King and the key plunged into the hole.

Diamond ran a little ways and then stopped, turning in one circle and half of another before asking, “Where’s Elata?”

Seldom caught up and said, “She already got onboard.”

Diamond didn’t want to believe him. “Why?”

“She doesn’t like here,” Seldom said reasonably.

From below, Quest roared, “Now,” and as if to prove the urgency, beams of bloodwood and bone pegs began to shatter.

“Out of my way,” Karlan shouted, and he vanished.

Diamond ran and jumped after him.

And then Seldom sprinted to the hole’s edge, finding what looked like an ordinary wooden trap door flung open, and the only surprise was how little surprise he felt, watching himself fearlessly leap after the others.

ELEVEN

They fell past the lost sun, mesmerized eyes absorbing the endless night. Seven of them noticed nothing else, but with the same vision, the eighth teased out a thin sliver of pale golden light.

Tritian fixed the eyes on a narrow patch of ink, and the light was a little brighter.

Whatever it was, they were closing the gap.

Two moments of debate ended with a plan. The glow was below them but not beneath. Aligning the head while extending arms and legs, the Eight allowed themselves to fall like the world’s weakest bird, fast but not straight, and time made the corona become real—one of the last and the oldest, too weak to flee the gaping wound in the world, far too stubborn to give up and die.

The Eight planned for a graceful collision.

The disk-shaped body sang in painful colors, in sharp yellows, and the bladders expanded for lift and then collapsed, and it sounded as if the last of the world’s air was exploding out of the giant’s mouth.

The Eight believed in inevitable successes. Their aim was perfect and true until they missed the giant corona. But the ancient creature noticed motion and ended up catching them instead, its longest, strongest neck stretching as far as possible, the last of its teeth removing a hand and foot before bringing the Eight close.

The corona might be the last living First.

Why it would grab this miserable creature was a mystery, and what it thought about its quarry remained unknown. But the leviathan kept the Eight close, and they fell together. The Eight clung to the neck that had damaged them and saved them, and they grew a new hand and a worthwhile foot. The giant mouth was close, wide when it caught the air and roaring when the air jetted free. In the presence of vast memory and every answer, there was no chance to piece together even the barest conversation. The world remained built from puzzle, from ignorance. Yet the Eight had never felt closer to any organism than this desperate doomed wondrous soul.

In Creation, no fall is eternal.

In the end, in terror or exaltation or maybe by sheer chance, the First emitted a single pulse of scorching purple light, showing its passenger what was rising fast from below.

The chamber ended with a barren floor, and all nine died.

And time flowed and eight of them were less dead.

More time was crossed while the shared body wasn’t just repaired but reinvented, the old papio-form given lungs for this air and a mouth gifted at cursing.

The body crawled out from beneath the corona’s smashed remains. The Creation loomed overhead. Walls defined a finite, knowable space. The space couldn’t be seen but was felt, invisible every way but in the mind. Tritian made the new body stand, and they enjoyed the first shared breath. The floor beneath was slick and gray and a little cool against just-born flesh, and it seemed far too flat. A perfect sphere had been promised, but the wise Masters were again proved wrong. They were standing at the bottom of a pipe, and a steady wind was blowing across the floor, one direction in mind. In the distance, in the darkness, great masses were slamming against the floor. Not just the coronas were falling. With the forest overhead, dead trees were falling, and downed aircraft, and it was inevitable that one object or a thousand more would crash down on top of the Eight. They would die again and crawl out into the open again, nothing ahead but work, hellish laborious work that would not end until the starved forest was safely dead underfoot.

The Eight practiced running, covering a short distance before a new sound made them pause.

A papio wing was diving from high overhead.

Divers fell silent inside them.

Tritian told the others to give him the only voice.

The jet engine throttled down, and the nose sprouted a column of light that pivoted, finding the gray floor rising, and then the machine landed in the distance, skidding sharply and then crashing into piece of debris.

Unused munitions detonated.

The violence washed across the landscape, and overhead, dozens and maybe hundreds of aircraft took sight of the goal.

They came in waves, exhausted wings followed by overloaded airships full of tree-walkers, and there were individuals riding beneath parachutes and inside drop-suits. Most of the refugees landed badly, dying instantly or after some plaintive wails. But others touched down successfully, and only time stood between now and that moment when some survivor, standing amidst the carnage, noticed the Eight

Those lucky eyes belonged to a papio crew riding inside what looked like a slayer-hunting aircraft. Motors and gas bladders held several dozen soldiers aloft, and they fixed their spotlights on a big papio body, a woman’s magnified voice shouting at them and echoing across the gray plain, asking if they were the great missing Eight.

Tritian demanded calm from his siblings.

Each of the Eight helped raise one hand high, friend to friend.

And then Tritian told a useful lie. Shouting over the roar of engines, he said, “We are the Seven. Divers is dead.”

Human memory forgot quite a lot after one day, and six hundred days could wipe away much of the past. But these creatures knew how to nourish old emotions, keeping them raw enough to last for generations.

Divers or not, one of the papio gunners opened fire, gutting the creatures that had helped ignite this endless war.

And once again, the Eight became dead.

Inside the Creation, in this one tiny realm, perhaps nothing had ever moved so swiftly.

Quest fell like a dart.

Massive and narrow, wearing a skin that slipped through any air, she plunged faster than the papio wings, and soon faster than every rocket. Distances that should have felt enormous were crossed in moments, crossed and found empty and barely noticed as a consequence. She spawned eyes that didn’t interrupt the precious airflow. She spat out brilliant flares to throw light across the walls of the world. And what she saw was shown to her passengers: the intricate, lovely reefs that had infested the corona world; the formerly high-realm where the sun ruled and where a great hole now waited; and beneath that hole, an expansive but not spectacularly wide cylinder leading down for another enormous journey, swiftly crossed.

“But do you see Them?” asked Diamond.

“If I do, I will tell you,” Quest said.

“See who?” asked Seldom.

Nobody answered.

Then Seldom looked at Elata, and she mouthed, “The Eight.”

The rounded chamber was intended for two bodies, plus the unfathomable gray ball. Crowded together, everybody touched everybody. The humans occupied one side, King and Diamond the other. The gray ball lay on King’s hands. Karlan’s rifle looked at home in his arms. The ceiling and floor were flat, but beyond each was a bubble that bore a strong resemblance to Quest’s crystalline eyes. They could see what she saw, except for the details that their speed that washed away, and the total exhaustion that stole their focus, and the limited numbers of eyes in their few heads. The reef wasn’t built from coral, it was woven from countless holes, and Diamond worried that the Eight were hiding inside any one of those holes, or they were lost in some other way.