I can feel the organized, looping structure of the thing, the magical machine the Scholar is so fond of, come apart under the blasting pressure of the wild, chaotic energy. The angel spasms, then freezes in place, its legs shuddering to a halt.
I can’t hold the flow for long, and I have no idea if the angel will recover, so I move fast. I grab a leg, swinging myself up and over, traversing the creature like an obstacle course, heading for the Scholar. He takes a half step back, not quite realizing what’s happened, and then I see panic breaking across his face. He throws up one arm, as though that would protect him from my blades—
And then I’m past him, the dredwurm’s eye in my hands, red light draining out of it like blood from a wound.
“No!” He turns on me, eyes wide. “Give it back! Quickly! The ship will—”
Hagan’s scream returns, sliding from high and terrified down toward a bass roar, a thundering growl that sets the room around us to shaking. The bands of gray light that had wrapped him dissolve, and he drops into a crouch on the pedestal.
“Give it to me!” the Scholar shrieks. “Please!”
I stand stock-still, waiting.
With a shriek of twisting metal, conduits and pipes all over the room tear themselves away from the walls, animated by the wild pressure of the Eddica flow inside them. They converge on the Scholar, jagged ends lancing toward him like spears. His scream rises as he’s pierced a hundred times over, disappearing in a matter of moments inside a compacting sphere of broken, twisting metal. After a few seconds, the bottom of the sphere begins to leak blood, thick and red.
Hagan tries to rise, stumbles, and falls to his knees. His body still flickers with distortion, growing fainter by the moment.
“Hagan!” I rush to the pedestal. “The doors. You have to close the doors!”
He looks up at me and nods, face clear for an instant before the distortion sweeps over it again. I feel a rumble through the floor, the sound of metal shifting far below.
“Thank you.” I reach out a hand to him. “Are … are you…”
And then he’s gone, fading into a spray of gray light that dissolves like mist. A quiet settles over the room. The angel is still, the bent and torn pipes fixed in place. The Scholar’s blood drips metronomically into a spreading puddle.
I pick my way out, past the splayed metal, past the still bodies of Erin and Arin. In the corridor, in spite of the pain all through me, I start to run.
* * *
They’re waiting for me. The ones who are left.
Meroe meets me at the bottom of the stairs, wrapping me in a hug tight enough to send spikes of pain through the burnt skin of my back. I ignore it and hug her back, just as tightly. Her braids are crusty with blood.
“You did it,” she says. “Gods, Isoka. You did it.”
I blink tears out of my eyes, and look past her.
The long curve of the door is closed, the unfolded steel sheets sealing off the entryway. I can hear crabs banging on it, distantly, but the metal doesn’t even shiver. They’re locked out. And we’re locked in.
Inside the door, bodies are piled in heaps. Crab bodies, blown apart or fried or cut to pieces, and human bodies, torn or slashed or mangled. Blood in every color imaginable has soaked into the soil, churned now into thick mud. There are dead hunters, the men and women I fought alongside on the way here, but so many others, too. Scavengers and servants, porters and children, lying in drifts like windblown sand.
“They came back to help,” Meroe says in my ear, as I walk forward. “Not just the fighters. Everyone who could hold a blade or a spear.”
“You wanted to save everyone,” I say, my eyes locked on the corpses.
Meroe squeezes my hand. “We saved everyone we could.”
The living are gathered just upslope of the carnage, sitting in stunned knots on the grass. A few are at work on bandages, helping the injured, but most just sit and stare at the closed doors, unable to believe that the nightmare is finally over. I see a few of the hunters, pitifully few. Aifin, Thora, and Jack are sitting together. Thora’s asleep, head resting on her lover’s shoulder, but Jack is awake enough to give me a little wave. I see Zarun, protesting feebly as Sister Cadua goes at him with her needle and thread.
Karakoa lies on the hillside, on his back, eyes closed. At first I think he’s asleep, too, but then I see the deep cuts in his coat, the crimson stains that surround them. The cuffs of his sleeves are scorched from powerburn, and I shudder to think what the flesh underneath must look like. His lover, the young man I’d seen at the officers’ council, kneels beside him, prostrated in an attitude like prayer.
“He fought to the last,” Meroe says quietly. “Sister Cadua told him to fall back, to get help, and he refused. You could smell his skin burning. When the doors finally closed, he walked back here and just … lay down.”
“Oh.” I put my arm around her shoulders, pulling her tight against me.
“Deepwalker.”
I turn, reluctantly. Shiara is standing between two tired-looking hunters, her kizen frayed at the edges, her makeup slightly smudged. By her standards, she might as well be naked.
“What?” I ask her.
“Where is the Scholar?” she demands. “He was seen going up the stairs.”
“Dead.” No need to elaborate on how.
“Oh.” She seems to deflate a little, then squares her shoulders. “What happens now?”
“What do you mean? We’re safe.”
“For the moment.” She waves a hand. “Will the ship keep going, past the Rot? Where does it stop? Will the doors open again, or are we trapped in here?”
I feel eyes on me, from all directions. Stares. Even Meroe is watching me.
What makes them think I have the answers?
“Deepwalker?” Shiara says.
Epilogue
Soliton continues on.
There’s food in the Garden, and freshwater. We’re short of clothes, furniture, the sort of thing the scavengers used to retrieve, but we survive. The old clades are dissolved, and even the Butcher’s crew is joined into our single community, united by the trauma of our flight and final, desperate battle.
The crew looks to Shiara and Zarun for leadership. They look to Meroe, who organized the march and saved them. And, for reasons I don’t understand, they look to me. They call me Deepwalker, like it means something, and nod quietly when I pass by.
Rot. I will never understand people.
We bury the dead, a novelty on Soliton. When we recover our strength, we explore the rest of the Garden. There are several more levels, different environments, different plants and animals. Meroe and I agree that we need to be careful with it. We take fruit from the trees; a few unfamiliar animals for meat; berries and vegetables. But not too much. This place is a refuge, and we don’t know how long we’ll need it. Or when we’ll need it again.
Eventually—there’s no way to judge the passage of time in the Garden, where the fake sun always shines—the door opens. We venture out, cautiously, but the killing frenzy that drove the crabs has passed. They are back to their old selves, wandering and only occasionally dangerous, and the hunters quickly go back to hunting. Scavengers venture forth, into fresh, rich territory near the bow of the ship where no one has gone before, and return with rich booty. A new town starts to take shape, around the base of the Garden, with barricades and crude shacks that grow by the day.
Meroe, Jack, Thora, and I go on an expedition, climbing the staircases from platform to platform until we make our way, exhausted, onto the deck. It’s night, and a blaze of glorious stars stretches from horizon to horizon. There’s no sign of land, no city lights, just the endless stretch of dark ocean.
Meroe says that she can get a rough idea of where we are from the stars, which surprises none of us. We wait, staring upward, while she sketches and calculates, tongue sticking out of the corner of her mouth. Finally, she announces that we have left the Vile Rot far behind. We have passed beyond it, beyond the Central Ocean, where no ship has ventured for a thousand years. And Soliton is still heading east, cutting smoothly through the water, taking us farther and farther from everything we’ve ever known.
There will be questions, when we get back. People will ask me when we’ll reach land, whether there’ll be more sacrifices, what happens next.
Hagan hasn’t appeared to me since the Scholar died. I’ve pressed my hand to the Eddica streams that still flow through the ship and called his name, but he never responds. It’s possible what the Scholar did destroyed him. Sometimes, though, when I let my thoughts run along with the strange gray energy, I can feel … something. I don’t know. I don’t know anything.
I hope wherever Hagan is, it’s somewhere he wants to be.
Thora and Jack wander off, to find a private corner. Meroe and I lie on the deck, side by side.
“I have to get back to Kahnzoka,” I say. “Tori is waiting for me.”
“I know,” Meroe says. She levers herself up on one elbow, then leans over and kisses me. “We’ll get there.”