City of Miracles

10. A Road in the Air

Ivanya Restroyka cocks an eyebrow as she takes an enormous drag from her cigarette. “So,” she says slowly. “You’ve…already been there, you say.”

“I know it sounds mad,” Sigrud says.

Taty and Ivanya say nothing. They just watch him. His rickety wooden chair creaks as he leans forward, rubbing his face. He’s done this many times before—returning to tell a case officer a wild story about what happened on the front lines—but it seems peculiarly difficult to pull it off right now. Probably because this story is particularly wild.

And particularly dangerous. It was impossible to explain his almost immediate return without referencing the Divine—which meant discussing Malwina, which then meant revealing Shara’s involvement with the Divine to Taty. He didn’t tell the girl everything, of course—he certainly didn’t tell her that Nokov was targeting Continental orphans who were secretly Divine, or the girl’s own extreme similarity to Malwina—but he had to tell her something.

He’d expected the girl to react violently, yet she sat there, blinking slowly, absorbing it all but not saying a word. She still hasn’t said a word since he started talking. For some reason her stillness feels worse than any amount of rage.

“It doesn’t just sound mad,” says Ivanya. “It sounds madder than mad. All of it does.”

“I know,” says Sigrud. “I know it feels like I walked out the door just an hour ag—”

“But it doesn’t feel like that,” says Ivanya. “That’s what happened.”

“I knew when I came to you both,” he says forcefully, “that we were playing with forces that were greater than ourselves. But now I am starting to get some idea of how great.”

“Yes, great enough to…I don’t know, stitch two moments together like pieces of cloth….” Ivanya laughs dully. The sound is animated in the air by the smoke from her lips. “I’m so happy to have the Divine as an ally.”

“An ally…” says Taty softly.

The two of them glance at her uncertainly. Those are the first words she’s spoken in a good while.

“Yes,” says Sigrud reluctantly. “An ally.”

“I see,” says Taty. She sits up a little. “And…and when, exactly, were you going to tell me about that? It’s one thing to find out your mother used to be some kind of intelligence agent, quite another to find out she was assassinated by a god!”

“A god who’s also after us,” says Ivanya.

“Yes,” says Sigrud, trying to change the subject. “We cannot stay here any longer.”

“And your Divine little friend—she says we need to get to Bulikov to escape him?” asks Ivanya.

“In five days,” he says. “Yes.”

“That’s not much time,” says Ivanya. “That’s no time, really. The only thing I’d trust to get us there is the express train.”

“How long does that take?” asks Sigrud.

“Four days, if the weather is decent. Which, it being the Continent in autumn, it likely won’t be.”

“Then we shall have to hope for five, and that will have to do.”

“Are you hearing yourselves?” says Taty, horrified. “Discussing train timetables like you’re planning for a holiday? You’re insane. You’re all insane! If any of this is true, then you’ve…” She shakes her head as she struggles with it. He can tell she doesn’t want to believe it, but he can also tell that she does. “You’ve been hiding things from me all along! The whole damned world’s been hiding things from me all along!”

“Taty,” says Sigrud. “I know it is a lot, but—”

“A lot?” says Taty. “A lot? You…You knew who’d killed my mother and didn’t tell me! You knew who was out to kill me, and you didn’t even tell me that! What kind of a person are you?”

“What good would it have done?” says Sigrud. “What could you do, besides sit up sleepless and anxious every night and every day? You will know what you need to kn—”

“I’m not your damned secret agent!” says Taty. She stands and sticks her finger out at him. “You don’t feed me only the information that I need! I didn’t opt into this, I didn’t ask for it, and you’ve no right to treat me like I did! There’s still more that you aren’t telling me, I can feel it. Both of you. The way you look at each other, the way you say things…”

Ivanya does a good job of not glancing at Sigrud, though she is trying very hard to smoke a cigarette that’s now mostly ash.

“Taty…” says Sigrud.

“The way I see it,” says Taty, stepping closer to Sigrud, “you need to get me on that express train very quick indeed. But what if I don’t go? What if I refuse to leave? What then, eh?”

“I was ordered to protect you,” he says, bristling. “Not to keep you comfortable. I can throw you in a trunk and drag you along if I need to.”

“And what gives you the right?” says Taty. “Why should you get to tell us what to do?”

“Because I’ve survived!” says Sigrud. “I’m still around to be here for you! You may not like what I do, and I might not like it either, but it works!”

“Does it?” says Taty. “It didn’t work for Mother! Who else has it failed? Who else has it let down?”

“That is why I’ve been training you!” says Sigrud, shouting so loud his side hurts. “That’s why I’ve been showing you how to defend yourself!”

“What do you mean?” says Taty.

“I…I am showing you so when the time comes, you will know what to do, and you won’t wind up like…”

Sigrud stops, startled, and trails off.

The silence stretches on. Ivanya and Taty watch him, tense.

“Like who?” says Taty.

Sigrud slowly sits back in his chair.

“Like who, Sigrud?” says Taty, now genuinely puzzled.

He blinks and looks down at his hands. They’re trembling. Little white half-moons are fading on his palms—indentations from where his fingernails were digging into his flesh.

Sigrud swallows. He stares into the table for a long, long time. Neither of the women move.

He quietly says, “You…You are right.”

The two women look at each other. “Who is?” says Ivanya.

“Taty.” His voice is strained and hoarse. “I should not play games, or keep secrets. I should not…hide from you.” He looks at her balefully. “The Divine children have been hiding for many years among Continental orphans. Many of them did not even know they were Divine. Our enemy has been killing them one by one. And he thinks you are one such child.”

Taty stares at him. She looks back at Ivanya, who walks to the kitchen, takes out a teacup, and promptly fills it to the brim with potato wine.

“He does?” asks Taty, bewildered.

Sigrud nods.

“So…he thinks that I’m…I’m Divine?”

He nods again.

Ivanya downs the potato wine in a single gulp.

Taty laughs—a single, short sound of scornful disbelief. “You’re joking.”

He shakes his head.

“What, he thinks I have magic powers? He thinks I can fly, or…or walk through walls?”

“I do not know what he thinks you can do,” says Sigrud. “Only what he thinks you are.”

“And why does he think that?”

“Because…Because you bear a very strong resemblance to the girl I met at the shipwreck.”

“What, this Malwina girl?”

He nods.

“Oh, so because I look like a girl, I must be like her?” she says. “Is that it?”

“She denied it too,” says Sigrud. “But her opinion does not matter. Nor does mine, or yours. Only his, and what he plans to do about it.”

“Which is…what? Eat me up? Like a creature from an old story?”

“Something like that.”

She laughs again and slowly sits back down. “Unbelievable. It’s all so stupid. All so bloody stupid.”

“Do you see why I did not wish to tell you?” asks Sigrud. “Did you see that I didn’t want to scare you, to—”

“Scared?” says Taty, her cheeks coloring. “Scared? I’m not scared, Sigrud!”

“Then…what?” says Ivanya.

“I’m…I’m angry!” says Taty. “I’m angry that…that all this happened over such a stupid idea! Such a stupid, ridiculous, nonsense idea! The idea that I could…That I could do more, that I could be more, or that I could ever want to be more! Do you know what I want? Do you know what I really want right now?”

“No,” says Sigrud.

“I want to go home,” says Taty. Her eyes fill with tears, but her words are firm. “I want to go home, and sit at the breakfast table with my mother, and read the newspaper with her. Right now, there is nothing in the world I can think of, no magic power or fantastical afterlife, that could ever be any better than that. I want my life to be normal again. I liked being normal. And if I had any Divine powers, I would…I would put all of them toward getting that back.” She sits in silence. “But it’s not coming back, is it.”

“No,” says Sigrud.

“And now we have to run again?”

“Yes.”

Another miserable laugh. “Do you know what it’s like, to lose everything in an instant?” Taty asks. “To lose normal overnight?”

“Yes,” says Sigrud.

“Yes,” says Ivanya.

Taty blinks tears away and looks at them both. “You…You do?”

Ivanya walks over, sits opposite her, and sighs deeply. “Yes, dear. Us and many, many others.”

“But…How do you do it?” asks Taty, sniffling. “How did you just…just keep going?”

“We can try to show you,” says Sigrud. He stands and walks over to her. “But first, Taty, we need to move. Quickly.”

He holds his hand out to her. She looks at it for a moment, then reaches out and takes it.

Ivanya opens the trunk, showing him where the clothes hangers can hook on, the little drawers where the shoes can be stored. “Looks normal, yes?” she says.

“Yes?” says Sigrud.

“But…” She reaches into the back, undoes some clasp, and the entire back of the trunk opens up, revealing a hidden compartment that is obviously meant to store firearms. “See? There we go. It’s got capacity for two long riflings, broken down, maybe a scatter-gun, and probably three to four pistols. We need to secure them with these ties here, so they don’t rattle….”

Sigrud nods, impressed. “Sometimes you give me pause, Ivanya Restroyka. It’s like you were preparing for an invasion.”

“Oh, and what happened in Voortyashtan wasn’t an invasion? When all those Divine soldiers almost rowed ashore and started slaughtering everyone?”

“Fair point.” He points at two smaller clasps in the back of the trunk. “What are those for? Blades? Rapiers?”

“Yes,” says Ivanya with a sniff. “Do you know, I’m actually much better with a sword than I am with a firearm? Fencing is a time-honored ladies’ sport in Bulikov. Mother drilled me quite mercilessly in the art. But, like everything Bulikovian, it’s hopelessly out of date. Only a fool goes to battle with a sword these days.”

She walks around her bed to her chest of drawers. Ivanya Restroyka’s bedroom, much like Ivanya herself, is bare, stark, and economical, only possessing enough to do what is necessary. He regularly forgets he’s in the room with the richest woman on the Continent. “I’d take a damned cannon to Bulikov if I could,” she says, opening up her drawers and pulling out clothes. “I have a house there, but I never use it. Used to be Vo’s, just like a quarter of the damned city. I can’t stand to be within those walls anymore. But I suppose I’ll have to try.”

“I have heard the city has changed.”

“Oh, it’s changed. Just like everything else, Bulikov’s changed as well. But…Ah.” She reaches into one drawer and takes out a slender, sparkling black dress. She unfolds it and holds it up to the light. It’s old and lined, but still beautiful, a relic of some past era of her life. She smiles at it, a sad, wistful expression, then holds it up to herself, pressing it against her wiry frame. “Think it still fits?”

Sigrud looks at Ivanya Restroyka. He takes in her lean, hard face, her neck long and smooth, her eyes bright and brittle like flint. “I do, actually,” he says.

“Shows a lot of shoulder. Shoulders that probably aren’t much to look at after a few years spent out here.” She sighs, perhaps remembering better days, then slowly places it back in the drawer. “Bulikov might have changed, Sigrud, but like so many things, it can’t forget what’s happened to it. It is still what it was. And that can’t change. So I shall step lightly.”

“I see,” says Sigrud quietly.

“Do you have any clothes?”

“Not beyond what I packed for the sea voyage,” says Sigrud. “And that will have to do.”

Taty walks to the door with a suitcase at her side. She’s dressed absurdly, like a schoolgirl dressed for a trip to the mountains during holiday, but Sigrud refrains from commenting on this. “It feels mad to be going to Bulikov on a whim like this,” she says. “The oldest city in the world…And we have to get there in five days?”

“Yes,” says Sigrud.

She scratches her chin. “Well, I’ve been thinking about that….Why not take the aero-tram?”

He frowns. “The…The what?”

Ivanya scoffs as she packs her trunk. “I said the express was the only thing I trusted. And I do not trust that…contraption.”

“It’s not a contraption,” says Taty. “I read all the financing papers on it. It’s an engineering marvel! Why not take that? It can get us there in three days in any weather at all!”

“Because it’s madness!” says Ivanya.

Taty sighs heavily. “Auntie Ivanya simply doesn’t trust progress. I keep telling her that Bulikov’s different—and she ought to know, since she’s financing a lot of what’s new!”

“I can hope a thing has changed,” snaps Ivanya, “while still not believing it has!”

Sigrud holds up a hand. “What is this? This…aero-tram?”

“You don’t know?” says Ivanya. “It’s the biggest thing to happen to the Continent this decade, for better or worse.” She slams a drawer shut. “In my opinion, the latter.”

Taty waves a dismissive hand at Ivanya. “Have you ever been mountain skiing, Sigrud? You know the lifts they use to get people up the mountain? Well, it’s like that, but done on a massive scale, going straight to Bulikov over the mountains. And it departs from the very same station that all the major trains use.”

He scratches his head. “They have…a big ski lift that carries people to Bulikov?”

“Basically, yes,” says Ivanya. “I’ve heard the toilets are a nightmare.”

“It’s a lot easier to mount towers on mountains than it is to blast a tunnel through them for trains,” says Taty. “And though we had rails around the hard part of the Tarsils, connecting Ahanashtan to Bulikov, no one had a direct route in between. That’s when someone proposed the aero-tram. It’s like the railroad but hundreds of feet above the ground, with cars holding twenty, thirty people running along huge cables!”

“It’s very popular,” says Ivanya in a tone that suggests she feels quite the opposite.

“It is,” says Taty. “It’d get us there in three days flat. It was partially designed by SDC, so it’s about as reliable as anything.”

Sigrud is quiet for a while. “SDC? The Southern Dreyling Company?”

“What else?” asks Taty.

He thinks for a moment. He remembers going to his daughter’s workroom in Voortyashtan, the giant loft filled with blueprints of all the things she’d ever designed, most of them unbuilt.

Could this have been among them? Is this strange machine Ivanya and Tatyana are describing something Signe dreamed up when she was alive?

He shakes himself, returning to the subject. “So we would be dangling from a little train car,” he says, “hundreds of feet above the ground. For three days.”

“Yes,” says Taty.

A pause.

“Ah,” says Sigrud. “No.”

“No to what?” says Taty.

“To all of it. To everything you just said.”

Her shoulders slump. “But it’d be so much faster….”

“No. The train we know. We will take the express.”

“If we can even get into the train station,” says Ivanya, snapping up the trunk. “If this enemy of ours is as clever as you say, Sigrud—surely he’ll be wise enough to watch the station?”

Sigrud frowns, for this has been something that’s concerned him since he met Malwina. “How many firearms fit in that trunk?”

“Six total.”

“Good. Choose carefully. Because we may need them.”

They arrive at the train station at 0500 the next day, before dawn. Ivanya and Tatyana are yawning and rubbing sleep from their eyes. There’s barely any light to see by. Sigrud slouches low in the auto, looking at the gates, the doors, the glass roof of the giant train station. It’s a madhouse even at this hour as Ahanashtanis come pouring in, caps clapped to their heads, valises and briefcases and packs clutched tight. He grimaces as he watches their silhouettes sprint through the turnstiles. Any one of them could be one of Nokov’s, he thinks.

But does Nokov have an army? Sigrud strongly suspects he doesn’t. The Saypuri Military, and the intelligence industry that’s grown up around it, are quite a lot of things, but Continental collaborators and saboteurs…that’s a stretch. It seems more likely that Nokov has but a handful of active agents operating from within the Ministry. Not enough to watch every road and train station on the Continent—so perhaps the madhouse ahead will be safe.

He looks north, to where the…thing begins. He’s never seen such a machine before in his life. He has no real word for what he’s seeing, though he supposes “aero-tram” will have to do. He remembers he saw it from the train when he first came to Ahanashtan—when was that? It must have been mere days ago but it now feels like years—and at the time he thought it was some kind of electric utility pole, only far, far too tall.

But now he hears the engines whirring and grinding, and he watches as the thick cables haul a bronzed, egg-shaped capsule into the air, the windows glowing with cheerful yellow light. The capsule shrinks as it climbs until the windows are indistinguishable from the stars still visible in the sky, except that these little pinpricks of light begin slowly crawling north.

Sigrud starts to think up a backup plan, just in case. It’s a very bad backup plan. But it’s better to have a bad one than no one at all.

“You’re sure we have the tickets for the express train?” he asks.

“Yes,” says Ivanya. “There are some benefits to being rich. We’ve got the whole cabin to ourselves. It departs at 0730, as always.”

“We’ll be going in during rush hour,” says Sigrud. “We want to be as difficult to spot as possible. So we have a bit to wait. Be on the lookout for a Saypuri woman of about forty, with yellow eyes.”

“Is she…Divine?” asks Taty.

“No. I get the impression that she is our enemy’s lieutenant. And I am almost positive she is stationed here in Ahanashtan. If anyone is here, it will be her.”

Two hours later they pull into the train station garage and step out of the car. Sigrud is dressed in his usual peacoat and knit cap: the civilized world has grown accustomed to the sight of Dreylings in sea laborers’ wear, though he keeps black gloves on, to hide his scar. Ivanya, however, is dressed like a Continental businesswoman, with a stern black skirt and a high gray jacket, and a sharp-brimmed hat perfectly perched atop her pinned-back hair. It’s a terrific change of pace from her usual attire, which is about as fancy as a bandsaw. Taty is dressed in similarly formal wear, though she’s been given a clipboard and a large leather bag—clearly the harried young assistant to this reputable businesswoman.

“The station has two floors,” says Ivanya as she arranges herself, “and the concourse is usually very well trafficked, with big crowds. Or, at least it used to be. I haven’t been here in years.”

Sigrud eyes the doors. “You both walk ahead of me. I’ll stay behind surveying the area. If something goes wrong—anything—wipe your nose and drop a handkerchief. All right?”

“All right,” say Taty and Ivanya at the same time.

Together they walk toward the station. Sigrud drops back, hauling the weapon-filled steamer trunk, and watches as the two women enter the door. He waits ninety seconds, then follows, entering the station.

Heat and smoke and noise. The Ahanashtani train station is a long, thin, busy structure, with two floors: restaurants and shops up top, and train platforms below. The tunnels are dim with smoke, and the concourse at first appears to be just a sea of hats, dark hats and white hats and gray hats, surging back and forth like schools of fish. He spies Taty and Ivanya in the crowd and lumbers ahead to keep up with them.

As they move, Sigrud keeps his eyes open. He sees many people, all nondescript, and a few Ahanashtani police officers—these he is especially mindful of—yet he sees no one looking, no one watching, no one quietly surveying the concourse. He wonders if his skills have faded, but he doesn’t think so: he cannot help but feel that they are alone, safe, and unwatched.

That’s not right, thinks Sigrud. Could it be this easy?

They continue on. A conductor whistles loudly, and a crowd of passengers streams toward one open train door and slowly congeals into a messy line. The express platform is somewhere up ahead, but he can’t see it yet. It feels like the journey through the station is taking an eternity. He keeps watching for hostile movement, yet none comes.

Perhaps we’re not important, thinks Sigrud. Perhaps we don’t matter. Perhaps Nokov has better things to attend t—

Taty and Ivanya have stopped on the concourse. Sigrud watches as Taty bows her head, wipes her nose, and a small, flittering handkerchief falls to the floor.

Something’s wrong.

Sigrud rolls the giant trunk over to a small wooden bench beside them, where he sits and pretends to examine his shoelaces. “What’s wrong?” he says quietly.

Taty’s eyes are terrified, while Ivanya’s are simply confused. Then Taty, still smiling, says in a quavering voice, “If we get on that train right now, we are all going to die.”

Sigrud pauses, bewildered. He glances at Ivanya, who gives the tiniest of shrugs. “What?” he says.

Taty gives a nervous laugh and says, “If we get on the express train to Bulikov, we will die. All of us.”

“What do you mean? I haven’t seen a tail yet.”

“Because we’ve already been spotted,” says Taty.

“You think we a—”

“Look across the concourse, northwest. Then look up. Up above the shops on the second floor. As if there’s a third floor, a hidden floor. Look. Look for the mirror.”

Sigrud casts a quick glance northwest…

And sees it. It’s a small mirror, smaller than your average window, mounted in the brick wall about eight feet above the shops.

“A two-way mirror?” says Ivanya.

“It must be,” says Sigrud. “A security office, perhaps.”

“And that’s where she is,” says Taty. “The woman with the yellow eyes.”

“Are…Are you sure, dear?” says Ivanya. “How can you know this?”

“I just know,” says Taty. Panic leaks into her voice. “I just know!”

“How will she kill us?” says Sigrud.

“She’ll get on the train car behind us,” says Taty. “Then she’ll wait two days to do it because there’s a snowstorm. On the third day she’ll use some kind of device….Something that throws explosives. She’ll shoot at our car and stick explosives to us, then detach us from the rest of the train and blow it off the tracks. Us and everyone caught with us.” Her voice shivers. “It takes you longer to die, Sigrud. The car smashes into the mountain slope and most of us die on impact. But you die with the snow around you turning bright red from your blood…Cherry red.” She shuts her eyes. “And your last thoughts are of the sea.”

“How do you know this?” asks Ivanya. She’s starting to sound terrified.

“I don’t know,” says Taty. “It was like I could smell it in the air….And then I just knew.”

The three of them fidget in silence for a moment, trying halfheartedly to maintain their various charades.

“What do we do?” asks Ivanya. “Do you believe her?”

“It…It seems impossible,” says Sigrud.

“I know,” says Taty. She sounds like she’s on the verge of tears. “But it’s true. I swear it’s true. I don’t know how, but it is.”

“Do you believe her, though?” asks Ivanya.

Sigrud remembers Taty sitting on the porch, knees clutched to her chest. I dreamed you’d come back far sooner than we expected. Than you expected, even. It would be as if you hadn’t even left….

And she’d been right. He hadn’t thought of it until now, but somehow, impossibly, Taty had known what would happen.

“I…I believe she believes it,” says Sigrud. “And I think that something is wrong. I think this is a feint, a trap. There is no one looking for us.” He glances up at the mirror in the wall. “Because we’ve already been found.”

“So now what?” says Ivanya. “We don’t exactly have a backup plan for getting to Bulikov in five days.”

“I…think we do.” He sighs deeply and looks at Taty. “I suppose all those finance papers you read wouldn’t have told us if the aero-tram has any tighter security, would it?”

“The aero-tram?” says Ivanya, aghast. “You really want to try that?”

“It’s almost impossible for someone to just swoop in and nab a ticket for that!” says Taty.

“I suspected so,” says Sigrud. “A very good thing, then, that we happen to have a millionaire in our midst.”

Kavitha Mishra narrows her eyes as she watches from behind the mirror. Something’s definitely wrong. Restroyka, the Komayd girl, and the dauvkind have all stopped on the concourse and are conferring with one another. Which shouldn’t be happening.

She looks back at her four officers. They’re all waiting in the back hallway of the security office, ready for her orders. One raises an eyebrow, as if wondering if they need to move.

“What in the hells,” she mutters, turning back to the concourse. “What in the hells…”

“Problem, ma’am?” says the train station security chief behind her. He’s a Continental, and is far too interested for his own good.

“Yes,” she snaps. “But not one of your concern!”

“Oh, ah…Sorry.” He turns away, and she’s glad of it: she’s been allowed to commandeer the office here solely through her Ministry credentials, but she doesn’t need any more attention than this. She definitely doesn’t want the train station security officers trying to stage an arrest: knowing the dauvkind, that would get messy fast, and messiness attracts eyes. If someone finds out that Ministry officers or even station security officers were trying to arrest Ivanya Restroyka and the daughter of Komayd, it’d be sure to cause a stir.

It was pure luck that they caught it. Mishra had told all of her sources to watch every communication going into or out of the Ahanashtani train station—and one just happened to come through late last night, purchasing an entire train car. Mishra had reached out to a few of her Ministry contacts, who assumed she was working a case, and traced it back to the tiny, sheep shit–spattered town of Dhorenave. Which had one very famous yet reclusive resident.

Mishra frowns as she watches Restroyka listen to the dauvkind. Her contacts had long suspected that Restroyka was somehow connected to Komayd’s “charity” networks, but they’d never been able to prove anything. Because Komayd had been good. Surprisingly good.

But all this is quite bad for Mishra. She doesn’t like the dauvkind having a damned real-estate tycoon on his side. It’s a lot easier to hunt desperate people, and that much wealth can keep desperation at bay for a long, long time.

She watches the three of them talk. They’re spooked.

Without thinking about it, Kavitha Mishra pats her right pocket. The small silver box is still there, and inside that, she knows, is a little, tiny black pearl…

Only use it if it’s an emergency, he told her. Only if everything is at risk.

And things aren’t at risk yet, but she’s worried.

Suddenly there’s movement: Restroyka and the Komayd girl turn and go north. Fast. The dauvkind, however, stays behind, standing next to the big steamer trunk. He turns and looks up, staring directly at the mirror with a grim, implacable look on his face.

Mishra looks at the two departing women, then back at the dauvkind. He’s still looking up, looking right at her.

Does he know I’m here? Does he…Does he see me?

She hesitates. Restroyka and the Komayd girl aren’t going for the train platforms, she sees, but going north, far north, to the…

“Shit,” says Mishra. “They’re going toward the fucking aero-tram!”

“What’s that, ma’am?” asks Nashal, one of her officers.

“Let me think,” she snaps.

This wasn’t at all what she expected—they bought out a damn train car, not an aero-tram ticket! The aero-tram is, unfortunately, pretty damned exclusive. She could maybe commandeer one of the cars, but doing so would raise a lot of questions back in Ghaladesh, and piss off a couple dozen very wealthy Continentals.

It’d ruin me to do that, thinks Mishra. I’d be blown. Ghaladesh would know right away something was amiss.

She debates going downstairs and stopping Restroyka and Komayd. Yet the dauvkind is still staring up at her with that grim expression on his face.

His meaning is painfully clear to her: Come downstairs, and things will get violent.

Which is not what Mishra needs right now.

“How the fuck did he know,” she whispers.

Then, finally, the dauvkind turns and strides away—but he’s stayed long enough to give Restroyka and Komayd a good lead.

“Hurry!” Mishra says to her team. “Downstairs, to the aero-tram platform! Now!”

“The aero-tram platform?” asks Nashal, bewildered.

“They’ve changed something up! They know they’ve been made! Hurry!”

“How in the hells are we going to get on that?” he asks.

“I’m going to have to pull rank,” says Mishra through gritted teeth.

The team turns and starts off downstairs. “That’s a lot of rank to pull,” Nashal says.

“We don’t have a choice!” says Mishra.

As she follows them out the door, she grabs the big, heavy briefcase in the corner. Inside this is a relatively new Ministry creation, a device that hurls an adhesive mine several hundred yards. Of course, the Ministry can’t publicly avow that it has created and is deploying such a device in the field—it is, obviously, a weapon system used specifically for sabotage, and the public feels very negatively about such things—but it should do well in this situation, with all these trams and trains and whatnot, all very big with such delicate connection points.

Make it look like an accident, he told Mishra. The girl will survive. I know she will, she just will. And when she does, capture her. And bring her to me.

Mishra, grunting with the weight of the briefcase, runs downstairs.

“I will have you know,” says Ivanya indignantly as she rejoins them in line for the aero-tram, “that I have never bribed anyone in my life.” She hands them their tickets.

“There is a first time for everything,” says Sigrud.

“How much did you have to give them?” asks Taty, looking at hers.

Ivanya says a number.

“Wow,” says Taty.

“Wow,” says Sigrud, who has never thought of money in such sums before.

“Yes, so it had better be a damn pleasant ride!” says Ivanya. “It was some commercial banker and his family who thought the tram would make a fun jaunt across the Tarsils. The rich, it turns out, are very, very expensive to pay off. Apparently we’ll be in the Jade Cabin—so we’ll be alone for the journey.”

“Hopefully very alone,” says Sigrud, looking backward through the crowd. The golden-eyed woman is nowhere to be seen. Hopefully their last-minute gambit paid off.

The line’s moving again. The three of them shuffle forward, Sigrud hauling the big trunk up the ramp to the aero-tram platform. The cold morning air slaps his cheeks, and he finally gets to see the vessel they’ll be spending the next three days on.

The aero-tram car is like a giant, long, bronzed egg, with a fat glass bubble or dome in the top, some kind of viewing room for passengers or perhaps the crew to see forward and backward. Above this dome is a large frame, sprouting up to cling to a thick cable running above the car. Within the frame, Sigrud sees, are a dozen or so wheels, which currently aren’t rotating. A second frame is below the tram car, clinging to a bottom cable. The whole thing is about seventy-five feet long and twelve feet wide at its thickest point, about the size of a small ship.

But how will it perform in the air? Sigrud knows he has an unusually specific experience in this: he has piloted a watercraft through the air before, in Bulikov—but that one was buoyed by miracles. What is in front of him is very loud, very heavy, yet also very fragile—and not at all miraculous.

“It’s amazing, isn’t it?” says Taty, her voice hushed with awe. “It’s amazing….”

“It’s something, all right,” says Ivanya. She stares at the tram car as if it were a large, threatening dog.

Sigrud watches as two mechanics open up a large hatch at the back of the tram car using a wrench, which they then store away in a bag of tools. One of the mechanics climbs into the hatch and hooks a hose up to a spigot. They then begin to pump something out of the tram car—human waste, he suspects. After all, the passengers probably can’t just void their bladders out the windows.

The conductor smiles at them and says, “Tickets, please.”

The three of them hand over their astronomically expensive tickets. The conductor takes them, then does a little bow. “Much appreciated! Please take your seats quickly, if you would. We depart in five minutes. No exceptions, I’m afraid—there’s a big storm coming.”

“Will that be an issue for the tram?” asks Ivanya.

“Oh, no, ma’am. The tram’s as steady as a mountain. But it can make getting up on the line a bit longer.”

The three of them thank the conductor, then turn and board the aero-tram car. No one on the platform notices as Sigrud grabs the bag of tools from beside the mechanics as he boards.

The door and interior are, as Sigrud expected, incredibly tiny. The trunk barely fits: people grouse and grumble at him as he hauls it down the tiny aisles, glaring as he mutters “excuse me” and “pardon me.” Finally the three of them stagger through to the private quarters at the very back—the Jade Cabin that Ivanya purchased.

The Jade Cabin is small but relatively opulent, considering the lack of space aboard the tram car. Four berths, wooden walls, bronzed fixtures, electrical lighting, and—perhaps most important—a private toilet, which he examines carefully, thinking.

“Is that it?” asks Taty. “Are we safe?”

Sigrud shuts the door, sets down the stolen bag of tools, and walks over to a porthole on the aft wall of the quarters. Through it he can see the tram platform and the tremendous rotating gears of the massive machine. At first there’s nothing. But then…

The Saypuri woman’s face surfaces in the crowd.

“Shit,” he says.

“What? What is it?” asks Ivanya.

The Saypuri woman doesn’t move. She just looks at the tram car with a furious expression on her face. Sigrud knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that, at the very least, he’s thoroughly ruined her morning.

“Is that…Is that her?” asks Ivanya.

“Yes,” says Sigrud.

“And she knows we’re on board?”

“Yes.”

“Why isn’t she…Why isn’t she doing anything?”

“She’s waiting for us to depart,” says Sigrud grimly. “So that way she knows we’re trapped on here.”

Someone blows a whistle. There’s a knock at the door, and one of the service crew sticks his head in. “All comfy?” asks the man. “We’re about to start up the line.”

“Very comfy,” says Sigrud.

The crewmember looks at Taty and Ivanya, who are pale with horror. “Ah—are you sure?”

“Yes,” says Sigrud angrily.

“Oh. Uh. All right. Well, you’ll want to take your seat, ladies and gentlemen. It could be a bit bumpy at the start.”

“Thank you,” says Sigrud.

The man leaves, but none of them sit. They keep looking out the window, watching the Saypuri woman. Then there’s a whistle, then a clacking, and the car slowly begins moving forward.

The tram car apparently rides along a belt of some kind before gliding onto the main transport cables. Sigrud can’t see it, but he can feel it when this happens, the entire car shuddering with a heavy clunk. Some people in the passenger areas ahead squeal or laugh. Sigrud stays focused on the Saypuri woman, who, as if on cue, strides forward, pulls out some kind of badge, and begins to talk to the conductor.

“She’s commandeering the tram car behind us,” says Sigrud.

“What?” says Ivanya. “She can do that?”

“Apparently.” He glances sideways at Taty. “They must want us very bad. Because what she is doing now will quickly get back to Ghaladesh, and that woman’s career in the Ministry will almost certainly be over.”

He watches as the Saypuri woman argues with the conductor, but it’s clear she’s going to be the victor. Sigrud waits to see if Taty plans to make any other predictions—perhaps they’ll meet the same fate on the aero-tram as they would have on the express—but she just trembles, pale and terrified, as any young girl would.

“So,” says Ivanya. “Now what?”

Sigrud looks out the aft-facing porthole in their quarters. It’s a terrifically odd view to him: the hills of the southern Tarsils curdle and coil about four hundred feet below him, the rich green growing brown as they enter the steppes. The whole view is vivisected by the huge cables running both above and below them. About every half mile or so they come to another cable support tower, and the car jumps and jostles a little as it goes up the cables, through the towers, and then back down the next section of cable, which seems to arc from tower to tower like drapes of bunting on a mantel. There’s another set of cables and towers about a hundred feet to the east, and sometimes he sees another tram car crawling along them heading south to Ahanashtan. Farther to the southeast he can see dark storm clouds churning, heading their way.

Ivanya is pacing back and forth while Taty sits on her bunk, pale and anxious.“Of all the things that could happen,” says Ivanya. “I never thought…” She stops and looks down. “Wait. Where did you get this bag of tools?”

Sigrud ignores her, squinting as he peers down the cables. He can see the next car a ways behind them, though it’s getting a bit misty and difficult to see. “They have controls in the cars,” he says. “Don’t they?”

“I don’t know,” says Ivanya. “Taty?”

Taty blinks, distracted. “What?”

“How do these damn cars work?” Ivanya asks. “Do they have controls?”

“What? Well, of course,” says Taty. She sounds dazed. “It’s not automatic. If…If a car in front breaks down, the one behind has to slow to a stop.”

“And the cars can speed up as well?” asks Sigrud.

“Well…certainly?”

“Then that’s what she plans to do,” he says. “She’s commandeered her own tram car. Then she will speed up, plant her bomb on our car, slow down so she’s no longer in danger, and detonate it.”

Ivanya’s mouth opens in terror. “Are you…Are you serious?”

“Very.” He kneels in front of Taty and looks into her face. “But she hasn’t done it yet. Nor will she do it soon. And you know why, don’t you Taty?”

Taty cocks an eyebrow. “I…I do?”

“You said we’d be killed on the train,” he says. “But you said she had to wait two days, because of a storm. Very soon we will be in that same storm of which you spoke. Won’t we?”

Taty looks away, disturbed. “How should I know?”

“Didn’t you know what would happen if we took the train?” he asks.

“Well…I…”

“So is this any different? Or were you wrong?”

“I don’t know!” she says. She stands and walks to the window. “I don’t…I don’t understand anything about it! It was like…You know the shell games you see people playing, on the street? Where you have to guess which cup has the ball? It was like watching that, and realizing at the end that you tracked it all along and knew where it would be. But you hadn’t known you were watching.”

Sigrud and Ivanya exchange a glance. None of this metaphor, of course, explains how she knew a woman she had never met was watching them from behind a mirror three floors above them.

“Let’s get back to our possibly imminent deaths,” says Ivanya. “So you think we have two days? Before she blows us and everyone on this tram car to smithereens?”

“I think so,” says Sigrud. He joins Taty at the window. “Those storm clouds will hit us before evening, or I never sailed a day in my life. I think she will wait.”

“So what’s your plan?” she asks. “Exactly how do you plan on preventing our deaths?”

Sigrud watches the cable below as the tram car clanks and cranks up one section of cable to the next cable support tower. The support towers themselves are tall, thin metal frames with a box at the top. Running around the interior of the box is a very small ledge, and on one side is a small platform with a spiral staircase leading down. A place to stop in an emergency and disembark, it seems.

Sigrud thinks.

Within an hour the storm’s upon them. They’ve moved high enough into the mountains that the precipitation is snow rather than rain, the fat white flakes striking the windows and walls, wet, crunchy smacks echoing through the vessel. The visibility outside the tram car grows limited, though Sigrud can see the faint halo of lights behind them as their pursuers trundle down the cables.

“It will get worse tomorrow,” he says, listening to the wind.

“How do you know?” asks Ivanya.

“I just know.”

He listens as they trundle along and pass through each cable support tower. He pulls out his pocket watch and starts timing them. They come to a tower about every twenty minutes, it seems, though it’s a little variable.

Their lunch is sandwiches, served on silver trays. “Very few soups get served,” remarks Ivanya, “in a craft that sways with the wind.”

Taty is grave and silent as she eats. She barely eats. After ten minutes of nibbling, she says, “They’re Saypuris.”

“What, dear?” says Ivanya.

“The people after us. They’re Saypuris. From the Ministry.” She looks at Sigrud. “Isn’t that what you said?”

“It is,” says Sigrud.

“So…correct me if I’m wrong, but…These people are against Mother? Or were against her, I suppose.”

Sigrud finishes his sandwich half, then brushes off his fingers. “Yes.”

“But…why?” asks Taty, perplexed. “I mean, they’re from the same country. Right? She was their prime minister.”

“People often don’t love their rulers, dear,” says Ivanya, sniffing.

“And they loved Shara even less than most,” says Sigrud. He says it thoughtlessly, speaking the plain truth, but he pauses when he sees Taty’s face.

“What do you mean?” she asks, hurt.

“Your mother…Your mother tried to change a lot of things when she was in office,” explains Ivanya. “She thought Saypur was doing many things it shouldn’t, and not doing many things it should. She tried to change that. But this made her the enemy of those in power.”

“But…But couldn’t she just have thrown them out?” asks Taty. “Exiled them? Jailed them? I mean, she was the prime minister!”

“She could have,” admits Sigrud. “Probably. But I think in her early days, Shara thought she could convince people to come to her side. She had just defeated two Divinities, and unseated Vinya Komayd. It looked like things were different. And I think she wanted her government to be different. Vinya was all too happy to persecute those who disagreed with her. Shara did not wish to go down that road. She hoped things would change with her.”

“But change is slow,” says Ivanya. “And painful. And incremental.”

“And those people in the train car behind us,” says Taty slowly. “The yellow-eyed woman, and her friends, and the man who killed Mother…They didn’t change at all. Did they?”

“No,” says Sigrud. “They did not.”

Taty slowly sets her sandwich down. “If she had been more…more like Vinya…If she had been willing to jail or exile the people who opposed her—would my mother still be alive?”

“Who can say, dear?” asks Ivanya sadly. “What’s done is done.”

“But it isn’t done!” says Taty. “It’s still happening! Those people are still trying to undo everything Mother did!”

“That is so,” says Sigrud. “But if your mother had been the sort of person who would have persecuted and oppressed those who opposed her—if she had been the sort of prime minister to root out the very people who pursue us right now, and ruin them—then I very much doubt if she would have also been the sort of person to adopt you, Taty.”

Taty bows her head. “What are you saying?”

“I am saying, I think,” says Sigrud slowly, “that what happened to Shara happened not because she was weak, or lenient. I think it happened because she was Shara. And it could not have gone another way.”

She looks at him, her dark eyes burning. “But you won’t be lenient with them—will you?”

“No,” he says. “I will not.”

“Good,” she says darkly. “They don’t deserve it. If I could, I would…I would…”

There’s a moment of silence. Sigrud watches out of the side of his eye as Taty picks at her sandwich. The girl is grieving, he thinks. Such sentiments are not unusual.

“Before I forget to say this,” says Sigrud. “Eat well, but please do not use the head.”

“I’m sorry—what? The head?” asks Ivanya.

He nods, chewing. “Use the communal one,” he says. “Out in the main cabin. If you have to, that is.”

“Am I allowed to ask why you can dictate which latrine we utilize?” asks Ivanya.

He takes another huge bite. “Do you ever notice where roaches and rats get into your house?”

Taty wrinkles her nose. “I think Mother had people for that….”

“Doors,” says Sigrud. “Windows. But also plumbing. You’ve got to make a lot of room for all the pipes, all the repairs, and so on, and so on. It is a strange thing, pumping pressurized water into a structure. It takes room, which lets lots of unexpected things in or out.”

“So what?” asks Ivanya. “What will be going in or out of our toilet that shouldn’t?”

Another bite. “Me.”

Taty stares at him. “You’re going to flush yourself down our commode.”

“No. I am going to remove the toilet. Then I will open up the hatch they use to vent or pump out the waste tank. Then I will get out of this tram car, onto one of the cable towers, wait, and jump on”—he points southward, in the direction of their pursuers—“that.”

Taty’s mouth is hanging open, agog. “And then you’ll do what?”

He finishes his sandwich and pulls out his pipe. “What I do best.”

Ivanya sets her sandwich down. “You’re going to take out our toilet, climb through the hole onto a tower—however many hundreds of feet above the ground—and just wait for the tram car full of assassins to come your way?”

He lights a match and puffs at his pipe. “Yes.” Then he thinks about it. “I would prefer the toilet go unused, but it is not totally necessary.”

“Could…Could that possibly work?” asks Taty.

“The snowstorm will be intense tomorrow,” he says. “They will not be able to see me there. Nor will they expect someone to try it.”

“Well, I must say that I certainly fucking wouldn’t!” Ivanya says. “Why not just, I don’t know, tell the crew that we’re being pursued by assailants?”

“They’d likely stop at the next available platform tower and pull us off to investigate,” says Sigrud, “and then see that the car behind us is full of Ministry agents—who would then override them, arrest us, and take us somewhere bad, where they would do very bad things to us.”

“How will you get back on?” asks Taty.

He frowns, considering it. “That is not the priority right now. The priority is us and everyone else on this car not dying.”

Ivanya rubs her eyes. “And what are we to do while you’re off in the snowstorm, boarding enemy vessels like some kind of ridiculous aerial pirate?”

“Taty, I would wish to have her hide somewhere safe. For you, Ivanya, well…” He glances at the trunk.

“Well, what?” asks Ivanya.

“What Taty said…She said that the Saypuri woman has a device used to throw bombs.”

“So?” Ivanya says.

“I think I know what kind she’s talking about. I think it throws sticky bombs, adhesive grenades. We used them once to sink ships. You’d float by on a rowing craft and throw the bombs onto the weak parts of the hull, and they’d stick on. They used timers back then, but now they probably use radio transmitters. I expect it’s a device that shoots them forward several hundred feet. Very nasty, very convenient, and very quiet—up until the detonation, of course.”

“Again—so?” asks Ivanya.

“So…You said you had practiced with long riflings.” He puffs at his pipe. “But have you ever practiced clay shooting? Or duck hunting?”

Ivanya pales. “Oh, dear.”

The next day, they get ready.

The snow persists. Great white chunks of it go tumbling off the top of the tram car like lumps of icing. It’s impossible to see it fall very far, though: the flakes are so fat and come so fast that neither of them can see much farther than forty or fifty feet below.

Sigrud spends a lot of his time examining and preparing the head. Using the stolen tools, he unscrews the plates around the base of the toilet and studies the piping underneath. “Should be easy to turn the water off,” he says. “And then disconnect the toilet, and remove it. But the way out through the hull is the hard part….”

“I feel like we’re breaking out of prison,” says Ivanya.

“No,” says Sigrud. “This is easier.” Then he pauses, remembering the altitude. “I think.”

He puts everything back as the crewman brings their lunch—this time, some kind of flat, cheesy bread he likes not at all. Once the man’s gone they shut the door, lock it, and move the trunk in front of it, along with one of the few chairs in the private quarters.

“Ready?” says Sigrud.

“I…suppose so,” says Ivanya.

“Then prep the weapons,” says Sigrud, “while I tend to the toilet.”

It takes less than an hour to completely remove the commode, placing it in the middle of their quarters, but figuring out how to get to the hatch is harder. He lowers himself down into the guts of the tram car, deep in the dark with all the pipes and wiring and clanking machinery. If he turns the wrong screw too much or sits on the wrong plate in the hull, there’s a very good chance he could get dumped out and go tumbling through the air until he smashes into the hills below. He makes an improvised harness out of one of Ivanya’s belts, and lashes himself to one of the sturdier pipes, but that’s no sure thing either.

He feels it first: one back panel of the tram car is burningly cold, as if exposed to the air. He finds the latch for it and realizes it will only open if pulled from the exterior. Grimacing, he pulls out his knife and tears the latch off.

The entire back panel lifts up. Flurries of snowflakes come swirling in at him, and he smells exhaust and the cold sting of winter air. It’s big enough for him to fit through, but only just.

“Success?” shouts Ivanya from above.

He cranes his head down and sees the thick cable streaming along not more than five feet below the hatch. This close, the cable looks about as thick as a tree trunk. The metal appears to have crushed sugar stuck to it, and he realizes it’s actually ice: the cable must be covered in a quarter inch of ice, which gets pulverized and crushed by the wheels of the tram car—but likely not so much that it’s no longer slick and slippery.

He groans. Excellent.

“I said—any success?” shouts Ivanya again.

He looks up through the shaft. “Somewhat.” Then he pats the space next to him. “Here is where you’ll be sitting.”

Her face drops. “Oh, no.”

Sigrud clambers up and out of the shaft where the toilet once was. “I’ll take the pistols,” he said. “And I’ll leave the riflings and the scatter-gun to you. Hopefully you won’t need to use either.”

She looks down into the shaft. “I did not really train on shooting from such confined spaces….”

“Well, if it helps any, just remember that your aim will determine if every man, woman, and child on this tram car lives or dies.”

“It…It certainly doesn’t!” says Ivanya, horrified.

“I’d also suggest putting on some trousers,” says Sigrud. “I do not think you want to wear your evening apparel down there.”

Sigrud goes into the gutted washroom and puts on a number of holsters—two for the pistols, one for his knife—as well as thick leather gloves. Usually he prefers to do any climbing with his bare hands, but then he’s usually handling rock or wood, not ice-slick steel.

Once he steps out of the washroom, Ivanya glances out the window at the cabling. “Would it be rude to say that I am now losing faith in this plan?”

“Yes.”

“All right. Well then, I will reconcile myself with just thinking it very loudly.”

“If this is actually happening right now,” asks Taty, sitting in the corner, “should I go?”

“Yes,” says Sigrud. “Get as close to the other end of the car as possible. Do whatever it takes to stay there. Pretend to sleep, if that helps.”

Taty hesitates, fingers gripping the doorknob behind her.

“Taty?” asks Sigrud.

She says nothing.

“What are you waiting for?” asks Sigrud.

She lowers her eyes. Then she clenches her jaw and says quietly, “You taught me how to shoot.”

“I what?” he says.

“You taught me how to shoot. How to do this, how t—”

“How to do this?” says Sigrud. “No. I do not recall that. What are you asking me, Taty?”

“I can help you,” she says, defiant. “You know I can. I can give you support, just like Auntie.”

Ivanya cringes. “Taty, dear…”

“You know I can!” she says.

“I taught you to shoot, yes,” says Sigrud. “Some. But I also taught you when to shoot. Knowing when to avoid a fight is just as important as knowing how to fight.”

“But I can help you!” says Taty desperately. She walks close and looks up into his face. “Please. Please!”

He looks down, impassive. “No, Taty.”

“But it’s not fair!”

“Not fair? Not fair that you will not be risking life and limb in this ordeal?”

“These…These people took Mother away!” she says, furious. “I am…I am owed the chance!”

“Owed?” Sigrud asks quietly. “You are saying it would be just to spill their blood? It would be equitable? As if being repaid a debt?”

Taty stares about the room as she tries to find the words. “I…I…”

“I have heard many of Shara’s words come tumbling from your lips, Tatyana Komayd,” says Sigrud. “But those are not hers. Shara Komayd would neither say nor think such a thing.”

Taty, fuming, falls silent. Then she takes a breath, swallows, and says, “They deserve it. They do. I wish Mother had jailed them…or executed them! Imagine all the heartache she could have saved with but the deaths of a few.” She shakes her head. “Perhaps the only way to truly clean a slate,” she says furiously, “is with blood.” Then she turns and walks out the cabin door, slamming it behind her.

Sigrud walks over to the toilet shaft, examining his pocket watch. “It’s been sixteen minutes since the last cable tower. Four more to go, thereabouts.”

Ivanya takes a shuddering breath. “Oh my gods. Oh my gods…”

Sigrud puts his watch away. He doesn’t wish to say so, but Taty’s words rattled him. To hear such raw fury pouring out of the girl is disturbing to him. “Let me go first. Then you get situated. You have one advantage: any explosives that come your way will be coming straight along the cable from the car behind us. Nothing from the sides. Keep the scatter-gun trained down the cable, and shoot anything you see coming. If I fall…” He grimaces, knowing this plan is far less likely to work. “If I fall, tell the crew you saw an explosion or something in the tram car behind us. They’ll stop this one and investigate—hopefully.”

“And if I can’t convince them to stop…?”

“Then our enemies will bomb the tram. And you and everyone else will die.”

She pales. “Don’t fall. Yes, because I want you to be safe, but—please, don’t fall.”

He straddles the shaft. “I will keep that in mind.” He looks at her. “Whatever happens, someone must get to the Solda Bridge. You must be there to meet Malwina. She can help you, help Taty, help everyone. But someone must be there. Understand?”

“I understand.”

“Good.” He drops down into the dark.

Sigrud crouches before the open hatch. It’s hard to tell how fast the car is going: the snow erases any sense of perspective, and the cable runs by so quickly it’s like staring into the surface of a streaming river.

He checks his pocket watch. The next tower should be coming up in a handful of minutes. He crouches in the open hatch, knees bent, arms open.

The tram car shudders, quakes. They’re climbing up now, he can feel it.

He wonders how long he’ll have. How quickly will the cable tower go by? Ten seconds? Less?

He can feel the tram car ascending farther. The tower should be coming soon. Very soon, he thinks, very, very soon…

Then he sees it. The massive frame of steel slides by underneath him, with an extremely, extremely narrow platform running around its edge.

Sigrud hesitates. Then he jumps out.

The second he does, he realizes he hesitated too long.

The tower’s already gone. Slipped by far faster than he ever expected. There’s nothing but the cable below.

He falls. Time stretches on for those five feet down to the cable, each second a millennium.

The cable.

His right arm flies out and loops around the cable, like he’s putting the massive metal cord in a headlock. He hits it hard and twists around awkwardly, straining his right shoulder, and he growls with pain. The cable is shaking furiously as the tram car churns away behind him, and he feels his right arm slipping, sliding out from on top of the cable, threatening to send him tumbling down. Sigrud struggles, then manages to link his left hand to his right, locking himself to the frozen cable, which vibrates and thrums wildly as the tram car departs.

The tram car disappears into the snow behind him, its bone-shaking rattle slowly fading. His legs swing freely below, dangling above a swirling white sea of snow. There’s nothing but the wind and the ice now. He grits his teeth, holding tight, but then the cable begins to vibrate again.

Because the next car is now coming, he thinks, and it will very gladly crush you.

Sigrud sets his jaw, then twists around until his body’s underneath the frozen cable. Then he crunches his stomach, lifting his waist up so that he can put his legs around the cable as well, like someone sliding down a pole—only this pole is horizontal, covered in ice, and hanging several hundred feet above the snowy Tarsils. It’s also sloping down, away from the tower, which doesn’t make going up it any easier.

He begins to inch his way back toward the tower, which now seems very far away. His gloves and clothing keep sticking to the ice, so he has to rip them away each time.

The thrumming in the cable grows harder. Soon he can hear the tram car just beyond.

He looks up along the cable, seeing the world upside down. The tower is just ten feet away. The next section of cabling is sloping away from it, but through the swirling snowflakes he can see faint lights climbing its thin, dark form: the lights of the Saypuri woman’s car.

Hurry. Hurry.

He inches up the cable. The tower’s now almost within reach. It’s much skinnier than it looked from the tram car, some kind of engineering feat he would have never imagined. No wonder it seemed to come and go in an instant.

He climbs up to the very edge of the tower. Then he twists himself around until he’s sitting on top of the cable. He sits up, riding it like one would a horse—he wobbles a bit, which makes his heart skip a beat—and gauges how to get onto the ledge and then onto the staircase on the western side without losing his grip or getting smashed by the oncoming tram car.

The lights are brighter now. The tram car is very close.

Just do it.

He falls forward. His fingers find the front rim of the ledge and his grip holds, leaving him dangling off the side of the tower. He knows he can’t go up this side of the platform, as he’d be crushed by the oncoming tram. He’ll need to inch around, to the platform on the western side of the tower. Which won’t be easy, as the tower is just as icy as the cable.

He looks down. There are crisscrossing supports about ten feet below him, but they don’t look like anything he could stand on. He grimaces, reaches out with his left hand, and begins slowly making his way along the edge of the tower to the corner, one handspan at a time.

He comes to the corner and grabs the corner strut. The staircase is only ten feet away now. He hauls himself up until he can lift his feet up to the side edge.

Finally, he thinks, relieved to be able to stand on something. Especially because the tram is less than a hundred feet away by now, and approaching fast.

He tries to push up with his legs, but finds he gravely underestimated how icy the ledge is: the soles of his boots slip and his feet go flying out from underneath him, sending him shooting back down the tower.

He shouts and hugs to the corner strut of the tower platform as he falls. The steel edge of the strut bites into his left bicep, and his feet fruitlessly try to find purchase on the slippery metal. Once again, he’s suspended over a precipitous drop, clinging to an icy piece of metal; but this time the tram car is much, much closer.

His eye widens as the car climbs up the cables toward him. He knows he won’t be able to get onto the platform in time. He’s out of the car’s way, so he won’t be crushed, but it will fly by him, leaving him alone up here on the tower, and be free to move closer to Ivanya and the other passengers.

The tram car slows just a bit as it mounts the last few feet of cabling to the tower. The whole tower is vibrating like the string of a vasha as the giant machine draws closer. He can see its wheels churning, see exhaust pouring out of its undercarriage…

And there, on the underside of the machine, the rungs of a metal ladder—one probably used by service crews to scale the hull.

A huge clank as the tram car finishes mounting the tower. It’s close enough that he can see ice clinging to the metal rungs.

This time, he thinks, do not hesitate.

With another huge clank, the tram car shoots forward, and begins to climb down the next segment of cabling.

Sigrud lifts himself up and shoves off the tower, hand outstretched.

His right fingers catch the rung of the ladder, and he’s jerked forward like a fish caught on a hook.

The next thing he knows, Sigrud is hurtling through the snow, feet swinging wildly below him. His right armpit and shoulder are bright with pain—it feels like the damn thing nearly tore his arm out of its socket. But he holds fast, clinging one-handed to the metal rung on the bottom of the tram car.

Another tram car flies through the snow on the other set of cables, going south to Ahanashtan. He sees children staring out the glass viewing dome at the top. They spot him, this strange man dangling from the bottom of the moving car. One of the boys points, and Sigrud can see him say: Wow!

This, he thinks, is not what I wanted.

Growling, he fights gravity and the wind and the cold, and lifts his left hand up until he can grasp the next rung. He grabs it, his grip holds, and he hauls himself up. When he’s four rungs up he can finally use his feet—which he applies very carefully to the ladder, mindful of what just happened on the tower.

He doesn’t slip. He takes a breath, shuts his eyes, and revels in the solid feel of the tram car, something hard and durable to hold on to.

Alive, he thinks to himself. You’re alive.

He scales the hull of the tram car. At the top there’s the large apparatus with the car’s upper wheel set on it, which runs along the upper cable. Below that is a glass viewing dome, which sits on the top of the car—and beside that, a very small hatch. He thinks the hatch is far enough away from the cockpit—where the assailants will likely be stationed, he imagines—that if he opens the hatch, perhaps they won’t notice the sound, or the change in pressure, or the sudden influx of cold air.

Which he knows is a stretch. So he readies one of his pistols.

He maneuvers himself up to the hatch, lying flat against the hull of the tram car. The glass dome is beside him, its blue glass warped with layers of ice. He can see the viewing area below. It seems empty, which comforts him. He wasn’t sure if the Saypuri woman had commandeered her own tram car or just boarded a full one, but it seems now like it was the former, which means no innocents would be caught in the crossfire: anything moving in there will be an enemy.

He rubs snow out of his eye, blinks, and examines the lock on the hatch. It’s complicated—very complicated. If he’s lucky, he’ll be able to—

He stops. There’s motion out of the corner of his eye.

He looks down through the glass dome on top of the tram car.

A young Saypuri man in a dark coat is strolling through the viewing area, smoking, a rifling in his hands.

There’s nowhere to hide on the side of the car, so Sigrud flattens himself to the hull of the tram car and tries to crawl back down the ladder.

It’s too late. The Saypuri guard—Ministry, certainly—sees him through the glass. The guard’s mouth drops open; his cigarette, still smoking, clings to his lip for one second, then falls. Sigrud can faintly hear the man saying, “What the fuck?”

Then the guard raises his rifling and the glass dome explodes.

Sigrud shuts his eye and turns his head away as the glass goes whirling around him. He feels something hot and hard strike his chest, and thinks, That’s it. I’m done for. But though there’s pain, there’s not much of it, which is curious.

Sigrud hears shouts, gunshots, and the clanging of metal. He opens his eye just in time to see the hull right in front of his face suddenly poke outward, as if it were a sheet of rubber and someone on the other side just jabbed it with their finger.

He sits back from the hull and looks down. The hull is riddled with such dents, and right where his chest was pressed are two of them, pointing outward: places where the bullets almost punched through the hull, but not quite. They must have jabbed his sternum, but it’s far better than being shot.

Lucky, thinks Sigrud. Damned lucky.

The guard is still firing, shredding the frame around the viewing dome. Sigrud raises his pistol, listening as the guard says, “Bastard! Bastard!”

Sigrud waits. Two more shots. Three. Then a pause.

Reloading.

Sigrud pops up over the frame of the dome, raises his pistol, and points it at the guard kneeling in the viewing area, fumbling with his gun.

The guard looks up.

Sigrud fires once, a sharp pop.

A small, neat hole appears over the guard’s left eye, and he slumps over.

Sigrud cocks his head, listening to see if there are any other opponents directly below the shattered glass dome. He hears someone shouting a question from inside the tram car—“Chandra? What’s going on?”—but it’s not close. Grunting, he lifts himself up and slips through the broken dome, landing quietly on the seat of a leather chair.

He looks around. The viewing area is on the upper level of the tram car, a small rest area with chairs and tables and a tiny bar. There are two short stairways to his immediate left and right that lead down to the next level.

He hears footsteps sprinting down the level below. Two sets, one on either side of the car. Then they stop—taking up defensive positions, surely. If he were to so much as stick his head around the corner at the bottom of either set of stairs, they’d shred him.

He’s lost the element of surprise—which is bad. He looks around himself, wondering what to do. His eye falls on the dead young man at his feet.

Sigrud pulls off his gloves, as it’s much easier to work firearms with bare hands. He crouches, tugs the man’s coat off, then takes off his own knit cap and pulls it down over the dead man’s face.

He frowns at his work. Just different enough to be alarming. I hope.

He lifts the corpse over his shoulder, then pauses, listening—no movement, not yet, unless they’ve moving very carefully.

He turns, shifts the corpse in his grasp, and hurls the dead young man down the stairs on his right. It lands on the floor with a loud thump.

The instant the body crosses the threshold at the bottom of the stairs, someone down the aisle from it opens fire. The corpse’s chest bursts open, then its arms and legs.

Sigrud doesn’t stay to watch further: he stalks down the stairs on his left and ducks his head around the corner.

Compartments and berths line the left wall of the tram car. The doors are open. Crouched in one door, just ten feet down the aisle, is a Saypuri man in black clothing, pistol in his hand, brow furrowed as he peeks across the middle aisle to try to see what his comrade on the right side of the car is firing at. He’s not, however, looking down the aisle at the left-hand stairway.

Sigrud pulls out his knife. I do hope, he thinks, that the tram doesn’t sway….

He pivots out around the corner and, in one smooth motion, flicks the knife forward. He’s in luck: the blade hurtles toward the Saypuri man and finds a home on the right side of his neck, just below his jaw. The man chokes and tumbles backward, firing one wild shot into the ceiling as he falls.

A voice from the right side of the car, a man’s: “Azad?”

Sigrud crouches low and creeps into the aisle. There are leather chairs in rows in the center of the tram car, and through them he can see a form huddled in the door of the middle compartment. He could get a better angle if he went farther down the aisle, but it’d draw attention.

He looks at the leather chairs separating them. Built for comfort, he thinks. But not for combat.

He points the pistol through the leather chairs and opens fire, five quick shots. The bullets punch through the leather and thin wood easily, raining on the doorway of the compartment. The huddled form collapses, but Sigrud doesn’t pause to look: he dashes forward, still staying low, and takes cover in the first compartment.

There’s no movement, no sound. He creeps out and across the tram car to the body lying in the doorway. Another young Saypuri man, gunshot wounds in his face and belly.

Sigrud reloads, glancing around for any sign of movement. Then he stalks back across the aisle to the compartment with the other dead Saypuri man, the one with Sigrud’s knife still lodged in his throat. The carpet is soaked in blood. It squishes wetly under the soles of his boots.

He kneels, pulls the knife out. A weak burst of blood flows forth from the wound. Not the way a living person bleeds, he knows.

As he wipes off the knife, the tram car jerks underneath him. He blinks as he regains his balance. Then he realizes what’s going on.

They’re speeding up, he thinks. They’re going to try and bomb the car.

He leaps out of the berth and runs down the aisle to the crew quarters. The door is closed. He peers through the glass window in the door. It’s dark inside but he can see the faint outline of the cockpit door on the other side of the quarters. He’s got to get to the cockpit, got to stop them from mining the aero car ahead, got to at least slow them down or—

There’s movement in the window. Someone shifting, rising up from a crouch. Sigrud sees the gleam of a gun in their hands.

He throws himself to the floor among the seats. Then the world fills up with gunfire.

Bullets chew through the doorway like it’s made of straw. The wood is shredded, pulped, pulverized into toothpicks. As he covers his head he identifies the sound as a high-caliber, fully automatic weapon, which means it’s very rare, very expensive, and very, very dangerous.

A pause in the gunfire. A woman’s voice shouts, “Nashal! Do it now! Fucking do it now!”

He’s got to do something, got to stop it somehow. He sits up, but then the gunfire resumes, sawing through the wall just above him, and he drops again.

She’s got him pinned down. There’s nothing he can do.

Crouched in the greasy, reeking, clanging guts of the tram car, Ivanya Restroyka stares down the cables in terror.

There’s not much she can hear over the sounds of the tram car’s engine, but she can hear that: it’s gunfire. And lots of it.

She stares down the cable, scatter-gun in her hands, its stock pressed to her shoulder. She raises it, not sure what she’s going to aim at or, gods forbid, what she’s going to shoot at.

Am I about to shoot a gun? Am I really? At a bomb? It’s all too preposterous to believe.

Then she sees it, crawling down the cable at them at a very fast rate: the second tram car. It’s far too close to be safe.

Something’s wrong.

She points her scatter-gun at the advancing car, feeling ridiculous and impotent.

It’s quite close now. Close enough for her to see that the front window is open, just above the tram car’s nose.

There’s a man in the window, a Saypuri man with a beard and a gray cap. He’s pointing something at her. It looks like a big piece of plumbing, made of green metal and with a big, gaping mouth. The man hunches low, pressing his cheek to its side, and shuts one eye.

He’s aiming it at her. He’s about to…

Something dark flies from the thing’s mouth.

Ivanya’s instincts take over. She squeezes the trigger, and…

The world lights up.

The explosion is loud enough that at first Sigrud thinks the tram car’s been knocked off its cables. It’s a bone-rattling, punctuated blast, not the dull roar of an incendiary mine but something high-impact. And from the smoke that’s now pouring through the bullet-riddled door to the crew’s quarters, it detonated very, very close.

The tram car slows to a stop. He expects it to fall—but it doesn’t.

Sigrud’s still reeling from the blast, but he manages to think: Ivanya. She shot it, didn’t she? And it went off right in their faces….

He stands. The chatter of gunfire seems to have ceased. The stream of smoke from the crew’s quarters is thickening.

It’s a miracle we weren’t blown off the cables, he thinks.

He bursts through the pulverized door, which comes apart easily under his bulk. He crouches low, struggling to see through the smoke. The cockpit door is speckled with holes, some big, some small. Shrapnel—which means whoever’s in the cockpit is probably in no laughing mood. He narrows his eye and spies a woman lying in the corner, a massive, fully automatic rifling beside her. A bun of black hair has unraveled on top of her head. The gold-eyed woman I saw in the mirror, he thinks.

She’s not the priority right now, he knows. He needs to make sure whoever has that mine-throwing device isn’t going to use it again.

He walks through the smoke, kicks open the cockpit door, and is slapped in the face by the cool winter air. The front windows and the nose of the tram car are a blackened mess. The top front of the outer hull has been blown in, peppering the cockpit with shrapnel. Lying beside the door is a Saypuri man, still clutching the battered mine-throwing weapon. Something has shaved off a lot of his scalp, or perhaps it’s been blown off—regardless, his face is a mottled mass of blood. Sigrud thinks he’s dead, but then he shifts and moans. Blood bubbles out of his ragged lips.

Sigrud looks forward, through the blown-in windows. The bomb must have gone off about twenty feet in front of the nose of the car: the cables there are blackened and somewhat shredded, like unraveling yarn.

That’s not good, he thinks.

He can see the next tram car fifty or sixty feet ahead. It appears to have stopped as well. He supposes he can’t blame them: they don’t have any visibility on what’s going on yet, and they’re likely doing systems checks to make sure their craft is still functional after the detonation.

But huddled in the hatch at the bottom is a pale figure: Ivanya. She’s wide-eyed, shivering, but she appears uninjured, clutching the scatter-gun like it’s a prized toy. Its muzzle is smoking, very slightly.

Sigrud sighs and waves to her, relieved. She waves back with one trembling hand.

Then she sits up, mouth open, and points. Not at him, he realizes. But something behind him.

Then the knife sinks into his back.

Sigrud roars and brings his left elbow down, catching his assailant in the side—the Saypuri woman. She coughs and falls backward into the smoky cabin. He looks back at his shoulder, and sees a combat knife buried two inches into it. He reaches up and rips it out.

It should have gone in farther—hells, she could have cut his throat. She’s had training, after all. It takes him a minute to realize why: as she struggles to stand, he sees she’s bleeding freely from a wound in her belly. Shrapnel, he thinks. She’s probably drunk with shock.

“You piece of shit,” she mutters. “You…you piece of shit…”

He pulls out his pistol, intending to put her down. But she flies up with surprising strength and speed, and slaps the gun out of his hand. She delivers one quick strike to his neck, which nearly makes him black out, but he manages to block the next blow with his right arm before she can finish the job.

Sigrud grasps her wrist and swings his skull forward, soundly head-butting her on the cheek. She moans and stumbles back, but he’s already advancing, brandishing her own knife at her. Growling, she assumes a defensive stance.

“You were going to kill Tatyana,” says Sigrud. “You were the people who killed Shara.”

The woman spits blood on the ground. “May that fucking bitch rot,” she says. “May her and you and all you’ve done rot and fester.”

Sigrud nods, as if this is the answer he wanted. “I’m going to kill you now.”

She spits more blood. “And I’m going to make you work for it.”

They close in on each other.

She fights well, using his size and the small confines against him, trying to deliver quick, sharp blows to his joints, to his neck, to his face. But this is not her fight to win. She’s in much worse shape than he is. And he has a hundred pounds on her, and a knife.

She dodges the knife as best she can, backing down through the crew’s quarters, back through the pulverized door. She catches the blade on her underarm, then along her side. He opens up her ribs, and blood spatters onto the floor. She’s good—she doesn’t even cry out with the pain—but not good enough.

She finally stumbles. He steps into her stance, bumps his shoulder into hers, and buries the knife up under her ribs.

The slightest whimper. She tries to crush his nose with the heel of her palm, but he turns his face away and takes the blow on the side of his skull.

He pushes the knife in farther. Still she fights against him, trying to punch his throat.

He grabs her back with his free hand, pulls her forward, and shoves the blade in even deeper.

That should do it. She should stop fighting.

But then, to his surprise, she draws a deep breath and yells in a ragged voice, “Now, Nashal! Do it now, do it now!”

He drops her and turns. The bloodied, ravaged man in the cockpit has staggered to his feet. He’s brought the mine-thrower up to his shoulder and is drunkenly pointing it through the broken windows.

Time feels like it slows down. He can’t see Ivanya, but he knows she’s there, still holding the scatter-gun. If she shoots another mine out of the air, it’ll blow the cables apart and send both tram cars down.

Sigrud pulls the second pistol out of the holster on his thigh, and brings it up. But then, to his disbelief, the Saypuri woman’s on him again, leaping onto his back and clawing at his face, trying to throw his aim off.

He struggles to hold the pistol up. The bloody Saypuri man is still trying to aim the mine-thrower out the window. The woman is punching Sigrud’s face, digging her fingers into his cheek, and then into his eye…

Splut.

She rips out his false eye. This surprises her so much that she freezes just for one moment, holding the warm, white sphere. “What?” she says, bewildered.

Sigrud aims and fires.

The shot is true: the side of the Saypuri man’s skull bursts open and he collapses, his weapon falling to the floor beside him.

With a shove, Sigrud tosses the Saypuri woman off. She falls to the floor, gasping.

He turns around, his chest heaving. He bends down, takes his false eye out of her hand, and stows it away in his pocket. As he stands, her other hand flies up to her mouth.

She slips something between her lips, a small, black sphere. Then she swallows it.

“Poison?” asks Sigrud. “Why, if you’re already dying?”

She laughs bitterly. “I thought you knew everything about the Divine,” she says. “They’re all about resurrection.”

Sigrud chooses to ignore this. “Why do you work for him? Why risk your life and kill innocents for him?”

“The game’s rigged,” she gasps. “Every system’s broken. Saypuri, Continental, Divine. There are no innocents. He’s going to burn it all down. Burn it all down and start over again.”

“And you? Will you burn as well?”

“No.” She shuts her eyes. “When he starts over, I’ll be right there with him.”

She opens her eyes. They’re no longer the amber-gold color he’s familiar with: they’re jet-black, like they’re made of oil.

Sigrud says, “What in the…?”

The woman lifts her left hand and plunges it into the wound in her side. Her face registers no pain: it’s as if she’s in a daze. Impossibly, she shoves her hand in deeper and deeper, the ribs crackling and crunching, until her wrist enters the wound, and then part of her forearm…and then she begins to pull something out.

It is long, and black, and gleaming. She pulls out a foot of it, then two feet, then she’s using both hands to pull it out, more and more and more. Sigrud points the pistol and shoots her in the face, emptying the pistol into her skull. The bullets punch through her cheek and brow, but it makes no difference: her hands keep pulling, and pulling, and pulling…

And then it’s out.

It’s a spear. A huge, long, black spear, taller than he is, glimmering like oil. Though it makes no sense, he understands that the woman has just pulled this dark spear from her heart.

Still lying prone on the floor, her blank, black eyes staring up at the ceiling, the woman slams the butt of the spear down on the floor of the tram car.

The impact of the spear is rendered in silence: it’s as if its touch kills all sound around it—and then after it, all light. The light from the windows, the fluttering lights in the ceiling—they all die the instant the spear makes contact, and all is dark.

Sigrud stands in the black. He pats his belt, pulls out more bullets, and begins reloading his pistol, thinking only, This is bad.

He feels vibrations in the floor: someone is climbing to their feet close to them. Someone…big.

Slowly, slowly, the lights return, the gray-white light of a snow flurry, and with it the rumble of the tram car. Then he sees the woman is not lying on the floor anymore.

There is something in the cabin of the tram car with him. Something very tall, something heaving with exertion, holding the spear.

It seems human-shaped, but it’s difficult to confirm this: it looks like it’s made of smoke and oil and sludge—a tall, thin creature whose long limbs speak of wiry strength. Its face, however, is blank, perfectly blank, like the face of a statue made of jet whose features have been completely sanded over.

The thing takes a breath—or it seems to, for can such things breathe?—and screams.

Its scream is silence: when it cries out all sounds die with it, as if Sigrud has entered a perfect vacuum incapable of transmitting sound.

Yet there are still words in that silence, an idea communicated in wordlessness:

Sigrud raises the pistol and starts shooting.

Shooting the thing, it seems, mostly succeeds in just pissing it off. He can hear the gunshots, though, which suggests sound still works—somewhat. The creature staggers back a little, but then lunges forward, its dark spear flying forward.

Sigrud ducks just in time. The shaft tears through the air just above him and sinks deep into the wall, slashing through it as if it were water.

Curiously, though, the impact makes no sound. If he hadn’t seen it happen, he wouldn’t have known it’d happened at all.

He reaches up with his right hand, attempting to grab the spear and wrench it out of the creature’s grasp, but the merest touch of the shaft is like touching a glacier: his palm screams with icy pain, and he snaps it away, hissing.

He rolls away and scrambles back into the crew’s quarters. He looks at his right hand and sees the flesh of his palm is bright red, like he dipped it in open flames. Not good, he thinks. The woman’s fully automatic rifling is still lying on the ground. He snatches it up, checks to confirm it’s loaded, and looks up just in time to see the creature dart into the quarters, the spear lashing out again like a black tongue.

Sigrud dives to the right, and once more the spear barely misses him. He can’t hear its strike again—it’s like its blows happen with no sound at all—but he watches as the spear slashes through the control panels of the tram car. Then the creature pulls the spear back, slaps its hands together…

And all sound dies. Seemingly permanently, this time.

Sigrud raises the rifling and opens up on the creature in a quick burst. The muzzle flare is bright, but the gun’s chatter makes no sound. The creature flinches as the bullets spatter its face, its torso, and Sigrud uses its distraction to dive out the door, past it, and down the aisle, sprinting away with soundless steps.

His sense of gravity shifts, and he realizes the tram car is now moving forward again, fast. The creature must have hit a lever or button when it stabbed its spear into the control panel—or perhaps it has mind enough to try to get close to Ivanya’s car, close enough to jump aboard and slaughter everyone in it.

He whirls around to see the creature is much, much closer than he realizes, and he falls back just as the spear blade darts out again, slashing open the chairs behind him.

He points the rifling up at the creature and fires, spraying it down with bullets. It recoils, tiny flickers appearing in its oily skin. Still the world is silent and soundless. The recoil, his own growls, the burst of the bullets—they’re all totally silent, not even making a whisper. The effect is profoundly disorienting to him.

Sigrud stands and sprints farther down the aisle, then rolls behind a row of chairs to hide. This, he realizes, was a bad choice: he never realized how much he was so dependent on sound to navigate combat, but now that it’s like he’s deaf, he can’t hear if the creature’s near or not.

He crouches and places his palm flat on the floor. He can feel vibrations, very slightly. The creak of the tram car as the wind and snow strikes its hull. The engine thrumming as the car blindly charges forward. And then, from somewhere near, rapid impacts…

Sigrud falls to the floor just as the black shaft shoots through the chair above him, punching through the wall of the tram. The spear retreats and white light pours through—it must have stabbed clean through the hull.

He rolls out into the aisle, only to find the creature stepping forward to straddle him. It raises its spear high, intending to run him through. This time there’s nowhere for him to move to, no escape.

Then the tram car jumps and the creature stumbles back. Sigrud rolls over, rises, and springs back down the tram car—realizing that his car has just collided with Ivanya and Taty’s.

I do hope, he thinks as he flees, that Ivanya has not been crushed….

He has to think of a plan. There must be something to fight it with. Maybe not damage it, since bullets certainly don’t seem to work, but if he can throw it out of the car somehow…

He cocks his head. It is, after all, very hard to stand up on the top of the car, since it’s so icy. He’s experienced this personally, of course.

He runs down the tram car, past the corpses of the three Saypuri men, back up the stairs, back to the waiting area where he came in….

Then the wall beside him seems to erupt. First comes the spear, shooting through the metal wall, and then the creature wriggles through the perforation, parting the metal effortlessly and shouldering through like some sort of bizarre birth.

Sigrud staggers back as he avoids the spear, falling to the floor. The creature whips around, the spear lashes out…

He has no time to lift the rifling in his right hand, no time to move. The creature will hurl the spear around and plunge it into his breast.

His instincts take over. With his left hand, Sigrud reaches up and snatches the shaft of the spear, just behind the blade, right as the creature swings it to point at his chest.

It should burn him, he knows. It should be like touching metal that’s been submerged in the frozen depths of the ocean. It should rip his skin away, sloughing off the flesh of his hand like it’s made of wet tissue paper.

But it doesn’t. It doesn’t hurt at all. His left hand holds the spear tight, and hard—and painlessly.

He feels a flicker of confusion from the black creature.

The point of the blade hovers just above his heart.

The creature quivers with rage, and tries its hardest to push through his grasp.

Sigrud clenches his jaw, turning his left shoulder into his hold on the spear, pushing it away from his heart. The point inches closer, and closer….

The tip pierces his sweater, nicks the flesh behind it on his right breast, close to the shoulder. The wound is like being shot through with ice.

He roars silently, leans forward, and pushes hard.

The creature’s stance on the floor slips, and it falls back, surprised.

Sigrud—still operating completely off of instinct—shifts the spear in the creature’s grasp so that the butt of it is pointed at its head, and shoves forward again, hard.

The butt of the spear slams into the creature’s face—and this impact makes noise, a thick, loud clunk.

With that, all sound returns—the roar of the wind, the groan of the engines, and the creak of the metal as the tram car trundles forward along the wires.

Sigrud drops the spear and the rifling, climbs up onto a chair, and vaults up through the broken viewing dome in the roof.

The snow is even more intense now. The wheels grind and moan above him, and when he looks forward, he can see why: their tram car has slammed into the back of Ivanya and Taty’s car, shoving it forward up the cables.

I hope this works, thinks Sigrud. He clambers forward, bear-crawling along the icy top of the tram car. He feels his grip slip once, twice, and then he’s sliding face-first down toward Ivanya’s car, down to the broken nose of his car and its shattered windows…

He can see Ivanya’s face in the window ahead. She must have climbed back up through the shaft to their room. She’s watching him, and he can see her mouth the words—Oh, shit.

Don’t worry, he mentally tells her. This was intended. Sort of.

He keeps sliding down, down, faster and faster toward the nose of his tram car. Ordinarily either he’d go tumbling off the front of the tram car to be cut in half by the wheels as they zip along the lower cable, or he’d miss the cable entirely and go plummeting to his death. But as the front of the tram car has been opened up by the explosion, he instead falls headfirst into the open cockpit.

His landing is not graceful. The window frames are jagged and scratch at his chest, and though he breaks his fall somewhat his head still slams into the cockpit controls. It’s enough to dizzy him, but he keeps his wits and crawls to the back of the cockpit.

Then things go silent again.

The creature must have done that…that thing it did earlier, casting that spell to kill all sound. But he can tell it’s following his progress across the top of the tram car, because he can see Ivanya’s face in the back window ahead of him: her eyes get huge and round, watching something above him, and she starts silently screaming.

Then there’s another face beside hers—Taty’s. The girl, he sees, has defied his orders, and come to watch. Her face goes blank with horror—Sigrud thinks, What must I do to get this damned fool girl to listen to me?—but she doesn’t scream like Ivanya. She just stares.

He can feel the vibrations in the tram car, feel the creature progressing across the top of the hull. It must be stabbing its spear down as it walks across the tram car, using it to hold on steady….

Sigrud narrows his eye. I am ready. I am ready for you.

The creature leaps down into the cockpit and swings the blade of its spear around it, slashing the walls in a 180-degree arc.

But Sigrud’s not there. He’s standing down the aisle just outside the door—with the mine-thrower ready and waiting.

Sigrud pulls the trigger.

The sticky bomb hurtles forward and smacks the creature in the face—hard. And sticks.

The creature stumbles back with the impact. Then it whirls around, clawing at its face. Though it doesn’t seem to have any eyes, having a giant, adhesive glob stuck to its face appears to have blinded it.

Sound returns again—the gears, the crunch of metal, Ivanya’s tinny screams ahead.

Sigrud lowers his shoulder, mine-thrower still in his hands, and charges forward.

His left palm hits the thing dead in the back. Once again, the contact causes no harm. He keeps shoving forward, pushing the creature up and out….

The creature flips forward out of the broken hull, bounces off the back of Ivanya’s car, and falls, spear still clutched in its hands.

Sigrud almost breathes a sigh of relief. Then the spear stabs in through the bottom floor of the tram car, narrowly missing his crotch.

Sigrud leaps aside, looking down. The creature must have jammed its spear up into the undercarriage of the tram car—and is probably still hanging on to its end, somewhere down below him.

Sigrud looks ahead at Ivanya’s tram car, which sits on the cables just beyond the ruptured cockpit of his own. The latrine hatch he originally climbed out of is still open.

He mounts the ruined control board, gauges the distance, and carefully steps across the gap into the open hatch on the back of Ivanya’s tram car. He sets down the mine-thrower, grabs onto the top of the hatch for support, and reaches across into the open cockpit of the damaged tram.

He starts pushing levers until one of them works: the tram car stops advancing and instead begins reversing, crawling back down the cable away from him while Ivanya’s car keeps moving forward.

As the car retreats, he sees he was right: the creature is holding on to the butt of its long, black spear, which is jammed into the tram’s undercarriage. The creature twists in the wintry breezes as the tram car zips away, trying and failing to pull the sticky bomb off its face. It vanishes into the snow flurries.

Sigrud, groaning with pain, pulls out his pocket watch. Within a few seconds they should begin climbing to the next tower and the next set of cables. He snaps his pocket watch shut and waits calmly until they finally do so, proceeding safely and surely onto the next segment of the aero-tram line.

Then he picks up the mine-thrower and examines it. There’s a small latch on the side, like a little door. He opens it up.

Inside the little door is a small red button.

Sigrud looks back down the cable. He pushes the button.

There’s a boom from somewhere out in the storm as the radio-controlled mine detonates. He watches as the cables on the section they just left suddenly go slack and begin to fall, as if severed somewhere in the middle. Then there’s a second sound, a loud crash like a hundred tons of metal have slammed into something hard, but this time it’s from far below them.

Sigrud smiles wickedly, tosses the mine-thrower out into the wintry air, shuts the hatch, and climbs back up the shaft.

Sigrud lies on the loose pile of plumbing in the bathroom, trying to find a comfortable position. It seems impossible: all the pipes and the plates and the tools feel arranged to poke every bruise or scrape or pulled muscle on his body.

He hears a door open in the cabin beyond, and freezes. He can hear someone dart in, ask a panicked question. Ivanya’s voice answers, along with Taty’s. Sigrud stays perfectly still: it’s likely a service crewman, and if he were to walk in and find Sigrud battered, bloody, and lying on a disassembled toilet with a lot of guns on his person, it would raise some questions.

But the door doesn’t open. The crewman departs. Then, finally, the motor in the aero-tram springs back to life. He feels the world shift, and then slowly, slowly, they begin moving forward again.

Sigrud wants to exhale with relief, but he doesn’t risk it. He must stay hidden. He waits for a few minutes longer, and then…

He awakes with a snort as the door begins to open. Apparently despite the uncomfortable plumbing in the very cramped bathroom, he fell asleep out of sheer exhaustion.

Ivanya’s face peers in at him. The room is dark beyond—apparently hours must have passed. “I thought you said you were going to put the toilet back together,” she says.

“I was,” he says, groaning as he sits up. “But I did not realize how injured I was. She gave me quite a beating.”

“She? That thing was a she?”

“It is. Or was.”

“Is it dead?”

Sigrud pats his arm, feels the fabric on the sleeve of his sweater. It’s crusty and sticky with blood. He’s not sure where he got that laceration, but he supposes he had plenty of chances. “I doubt it. It hardly minded getting shot in the face and chest many times,” he says. “I am not convinced that having a mine detonated on its face and then dumping a tram on it finished it off. It is likely in a better state than I am, actually.”

“We have some time to clean you up,” says Ivanya. “I told the crewman you were ill in here. Apparently they never planned for this sort of attack on an aero-tram—engineers are so brilliant, up until they aren’t. They asked if the passengers wished to disembark at the next tram base, but as it’s a frozen-over maintenance facility way up in the teeth of the Tarsils, very few passengers have agreed. So we just continue on our merry way—to Bulikov.”

Sigrud sits on the pile of plumbing, breathing hard and trying not to move too much.

“You look like shit,” she says.

“I look like shit,” he agrees.

“I know first aid.”

“You do?”

“Some. I had to learn medicine when taking care of the sheep.”

“I am not a sheep.”

“No. You smell worse.” She nods at his arm. “You’re still bleeding. You need stitches.”

“I need brandy,” he sighs. Wincing with pain, he begins taking off his boots, then his shirt. There’s a black, unpleasant-looking nick on his right breast, where the spear stabbed him. The wound isn’t open—it appears to have been fused shut, as if the spear blade was burning hot—but the blackness lies below his skin, like a bubble of oil suspended in his flesh just beside his shoulder. His right hand, however, simply looks burned—it’s as if the tip of the spear did something…else.

He pushes on the black mark. It doesn’t hurt any—but it doesn’t go away, either. That’s concerning, he thinks.

Ivanya fetches a bag from her trunk. Inside are needles, scissors, and bandages—almost a full kit.

“You are prepared,” says Sigrud, impressed.

She kneels and begins cleaning off the gash on his arm. “We have forty-seven rounds left for the pistols,” she says, dabbing the wound with alcohol. “And nineteen shells for the scatter-gun, and fifty-five rounds for the riflings. Though I have yet to count what you’ve returned with. I’ve already disassembled the scatter-gun and hid it away. Let me know when you want to surrender your pistols. I’ll clean them and do the same.”

Sigrud watches her as she works, threading the needle through his flesh. He suddenly feels terribly sad for Ivanya: he imagines her as she was, glittering and laughing, compared to this person she is now, stark and paranoid, casually discussing ammunition as she tends to ghastly wounds. She is still lovely, but there’s a harrowed sense to it now, the fierce, fragile beauty of a wary hind on the slopes, ready to spring away at the snap of a branch.

She catches him looking. “What?”

“You never stop, do you?” he asks.

“I can’t afford to stop,” she says, looping her stitches back around. “Neither can you. We’re going to Bulikov, after all. That city is fraught with harm. I remember.”

“You walked away from civilization, Ivanya Restroyka,” says Sigrud. “I wonder if one day you can walk away from what happened to you as well.”

“Can I?” she says, tying off the stitches. “Can you? You had, what, ten years to do something else with your life? You could have done anything else. Started over. But you didn’t. You held on to it. You didn’t let it go.”

Sigrud is silent.

“Perhaps I’m a fool,” says Ivanya. “All I think of now is what will happen to Taty after all this. Maybe you’re right, maybe she’s Divine. But one can be Divine and also be a young, terrified, innocent girl.” She snips off the thread. “And as we take her back to Bulikov, all I can think is—I will not let what happened to me happen to her.”

After Ivanya’s done her work, Sigrud goes in search of Taty. Night has fallen, and the main cabin of the aero-tram is dark, but people are still awake, blinking owlishly in their berths as they wait to see if yet another explosion will come. Sigrud walks past them and climbs the stairs up to the viewing dome.

The viewing area is empty except for her. She sits at the far end, hugging her knees, staring up at the night sky. The moon is trying to free itself from a tangle of thin clouds, its pale luminescence stretched and distorted by the layers of ice on the glass.

Sigrud walks over and sits on the floor in the aisle. For a moment neither of them says anything.

“Are you all right?” asks Sigrud.

“Yes,” she says.

“Oh. Good.”

“Our tram didn’t experience anything beyond a few bumps. It looked like you got the worst of it. Were you hurt?”

“I was. But I will manage.”

There’s a moment of silence.

“So,” Taty says. “That was the Divine.”

“Yes.”

“That was what you and Mother fought.”

“Yes.”

“And that’s what the god you’re fighting thinks I am.”

“Ah. Something like that.”

There’s another long silence, punctured only by the clunk of the tram engine and the crackle of snowflakes on the glass above.

“It’s not right, is it,” she says.

“What isn’t? he asks.

“It’s not right that…that I could do what I did at the train station,” she says.“That I could see something that…that was going to happen, or could have happened. I mean…” She laughs desperately. “Of course it isn’t right! How could it be?”

“No,” Sigrud says. “It is not.”

“How am I supposed to live like this? How are you supposed to, to live with me beside you? I feel so afraid of…”

“Of what?”

“Of being someone else,” she says. “Of changing. I don’t want to lose me.” She blinks, and tears fall into her lap. “If that happens, then…then I really lose Mother. I lose what she taught me. Who she raised me to be.”

Sigrud thinks for a moment. “What do you remember of your time before Shara, Taty? Before the orphanage? Anything?”

“Little,” she says. “I remember a lot about the orphanage, as I was four when Mother adopted me. But before that…I remember a woman. In the snow. We were in the woods. She was crying. And she was saying she was sorry. She was sorry she was going to have to give me over to these people, but she had no choice. And then a man walked out of the woods, and took me by the hand. And the woman ran over, crying, and kissed me on the cheek. And her lips felt so hot. It was so warm, that kiss.”

“Who was this man?” he asks.

“I don’t know.”

“Where did you go?”

“I don’t remember. I remember the orphanage, after that. But I dream about her, sometimes. This crying woman, her tears shining in the light of a fire. I think she is my mother. My birth mother, I mean. And in my memory, at least, she looks human. When I dream about her, I always wake up and feel a warmth on my cheek. It’s as if her kiss is still there. It’s as if that moment is still going on.” She sighs. “It’s unfair that the dead leave us,” she says. “But it’s worse that they never really go away.”

“Yes,” Sigrud says quietly. “Yes, it is.”

“What can I do? What can you do, knowing I might be something…different?”

He takes a long, slow breath. “In my operational days, there were three ways of thinking about things. There were things you knew. Then there were things you knew you didn’t know. And then there were the things you didn’t know that you didn’t know.”

“No wonder we keep having so many international crises,” she says, “if you lot are running around talking like that.”

“The rule was,” says Sigrud, ignoring her, “that you only worried about the first and second things. The things you didn’t know that you didn’t know, you pushed out of your brain.”

“What do you mean?” she says. “That doesn’t help me at all!”

“It is about accepting a lack of control,” says Sigrud. “Understanding that the situation you are in is complex and—how did Vinya used to put it?—fluid.”

“It’s a little harder to accept this as a…a fluid situation when I might be Divine!”

Sigrud thinks for a moment. Then he pulls off the black glove on his left hand. He lifts the palm and shows it to her.

“Ugh,” says Taty, horrified. “What is that? Did that thing you fought do that?”

“No. This was done a long, long time ago.”

“Who did that to you?” asks Taty.

“No one exceptional,” says Sigrud. “Some ordinary sadists, though they used an extraordinary instrument.” He looks at his palm, feeling the lines of the scar with his thumb. “A Divine instrument. But…ever since they did this to me, I have survived things I should not have survived. Urav, and our enemy, and Malwina’s manipulations…And I could touch that strange, black creature aboard the aero-tram with this hand, and it would not burn me. It is…unnatural.”

“What are you saying?” asks Taty.

“I am saying, Taty, that…I think I am somewhat like you,” says Sigrud. “There are things that I can do. I do not understand them. I do not know how they work or if they have affected who I am. I do not know how or if this scar has changed me. So I fall back on the things I know.”

“Which is what?” asks Taty.

“That there are those who mean us harm,” says Sigrud. He makes a fist and lowers his hand. “And those who offer us shelter. We must flee from one to get to the other. The rest—that is beyond our control.”

Taty smiles sadly at him. “This is what you know how to do, isn’t it?”

“What do you mean?”

“When you were on the tram, with that thing, you looked…different. You looked relieved. Like you were playing a game you hadn’t played in a long, long time. That’s how you worked with Mother, wasn’t it? She figured out what to do, and you made sure it happened. This is what you know. You were finally getting to do something you understood.”

Sigrud sits in silence.

“You want her here even more than I do, maybe,” says Taty. “To tell you what to do again. To figure it all out. That’s why you waited on her for thirteen years, isn’t it? So she could tell you what to do next, how to make things go back to normal. To help you get home.”

He looks away. “There is no going back to normal, Tatyana Komayd,” he says softly. “There is no going home. I know that now. There is no way out of this, not for me. I have made my peace with knowing that my fight is lost.”

“But you’ve defeated such things before, haven’t you?”

“ ‘Defeat?’ ‘Victory’? Those are words. What comes after them? What comes next?” He looks up at the moon. “In Voortyashtan, after my daughter died…There were soldiers there, guarding her, trying to capture me. Young people, fresh recruits. Just following orders. I was in a rage, and when I found them, I, I fell upon them, and I…I…”

The tram clunks and clinks through the next tower.

“Your daughter had just died,” says Taty.

“What kind of an excuse is that?” asks Sigrud. “I am old, Taty. All those things that one saves for, that one builds for, that one lives for…I have lost those things by now. I have only my grudges and grievances to keep me going now. They are my only guiding stars. And I suspect they shall not last much longer.”

“You live to hurt, then,” says Taty. “And nothing more?”

Sigrud is quiet.

“I know I’m young,” says Taty softly, “but it feels to me that…that death is but a thunderstorm. Just wind and noise. You can’t ask meaning of such a thing. Not even of your own.” She shakes her head. “I thought it would feel better. You killing them, hurting those people. But it feels like…like nothing.”

“Anger is a hard thing to live with, Tatyana. I think sometimes we are not punished for our anger—we are punished by it, I think.”

“Or perhaps,” says Taty, “we just weren’t punishing the right people.”

They sit in silence.

“Mother wouldn’t have said that, would she?” says Taty softly.

“No. She would not have.”

“Perhaps I’m changing already, then. Perhaps I don’t even know it’s happening.”

Sigrud looks at her, his jaw set. “If you really change, Taty…If something takes you and makes you different…I will not let you forget who you are. I will be there to remind you, Tatyana Komayd. Until you are you.”

“I didn’t think you were quite the staying type,” she says.

“For you, I will stay.”

She looks at him questioningly—wondering, of course, if this time he’s telling her everything.

“You’re tired,” he says. “Sleep here if you wish.”

“And you’ll really stay?”

“Close your eyes,” he says, “I’ll be here in the morning.”

She closes her eyes.