But the proposed target was a single tree, and destroying Marduk seemed proportioned, even reasonable.

Divers gave her approval, and none of the Seven attempted to stop her.

Twenty days before the attack, during a final meeting of conspirators, one grinning lieutenant revealed that with so much fuel and manpower on hand, a far wider attack had been mandated. “In case the little boy wanders or escapes every trap,” was the excuse offered.

Divers couldn’t disagree with the logic.

Tritian couldn’t agree. He said nothing, but even his silence felt disapproving. Yet Divers was secure enough to invite her brother’s opinion: one last chance to offer up whatever words that he wished.

Tritian responded with the obvious logic. “If this happens, and if everything afterward happens as you hope, then the humans and the world only lose everything that they might have gotten from that one boy.”

No offspring, in other words. Which assumed of course that Diamond could father children . . . but waiting to find out meant waiting too long. If Diamond vanished, both human species would remain frail and mortal, which was exactly what Divers intended.

The Eight knew this: They had lived forever inside the old corona, implying they were in some fashion immortal. Immortal beings could afford patience. The forest and every soft mind around them would soon forget the carnage. The Eight would remember, and the other two siblings too, assuming they continued wandering the world for thousands and millions of days. And of course Diamond wouldn’t actually be dead. That was a point worth making, worth repeating. The boy would survive fire and stomach acids. And a better day was coming, a perfect day when the world that Divers had created could dredge up an old corona, embracing that human child all over again.

That’s where she put her thoughts. Every day until the trees fell, Divers reminded herself that the suffering would pass. Revenge was just a different kind of storm. Regrets mattered, but lumped together, the voices inside her—the Seven’s voices and her own—were the world’s smallest noise.

The attack was delivered on schedule, and the only important failure in that fine bold overgrown scheme was that against long odds, Diamond survived for another two days.

But that was best, in the end. The boy was a critical chore best done by Divers and Divers alone.

She ran through the night to meet Bountiful, but it fell short of her and she had to sprint to the crash site, finding Merit first. The slayer was sitting up and talking. And Divers killed him swiftly, without pain, and then she wiped the one hand clean on her trousers, thinking only about Diamond.

Because some moments have to be perfect, she misheard a nearby thudding, looking at the echo, not the cannon.

The boy was as obvious and tiny as she had imagined. He was perched high on the eroded crest of sourlip, big eyes bright from an endless flow of tears. Shame struck, but the sensation was brief and weak. Disapproving words danced about her. But there was no need to defend her actions, not to herself or any suffering witnesses. The adoptive father would have been a stumbling stone. There was no doubt in that matter. As every papio understood, dangerous stones should be kicked off the path, and nothing too wrong had been done. Yet Divers found herself wasting a few breaths arguing with the whispers coming from each of the Seven.

“Merit was disruptive,” she said with her mind.

She warned, “He would have fought us now, and he would have led the assault to recover his son tomorrow and the day after.”

Then aloud, she said, “Time makes sense of every mess.”

And she paused at that point, waiting for Tritian’s response, or anyone’s. But the only voice came from a weak sister and her steadiest ally.

“You’re talking,” said the girl. “But you’re not talking to us.”

Divers laughed.

“None of us spoke,” the sister insisted.

She laughed out loud, mocking the liars.

Meanwhile the boy hadn’t moved, which was hard to believe. Diamond was staring at the Eight. Fresh smoke was standing tall behind him. He should have run into the smoke while he had the chance. Divers had foolishly given him enough time to flee, or better than that, hide. If that little body wormed its way deep inside a crevice, it could keep out of her reach for a little while. But no, he was standing on the same knoll, too stunned or sad to think, much less act on the simplest instinct.

At last, Divers began climbing to the ridge’s crest. The reef beneath her was as narrow and keen as an old medical scalpel, and she couldn’t run fast. The boy watched her coming, and then he yelled, one hand high over his head and waving, as if that motion helped fling his word into the high bright morning air.

“Here,” he shouted. And again, “Here.”

Divers glanced over her shoulder. Two fletches were closing on the boy, but they were still too distant to matter.

She sprinted on feet and hands.

Then the hard chugging rattle of rotors took away every other sound, and three whiffbirds came from behind, sweeping low over her, two of the craft pivoting before settling on the ridge in front of Divers, stubbornly barring her way.

The unit banners told her everything. These were birds from a distant base, and none of these soldiers could be trusted.

Divers stopped for an instant, pretending obedience.

To the Seven, she said, “Suggestions.”

No one responded.

Then she broke into a hard sprint, bounding down the slope to evade the big machines. Armed warriors jumped free, shouting commands at each other and at her. She was past the first whiffbird when the second machine launched again. A loudspeaker punched through the roar, the woman pilot shouting to her, saying, “Back away and let us take the prize. The prize. The prize.”

Divers paused, listening for the other Seven, listening carefully, but she heard nothing. Not disapproval, not agreement. Not rage or fear or even an empty gray sound inviting her to do what she wished.

What she wished.

The world’s largest hands grabbed and yanked, a lump of coral wrenched free of the weathered reef. Her aim felt wrong, and as soon as the projectile left the hand, she began hunting for more ammunition. But the pilot never imagined being attacked by something as stark as one tossed stone. She couldn’t guess Divers’ power and flew straight until the canopy shattered and the airship dove, striking nose-first, rotors shattering and scattering before the wreckage came to rest on the broken, worn-out ground.

Divers picked up one of the rotor blades—a long piece of corona bone, white in the body and whiter along the sharpest edge—and ran on. The third whiffbird had settled just under the knoll, on a tiny patch of half-flat ground. Diamond was surrounded by papio soldiers. He didn’t run from them either. Then a big loudspeaker blared, a tree-walker yelling from the nearest fletch, the worst possible rendering of papio saying, “Ours, ours, ours.”

Divers arrived at the base of the knoll.

Two soldiers lifted their rifles, and she chopped them with the blade.

An officer fired into her body, and she knocked him down with her sword’s blunt face, yanking the gun away before lifting his body—a proud papio warrior held kicking in one hand.

The Seven said nothing.

The officer rose and spun once in the air before landing in the whiffbird’s whirring rotors, and the reef was splattered with pieces and mist.

Panicked, the remaining soldiers scattered.

But Diamond remained where he had always been, rocking side to side and then not rocking, setting his feet apart and his hands at his side.

“What are you doing?” Divers called out.

“Standing like soldier,” said the weeping boy.

“You should have run,” she said.