The sun had barreled into a clear sky, so the ground was mostly dry, and no one had seen the airship all morning. Rain had turned the man-eating plants lethargic, but there was enough camouflaged movement near the lake that no one objected to leaving as soon as Claes and Saito returned.

“We should be able to reach the cave by day’s end,” said Andor.

When Claes and Saito returned from scouting, Farisa could tell by their faces they had found something they didn’t like, and her eyebrows had only begun to move to ask, What?, when Saito answered:

“Blackrue.”

“There’s a lot of it,” said Claes. “We took as high a vantage point as we could, and saw no way around.”

Farisa, feeling unwell in the stomach, crossed her arms.

“We have to protect you at all costs,” said Claes. He looked at Andor. “How much fuel is left in the motorcycle? Enough to get to Lethe Tell?”

“I’m not sure. It’ll be close.”

Claes looked south. “I hate this idea of splitting up. On the other hand, if Farisa is incapacitated, that’s worse for all of us. We’re all outlaws, but she’s the one they really want. The rest of us aren’t worth risking what is probably their only airship. If you can get her to safety, it’ll buy us time.”

Saito said, “In the Company’s world, that’s often all one can do. Buy time, or sell it.”

“That is very true.”

“So I concur with your decision, Claes.”

“Lethe Tell is easy to find,” Andor said. “Unless it becomes unsafe to be in the open, let’s plan on meeting there.”

Claes said, “That sounds like as good of a plan as it gets.”

Farisa wrapped her arms around Mazie for a long embrace. They kissed; they were no longer bashful about their affections, even in front of the others. Mazie’s hair, though black as polished jet in typical light, took on a tinge of brown.

“I’ll see you soon,” Farisa said.

“You better,” Mazie said.

“I’m going to shut my eyes when we cross the blackrue patch,” Farisa told Andor. “Otherwise, you’ll have me as a second set of eyes.” She looked at her pistol.

“I appreciate that.”

Andor, who had already taken the motorcycle’s front third of the backless wicker seat, started the engine. Farisa sat behind him, and as soon as she did, the machine jerked forward. She looked back to see the others recede. In little time at all, they were specks, nearly invisible for their well-chosen clothing.

“Let me know if this is a good speed,” Andor said.

Farisa yelled over the rushing wind. “It is!” She gave a thumbs-up signal for approval.

Andor laughed. “If you ever come to Salinay, avoid that gesture. It means something different there.”

The scrubland flung itself by, the motor too loud for conversation. Although Farisa had hardly slept, the wind in her hair invigorated her; she had almost lost herself in the ride when she remembered, by sight, the reason they were coming through so fast—blackrue shrubs, with mixed yellow and purple flowers, rose higher than trees.

Andor said, “You may want to—”

Farisa shut her eyes, but this left her unable to anticipate the motorcycle’s turns and bumps, so she had to open one whenever the motion became too much for her. Her vision blurred, and she decided it was too painful to focus on anything but the horizon, itself barely distinct.

“The worst of it is just ahead,” Andor said.

She sneezed and coughed. The pain in her eyes spread through her face, all the way to the back of her head, where it felt like she had taken an electric shock that throbbed in twisted harmony with the motorcycle’s shaking and sounds. Her eyes shut of their own accord so hard her temples hurt. I’ve been here before. I’ve never left. She was, in that instant, riding the bicycle she had made for Erysi, its frame and handlebars deformed by a fire’s heat, down a hill, and she looked at her bare leg to see that the snake coiled around her ankle had finally fallen off...

“We’re past it now,” said Andor’s voice.

Farisa opened her eyes to colors saltwater bright.

“I got through it as fast as I could.”

“Thank you.”

She estimated they were now doing thirty miles per hour, meaning this ride had reduced her exposure to blackrue pollen by a factor of at least ten. She was thankful—thankful to be here on a motorcycle with that odious plant behind her, thankful to have come this way with six people she now considered her closest friends, and thankful that she was not astride Erysi’s bicycle or in a forest fire or in a madhouse.

They did encounter two more patches of blackrue, but Andor, assessing the wind correctly, took eastern detours that avoided even the faintest vapor. Lethe Tell, due to its prominence over a flat grassy landscape, seemed fully mountainous as they approached.

“It’s all enough to hide you from the airship,” said Andor.

The engine sputtered. He coasted to a stop and examined the fuel tank. “We’re out, it looks like.” He gave an apologetic shrug.

Farisa smiled. “You’ve done more than enough. We can walk the rest of the way.”

“Well, there is one thing we need to do.”

“What’s that?”

“Get rid of our vehicle. It’ll give us away.” He looked around the plain, the same in all directions, aside from Lethe Tell being a few hundred yards off. “We don't have time to bury it, and it’s too heavy to carry.”

“Right,” Farisa said as she walked around the vehicle. “Where the hell would we put it?”

“I don’t see any good places to hide it.”

Farisa crouched to examine the chassis. “Here.” She pulled a latch that loosed a pedal, and found an identical one on the other side. “I’ll take care of it.”

“You can pedal that?”

She got on and tried. “Not fast,” she admitted.

The heavy dead machine had been designed for an orc’s strength, so between its bulk and the bumpy terrain, she could drive it no faster than walking speed as they examined the perimeter of Lethe Tell to scout its defenses. Most of the bushes around here, in their dry-season foliage, were too thin to conceal anything, but she found a patch of brush with enough black-leaved cover to conceal the device from sight above.

“That’ll have to do,” Andor said.

“We can come back to it, once this”—she pointed west, which she believed to the airship’s direction, and her finger drew a circle—“is over.”

This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

They surveyed the territory. Out here, any time one intended to spend more than an hour in a place, it was instinctive to take note of its defenses. Lethe Tell’s base was slightly oblong, suggesting that the ancient city had shaped itself around a river or creek that no longer existed. At the hill’s top, there was a single tree, identical in shape and leaf structure to olive, but bearing no fruit. As she and Andor walked around the mound’s flat top they found, to their mutual surprise, that a partial excavation had already been done here, exposing waist-high mud-brick walls of ancient homes and granaries, and also leaving steep cliffs on the northern face. The mound’s southern slope sported some leafless bushes whose limbs branched with a certain regularity. Farisa snapped off a Y-shaped branch. “We could use a few more of these.”

“For what?”

“Weaponry.” She explained to Andor what she had in mind.

“I hope you are right,” Andor said at the end of her explanation. “I hope it works.”

By midday, they had fully explored the Tell and its environs. Bright red beetles buzzed in the heat. Andor sat down in the single tree’s broad shadow, and Farisa sat next to him. She rolled her jacket up to use it as a pillow.

“I didn’t sleep well,” she said. “I should rest.”

“Please do. I’ll wake you if there’s anything for you to do.”

“Don’t let me sleep for more than an hour.” She tried to lay down, but a tree root dug into her back, so she had to shift to avoid it. “When do you think the others will get here?”

“Middle or late afternoon,” Andor said. “We’ll be safe together in the cave by sundown.”

“That’s if there’s no mess above us."

“Right.”

Farisa wished for fog, which would hide them, but the sky remained as clear as on the day it was made. High white clouds moved in around one o’clock, giving the brown branches and green leaves of the hill’s sole tree a background, but were not low enough to hide them. Midday warmth built in her body, and she found her eyelids heavy; her gaze lost focus, at first diffuse amidst the sway of tree limbs in wind, and...

“The story is in me.”

Andor, puzzled, looked at her. “What?”

“I’ve been running.” The words came fluently, though she had no desire to say them. “I’ve been running away. The past seven months, I’ve been running."

He put a hand on her arm. “We have all been. But you are wrong to say we are running away. We are running toward something. No one but us knows this place exists.”

"You've heard about the fire in Cait Forest, right?”

“Only from you.”

She sat crossed her legs, cushioning her tailbone with a spurt of grass. “We have four hours to wait for the others, don’t we? I suppose I have all the time in the world to tell you.” She recounted everything—the April 26 blaze, as she remembered it; her arrival in Exmore; her time with Merrick and Nadia; Mazie and Claes and the decision to come this way; Runar and Garet, up to Garet’s death.

“The rest of it,” she said as she finished, “you have seen.”

“That’s very interesting.”

Interesting. An enigmatic word, a confession of judgment. “There’s a part of my story you don’t believe.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You didn’t have to. The Monster in Cait Forest, the forty eyes. There’s nothing in nature like that. It’s only rational that you, like everyone, would believe I made the story up.” She looked at the ground between her feet. "You think I’m a killer.”

“We are all killers.” Andor looked down the hill. “I know you didn’t set the fire on purpose. You’d never kill an innocent person.”

“I...” Farisa brushed dirt off her knee. “I’m sure I didn’t mean to set the fire, but I think I hurt the person who did, and in a way that led her to do it.”

Andor looked directly at her. “No one thinks of it that way but you.”

The horizon seemed blemished by a disturbance that, like the Marquessa, existed only in peripheral vision; her gaze resolved on a bird or tiny cloud—whatever it was, it was gone before her focus caught it.

“Magic has rules,” Farisa said. “Like science. We just don’t know what they are. It forms entanglements across time and space. If I kill someone using a gun or knife, I might feel guilt, and I might be traumatized by the act but, over decades, those perturbations go to zero. When magic is involved, though...”

Andor looked down the hill, then at her. "Then what?”

“I don’t know. The web you step into, every time you use that power, goes back centuries. You risk that you become, not knowing the fact, a word in someone else’s sentence. I might have once been... I might have been unsure of the intentions that were moving through me.” She hid her forearm behind herself, so Andor would not see that she had dug her fingernails into her own flesh—the feeling kept her mind in her body.

“I’m as confident as one can be that you did not mean to set Cait Forest on fire. If I were a man of faith, I would invoke it, but as a man of science, I must say I find it extremely improbable.”

“So, who did? If not me?”

“There is no way I would know that. Perhaps, for your own purposes, you need to figure that out. It seems to me that you might already know—that it may be that, as you said—”

She counted the sturdy Y-shaped branches she had gathered; she needed two more. “The story is in me.”

#

Mazie walked alongside Eric, as if being close to him would protect him from that aerial evil somewhere to the west, as the five went across the yellow grassy plain. Claes and Runar were no more than ten yards ahead, and Saito had fallen back with the animals. The wind had become slow. She felt Garet’s absence strongly today, and she doubted she was the only one. He, she told herself, would know where to go. He would find a way to make them invisible. The world was a worse place without him.

The sky here did not care that it was December, so sheets of summery heat fell on the flowers and briars alike. Insects bit Mazie’s arms and the itch often drove her to slap with a hand she no longer had. Most of the time, it no longer acutely upset her to be sans hand, forearm, and elbow—it was a change that had occurred, and emotion would not reverse it—but today she remembered Kanos’s cursed strength and maniacal laugh with renewed fidelity, and she wanted to see the man come back to life so she could beat him to a pulp and shut his beady eyes again.

She wished she had said something about that man on the first day. She wished she had done something. Had she opened his throat in his sleep, she would still have two hands. Perhaps Garet would not have been so exhausted by the delay caused by the man’s shenanigans that the deadly ambush in Switch Cave would have been avoided.

With one hand, she could shoot as well as someone with half a year of experience, but was no longer a markswoman. Attempts to write with her left hand produced childish, misshapen letters. The missing hand’s perverse independence of mind—as she walked, it would tap her belt to make meter for drum poetry; under stress, it would grab a useless phantom weapon—vexed her, even now.

What did she have to offer? She was no longer a sharpshooter. Her reflexes were still quick, but her responses had still not fully adjusted to her new body. She was strong, but the men were stronger. She was Farisa’s girlfriend—that was all, and if they returned to civilization, would Farisa still want her, an amputee pessima?

Mazie had, at least, seen a good number of sights on this journey. She would never forget having come here—the red rocks, the thousand-star nights, the curves of Farisa’s shoulders—and for this reason, even with bodily loss, she could not regret it. The world she had left had not given her a life worth staying put in; there was only here, only forward.

A pouch hung around her neck; she still had the “Flare Powder” harvested by the sprites, and had spotted two more of the fungal growths they’d used to make it, but she had not told anyone else about it just yet. She would test it for its safety first.

The stuff tasted like wet, bitter soil, but it did have an effect. When she put a crumb of it under her tongue, the world turned fuller in detail—grooves in tree bark, deeper; clouds, fuller in breath—and she wondered if Farisa saw the world this way all the time, and how beautiful but also maddening that must be. To have the experience once was enviable; to reside in it forever, she imagined, would be exhausting. Sometimes, for a brief instant, the white sun would turn turquoise, as if she were underwater, and this sort of experience led Mazie to doubt she would use this stuff often, but she was glad she had it, because the new abilities did work. She could throw a knife and correct its trajectory in flight. She could fix her eye on a dry leaf and make it burn. She had lost, due to her injury, usefulness in the ordinary world, but she did have that, at least.

#

Claes noticed the sun getting low when he heard Mazie’s voice.

“There’s Lethe Tell.”

He checked the copper-colored hill with his field glasses. He could not see Farisa or Andor, and was glad they had put themselves out of sight, but he knew they were there by a mark they had made in the bark of the hill’s solitary tree.

“Shit,” Eric said.

The airship had returned.

“We keep going,” Claes said. “There’s nowhere to hide.”

Runar, carrying Andor’s sniper rifle, took aim.

“Don’t. They’re farther away than they look, and we have to assume they’re too smart to get within rifle range. And we don’t know that we’re spotted yet.”

They continued walking. The airship covered an increasingly oppressive section of sky. No one looked directly at it, and they were sure to avoid using field glasses or drawing weaponry, because a glint of reflected sun off metal would surely give them away. Their clothes had been well-matched to terrain for daytime, but it was now late afternoon and nothing could hide their shadows.

Claes noticed an object—possibly a man, seated or harnessed—that dangled from the dirigible, half a mile above the ground, as if it were a kind of ornament.

“Let’s hurry,” Claes said. “We’re not far from Lethe Tell.”

They doubled their pace. Saito jerked the animals’ reins to hurry them. Mazie wanted to bolt, but this would split them up. The airship was flying low enough now, as it came toward them, they had lost any illusion about going unseen. The dirigible swung around and was now east of them, enabling Claes to see by naked eye what they had hung from the gondola. A mangled torso had been harnessed into place, limbs severed and blood-soaked flesh hanging off in strips.

A bullhorn-amplified voice tore through the still air.

“By the authority of the Global Company, I order you to drop all weapons and lie on the ground.”