside her cinderheart spreading through her body. The thirst for the fight energizing her. “No,” she forced herself to say, making him hesitate. “Why?” he asked. “If you set me free,” she said, “I will attack you. All of you. I feel it.” She paused though, feeling… Feeling. Feeling something other than the heat. “But that is progress, isn’t it? That I spoke to you of it?” “I’ll take it as such,” he said, nodding and leaning away from her bond. “Thanks for the warning. But you’re going to have to learn to control it. If you don’t, you’ll never learn anything else.” “I can fight,” she said, “even with that heat.” He shook his head. “It’s not enough just to fight, Elegy. Those other Charred, they could be left in a pit to fight for centuries, and they’d barely learn anything. You must choose to practice. Choose to learn.” He met her eyes. “Choose to control it.” She nodded slowly, then settled back, thinking. Until they neared the place where the ships had crashed. Where it was growing dangerously bright. EIGHT PEOPLE MET the Dawnchaser, one for each of the remaining ships of Beacon. They went running as soon as they were tossed their chunk of sunheart. Nomad stood on the deck, looking up, sweat running down his brow. The peaks of the mountains above looked aflame. Indeed, they probably were on fire. The pounding sunlight just on the other side of those peaks was liquifying the stone. He stepped back as he saw something shoot up on the other side, visible even at this great distance. A jet of magma, reaching high past the atmosphere. Like a sunspot. Storms. He’d thought he possessed a basic understanding of geology, despite needing a crash course in tectonics after leaving his homeworld. But he had no idea what would cause mountains to spring up anew with each passing of the sun, after they were melted down into nothing. Rebeke dashed up to the ship and nodded to him before climbing into the cockpit. She had to shove past the people they’d crammed in there, now that two more ships had to be left behind. Rebeke’s return meant that the convoy was ready. She lifted the Dawnchaser off, looking out through a windshield that still had a spear hole in it. Nomad remained on the deck, not wanting to deal with the packed interior. Plus, out here, he could feel the wind, cold against
his scalp. His hair wouldn’t grow back until he had more Investiture to spare. At least he’d been given some trousers, a belt, and a buttoned shirt. He’d left the collar undone. He leaned out, hands on the railing, watching the other eight ships lift off—leaving two broken ones at the foot of the mountain. Together, they fled with everything they had left. He turned, glancing toward the other horizon. He thought he could see the darkness of the shadow ahead—the dark side of the planet—but he wasn’t certain. It was a race of a very specific kind. They could move far faster than the sun would rise, but they weren’t just trying to outrun it. Right now, they were within a pool of darkness in the shape of a mountain. Like the shadow of a tree on a sunny morning, stretching long at first—but shrinking as the sun climbed the sky. Would they be able to run the length of that shadow and escape into the night? Or would they get to the edge, only to find a fiery gap between them and safety? Ever widening, driving them back, until they were destroyed as the last shade vanished? It was going to be close. He could read it in the way the convoy pushed their engines to their utmost, despite the recent slapdash repairs. There wasn’t time to coddle the machines. If something went wrong, they died. They might die anyway. So they pushed, burning away the very souls of their deceased loved ones in a mad rush toward safety. He witnessed it from the lead ship. Elegy’s vessel, though a bulbous exploring machine, was still faster than the large transports behind. Rebeke slowed her ship to stay with the others—but then sped up, likely after being chewed out for delaying. Compassion herself had insisted all the ships fly at their best speed and not slow if others had troubles. Right now, they had to pray, flee, and hold firm. Compassion, in this context, had to be about the survival of their people. That last one, the knight says, is a lot slower than the rest… Nomad could just barely make out what he meant. Far down the line, the final ship was struggling. It wasn’t the one with the Chorus; that was near the middle of the pack. Instead it was the bulky water tower ship, now packed with people—a number of them huddled outside, on the deck. Nomad looked up at the ridge, which glowed like a crown. Then the tips of the peaks began to melt, magma pouring down the back side. Nomad, I feel something, Auxiliary said. Do you feel that? What is it? “I don’t know what you…” He trailed off as he saw it in the air beside him. A small fracture, a misalignment—like how a broken mirror might reflect a disjointed image. It floated beside his head, the size of a fingernail. There was something familiar about it. “It’s one of my fragments,” he whispered. “A piece of my armor. You said those were
dead!” I thought they were gone, consumed. Why was it back now? What had happened? Was it because he fought again? Was it because of why he had fought again? He turned back down the line of terrified ships. That last one had fallen farther behind. “Aux,” he asked. “How much do we have?” Roughly six percent Skip capacity. Just over your strength threshold. “Enough, though,” he whispered. “Maybe enough?” For what? Nomad dashed forward and leaped. He soared above a washed-out mudscape, air tugging at him—as if to cradle him—until he slammed down on the deck of the ship next in line. He ran across this as the people at the sides cried out. Ahead, light began to break around the peaks, like floodwaters through a failing dam. He vaulted himself again, into the arms of the wind, and landed on the top of the Chorus’s ship. He ran. Ran toward the sun, soaring, landing, bounding along the line of ships until he reached the next to last one—and looked across a much wider gap between it and the final straggler. People on deck backed away, watching him with awe as he took a breath, then ran for everything he had and threw himself into the sky. He hung there, locking gaze with the looming dawn, until he hit the final deck and rolled. He came up with gritted teeth, dashing for the back of the ship, passing terrified people. As he arrived, he manifested Auxiliary as a shield. “Bigger, Aux,” he growled. How big? “Bigger! Use it all!” The sun finally crested the rise. And Auxiliary burned away Nomad’s Investiture, growing. Light exploded around them, the force of it beating against the shield, driving him backward—but Auxiliary, using the power of that sunheart, had grown truly large. Big as a building, big enough to shelter the entire ship. The blazing fire of an angry sun washed over the shield. It set the air ablaze at the sides, as if Nomad were standing with shield braced not against mere light—but against the flaming breath spat by some fearsome beast of lore. The shield remained secure, and Nomad held it in place, grunting at the force of the solar fury. Sweating, he put his shoulder against it, and looked back to see the wide-eyed people. Surprised to be surviving their very first dawn. A second later, the ship passed into the shadows and the heat vanished. Nomad dismissed the shield and slumped against the railing, dumbfounded by a sudden flood of exhaustion. He felt numb, he felt cold, he felt… Normal. Storms. This was what it was like to be without even a single drop of Investiture. It had been a very, very long time. I can’t believe that worked, the knight whispers with boundless shock and enthusiasm. Nomad shook his head, lying back on the deck, feeling weak. Unaware of his surroundings. Tired. The weight of years and years pressing against him. I felt something from that light, Auxiliary said. Something very unusual. Did you sense the force of it? Light
shouldn’t push like that, Nomad. “It was being pulled into the ground,” Nomad whispered. “Like…an electric current. Like lightning, forming a current between cloud and ground—only this time, between sunlight and the core of the planet.” Storms. That was it. That’s why he could stand on the deck up high and not be aflame. Because he hadn’t been between the sun and the planet. That was why sunhearts were charged so much as they were made. That was why the ground melted. Everything between the sun and the core…it acted like the filament of an incandescent light bulb. Superheated by the transfer of energy. Something roused him from his stupor. Were those… Cheers? He numbly picked himself up off the deck, standing straighter as he looked along the column of ships. The cheers came from those ahead, who rejoiced in having made it into the shadows. The Beaconites on this last ship didn’t shout. They stared at Nomad, trembling, overwhelmed. They knew. Though they’d only been in the sunlight for a moment, that would have been enough to vaporize their ship. Being that close to death rattled a person. Someone familiar stood at the front of the group. He hadn’t realized that Contemplation was on this ship. She knelt, holding a young girl, and looked at Nomad. He braced himself for further adulation. Instead she just bowed her head, hugged the girl to her breast, and whispered, “Thank you.” Nomad nodded, then slumped by the railing—barely aware—as they flew. Eventually they landed a safe distance into the dark side, beneath the specular light of the rings. The ships set down in a circle. There, amid plants growing with uncanny speed, they offered prayer. He’d remained on the ship as each of them left and knelt. He’d never seen it done this way, with everyone kneeling together. They let Confidence lead, but each seemed to be saying their own version, quietly. To Nomad’s people, religion, the monarchy, and certain levels of bureaucracy were all intertwined. He’d been modestly religious himself, and still accepted the idea of a God Beyond. But he’d never seen something like this prayer, so raw, so tearful, so genuine. He climbed to his feet and couldn’t help but watch, couldn’t help but feel the energy. The people began to rise, and the Greater Good gathered at the heart of the circle they’d formed. There, they waved him forward. Perhaps he should just have walked away, but the cynical part of him…well, it seemed to have been put to sleep by the fatigue of being completely without Investiture. He stumbled down off the ship, then walked through the undulating, growing grass to stand before the Greater Good. Each of the three women removed a glove and held a hand toward him, taking his hand in their gnarled ones. “It won’t work,” he told them. “Offering me your heat.” “It didn’t before,” Compassion whispered, seated as always. “But you weren’t one of us then.” “I’ve been told by Rebeke,” Contemplation said, “that you prefer not to be called Sunlit.” He nodded,
feeling strangely self-conscious with everyone watching him. “I’d rather be known for what I’ve done, not for some prophecy.” “You go by the name Nomad. Why?” Confidence asked, squeezing his hand. “It is the name I deserve. And it sounds a little like my birth name, in my own language.” “Which is?” “Sigzil,” he whispered. For some reason, speaking it again after so long brought tears to his eyes. “Nomad,” Compassion said. “A wanderer with no place. That name no longer fits you, Sigzel, because you have a place. Here, with us.” She said the name a little oddly, according to their own accents. “Will you accept a name from us?” Contemplation asked. “One you deserve and have earned?” Feeling numb, he nodded. “We name you Zellion,” Contemplation said. “After the original Lodestar, who led us to this land and to life. As you have led us.” “Zellion,” he whispered. “It means One Who Finds,” Compassion said. “Though I know not the original language.” “It’s from Yolen,” he whispered. “Where my master was born.” “Zellion,” Confidence said. “You are one of us now. Whatever you’ve run from, whatever you’ve left, whatever you’ve done—none of that matters. Here, you are of Beacon, of the planet Canticle. We welcome you. We accept you.” He tried to spit out an argument. Something about how you couldn’t make someone your own with words. You couldn’t erase what someone had done with kindly sentiment. Could you? Words are power, the knight whispers, as long as they have meaning. As long as they have Intent. “I…” he whispered. “I accept.” Warmth flooded into him through their grip. He gasped, eyes going wide. The three elderly women smiled at him as he dropped to his knees, feeling an ignition within him. They stepped back, releasing his hand. But then each of the other people, even the children, approached in turn. One at a time, they touched him with ungloved hands. A hand to his. A touch on the side of the face. A few hugs. Each of them imparted warmth, until he was afire with it. Until he knelt there wondering why he didn’t glow like the sun. They stood back, and let it burn within him. That’s not much in the way of BEUs, Auxiliary said. Less than a single percent combined—but a remarkable amount for each person to give up, though, as they have. It felt like so much more. Perhaps it was being without, then having the Investiture returned. Perhaps it was something else, something special about how this was given. In contrast to his earlier numbness, he now felt more alive than he had in years. The Greater Good approached again. “Zellion,” Contemplation said, “this is our thanks to you. But…we have work to do. One final task. We need to find the way into the Refuge.” “You have a plan?” Confidence asked. “To get us there?” “Yes,” he said, voice hoarse. “But…could I have a moment or two to process this first, please?” “Of course,” Compassion said. “You have given us all each and
every moment we have, from now until we are given to the sun. Please, take some for yourself.” HE DIDN’T WANT to go back to his room because Elegy was there. He wanted to be alone. So he strolled away from the group of ships, looking toward the sky. He’d seen rings on other planets, but never ones so vivid, so colorful, and so bright. But like so many things in life, it was a trade-off. Vibrant rings. Terrible sun. Hand in hand, dreads and beauties. Same as they were inside a person like him. If he hadn’t been through the terrible experiences that had scarred him, he’d never have been able to fight to rescue Rebeke and Zeal. But if he hadn’t been through those horrors, he also wouldn’t have been broken. He stepped up onto a rise. The earth was springy underfoot, and as he stood on the hill, plants grew up around his feet, tickling his shins. His shoes—not proper boots, as he liked, but they were all the Beaconites had been able to provide—were too new, unbroken. They hadn’t seen horrors yet, and so they were inflexible. But once they got worn in, they also would start to wear out. Could a soul wear out, likewise? In his youth, he’d have said that was impossible. That souls weren’t like pieces of cloth or leather; that people were too valuable to ever be “worn out.” Yet here he was. Taking this people’s offered warmth and love, all while leading them toward a lie. That was beautiful, what they did, Auxiliary said. You’re Connected fully to this place, somehow. You’re a man of two homeworlds now. “And we’ll have to leave this one too,” he said, voice hoarse. “We’ll have to keep running. Like always.” Yes, that is true. Perhaps we can enjoy it for a time first, though? Zellion hissed softly, frustration spoiling the moment. What was there to enjoy? The knowledge that these people were doomed? That he’d saved them not to bring them to salvation, but so they could help him get to safety? Beside him, a tree was growing—a long, thin shoot, sprouting leaves that trembled like the legs of a toddler taking her first steps. He watched it, then turned away—coming face-to-face with Rebeke, who was striding up the small hill, holding a new coat for him made of the same brown leather as before. Auxiliary would have noticed her coming, but hadn’t said anything. Traitor. And as she joined him—pale face cast in ringlight, holding out that jacket—he realized she hadn’t been there earlier. When everyone had presented him with heat. She’d been with the Chorus, having this jacket fabricated for him. He took it, hesitant, worried about that look in her eyes. She slipped off her glove, then held out her hand. “I didn’t get a chance,” she said, “to thank you.” He caught her hand by the clothed portion of her wrist as she reached for him. Stopping her from touching his face. “Why?” she asked. “You let the others.” “I think
you might want to give something more than they did,” he replied. She met his eyes briefly, like the fleeting bob of a lifespren, then glanced away, blushing. “Why not?” she asked. “Why shouldn’t we find a little comfort in the few hours remaining before we fly back out? They might be the last hours we have.” “I don’t begrudge you comfort, Rebeke,” he said. “You deserve it. But not with me. I’m too old for you.” “Old? I’m of age. What is a decade or so difference considering what we’ve been through?” “A decade or so?” he asked, smiling. He nodded his chin toward the ring of ships. “You see those old women who lead your folk? I’m older than they are.” She turned toward him, jaw dropping. He nodded in response. “Well,” she eventually said, “I don’t care.” “I do,” he said gently. “Even if I didn’t, Rebeke, I’m going to leave soon. Whatever happens, I must walk away, abandon you all. I can’t stay. “Before you object and say you wouldn’t care about that either, you’re wrong. My years haven’t given me wisdom, but they have given me knowledge. And I know, I know, the hurt it causes when I leave. Assuming I’ve made mistakes. Assuming I’ve let attachments grow.” She glanced to the side, where he’d rested his hand on the fledgling bough of the growing tree—where little snaking vines had wound around his fingers. Though he tried to pull back gently, he ended up snapping them anyway. “You could stay,” she whispered. “We could fight whatever is hunting you.” “You don’t know what you’re saying,” he told her, smiling gently. “You have no idea.” “We thought cresting a mountain was impossible, yet here we are,” she said. “We could climb your mountain too, Zellion.” Zellion. He did like how the word sounded. Perhaps that was his now-reinforced Connection to their land, and this people. Such an odd thing, Spiritual Connection. He couldn’t even rightly say what it would do to him. Some uses of Investiture were easily quantified, others were…well, as arcane as the human soul itself. “I’m sorry,” he told Rebeke. “But no. I can’t be this person you’re looking for.” She looked away sharply, then slid her glove back on. She didn’t run away in shame or embarrassment, which made him feel slightly better. But she also didn’t meet his eyes as she stood there, on the top of the hill, looking up at the rings. “I no longer want to learn to kill like you do,” she finally said, voice soft. “I don’t want to be that terrible.” She blushed again. “Not that you are…I mean—” “It’s all right,” he said. “It is terrible.” “Beautiful too.” “I used to believe that,” he said. “Though…” She cocked her head, glancing at him. “There was a time,” he said, “when I could stand tall even when fighting. A time before my Torment seized me.” He took in her confused stare, and felt moved to give her something. An explanation, to soften his rejection. “I was a
knight,” he said, “of a very exclusive order. Two different orders actually, at two different times. For the first, I was one of their leaders, with oaths that were supposed to turn what I did from terrible into—if not beautiful—honorable. But then…” How to explain this next part? A part he didn’t fully understand himself. “I was given charge over an extremely dangerous item. Capable of killing gods. Laying waste to planets. I carried that burden, found new bonds, but the weapon consumed important parts of me. Shredded the soul of one of my dearest friends. Stole my armor. I was left a husk of what I’d once been. Not just because of what the weapon had done to me—but because of the things I’d done.” He clasped his hands behind his back, remembering what it felt like to wear that uniform, bear that armor, carry those oaths. “I had to ask myself, once it was all done, if honor was a sham. If it was a ruse used to make men kill one another—to let them pretend there was a purpose to it. If that concept—the very idea of an honorable soldier—was not the most pernicious evil that had ever blighted the cosmere.” “And what you did in protecting us?” she said softly. “Was that a blight? A pernicious evil?” Storms, he didn’t want to have to make that call. Judge between evil and honor. He just wanted to keep running. Why did questions like this always bubble up if he stayed in one place too long? How many excuses would he make for walking away? And would he ever be able to dig down within himself and find the actual reason he’d done it? Not the surface-level, easy explanation. But the core of what made him, of all people, capable of turning his back on everyone he’d loved? Rebeke was waiting for an answer to her question. She looked at him, bright-eyed and curious. “No,” he told her. “Protecting your people by fighting the Charred was not evil, Rebeke. But I don’t think I can ever call it beautiful again.” He shook his head. “You wouldn’t say so either. Not if you could look inside me and see how much fun I was having during that fight.” She paled visibly. “I still want to find a way to help my people,” she said, looking away from him. “If not by fighting, then by leading. But there will be time, I suppose, to figure that out once we’ve found the Refuge.” He grimaced. She’d storming handed him the opportunity, hadn’t she? Even if she didn’t know it. He couldn’t just saunter past that one and pretend nothing was wrong. “Rebeke,” he forced himself to say. “I have to say it again. This sanctuary you’re looking for. It doesn’t—” “Stop,” she said, spinning on him. “Don’t say it.” “You should know what it actually is. A place created by outsiders to protect themselves. A—” “You told us earlier there was a chance,” she said. “Is that still true? Is there any hope
that a place exists where we can find safety?” Storms, he wasn’t certain he could maintain that lie. This was almost certainly a Scadrian research facility, by that key. A place to house a small group of scientists come to study the way Canticle’s sun worked. They would have watched this people with the cold detachment of researchers with subjects. He’d been there. He’d seen that kind of attitude. It wasn’t universal among scientists, but this would be a self-selecting group. And as proof, he knew they had done nothing to help so far, despite the terrible lives this people lived. “Don’t say anything,” she said. “I see it in your eyes.” “But—” “We have a story,” she said, “about an ancient man who asked to know his fate. In it, hope was extinguished forever. For he knew the answer.” “It’s…a common variety of myth,” he said. “I know a dozen variations from a dozen different planets.” “I will not be that man,” she said. “I will maintain hope.” “Then maintain hope in something real,” he said. “If the Refuge proves to not be real, you need to find another path to safety. The one your sister envisioned, Rebeke. Throwing off the rule of the Cinder King.” “Where has that gotten us?” “It’s made you into a beacon,” he said. “Others will see. There comes a time when every tyrant is weak or exposed. Given the chance, his people will topple him themselves.” “Are you sure?” “Certain,” he said. She thought a moment, but shook her head. “Elegy could have persuaded the people of Union to overthrow the Cinder King, but we don’t have that Elegy anymore. And we can’t survive any longer out here. We have ditched our farming equipment. We have a single prospector. We don’t have food, living space, supplies. “Our only real hope is to find the Refuge. It’s what the Greater Good wants, and it’s what our people want. So keep your concerns to yourself. And leave us with hope.” He took a deep breath, then nodded. “All right, then,” she said. “What do we do next? How do we find the entrance and how do we get through the Cinder King’s forces to reach it? He knows we’ve survived. He’s going to array everything he has to stop us.” “Well, this is where you’re fortunate to have a killer among you,” Zellion said. “Because it’s time to show the Cinder King what an actual battle looks like.” REBEKE WAS RIGHT. The Cinder King had brought all his forces to bear. He lined them up, dozens of ships and hundreds of Charred, hovering in the air just outside the cloud cover of the shadow. Waiting exactly in the place where, one day ago, the Beaconites had tried to locate the Refuge. Judging by the look of those forces, the Cinder King thought he was ready for anything. That made it oh so very sweet to watch as Zellion’s ships emerged from the rain and opened fire with large, ship-mounted guns. Balls of light as thick as a
man’s leg cut the twilight sky, shot from the cannons, ripping apart the Cinder King’s forces like they were twigs before a highstorm. Ships went blazing to the ground, and Charred howled as they were blasted free from exploding decks. The initial barrage—and the shock it prompted—was the primary thing Zellion was counting on. He rode in the lead ship, Elegy’s ship, which had a single cannon welded to the roof. Four of their other ships had guns, while the remaining four acted exclusively as transports, clogged with as many people as could be stuffed onto them. The improvised gunship fire cut through the leading enemy ranks, punching a wide hole in the Cinder King’s forces—which scattered. In that instant, Zellion’s forces seemed invincible. He glanced to the side, to where Rebeke was piloting the Dawnchaser. In her eyes, he saw a feeling he’d once known. That feeling of terrible awe, of horror and nausea, when confronting your own capacity for destruction. That was the moment it hit home—amid the roar and the silence of cannon fire. Watching people fall, torn apart by what you’d done. That moment changed a person. Storms, he hoped the enemy responded with a similar stupor. One thing he’d learned in combat was this: never underestimate the sheer panic a coordinated strike can cause in an untrained line of troops. Many battles could be won in a single brilliant charge. His ships flew right through the center of the enemy forces. Then kept going. Because he was certain the Refuge, if it existed, was not in this specific region. “Shades!” Zeal’s voice said from the radio. “That was a beautiful sight.” “I offer this warning,” Solemnity Divine said. “Those shots drained our sunhearts something frightening. We don’t have much left, after our flight here and what we gave Zellion. Be careful how much you fire them.” After Zellion had expended all of his Investiture to shield the final ship, the Greater Good had gladly offered him even more from each remaining sunheart. Enough to get him just over five percent Skip capacity, just barely above his minimum thresholds to maintain peak fighting capacity. Storms, he could barely remember what it was like to run around at fifty or sixty percent capacity, never needing to worry about running dry. How long had it been? Though he missed that, he found himself even more grateful for this five percent, in the face of Beacon’s sacrifice. “How certain are you,” Confidence said, “in this plan of yours, Zellion? We could fly down low in the chaos and use our prospector to find the opening.” “It’s not here,” Zellion said, leaning down to the radio. “I promise you that, Confidence. We push forward. Projecting confidence—as you understand so well—at full speed.” They did so, ignoring the landscape they’d searched the day before. And despite the certainty he projected, his nerves betrayed him. This was a gamble. Zellion was betting—with everyone’s lives as the ante—that the actual location was close. That the Cinder King had managed to keep the true location a
secret, but only by a little. Like how a magician might focus everyone’s attention on one hand, while the other secretly stacked the deck. They knew the Cinder King’s city always traveled in a straight line, periodically stopping to farm. Somewhere along that path, he tried to open the door to the Refuge. But Zellion was banking on the idea that, to prevent anyone from finding it, he’d arranged for inaccuracies to be propagated about its true location. More, he was gambling that the Cinder King would be worried. That he’d be watching to see what Zellion did. That he’d be frightened, deep down, that his secret was not safe. That— It’s happening. Look to your right, ninety degrees. “There!” Zellion said, pointing as a squadron that had been off to the side—including the Cinder King’s own ship—turned and blasted backward. Ten ships, presumably among the fastest in the enemy’s fleet, went flying on ahead. They would lead everyone right to the doorway. It’s uncanny, you realize, how you can pick out what people are going to do sometimes. “How?” Rebeke asked. “How did you know?” “Deep down,” he said, leaning forward, “the Cinder King is insecure. He worries he isn’t as strong as he acts. He worries that it will all be taken from him: his throne, his power, his secrets. We are playing on those fears. “We’re saying, ‘We know what we’re doing. We know where the opening really is.’ After all, why else would we commit everything to breaking through like this? Why else would we fly with such confidence right toward his secret location?” “But we’re not,” she said. “We don’t know where it is.” “He doesn’t know that,” Zellion said. “In his eyes, we’ve found him out. So now he needs to go protect it. He doesn’t realize—he can’t realize, because his insecurities are too overpowering and his intellect too underwhelming—that he’s actually leading us right to his secret.” “Assuming we survive that long,” Zeal said over the radio. “Some of those other ships are recovering. They’re sweeping toward us.” Damnation. The enemy ships had indeed started to swarm back. They were probably realizing just how slow the Beaconite ships had to move to protect those overloaded transports. Or perhaps they had seen that the guns were just welded in place and didn’t have proper turrets. For all their startling flash and bang, Zellion’s forces were extremely vulnerable. “Rebeke,” he said, “you’re going to have to do what I told you.” “I don’t know how to aim this thing, though!” “Don’t focus on shooting it. Focus on getting me where I need to be.” Zellion grabbed a steel spear—fashioned for him by the Chorus—then left the cab, striding into the back room. He stopped beside Elegy, still chained by one hand to the wall. “You’re needed,” he said, reaching for her chained wrist. “I’m not ready!” she said. “I can’t control it.” “A lesson for you,” he said. “You never get to be ready. You just have to move forward anyway. That’s something Kaladin taught me.” He
undid her manacle. She immediately leaped to her feet, pushing toward him aggressively. He locked eyes with her and waited for the punch. Which…through a battle conveyed by the twisting of expressions on her face…never came. Something thumped from outside—a Charred jumping onto their deck. He had little hope they’d be scared away by a simple kata this time. The Cinder King was backed into a corner. His forces would fight. Elegy turned toward the sound and growled softly. “Stay close to me,” Zellion said, “and don’t lose control. Remember, we aren’t here to kill. We’re here to survive.” “I just want to fight.” “Fight with purpose,” he said. “Never forget the why.” He raised his empty hand, and a glittering spear appeared in it. He’d been draining away the patina on his soul using the little sunheart, but it was still satisfying how easily he managed to create the weapon. “Take good care of him,” Zellion told Elegy, handing the Shardspear to her. “Why give it to me?” she said, taking the spear with reverence. “Because you lack training,” he said, “but I still need backup. You’ll be far more effective with that than you will be empty-handed, and the fact that it can cut through anything will make up for your inability to thrust with it accurately. Just be careful—don’t stab the ship, and do your best not to hit me. Cuts from weapons like that are storming tough to heal.” He nodded to Elegy, who nodded back, eyes alight with eagerness. Together, they burst onto the deck. ZELLION USED HIS spear to catch the arm of a Charred swinging a machete at his head. He heaved back, then tripped the fellow—but before he could deliver a death blow, Elegy was upon the Charred, stabbing at him repeatedly with her spear. It didn’t cut his flesh, but his soul—and when it went into the Charred’s brain, his eyes burned and shriveled like coals, his cinderheart going out. Once he was dead, she kept going, stabbing down through him into the deck itself. Zellion caught her arm, making her pause. Maybe we should be a little more…reserved with her weapon, eh? I’ll try to remember to blunt it if she goes too far. Zellion looked Elegy in the eyes again. “Be careful.” She nodded, wide eyed, way too excited. At least she was enthusiastic. Only one Charred had made it to their ship; he’d come off a hovercycle, which—unfortunately—had fallen behind after he’d leaped over. It was now vanishing into the distance behind them. The Dawnchaser, the most maneuverable of the Beacon forces, flew a little off from the main formation—which was made up of the four gunships surrounding the small cluster of four densely packed passenger ships. It was an extremely vulnerable position, something the majority of the Cinder King’s pilots seemed to recognize. While their leader and his most elite had flown off in their fastest ships, the rest buzzed around the Beaconites. Fortunately they didn’t immediately go for the transports; they took the more obvious option of trying
to take out the gunships. People often aimed for the defenses first, as if there was a kind of hierarchy you were supposed to follow. He wasn’t going to complain. Rebeke, following his instructions, swung the Dawnchaser in close to Zeal’s gunship—which had five Charred swarming its deck. Once close, Zellion jumped. He hit the deck with spear in hand, drawing the attention of the Charred before they could go for the people inside the cab. At Zellion’s suggestion, they’d kept the gunships clear of civilians. Just a pilot and copilot in each one. That left tons of people on the decks of the transports exposed to gunfire and shrapnel. He tried not to think about that as Elegy landed beside him, and they engaged the Charred on the deck of Zeal’s gunship. The two of them made a good team—as Zellion proved effective at seizing attention with his flashing spear and tactical strikes. The Charred focused on him, which let Elegy tear through them with the borrowed weapon. In seconds, four of the Charred were down, and the last one leaped off the deck toward another gunship passing nearby. Zellion nodded to Elegy, who was grinning, and they followed—soaring through the air. As they landed on this second gunship, they met another group of Charred. These, though, scattered instead of fighting. They surged off the ship to nearby passing enemy vessels. That was wrong. Very wrong. He knew from his experience with Elegy that Charred preferred to fight, no matter what. They would only run away if directly and forcibly instructed to do so. He glanced to the side and saw small cinderhearts on the deck—perhaps attached with magnets—glowing from the center with wiring and casing around them. He grabbed Elegy by instinct and threw her toward the Dawnchaser, which was sweeping back their direction. He jumped a second later, then the ship behind them—poor people in the cab included—went up in a bright explosion of red fire and burning metal. Elegy landed on the Dawnchaser, then stumbled, staring down at the wreck as it plowed into the muddy landscape below—then detonated again, the shockwave rattling their own ship. “Cheating,” she hissed, her cinderheart pulsing with a white-red anger. “That’s cheating.” “There are no rules,” he said. “We’re the ones who brought cannons to the fight.” He felt like a fool, though. He’d known they used explosives. The Beaconites had deployed them effectively in their initial raid to save their friends. He should have prepared for this. The maneuver made sense, as the bombs would work even if Zellion proved too frightening or powerful for the Charred. They didn’t need to fight. They just needed to be mobile delivery mechanisms. “Get back onto Zeal’s ship,” Zellion shouted, pointing. “Defend it! Don’t let any of the Charred linger long enough to plant more bombs. If they do, toss the bombs overboard.” She nodded as he waved for Rebeke to steer them that direction. Elegy jumped across to that deck, and Zellion pointed forward—to where Charred were dropping off of an enemy ship
to the deck of the third of the four gunships. Rebeke pushed them forward, and he leaped, using the momentum to carry him through the rushing air to land on the ship. A Charred here was charging something against her cinderheart—one of the bombs. It seemed they needed to be primed, which gave him a few moments to break through the others and stab her through the neck. His weapon wasn’t Invested, though. Just a common spear. Shockingly she survived that hit, forcing him to slap her hand and kick the bomb over the side. The explosion rocked the ship as he sparred with three other Charred. At least the one he’d stabbed seemed to have trouble fighting. She could barely keep to her feet. Thinking of that, he focused on the feet and legs of the Charred. He got in a few stabs, then grabbed the railing and motioned in a circle. The pilot, a woman he didn’t know well, got the idea and rolled the ship—sending a bunch of wounded Charred screaming into the mud below while Zellion hung on. A quick glance told him that Elegy was holding her own on the deck of Zeal’s gunship. Aux was extremely effective against enemies who were used to being able to rush in and dominate the fight, unconcerned about whether they might take a hit or two. A weapon that cut through metal and severed souls was an excellent way to punish the overly aggressive. Elegy finished off the Charred who tried to stop her, then kicked two bombs over the side—they didn’t detonate, but instead fell mutely to the mud. Unfortunately that only protected two of the gunships. One was down. Elegy was on one deck. He was on the third. And the last… He felt the shock wave as a blast went off nearby. He spun and found the final gunship—piloted by Jeffrey Jeffrey—struggling to stay in the air. It had a gaping hole in one side, where—in the strange way of the cinderhearts of this place—the steel itself continued to smolder. Judging by the way the ship was floundering, it was as good as down—especially as he saw three more Charred affixing bombs to various portions of the deck. So that was two gunships down. And… No. Not down yet. That ship was dead. But people were still alive on board. This time, he didn’t need prompting from Auxiliary. He didn’t think further; he ran to the edge of his ship and leaped. A moment of rushing wind followed, then he hit the deck of the fourth gunship hard—as it had been approaching too quickly—losing his spear in the roll. He was thrown to the side as the ship rocked. With a cry, he summoned Auxiliary as a grappling hook and sank it into the deck, holding himself in place. Hopefully Elegy would be able to survive for a short time unarmed. Wind roaring around him, ship trembling, he surged to his feet and—ignoring the Charred who were charging their bombs—bounded for the cab of the ship. Inside,
he could see only Jeffrey Jeffrey, trying frantically to control the ship. Zellion summoned Auxiliary as a full-sized Shardblade, as long as a man was tall, then used it to slice off the top of the ship’s cab like he was opening a can of food. He saw no sign of the copilot; perhaps they’d been thrown free. Zellion pulled himself up over the lip and reached down, grabbing a confused Jeffrey Jeffrey by the coat. Auxiliary sliced the man’s restraining belt free, then Zellion grabbed him with both hands and heaved him out. He looked back as the Charred leaped free of the ship, falling to the mud below, as other ships were too far to reach. Zellion eyed the blinking bombs, then summoned Auxiliary once more. As a shield. On top of one of the bombs. Zellion jumped onto it as the bomb detonated. He and Jeffrey Jeffrey were thrown into the air. Zellion caught sight of a flash of color and metal in the chaos, and swung. When everything settled, he hung by one arm from a set of claw hooks he’d formed from Auxiliary, which he’d rammed into the hull of the Dawnchaser. He held Jeffrey Jeffrey by one arm beneath him, dangling above a drop of some twenty or thirty feet. Looks like he’s got a few broken ribs, the knight observes. Severe whiplash. Some nasty bruises waiting to form all along his right side, maybe a concussion. But he was alive. Zellion hauled him up and tossed him onto the deck of the Dawnchaser. Zellion followed, stumbling up onto the deck. On a nearby ship, Elegy was facing several Charred on her own. He shouted to her, then formed Auxiliary into the shape of a metal ball, easy to throw. He hurled it to her, and she caught it. Aux formed into a machete in her hand. Zellion turned back to Jeffrey Jeffrey, dazed on the deck. The bearded man looked up, eyes wide, trembling. “Why…” he said. “Why is the light breaking around you?” Zellion glanced to the side. More fragments hung in the air around him in an arch. Three others glowed on his arms, remnants of a different kind of spren. All were reflections of light in the air, making it seem distorted. Maybe…ten of them? Almost like old times. The remnants of two orders, and the oaths he’d left behind. Nomad smiled and gestured for Jeffrey Jeffrey to make his way into the cab of the Dawnchaser, which the man did, limping. Zellion prepared himself for the next fight, raising his fists, ready to go hand to hand. But the enemy forces were falling back for some reason. There, the knight says. Look, faithful squire. Ships have landed ahead of us. The Cinder King’s entourage. They’d circled a spot on the ground, and had sharpshooters on the decks with rifles pointed skyward. Zellion nodded through the windshield to Rebeke, who took their ship out of the formation and flew it down to do a quick scan. Blasts of rifle fire took bits
off the railing and made dents in the hull, but didn’t penetrate the thicker armor of Elegy’s vessel. Rebeke surveyed the spot, then met his eyes through the glass. She nodded once, firmly. The ship’s prospector scanners had identified a large power source below—as he’d hoped, the Cinder King had led them straight to the Refuge. It was time to see what was inside. ELEGY GOT THE SENSE that the battle, in its current form, was finished. The enemy ships were pulling back, and the Dawnchaser had finished its low-level sweep and determined they were in the right location. Now it seemed like a standoff between the Beaconites in the air and the Cinder King’s forces below. She felt…fear. Not the blinding, sudden, debilitating fear of hands around your neck. The creeping, pernicious, omnipresent dread that things were slipping out of your control. That wasn’t her emotion. It was the Cinder King’s. Her own emotions were still aflame. A fire that urged her to find another enemy, to keep swinging this magnificent machete that killed without wounding. To never stop moving, never stop attacking. Never. Stop. But there was nobody else to kill, and she held herself back—with effort—from entering the cab of her ship and seeking a confrontation with the person piloting it. Instead, as the Dawnchaser swept close, she vaulted over the span between the two ships and grabbed hold of the railing. Moments later, she pushed into the cab, where the woman Rebeke was at the controls. Elegy clutched her magical weapon. But she did not need to use it. The man, the killer, had explained. She could choose her moments. She could make them all the sweeter for having held back. Rebeke turned—then smiled at her. A genuine smile, it seemed. She was glad to see Elegy. Granted, she’d acted that way before—but following the energizing thrill of the killing, knowing that in the back of her mind she’d been contemplating attacking Rebeke… It was such an incongruous thing to see an inviting smile. She wants me to be here with her, Elegy thought. What is wrong with her? It was disarming. Intriguing. Even…inspiring? “Elegy,” Rebeke said, cocking her head. “Are you well?” “I…feel different.” “You’re remembering,” Rebeke said, grabbing her hand. “It’s going to happen. You’ll remember everything soon.” “Are you not,” Elegy said, “supposed to be piloting?” “Right!” Rebeke said, spinning toward her seat. She did something with the radio, and the killer’s voice came on, speaking from one of the gunships. “All right,” he said. “Everyone be ready to swing down into the space I make for us.” “They’re entrenched there,” Confidence replied. “How are you going to make space for us? They’ll shoot us if we land.” “You people…” the killer said, his voice…grumpy? That didn’t seem an appropriate word for a man of his ferocity, so perhaps she did not understand emotions as well as she thought. “You spend your lives flying. How can you be so ignorant of the power of air superiority? I guess if you never go to war, and
rarely stay in one place long… Well, just watch.” Elegy leaned forward and watched through the windshield as one of the gunships broke out of their formation. It swung around, then dipped, so its large anti-ship guns were pointed at an angle toward the ground. Then it swooped past the Cinder King’s position, firing. Turned out, being on the ground—and therefore immobile—when someone else had a ship with that kind of firepower was exciting. The type of excitement that most people didn’t like. The type that involved ships exploding, people screaming and jumping out of the way. The killer was able to stay out of range and drop his shots with gravity—and while he could come in at full speed, they had to just sit there. In moments, the Cinder King and his forces were scattered. Elegy nodded. It was an effective way to kill, but far too distant and unengaging for her taste. She’d have enjoyed being among those being shot at, perhaps. So much energy and alarm there. Wait. No. That might get her killed. She was supposed to want to avoid that. After all, who would make certain Rebeke smiled if Elegy died? A conundrum. “That was certainly impressive,” Confidence said over the radio. “But I offer this warning: if we land there, won’t they have your ‘air superiority’ over us?” “Yup,” the killer said. “Which is why I suggest we be quick about this next part. Everyone land and be ready to run for shelter. This is what we’ve been waiting for. It’s time to open that door.” While everyone else did as he asked, Rebeke swooped in and—using a screen on the ship that told her where to look—activated the dirt movers on the Dawnchaser. Elegy left her to it, scrambling out onto the deck and jumping the twenty or so feet to the soft ground. By the time the others had landed and gathered, Rebeke had uncovered something. A large metallic disc set into the ground, only about two feet under the ashen lava soil. Rebeke landed her ship and joined the group huddled around the disc. The killer stopped at the edge of it, and Zeal joined him, handing up the smaller disc they’d all talked about as being some sort of key. The killer took this, looked it over, then tossed it back to Zeal before hopping down the several feet to land on the surface of the silvery thing. There, he leaned forward and spoke in a loud voice. “Under the Refugee and Lost Expatriate Bill of Silverlight Codes of Interplanetary Conduct, I formally request asylum in this facility. Please respond.” Silence. Why wasn’t he using the key? Elegy understood all those words, but the context eluded her. Instead she looked to the sky, where the Cinder King’s forces—looking even more intimidating—were gathering around them. Suddenly a cylindrical pole, maybe four feet tall, shot up from the metal below, emerging near the killer. A voice spoke from it, heavily accented, but in their language. “Wait. Are you Rosharan?” “I am,” the killer said.
“I seek asylum under the—” “Yes, yes. Fine. You can negotiate.” “These will need protection while we discuss,” he said, gesturing to the others. Silence. Elegy watched the sky, trying to feel the fear the others obviously did from their postures. It was difficult for her because the Cinder King was no longer afraid. He thought he had them. Then a blast of energy ripped up from beneath the earth, shooting right across the Cinder King’s bow. The ships pulled back in a panic. Since when did the ground shoot? It was a deliberate message: stay back. “Fine,” the accented voice said from the pole. “You may bring three people, Rosharan. We’re only listening, mind you, because we’re curious how you got here.” Another column rose beside the pole, this one much larger, and a door opened on the front. Some kind of…transport device? To carry them down into the Refuge? “I assume I should bring the Greater Good?” he asked, turning toward the gathering townspeople. “Bring Rebeke in my place,” Compassion said from her chair, which her grandsons set down on the earth for her. “We should not send all three. Just in case. As you taught us.” The killer and Rebeke shared a glance, and he nodded, then paused, looking to Elegy. “I’ll need that back.” Right. She still had the sword. She’d been clinging to it, but forced herself to extend it toward him. The weapon vanished from her fingers, turning to glowing mist, before she could deliver it. The killer stepped closer, speaking softly. “You might be the only one these people have after this.” “I don’t understand.” “If the next part goes poorly,” he said, “try to protect them. I guess that’s all I can ask.” “Poorly?” she asked, cocking her head. “Why would it go poorly?” He just gave her a grim look. And that, she knew how to interpret perfectly. A battle was coming. For him. “You’re going to fight the people who live in the Refuge?” she whispered. “Not physically,” he said. “Which is unfortunate. Because I’m pretty sure I could win, if that were the case.” Leaving her with that cryptic statement, he entered the metal tube, joined by Confidence, Contemplation, and Rebeke. A second later, the tube descended, taking them to the place of safety. THE DOOR OPENED, and Zellion saw exactly what he’d feared. A large room, capsule shaped, with workstations set through it and monitors on the walls. There would be two more levels beneath this, one for activities, one for quarters. It was big enough for the two dozen people who crewed it—but it was no giant sanctuary. Beside Zellion, the three Beaconites regarded their surroundings with wide eyes, stunned, maybe amazed. They were a technologically advanced people, yes, but they obviously hadn’t seen anything like this before. It was, indeed, a spaceship. A science vessel. Embedded in the ground of this planet to hide and protect it while the scientists took readings. They could maybe take in a hundred and thirty or so refugees. But it would pack
the place to the walls, strain their life support. But…maybe there was another way. Two people, a man and a woman, stepped up to meet him. They wore small metal ornaments at the sides of their faces, triangular, with red enamel. These were TimeTellers, one faction among the many Scadrian political movements. Theoretically they were neutral in the current conflicts. A group of scientists, seeking to “understand the various mysteries of the cosmere.” And they were absolutely not, of course, an arm of the military working in secret to develop tech that would let Scadrial stay ahead in the increasingly dangerous arms race that currently consumed most of the developed planets. “Rosharan,” the man said in his own tongue. “Can we speak in a civilized language, please? Do you speak Malwish?” Zellion shook his head, pretending not to understand and hoping they didn’t speak any of his native languages. At least he could honestly claim ignorance of Azish, having been forced to overwrite the ability to speak that with the local language. “Very well,” the man said, continuing in the local tongue. He had tan skin and was tall for a Scadrian, even an inch or so taller than Zellion. “Rosharan, have you said the oaths?” “No,” Zellion lied. “I’m a free man. I’ve got no part in the conflicts. Just want to keep my head down and stay alive.” “Can you fight?” “I have a Blade.” The two Scadrians shared a look. “How did you get onto this planet?” the woman asked. “I came via Shadesmar,” he said. “There’s no perpendicularity here.” “Got shoved through by a temporary one,” he lied. “I was traveling this way but didn’t intend to stop. Now I’m stuck. It was the strangest thing. Don’t know if I can even explain it.” “There are strange events on this planet,” the woman said, folding her arms. Like the man, she wore modern clothing. Black jeans, a lab coat, one of the fancy shirts their space force loved. “We’ll be leaving soon,” the man said. “Travel is dangerous these days. We could use someone who can fight. You’ve done mercenary work, I assume, if you have a Blade?” Zellion nodded. “Excellent,” the man said, clapping his hands. “You’re hired.” “Hired?” Confidence said, finally shaking out of her awed stupor. “But—” “I’m not interested in a job,” Zellion said. “I’m already working for these people. I want to negotiate for you to help them.” “Please, dwellers in the Refuge,” Rebeke said, dropping to her knees. “Please. Let us join you. We are hard workers, with strong souls. We have rejected the Cinder King’s terrible ways and have overcome so much to get to you. Please.” “You? Join us?” the woman said, sounding amused. “We’re basically at capacity as it is. What do you think we are? A charity?” “Listen,” Zellion said, stepping closer to the two of them. “Have you been watching what’s going on above?” “We have a few of the locals already,” the man said, “to use as subjects in our research. We could use one or
two more, I suppose, but that’s it. Really, what we need are those sunhearts, but we already have a supplier of those.” “Supplier?” Zellion asked. “How did you…” It clicked. “The Cinder King. Guy with the glowing eyes. He’s been meeting with you?” “Delivers us things we need now and then,” the woman said. “And we give him little tidbits of technology or knowledge. These people had little idea how to exploit their native Investiture.” Storms. The Cinder King hadn’t been trying to get into this place—he’d accomplished it, likely years ago. That was probably how he’d learned to make Charred, how he got the bracers to control them. He hadn’t been protecting this place because he wanted to escape into it; he had been using it as the secret source of his power. “Listen,” Zellion said, “that man is a tyrant.” “And?” the woman said. “What are their problems to us?” the man said. “You’re a mercenary, Rosharan. You know there are dozens of these little planets scattered around, all with their own backward monarchies and their own stupid ways of doing things. What, you want us to take in everyone who is having a bad day?” “I…” The objections were obvious. But he found he couldn’t make them because he’d known all along what would happen here. He’d been planning for it to happen. Farther into the room, sitting on a nearby table, was a glowing jar. Dor, they called it. A kind of pure Investiture which he could use to activate another Skip, to escape this world, to run to another planet. Just as he’d hoped. This was why he’d come. What else had he been expecting? He’d gotten the Beaconites to the door, then through it. That’s what he’d promised. And they’d known. He’d warned them multiple times. As words failed him, the others tried. “Please, may we negotiate?” Confidence said. “May we invoke, if not your sense of mercy or justice, your sense of commerce? What can we trade you for our safety?” The two just gave her amused looks. If the Scadrians had wanted anything from these people, they’d have taken it—they likely used the Cinder King as an intermediary more out of convenience than anything else. “We don’t need anything,” the man said to the trio of Beaconites. “You may go now; continue your own squabbles. We’re not interested in interfering.” “You could destroy the Cinder King’s ship,” Zellion said, feeling the need to try once more. “The sun will soon rise. You could take this people in only until the light passes us. You…you could do something?” “You are welcome to stay and take our offer, Rosharan,” the woman said, her attention trailing away. “We’ve heard your plea. That’s all that we’re required to do by interplanetary law. The locals will need to see to their own troubles.” The man nodded, then gestured toward the elevator, his posture stern. They didn’t look armed, but Zellion knew from experience that groups like this were far from weak, even the scientists. Though he’d said he’d prefer
a physical fight earlier, he doubted he could take this entire group. If he even had the heart to try. Which right now…he just didn’t. “You were right, Zellion,” Rebeke whispered, still kneeling. “You tried to warn us. There is no refuge here.” “I…” He looked back to them, expecting to see anger and dismay at this betrayal. Their expressions of resignation hurt even more. “You tried,” Contemplation said to him with a nod. “You did everything we asked of you and more. Zellion, there is no need for that look of sorrow. This was the direction we’ve been pointed for many rotations.” “It was a fond dream,” Confidence said, taking Rebeke by the arm and pulling her back. “It’s not a sanctuary at all, is it? These are offworlders, like you?” “Yes,” Zellion said. “I’m sorry. They’re here to study your sun. This ship isn’t that big.” “Ship,” Rebeke said. “It’s…a ship.” He nodded. That seemed enough to explain it to them. They knew; they had heard. They retreated to the elevator. He wanted to go with them, but he hesitated before entering. “What do you think, Aux?” he whispered. I think, the knight says, that we have gotten exactly what we deserve from this exchange. Wisely put. He met Contemplation’s eyes and knew he wasn’t going with them. What point was there in going up to die? He needed to keep running. That was what he did. This was why it was better not to get involved. A part of him had been preparing for this all along, had tried to keep a distance between him and them. The realist in him took charge, insisting that it was time to be done. “Stay,” Contemplation said to him in a heartbreakingly soft, caring way. “Stay with your kind.” The door closed, then carried them back up to the surface. On a monitor, Zellion watched the Cinder King’s forces creep closer, and this time no blast from beneath rose to frighten them off. The Beaconites were out of power, out of resources, exhausted, and defeated. It was over. Zellion…Nomad…sighed, then settled down in a place by the wall, closed his eyes, and—for once—let himself rest. SITTING WAS TOO easy. And that made it hard. Head tipped back. Eyes closed. Breathing even. It let Nomad hear the small sounds: the persistent, ubiquitous—yet oft inaudible—sounds of life. Fingers tapping on touchpads. The deep, musical voice of the ship’s Awakened Steelmind giving a status report. People chuckling softly—the aftershocks of a joke that had been too quiet for him to hear. But there was no motion. No place to run, no place to be. In moments like this, when he wasn’t solving some problem or scrambling from one disaster to the next, Nomad could hear his own thoughts far too easily. “Am I a coward, Aux?” he asked. For being traumatized? I’m not the greatest expert on humans, but I hardly think that’s an appropriate way of looking at what has happened to you. “Even so,” he whispered. He could feel that jar of pure

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