The boy watched the battles until the sameness and fatigue claimed his will. And then without announcing his attentions, he abandoned his piece of the bridge, walking quickly to the Ruler’s main dock.

Every face stared at him.

And reading every face, he saw hatred and fear and the keen paranoid thoughts of creatures that would never look on him with any shred of real trust.

The dock had always been a vast space, a gigantic room busy with small airships and the Archon’s private fletch. But those lesser craft had been moved elsewhere, or they were burnt and lost. What had replaced them was a single vessel—the Panoply Night. The dock’s largest wall had been peeled back to bring that great clumsy, heavily armored balloon onboard, and dozens of cables kept the Panoply secure, comfortable. Armed guards stood where they looked menacing, and other guards watched from high perches. Until they reached home, the Ruler of the Storm was only the second most important ship in the world.

“Stop,” one guard said.

King continued walking. “Call and ask my father,” he said. “He’ll explain why I’m going up there.”

“Your father doesn’t have buoyancy anymore,” said the next guard.

“Then please shoot me,” said King. “Punch my hearts, and let’s find out what happens next.”

Guns were lowered, and he walked on. But every available call-line was opened, generals hearing news that would ensure a nice fresh panic.

The gangway led up to the public hallways, and King soon arrived at the steel door leading to the prison.

One hard blow with his palm, and the door shook in its frame.

From the other side, a scared man shouted, “I’ll open. Let me unlock.”

“I’ll save you the bother,” said King. “Stand back.”

One moment of focused, harmless violence made him a little happier.

Every guard vanished after that. Three prisoners were sitting in the first cell. No charges had been named, but until the full conspiracies were dissected, they would be kept here for their own safety. Nissim was standing in the room’s center—a sorry man suddenly older than his days. The two children were huddled against the back wall, staring at King without quite focusing on him, each holding the other’s hands. Those creatures used to look frail and small. Not anymore. After today, after watching what the Eight and Quest could achieve against one another, King felt the sudden need to huddle with them, awaiting the next awful storm.

The next cell was empty, while the cell after that held the other boy, Karlan.

Like Nissim, he was standing. But he was far from defeated, and despite blisters and burns and probably no sleep, he looked happy enough. At least the smile was more convincing than some, and the humor came with a sharp, unaffected tone.

“Are we winning the war?” he asked.

With both mouths, King laughed, and he pressed on.

Prima and her lieutenant were locked together in the same cell. King’s father and the generals weren’t sure what blame to strap to each of them. The woman had ordered the reef-hammers armed, and her loyal lieutenant did nothing to stop the disaster. Neither had been interrogated, but Sondaw suffered some cracked bones between his last post and this bleak little space. Then they were thrown together so that careful people could listen to every word, waiting for them to convict each other.

The pair acted as if they hadn’t shared one word all day.

But looking at the intruder, Prima sighed deeply.

“Do you know what I would do?” she asked. “If I could step back fourteen hundred days . . . what would I do without any regrets?”

“Throw us back to the coronas.”

She nodded, dipping her head.

“And knowing what I know,” said King, “do you think I’d crawl out of that stomach? Out into this miserable shit of a world?”

Her lieutenant rose, making ready to defend his lady.

But King pushed on to the end, to the solid door that he didn’t break down once before and didn’t need to touch this time. The door was unlocked and ajar. The prisoner and his monkey had been told to remain where they were, and both seemed happy to comply, sitting together in the farthest corner. Diamond was wearing a mechanic’s jumper, sleeves cut short to suit his arms. The air smelled of toilet wastes. Monkey shit and human shit smelled mostly the same to King. He entered the cell where an old woman once beat up an old man. Boy and monkey stared at the dried blood on the floor. King approached, stopping a long stride short of them, and then he said, “They’re afraid that I told you what to do. Starting the war was my idea.”

The monkey looked up, one lip lifting to brandish the incisors.

“They don’t want to think you could have done this by yourself. You’re too polite, too kind. Too dull and plain and normal. I must have coaxed you somehow, and the guilt is half-mine.”

“It’s not yours,” said the boy.

King laughed, asking, “Aren’t you going to share with your brother?”

Diamond sighed and closed his eyes. “You’re still walking free.”

“Do they have a room that can hold me?”

“You’re my brother,” Diamond said.

King said nothing.

“And you tried to kill me once.”

“I won’t again.”

“No?”

King needed to see the eyes, wanting this chance to measure the soul. That’s why he said, “I killed ten men to come down here and tell you something, brother.”

The pale eyes lifted.

King tried two smiles. “You’re the scariest one among us. But you always suspected that, didn’t you?”

She ate enough not to need food anymore, and she practiced shapes that she had never mastered, measuring her successes in the reflective surfaces sharing the storeroom with her. One shape was critical, and she didn’t like the results. But this was the best disguise for the environment, and that’s why she put it on and made it as close to perfect as she could before leaving the storeroom behind.

The long, awful day was finally drawing to an end.

Fear had always governed Quest’s life, but this was no simple fear, urging her to flee to reliable safe havens. She knew that she couldn’t continue living in the wilderness, not with a war screeching past every few moments, and she couldn’t feel safe in any outlying District. But riding the Ruler back to its home berth wasn’t the strategy of a desperate coward. This was one brother’s home, and from the scuttlebutt and offhand statements of little officers, she knew that the other brother would soon live among the bloodwoods, biding his days until he was old enough to sire a new race of humans.

She needed to be close to Diamond and to King.

A thousand terrors had pushed her inside a white sack filled with dead parts, brought to the Ruler and a storeroom where field rations and bottled water made her halfway strong again. And now she was inside an endless hallway that cut down the middle of the world’s largest machine, walking past soldiers, past civilians and mechanics and people whose lives were undecipherable to her. She wore a plain face for good reason. Men didn’t look too carefully at her features or her bland fleshy body. Her uniform and the boots were stolen from a closet, and they helped hide most of her new flesh. But every step brought terror, every pause doubt. She smelled wrong, and her bones were wrong, and she didn’t have any kind of life story to share with strangers.

Why did she even risk stepping out into plain view?

But then she happened across a crew lounge and its tall windows. As if she saw these scenes every day, she slowly crossed the open floor. The Ruler was approaching the first of the great bloodwoods, grand and powerful, dwarfing this assemblage of gas and corona parts, metal and more metal. The window was shaped to afford a fair view forwards, and for the first time in her life, Quest could see the center of the world up close, and her new heart slowed in response, fighting to keep her calm.