“We have to survive,” Hallon says. “This battle is lost.”

“There’s really nothing we can do?” Milo asks.

“Pray,” Hallon says. “The gods are always listening, although it’s a mystery how they’ll respond. For now, we’d better get indoors.”

A wind rises, its equations swirling around Milo, but dimmer than before. There are sections missing, as if they’d been gouged out. The shadows sent aloft another flight of poison. Come, we’re needed. The wind whips around him, lifting him into the air and separating him from Hallon.

“What’s going on? Is Eratosthenes all right?” Hallon reaches for Milo, but the wind carries him away.

“I don’t know. She says we’re needed.” The wind gathers under him, lifting him higher.

“You’re seriously not leaving without me,” Hallon says.

“I’m not doing anything,” Milo says.

Suddenly he’s hurtling upwards. There’s no engine or rattling this time, just his face protected by a shield of air. Impossible. Impossible. Impossible. Milo’s mind rebels, but the proof of his senses is all around. He’s once again high above the city where the air is thin and cold, surrounded by an endless sky. Thirteen artillery shells fly towards him.

The shadows ride the poison. I can’t overcome them alone.

Milo rubs his eyes. Later…he’ll form these experiences into proper equations later. Assuming there is one. “Wh-what can we do?”

The space around Milo shifts, and a terrible tension crawls across his skin. He sees for the first time the great knots of equations spanning the sky, locking the forces that move the world’s weather systems. An incomprehensible amount of energy is jammed, grinding against itself.

My siblings are trapped. Free them, and they’ll help us with the poison.

Milo’s wits flee in the face of these equations. “How? How is this possible?”

Of course, he’d been thinking about the weather. Asking the question of what it would take to create the storm walls and stop all meteorological phenomena. He’d studied the problem set for almost two years, unable to let it alone even with all the other strange things he’d had to think about and calculate. But even so, he recognizes only a few of the equations before him.

The artillery shells flash under him.

Use your will, the wind says, to unravel the ties.

Hallon often talked about energy. At first, Milo thought she meant the mechanical kind—using the limbs as levers, relying on centripetal and centrifugal forces, and so on. But the more he listened, the more her model clarified her words. She really meant energy—the glowing, vibrating equations that he sees in her movements, hinting at music he can’t hear and calculations he can’t see. The feeling of it tingles up his spine and sparks among his thoughts.

Milo, exhausted, emptied out by everything that’s happened, reaches out and the wind reaches with him. As if the wind is his Lion, they trace together the outlines of the equations binding the weather. They shift cords aside to work their way deeper inside.

Down below, far below and far away, the artillery shells burst against the city. Panic rises in Milo, and he loses the feeling of the wind working with him. The equations slip from his hands. There’s too much damage to the world’s underpinnings, across too wide an area. “I can’t do it,” he says.

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Are you sure? If so, then all is lost. Not that you care about all. Your attention is only on one—Hallon Nilsdotter. She may be immortal, but she’s not immune to death. She’ll die today if you don’t act.

“What am I supposed to do? It’d take decades, maybe centuries to undo these equations—”

Free them. Free my brothers and sisters.

“Take me back to Hallon.”

The air in front of Milo condenses and spirals into a lens. The wind shows him a distorted image of Hallon, still on the roof, looking up at him. What is she still doing outside? Milo cries out, but the wind won’t let him go.

“Take me back! Take me to her right now!”

Not until you free my siblings!

Hallon coughs. If she doesn’t go inside now, she’s going to die. But the wind doesn’t show what happens next. The lens disappears and takes Hallon with it.

“No!”

Free them! It’s the only way for her to survive.

The pain and stress and fear and love—they break Milo open. He sees himself from outside his body. The world is dark except for the vast web of energies painted across the sky from horizon to horizon. They ripple from a single source. One weapon had done this. Just one, centered above Dawrtaine. The people who’d fought in the war all those years ago—they must’ve been insane. Really insane. That’s the only reasonable opinion anyone can come to after seeing the damage they’d done.

Milo finds himself hovering where the equations are tightest, thickest, thorniest. The knot pulses with violet light, the mishmash of energies trembling in terrible equilibrium. A strong enough shock…

He gathers himself. There’s no air in this strange place, but he takes a deep breath anyway. The wind draws into him, and he remembers the feeling when he’d shot the artillery shell out of the sky. The way all the equations lined up true. The way they glowed in his cell as he moved through the Way of the Soft Fist. The way he felt in the cave after waking up from his injury. The way it felt to run over the ice. The first time he saw Hallon in his workroom and lost his heart to her.

The way a fist can be hard and soft. The same way a person can be and not be at the same time.

The wind flows through the cracks of him and into his hands.

The wind’s siblings struggle to free themselves from behind the twisted equations. To meet the incoming fist.

Milo shatters.

Red and black and violet spill out.

The energy burns and flings him away.

He falls from dark to blue. Light pulses above him. Violet, red, and black foam from the rupture in the sky.

Crack. Crackle. Crack. The sound of the avalanche, the ice breaking on the mountain. It reverberates through every part of him.

A fire spreads across the heavens.

Milo is falling to his third death, but he can’t take his eyes from the burning equations. Everything, everything is fire. Wind and fire.

A cushion slows his fall. Winds roar past, sweeping in all directions. The numbers are dizzying and too many to follow.

Did you really think I would let you fall?

Milo has no words with which to answer. They’ve all fled in the presence of the equations shining arc light bright.

The winds sweep through the city of Dawrtaine. In the distance, storm clouds gather like black boiling water.

###

Hallon covers her nose and mouth with cloth. She knows it won’t work, but does it anyway, wanting to keep Milo in sight. At least he’s safe, she thinks when the shells hit.

And then he vanishes. The dot in the sky that was him disappears. With nothing to keep her on the roof, she crawls back inside. The woman with the dark eyes helps her down the stairs to an empty office. They close the door and stuff papers into the gaps, hoping it will be enough to keep the siloxin out. The woman's name is Houda, and she sobs quietly, keeping her grief to herself while Hallon waits.

Waiting has always been hard. She’d thought that after six hundred years, she’d be better at it, but no—the seconds tick past, each allowing for one more breath, one more thought to the people outside, to the one who’d vanished, and the one she misses most of all.

A tremor runs through the world. She feels it even with her dulled senses. Good or bad, salvation or calamity—what will it be? Hallon waits and counts the seconds. Until finally, a tremendous wind howls outside. Only then does Hallon smile.

Milo, her unintended student, has done something remarkable.