Why wasn’t she grieving?

Though they’d been fearing the form her grief would take, this clear lack of it was jarring. Not to mention seeing her cavalierly take control of a young man who was, well, one of them. They didn’t know him, but what did that matter? He was innocent, not to mention that he bore more than a passing resemblance to Werran and was probably his brother. Nova freed slaves; she didn’t take them. And of course it was even worse than that, if what Lazlo said was true: By taking this ship and leaving the others behind—who were also their kin and kindred—they had doomed at least one of them.

“Nova,” said Kiska in an uncertain tone. “What are you going to do with him?”

“Do?” Nova regarded Lazlo. “Well, I suppose that depends on him. I always planned to keep Skathis in a birdcage.”

That didn’t answer the question. They would have helped her keep Skathis in a birdcage. “But he’s not Skathis,” Kiska pointed out.

“No, but he is a Mesarthim smith, and that is a very rare treasure.”

“Treasure?” repeated Rook. In the course of their piracy, they had looted many a treasure, but they had never stolen people. Having been rescued from the certainty of slavery themselves, the very thought was anathema to them. “But you can’t just keep him,” he blurted, as though nothing were more obvious.

“I have to,” said Nova. “I need him if I’m going to find Kora.”

Rook’s mouth opened and then closed again. There was a moment of stunned silence, which Nova took advantage of to move past them, pushing between Rook and Kiska, who stood as though their boots were magnetized to the floor, even as Lazlo was pulled past, struggling, the bird following in their wake.

In a low voice, Werran asked Kiska, “You’re sure Korako’s dead?” After all, he and Rook hadn’t heard the mind chorus of dead she’s dead she’s dead, or seen the memory of the knife going into her heart the way Kiska had.

“Very sure,” she replied, chilled to her core.

“Then what was that about?” asked Werran. They all felt as though some fundamental truth had been yanked out from under them, leaving them in free fall.

“She’s lost it,” said Rook. “Did you see her eyes? That’s madness.”

“It’s grief,” said Kiska. “It’s shock.”

“It’s kidnapping,” said Werran. “It’s slavery.”

“I know,” she said, and they followed Nova down the passage.

There was a surreal familiarity to the route. They came to the crossing of passages, and they all stopped in their tracks, hit by the same memory at the same moment. They had all three followed Korako this way. The nursery was to the left. Kiska had the strangest feeling that if she went that way, she would find it all exactly as it had been on that long-ago day when Minya had screamed and tried to stop Korako from taking her away.

It shamed her that she had said and done nothing on Minya’s behalf when Nova took her away. “This isn’t right,” she said.

They went through a door into a large room with a dining table at its center. The far wall was an arcade of archways open to a garden. The metal was almost entirely covered in a profusion of flowers and vines. There was a large chair at the head of the table. Nova pulled it back and sat, her arms on the armrests as though she were trying on some new role. She was already pirate queen of the Devourer. Now she was captain of an avenging angel that no force in the Continuum could stop.

Lazlo was still suspended in the air, and he was still struggling. Seeing Nova in Minya’s chair, he thought, was almost too neat: one foe sliding into another’s place. The game board was even sitting there, but all the pieces had fallen off and scattered across the floor, and in Lazlo’s state of extremis, that seemed to say everything. When this game was over, would anyone be left standing?

“I won’t help you,” he told her, and there was venom in his own voice.

She turned to him, but her face was tired, incurious. He knew she didn’t understand him, but he spoke anyway, because threats and promises were all he had. “Whatever you plan to do, whatever you mean to use me for, you’ll fail.” There was a new darkness in him, as though a root of his soul had tapped down into a hidden pool of poison and drunk, tainting him with vengeance, and a will to do violence that he had never known before.

She had kept him from keeping his promise to Sarai, and it felt as though, in so doing, Nova had remade him into a shadow version of himself. “You’ll slip up,” he said, “and I’ll be ready, and I’ll take back my power and make you pay.”

In response, with a flick of her wrist, she sent up a spray of mesarthium from the floor, and met it with a spray from above. The two fused in the middle and formed, in an instant, a cage all the way around him. It shoved at his legs, and pushed down his head as it shrank, closing him in. It was so small. He couldn’t even sit up in it, and his legs, already bruised from his earlier attempts to free them, were torqued back against his body. He let out a roar of pain.

“Stop!” cried Kiska, taking a few frantic steps toward them. “Nova, he’s not our enemy. He’s like us.”

The gaze Nova turned to her stopped her in her tracks. It was dark with suspicion, as though she were just now seeing them for who they truly were. “My enemies are your enemies,” she said.

“He’s not—” Kiska started, but Nova cut her off.

“You’re not going to stop me from finding her. No one’s ever going to stop me again.”

It was more than Kiska could bear. She said, in distress, her voice rich with empathy, “Nova, Kora’s dead.”

The word dead possessed the air. For an instant Kiska beheld the same bottomless anguish that Sarai had seen in Nova’s eyes, and then it was gone, and there was only wrath.

And the wrath exploded.

Chapter 57

Awe, Elation, Horror

“I wish we had the dragon,” said Ruza, clutching the safety rail of the silk sleigh, and not sounding quite as unflappable as one might hope one’s warrior escort to sound.

“I’d even take the winged horse,” said Thyon, likewise clinging. Both were remembering the mesarthium beasts Lazlo had quickened to fly Eril-Fane, Azareen, and Suheyla up to the citadel. They seemed a much sturdier method of transport just now than this contraption of silk and gas rocked by every breeze.

The city was very far below, this aerial perspective supremely new. Weep’s domes and byways made patterns that could not have been guessed at from below, and the devastation of the ripped-up anchors was clear to see. It would have been fascinating if it weren’t so terrifying.

In one sleigh, the negligible weight of Sarai, Minya, and Sparrow— a ghost, a stick-child, and an underfed sixteen-year-old—was offset by Thyon and Ruza. In the other, Feral and Ruby shared with Calixte and Tzara. Sarai and Feral were the primary pilots, though Ruby and Sparrow could each step in if needed. They’d practiced in the pavilion, learning how to operate the outflow valves and, when it came time to descend, release the ulola gas and slowly deflate the pontoons.

The trouble would come in getting back again—if the worst happened and they failed to achieve their aim of reclaiming both Lazlo and their home. (Well, they were all mindful that this was not the very worst that could happen, but they did not speak those other scenarios aloud.) Once the ulola gas was released, which it would have to be for them to descend, the craft would be unable to re-ascend. It was an imperfect device.

They had one advantage that humans would not, and that advantage was Sparrow. Ozwin had given her some ulola seedlings to take with them. If it came to it, she could cultivate them as only she could—with unnatural speed—and essentially grow more gas for a return journey. It was a last resort, but not one Sarai wished to consider, because if it came to that, it would mean Lazlo was lost, and she could not bear the possibility.

With the citadel gone from Weep’s sky, it was not easy to guess precisely where the floating orb had been, and the warp had been hard enough to spot when they knew just where it was. That, combined with their novice flight skills, made for a fraught several hours of flying in circles.

“On the upside,” said Sarai, trying to contain her growing frustration, “I’m really learning how to maneuver this thing.”

It was Ruby who finally spotted it—the quirk in the fabric of the air—and as they circled over to it, the godspawn found their anxiety somewhat alleviated by their anticipation of the humans’—and Minya’s—reactions to what they were about to see. Even under dire circumstances, there is a unique pleasure in introducing the bizarre and inconceivable to others.

Ruby did the honors. As Feral brought the craft near, she reached out to the vague, dreamy line in the air and, as Lazlo had, grasped its edges and tugged it open.

The ensuing silence was the sound of two warriors, an alchemist, an acrobat, and Minya forgetting how to breathe. It was short-lived. Calixte shattered it with an exclamation. The words were in her language and thus unintelligible, but they were clearly profane, and captured the mood perfectly: awe, elation, horror.

They saw into the other world.

To their immense relief, the citadel was visible in the middle distance. It had been twisted into a nightmare version of itself. In Weep, the seraph had stood upright, arms outstretched in a pose of supplication. Here, it was hunched and contorted, as though it were cowering under the low gray sky, afraid to stand upright lest the mist enshroud it. Its wings, which had been elegant, were ragged, and the ridges of its spine stood out sharply on its gaunt, warped back. Its arms were wrapped around itself, as though it were cold or afraid, and its face, which had, before, been placid, was a rictus of rage, eyes tight shut, mouth open in a scream.

“That bodes well,” said Feral, deadpan.

“What’s she done to it?” demanded Ruby.

They all felt the same protective anger—as though the citadel were alive, and the stranger who’d stolen it had harmed or frightened it.