“I look forward to her telling me all about you.”
“Typical Arianna.” Shannra laughed but had the decency to heed the conversation’s conclusion. She turned forward, revving the engine to life.
The lurch of the trike jolted some tension from Arianna’s muscles. The airfield passed in a haze of Ter.0 dust, airships, and homeless Fenthri. She was close to Florence now and the only thing that mattered was seeing her again. Everything else in the world could wait.
Off in the distance, the spires of Ter.0 grew in size. Arianna squinted at the diffuse light of Loom, trying to better make out their shape.
“They’re stabilizing them,” Louie explained without invitation. “Won’t look like they did before the Dragons descended—that’d take years.”
Arianna didn’t miss how Louie did not imply if they did or didn’t have years to take. “Assuming the Dragon King doesn’t kill us all first.”
“I doubt he’ll do that.”
“Let me guess: you’re also now some expert on Nova’s politics?” Arianna refrained from commenting that, of the two of them, she was the one who had just spent extended time on the floating islands. She was the one who had an all-too-personal encounter with the Dragon King.
“I am the best organ dealer in all of Loom.” Louie’s chest swelled against his vest—so much that Arianna was afraid he might crack a rib. “It is important I pay attention to inter-world politics.”
“‘The best’ may be a bit of a stretch.” Arianna leaned back against the railing behind the bench.
Louie cracked a smile. It wasn’t one of his usual thin-lipped, tight expressions. It showed his teeth, yellowed with age, and his black gums that recessed away from them.
Black gums. The man was a Chimera. Arianna made careful note of the information, filing and storing it safely away. He had no visible Dragon parts, which meant he only had blood. Or he had something unseen to the naked eye, like a stomach . . . or lungs.
The gears of her mind ground to a halt.
There was an odd disconnect between her body as it moved closer to Florence, and her mind as it thought back to the only Dragon she’d known personally with magic in the lungs—Cvareh. She wanted to be in both places at once. It was a divided soul that Arianna had never known before.
Arianna played off her silence by twisting to get a better look at the once-great towers of Ter.0.
“What did they look like before?” Helen asked.
Louie and Arianna both opened their mouths at the same time.
“After you.” He motioned with his bird-boned hand.
“No, I’m curious what you’ll say,” Arianna admitted. “The last time I was here . . .”
“You couldn’t have been older than twelve.”
Ten, actually. Arianna kept the thought to herself, owing Louie no information on her past. She turned it back on him instead. “How old were you, Louie?”
“Well, I was here a few years before the One Year War ended.” He paused. “I would guess around . . . twenty.”
Arianna didn’t know what surprised her more: the fact that Louie was easily over forty years of age, or that he outright admitted to the fact. She inspected him as he continued speaking to Helen.
His black hair was carefully pulled back, so taut it stretched wrinkles in his forehead and around his eyes. The parchment-whiteness of his mouth was lined with folded shadow around his lips. And his eyes, as sharp and piercing as a hawk’s, had a cloudiness to them that one commonly found in advanced age.
Even with his Dragon blood, Louie was a man well into his twilight years. What did someone with such little time left fight for? Arianna looked over to Helen and Will, who were both listening intently to Louie’s descriptions. What were any of them fighting for?
Dusk promised dawn to no man.
“All around here—” Louie gave a small wave of his hand “—were schools and dormitories.”
“Where breeding happened?” Helen clarified.
“Indeed.”
“Where you were born.” It was impossible to tell from the upturned slabs and forlorn remnants littering the road that this place had once been anything more than a rubble field. But Arianna still remembered what it used to look like with precision.
“Not quite.” Helen gave a sly grin. “I was born in Holx, just after the Dragons instated family law.”
Arianna couldn’t stop her jaw from dropping. Helen was eleven. Oh, the girl’s insufferably childish nature made sense now. She was a Raven, an explorer, a curious soul, one who had seen beyond her years. But she was five years younger than Florence and had yet to reach adulthood.
“I know, I’m clever for my age.” Helen beamed proudly.
“Makes sense why the Dragons didn’t kill you.” Helen’s time in the floating prison of Ter.4.2 finally had an explanation. The guild had locked up a child rather than executing her for running, to preserve what would no doubt be one of the greatest Raven minds of their generation—as loathe as Arianna was to admit it.
“I suppose I should be grateful.” Helen’s face fell as she looked out at the wasteland. Arianna wondered if she saw the iron bars of her cell in the curved rods of steel that protruded from the ground like industrial saplings, growing from the remnants of the old world. “So all this was beautiful?”
“It was . . .” Arianna answered this time. She, too, had finished her schooling early, choosing the Rivets’ Guild and meeting Master Oliver when she was younger than even Helen. She remembered the land as it was then. It was a different sort of beauty than she’d seen on Nova. But her memories of Ter.0 glittered more brightly than the floating sky world and all its colors. “It all moved like clockwork. Teachers from every guild took up residence. We learned from the best in all disciplines.”
“Sounds boring.” Helen yawned. “All I want is maps and speed.”
Arianna huffed in amusement. The girl was such a little crow. “Why did you run away from the guild, if you are so akin to it?”
Helen shrugged. “Freedom. Isn’t that what all Ravens want? Freedom to explore, go where you want, when and how. Take your life back from the world and hold it in your hands?”
“Who knew it was possible?”
“What?” Helen asked.
“We can agree on something.”
Helen looked just as surprised as Ari felt.
At the center of Ter.0 was the old meeting hall of the Vicar Tribunal. Where the dormitories and labs occupied the surrounding area, the five-towered hall stretched up and casted its long shadows like hands on a clock. Louie had been correct: work had begun to stabilize the Towers and reinforce them as residences.
Shannra drove the trike around the main entrance to a flat area on the side that had been allocated for parking.
“This is it!” she announced, quieting the engine and hopping down onto the dusty ground.