Caly and Olm followed the dust storm out of the city and down into the scrublands, passing the scattered parade of repulsor bikes and homesteader trucks and old sandcutter boats that were so laden with luggage they didn’t hover, so much as drag along the sand. Eventually, the scrublands gave way to even scrubbier lands, and it was just Caly and Olm alone. The hills no longer grew with an abundance of weeds, only patches of sharp-looking grass, and twists and clumps of gnarled cacti. Pipes of stiff plants cast shadows down the ridges of the hills, looking every bit like people standing along the red cliffs, raising their hands to beg for a ride.

Coordinates ticked away on the corner of her visor, routing their path to the orphanage. The tails of the storm showered the hills with dust, dust, and more dust. But when it came to the cracked flats, its fury dried up, and it spread into a tan haze across all that empty land. You couldn’t ask for better terrain. Caly leaned forward in the stirrups and Olm squeezed tighter around her waist. She throttled on, and the bike reared and screamed as it plunged into the haze, leaving a sandy vortex in their wake.

They thundered across the desert. Her legs went numb, and even then, she kept going.

A shift, on the horizon was the only warning. A gap rose up out of nowhere, a massive canyon deeper than it was wide. She yanked on the brakes, and shoved the repulsor hard against the sand as she tried to halt the bike’s forward movement. Not soon enough. Caly cursed and threw the bike into a turn until they sped along the edge of the cliff.

“Sorry,” she growled. She hadn’t seen the canyon until they were practically staring down into it.

Olm didn’t say anything about their near miss, no criticism, no disapproving intake of breath. She was quietly grateful for that.

Both of them stayed seated in silence for a long moment, taking in the view. Entire cities could’ve fit down there, and no one would know. Plants grew in the cracks and shelves down the cliff faces, and one enterprising old tree had found enough dirt to make a home on a rocky outcropping jutting halfway across the canyon. Far below, the glint of brown water suggested that a creek might be down there, hidden in shadow and dry, tangled brush.

Olm grunted. Caly turned her head to follow his gaze, down the other side of the canyon. At first, she thought she was looking at some huge shadow cutting across the canyon. Her helmet zoomed in on a structure, black and metallic, that jutted from one end of the gap to the other. Spikes large enough to spear a spacecraft jutted up from its twisting form. The structure, which looked more like the intertwined roots of some moon-sized tree, growing through the stone.

“What is that?”

“Only the Dead Ones know,” Olm said.

Like the Spirines of the Independent Cities, the root bridge was made of that black, glittering substance favored by the Dys. Not quite metal. Maybe, once, it dammed the river, but the river had cut beneath it, and kept on its winding trail, so the Root looked more like an exposed, planet-sized rib.

“Let’s head South,” Olm said. “We’ll find another crossing.”

“That thing looks sturdy enough.”

“It’s Dyss.”

“So? We’re just passing over it. Bike won’t even touch the thing.”

Olm rumbled his discomfort.

“You think the human crossed somewhere else?” Caly cocked her head, a challenge.

Olm grunted, as if to say “Fine.”

The Bridge grew at an angle. While the opposing side rose smoothly to the top of the cliff, their side began with a bit of a drop. “Hang on,” she said, as she lined up the bike and revved the repulsors. They flew off the cliff, and she pulled up hard to keep the heavy nose level as they fell toward the Dyssian dam, or whatever it was. They crunched on impact. And then, her stomach dropped as the repulsor almost slid off the smooth, mottled-black structure. Then, it was smooth riding. They hovered a foot or two above the Bridge, but even so, Olm’s hands crushed her shoulders under his anxious grip. Normally, he hated when she pulled the throttle, so she was surprised when he leaned forward and spoke in a tense voice, “Faster.”

She had to resist ramping off the other side. With sand once more under their feet, Olm let go of her, leaned back in the saddle, and gave a loud sigh. She glanced in the mirror, and saw him squeezing his eyes shut, the cracks in his skins glowing a dull red.

“Need a rest?” she asked.

“I thought we were trying to catch up to him.”

“No sense going in unprepared. Be ready, or be ready to die, right?”

“I am always ready for death.” Olm sniffed. Looked back at the Bridge, its gnarled spines standing sentry over the canyon. “But let’s not camp here.”

They rode until the air was so chill, Caly couldn’t feel her fingers. Her visor’s heaters struggled to keep up without fogging up her helmet, so they dismounted and built a small camp in the shadow of a rocky berm. Olm set out his pocket fire, a small spherical device that gave off a warm, blue glow. They used the bike and their own bodies to shield the light from any far off watchers. The sunset lit up a torn tuft of cloud. It looked like the last, falling petal of a fiery rose.

As the sun waned, one of Nowhere’s moons seemed to gain strength. Caly spotted the Hyperlane not far off, a string of double lights spread across the sky like a constellation of twin arrows, side by side.

When the Hyperlane started to glow, Caly stood up.

She watched it, for a long moment. Gathering light, going from a pale fuzz to full blue and into white as all that pent-up energy flushed out. And then, it was just those two strings of light once more.

“More Auran Arais,” Caly said.

“Floaters? How can you tell?”

“Helmet caught their IDs. That’s the second batch of freighters this week. Headed out to the new belts, I’d guess.”

Olm looked up, though his hands stayed hovering over the pocket fire, said, “More and more these days. Wonder why?”

The Hyperlanes were not one way to cross the systems of the Synod—they were the only way. Without them, the Synod was nothing more than a series of isolated planets, separated by millions of light years. Once, Caly had asked her mother, “Why don’t we just build more?”

“We didn’t build them,” her mother said, disgusted that her own child would ask such an inane question. “We only discovered them. It was the Dyss who set all this in motion.”

The Synod’s ability to power the lanes was severely limited. Getting passage to the Synod’s core (where everyone wanted to be) was more expensive than going out. So the only people who came all this way, to New Nowhere—the last junction on the furthest frontier—were prospectors, fortune seekers, families in dire need, dreamers or fools (which were the same thing), the odd adventurer and thrill seeker, and, of course, the exiles. Like Olm. Like me.

Out here, there was only one hyperlane, and the Synod was not keen on wasting the reserves to keep it running. Even the Auran Arais—those patient masters of interstellar industry—only sent the odd mega-freighter to work the belts beyond. If the lane was lighting up again, twice in one week, something big was happening back home.

But what? And why now? The Couran Unity was still gathering their support in the Councils, both Mass and Crown. It would be decades before their plans went into motion.

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She stared up at the hyperlane, as if she could demand answers from it. She stood, forgetting how cold and tired she was, until Olm tugged on her sleeve, and offered her a piece of dried biscuit and a clod of cheese so cold it was almost frozen. Caly flipped her visor open, and wolfed it down.

As they settled in for the night, she scanned the horizon one last time, searching for lifeforms. Her visor illuminated only the strange, urchin-like plants that grew in clusters along the shadowed parts of the desert. Feathery fronds stuck out of the spines and waved in the wind, catching airborne microbes, or whatever it was they did for food.

“Thank the stars for the Synod’s Finest,” Olm said, as he pulled out a couple of emergency packs and bedrolls from the top trunk of the enforcer’s bike. Caly took a bedroll, the metallic fabric crinkling as she laid it out. She curled as close to the pocket flame as she could without melting her bedroll, and willed herself to relax. She started to dim her visor to block out the light from the stars, when Olm muttered something from the bedroll next to hers.

“What?” Caly turned over.

“Can’t stop thinking about him,” Olm grumbled.

“The human?”

Olm rolled over and propped himself up on a huge elbow, “One second, he was there. The next—you saw it, didn’t you?”

“I didn’t see anything. There was too much dust.”

“Exactly. How fast did he get up to your tower?”

“Maybe the human’s got a double. Like Split Agasgar?”

“No,” Olm said. “It was only him.”

They both sat in silence.

She’d never seen him like this. There was something about Olm’s quiet contemplation that dampened her enthusiasm for the new plan. Tomorrow’s problem.

The chill bit into her suit and she sank deeper into her crinkly bedroll and shoved her hands under her arms. Her thoughts turned from the new plan to old plans gone awry. To friends, become enemies. And then, as always, to Caspian, and to the dream of a life, long left behind.

Olm woke her before the sun of dawn spilled its golden blood over the horizon. They saddled up, this time with Olm riding pilot, and Caly leaning back in the cushy passenger seat. When they crossed a rough mountain pass, they found themselves in an ocean of gray and green grass. In the foothills, some enormous mass of cacti crowded out the grass, and created impassable mounds covered in spikes and tall-sprouting stems that waved heavily with bright-colored fruit. Almost like the plants were tempting them to come closer. A herd of scave boars chewed thoughtfully on the outer edges of the cacti mounds, their tongues thicker than the plates of thorny cacti could penetrate. One of them watched Caly and Olm hovering through grass and thorn with bored interest, just watching and chewing.

The foothills descended into a valley, carved by a few slow-moving streams of brown water. Majestic cliffs lined the valley walls, steep and painted with hundreds of segments, each one a different shade of red. Caly found herself wondering how those pathetic little streams could carve something so beautiful. They rode into the narrow beneath the cliffs and, even with the sun high overhead, the light failed to reach them, failed to warm the chill of the shadows.

There was a silhouette at the end of the canyon, standing still with its head upturned and enrobed in sunlight. Caly pointed it out, and Olm slowed the bike to a humming crawl.

“Wait. It’s just rocks,” she said, “Thought it was someone waiting for us.”

But Olm kept the bike tuned low, moving carefully and as soundlessly as he could, the water barely rippling under the repulsor. Even when they passed the stack of rocks (or wind-carved stone, or whatever it was), he kept his form hunched low and his eyes cast up at the increasingly-cracked canyon walls.

“Olm?”

“Dyss,” he said.

“How do you know?”

“I smell it,” Olm sniffed meaningfully.

They turned the last bend of the canyon, and looked down upon a forest of black stone, sprouting from the red sand. No, not stone, Caly thought, as she gazed over the labyrinths of glittering spires and obsidian fangs jutting up from the sand. This is the work of the Dead Ones. Sweeping statues of that ancient, brushed metal stood watch like misshapen sentinels, twisting up from the stone. They marched along the ridge like the backplates of some enormous reptile. Black arches marched up the sides of the valley and when the wind blew through them, it made a sound like a mournful choir, ten thousand voices.

“They walked here, once.” Olm said, wrinkling his nose. His shoulders were so tense, they almost reached his ears. His eyes scanned the black towers and arches and jagged scales bursting from the earth, all that obsidian metal glittering in the rising sun.

“Should we turn back?” Though they were alone, Caly felt the need to whisper, as if something about this place would know they had come. The Bridge was one thing, but even she could feel that gentle, insidious tug in her chest. It was those singing voices in the wind.

“No. You were right the first time. Let fear guide your way, and you will never find your glory.”

Olm leaned over (making the bike tip slightly) and grabbed a fistful of red dirt. He threw it up, letting it shower on his head as muttered some hrutskuld prayer for safe passage, though not in those exact words. It was more like asking Death to turn a blind eye while they crossed, in exchange for a more gruesome end at a later date.

Meanwhile, the wind sang through the blades and arches. An itch grew between her shoulder blades.

“Coordinates say the orphanage is through this valley.” She said.

“What kind of orphanage would be in a place like this?”

“Well,” Caly said, raising her helmet’s volume to be heard over the choir of dead voices, “If the human made it through here, then we can too.”

Olm made a doubtful rumble in his throat. But he pushed the bike forward, and they began the long, winding trek through the maze.

They rambled through jagged teeth and curving towers, around bends of treacherous cliffs. Rainpaths crisscrossed the sands and smooth slabs of rock, tinted red with iron or white from limestone powder. Olm kept blinking, like he was trying to clear his vision, and at one point he asked Caly, “Did you say something?”

“No.”

“Thought I heard … never mind.”

“Let me drive,” Caly said. Olm didn’t argue. He slid back, and started massaging his temples, and muttered something about how it would be better if the dead remembered to stay dead.

The sooner they left this place, the better.

On one sheer cliff, someone had hammered stakes into the rock to use as handholds, but only one stake still remained. There was a cave where a tattered rucksack hidden in the shadows.

“Someone lived here,” she said.

“Must’ve been mad.”

“Or desperate.”

“Or both.”

When the ground became too treacherous, Olm had to lead the bike on foot, slowly hovering behind him as he pulled it with a rope tied around his waist. They had to pull it through a bend, scraping the metal on stone, when a sound up high made them both stop. Stones and pebbles slid down the cliff and skittered over their path, but Caly saw nothing above them.

She turned her scanners on full power, and left them running, even though it drained her suit. She could make up the charge later.

By midday, the Dead One’s ruins dwindled to knee-high shapes, so the sun struck the sharp rocks and the whole valley radiated with its heat, until even Olm was sweating. There wasn’t enough power for Caly’s fans, and her suit stuck to her every time she moved. She took off her gloves, and peeled back her sleeves, but kept her helmet in place.

They trudged up a steep slope with Olm dragging the bike, each footstep only gave a handful of centimeters, each breath leaving her lungs wanting more. At the top, they gasped and drank in the thin air.

Far below, there was a creek, muddy and brown and small enough in some places that Caly thought she might simply step over it. As it rolled down the valley, it collected dozens of other small streams and yet, it never seemed to grow any wider. But there were trees—actual trees—growing along the rocky bank. Some were sheltered in the cliffs, though even they drove their gnarled roots down to the creek. They looked like shriveled old men, bent by the dry centuries. But further up the creek, a copse of trees stood proud and tall above the rest—dark green steeples of the highland pines, fencing in the white-barked guardia trees with their broad leaves arranged like a wall of bright, yellow shields to shade their branches.

Caly’s helmet pinged. It took her a moment to see it, beneath the trees: a fort, with red walls so old, they crumbled seamlessly into the red sand. A single parapet lifted from the walls, shrouded by branches and yellow leaves.

“You ever see an orphanage like that?” she asked.

“Hrutskald don’t have orphanages,” he said, “Only barracks.”

“Oh, right,” Caly said, as if she had known that.

In a way, she supposed courans were the same. If you didn’t have a House, you didn’t have anything. You got sent wherever the ruling Houses sent you, and the rest of your life was written.

She chewed her lip, trying to plan their next move. “If I were a bandit, I’d hole up in there.”

“They do love their trees. Especially ones you can hang people from.”

The fort was quiet and still. Only the trees swayed in the breeze. She could shoot from a distance all day, but this—this was unknown. Caly swallowed, her throat suddenly thick.

A true Cavalier must face far worse than this.

“Think he’s in there?” Olm asked.

Caly put every ounce of her bravado into her reply, “Only one way to find out.”