Chapter Twenty

They didn't disturb him lying there on the floor—as they reformed Beacon and took casualty reports. Fifteen people captured. Ten percent of their population dragged off, to be left for the sun.

Eventually more officials arrived. He knew the three members of the Greater Good, along with Zeal—the little person who was, as best Nomad could determine, their approximation of a field commander or special ops planner. Also in attendance was Jeffrey Jeffrey—the man with the bushy black beard. As a sort of city steward or administrator, he had served under various incarnations of the Greater Good, offering continuity to a leadership trio that was usually made up of three old men or women in the months before they were turned into power sources.

Five other people joined in that he didn't know. Together, they convened to take stock after the disastrous attempt to find their legendary Refuge.

Auxiliary found it hilarious that they just left Nomad there. Lying on the floor, dozing. Like he was a sleeping dragon, dangerous to disturb.

Look how they arrange their chairs, the hero exclaims. Look, see it, Nomad. They don't dare scoot back, lest they bump you. Why don't they hold the meeting in another location? Or…you know…move you to a bed?

Nomad probably had one of his faces on. The one that said, "Don't touch me. I'm thinking about who to murder next, and I'm accepting volunteers."

Eventually the group started to discuss the real issue.

"We're dead," Confidence said, rising to speak. He could identify the tallest of the Greater Good from her voice, and pictured the spindly woman glaring at them all. "It is time to make our peace with Adonalsium."

"Pardon my brusqueness," a man Nomad hadn't met said, "but you are supposed to be the optimistic one! If it pleases you, give us hope."

"My title is Confidence," she replied. "My duty is to express what I know to be true with utmost energy of heart. It is not my duty to lie. I see no way out."

"We've been forced into an untenable corridor," Compassion agreed quietly. "This region has seen mountains for the last five years. We will soon encounter the heights. Beyond that, we haven't enough heat in our sunhearts to fly for much longer. We've divided them, shared them, and stretched the limits of our rationing."

"Even if we all gathered onto a few ships," Confidence said, "we won't last another rotation. We've gone too long without harvesting. After being driven off from one attempt, then abandoning the next, we're running on cold souls."

"Must we…surrender to the Cinder King?" Jeffrey Jeffrey asked softly.

Zeal pounded the table. "I'd rather die a cold death and leave my soul to light only the mud than give myself to him. Our souls would just further enforce his tyranny."

"Then what?" Compassion asked.

The entire room seemed to look toward Contemplation. Nomad cracked an eye to study her. With no hat and her hair back up in a black bun, she stood out even in a room full of people in similar clothing.

"Contemplation?" Compassion asked again. "You have a plan, surely?"

"I…can think of no plan," Contemplation admitted, "other than to die with pride, knowing we separated ourselves from that monster and fought him until the end. Elegy would be…proud to know that we never folded."

The room fell absolutely silent. Nomad decided it was time to make his entrance. Er, his, already-here-ance. He planned one of his master's grand speeches, the type that really roused people. But before he could rise and make it, the people in the room started standing.

"We go on," one said.

"We go on," another replied.

Nomad sat up, watching them each stand, gathering strength from the others. They didn't need his speech, he realized. This group was tough as carapace. They didn't need something to rally or galvanize them. And today…they didn't even need a soldier.

They needed something he had once been. They needed someone who could fix problems.

Storms. Could he be that man for them? Did it matter? Even if he somehow got them to the entrance…it wouldn't save them. Still, he found their air of defiance more intoxicating than the Cinder King's liquor. And if there was something left of the man he'd been, it was a severe loathing for bullies—particularly those who picked on the defenseless.

So he stood up, joining them all. They turned, looking up at him, making way for him to approach the Greater Good's table. There, he pressed his hands down flat on the wood. "That bastard," he said, "broke his oath to me."

The three gawked at him.

"…And?" Contemplation said. "He's a murderer and a tyrant. Of course he is an oath breaker too."

"I don't really care about the rest," Nomad said. "But the Cinder King made it personal…so I'm going to kill him. I'd prefer to topple his kingdom before I go—as a parting gift."

"We would love to hand you that opportunity," Confidence said. "But I don't think you understand the seriousness of our problem. We've been forced into an untenable corridor—one with blockages preventing forward motion."

"We fly back out," Nomad said. "Hide in the darkness again."

"We've sent scouts," Zeal said from behind. "The Cinder King has posted guards and scouts all along our northern flank—he must have called up all of his subjects to send him ships! If we try to go back to the north, he will catch us."

"We're trapped here," Compassion whispered. "Enemies to the north, and mountains to the south and to the east."

"Mountains?" Nomad frowned. "Rebeke said something about this…but remind me. I thought the landscape rearranged each rotation. How are there mountains?"

"Some larger features remain," Zeal explained. "There are always mountains at the poles, and those regions cannot be traveled. Sometimes they form in other places—and the ones in this region have been here for years now." He looked to the others, and his voice softened. "When they first rose, two entire cities were destroyed. I've scouted and tried to get through several times—to no avail. Originally Elegy thought that maybe if we could make this corridor tenable, we'd be able to escape the Cinder King."

"The mountains do melt and reform," Contemplation added. "But I offer this truth, Sunlit. Something about the core of our planet creates highlands here, and they are utterly impassable."

"I mean, we have flying ships," Nomad said. "We could go over them."

"Oh, over them!" Zeal said, smacking his forehead. "Why didn't I think of that?"

"I offer this explanation to your ignorance," Contemplation said. "Our engines cut out if we go too high. They roar and try, but we do not move—and then they die. Beyond that, people go unconscious if they spend more than a few minutes in the heights."

"Wait, how tall are these mountains?" Nomad asked.

"Tall," Zeal said. "At least a thousand feet."

A thousand feet? Like a single thousand?

At first, he assumed that the Connection had stopped working, and he hadn't interpreted those words correctly. These people were stymied by a set of "mountains" that would barely be considered hills on his homeworld? He'd lived in a city at over fifteen thousand feet elevation, back there.

And yet he wouldn't call them fools. Naive, maybe, but not idiots…

I'm lost, the knight says with an air of bafflement, commensurate with his solemn, dignity-ravaging intelligence. Am I understanding this right? What's going on?

"Math," Nomad realized. "Math is going on." He switched to their tongue. "Someone get me a pad of paper and something to write with."

When they resisted, he glared at them until someone who had been taking notes proffered the implements. A woman brought him a chair, and he settled down, rubbing his forehead. Writing came easily to him these days—strange to think that ability had once been considered unseemly to some back home.

He sketched out some equations, dredging far, far back—to a person he used to be. He thought through the way the hovercycles worked, picturing their engines. His best guess was that the engine mechanism somehow used Investiture from these sunhearts to superheat the air, then sent it out those jets on the bottoms, providing upward thrust. Essentially their hovercraft relied on downward-pointing jet engines rather than lift from wings.

"Propellant," he muttered. "That's the problem. Up above, the air gets too thin to act as a propellant for your ships. Remarkable…"

The people slowly gathered around, and if they seemed shocked to see complex mathematics produced by their "Sunlit Man," a killer with a sour attitude…well, he didn't blame them one bit.

"What does this all mean?" Contemplation asked softly as he wrote.

"Your planet is really small," he said. "Like, almost comically small. It takes how long to complete a rotation again?"

"Around twenty hours," Contemplation said.

"Hmm. Give me a clock."

They provided one, and he was able—using his own internal sense of time—to do some vague reckoning. Their hours were shorter than his by roughly half. Factoring it in…yeah, that gave him something to work with.

He guessed their day was maybe ten hours galactic standard. The planet was small, and turned slowly enough that people could keep up in ordinary aircraft. He figured it was possible to fly all the way around in just four hours. Except you couldn't. You had to wait for the planet to turn, because if you got too far ahead, you ran straight into the sunlight.

Calculating that—with some measurements he demanded from the others—he arrived at the planet's diameter. From there, the answers lined up. He'd been fooled at first, since the gravity felt roughly similar to what he knew back home. Less than most worlds, but still within common ranges. He could test that with a few dropped objects. Regardless, that initial gut impression had given him a false sense that he understood the physics of the world. In reality, he had been way off.

"Most worlds with this kind of gravity," he explained, "are much bigger. You've got something dense at your core—Invested, I'd say, since no natural element could create this kind of a gravitational pull and leave the planet livable.

"Your atmosphere also seems to thin at an alarming rate. From my estimation, a thousand feet up, and you're well into the death zone. No wonder you only hover your ships thirty or forty feet in the air."

He looked up to a circle of blank faces.

I'm raising my hand, the knight says. You can't see it, but I am. Call on me.

"Okay…" Nomad said in Alethi.

Can I go take an art class instead, teacher?

"Auxiliary, you're literally a living manifestation of physical forces—sharing substance with the concepts of gravitation and the interaxial force. You should know about this stuff."

Uh, right. And just because you're made of meat and various strange liquids, every human is born knowing all about primate anatomy.

"Well, it would be a good idea to pay attention anyway," Nomad said, though admittedly he felt foolish saying it. If he'd paid better attention himself, he'd have figured this out earlier. The curvature of the planet, the low air pressure at ground level…these things were blazing signals of the planet's size.

He switched back to the local language. "Look. It makes perfect sense that your engines give out as they try to cross mountains. These ships move via the displacement of air."

"If it pleases you to be contradicted," Contemplation said, "they fly using sunhearts."

"Yes and no," he said. "You fly using engines powered by sunhearts as a fuel source—you could be running on coal and stay aloft, if you could somehow compensate for the weight of such a large furnace and heavy fuel. What makes ships like this move, though, is propellant and not fuel. You know, pushing something out to give you thrust upward? Air in this case? No?"

They gave him blank stares.

"How," he said, "can you fly advanced ships like these and have no grasp of basic aviation science? Fluid dynamics? The law of motion and countermotion?"

More blank stares. Except for one woman at the side. A few looked to her. A mechanic or an engineer, he guessed. She dressed like the others, but had oil stains on her gloves.

"I can grasp some of this, Sunlit," she said, staring at the numbers he'd written. "But you've got to understand. We're refugees among refugees. The Cinder King has scientists who might be able to understand what you're saying, but even they focus on keeping the cities moving.

"We don't have the time, the resources, the lives to waste in theorizing. We use what works. We can keep it running, replicate it, but…" She shrugged. "We just can't afford to think lofty thoughts when mortality looms on the horizon."

He could respect that. Storms, he felt it himself. How much time had he had for dreaming since he'd been on the run?

"All of this," Confidence said, waving at the equations he'd written out, "confirms what we already knew—that if we go too high, the engines stop working and we suffocate?"

You should tell her, the knight interjects, that is basically the entire point of math. Explaining stuff everyone already knows.

Some days he wished he'd bonded a Cryptic.

"Indeed, it tells us what we know, Confidence," he said. "But more usefully it tells us why. Which is the first step to fixing any problem."

"And can you fix this one?" Contemplation said. "In less than ten hours? Because that's when we're going to encounter those highlands."

Ten of their hours. Could he fix a problem like this in that amount of time?

Impossible.

"Absolutely," he said. "I'll need some things, not the least of which being access to whatever fabrication machines you have. Rebeke said you can make new ship parts from raw materials?"

"Yes," Jeffrey Jeffrey said. "We can."

"Good. I need access to that, a quiet room, some tools, and…the Charred we captured. Rebeke's sister. For certain tests of a relevant nature."

They didn't question him. Good. He was still working on a way to escape his Torment, and he wanted a test subject to try out his theories on. Smart scientists did not experiment on themselves.

"Wait," Confidence said. "Even if a miracle occurs and we get over the mountain, we're still as good as dead. What about our dwindling power supply?"

"We'll find a way to get more," Nomad said.

"And the Cinder King?" she demanded. "The overwhelming forces we're facing? The fact that we keep losing people to his attacks, day after day? What is our objective here? What are you trying to accomplish, other than kill him? What is our final objective?"

"That's up to you," Nomad said. "I want to find that door. I'll do what I can to get you over those mountains, then get power to keep you going another day. Then we'll be back in this area and we can search again." He shrugged.

"That again?" Confidence said. "You yourself said that door wouldn't help us."

"I…" He trailed off.

She had a point.

"Peace, Confidence," Compassion said. The old woman, with ebony skin and tight curls of white hair, seemed so frail in her seat. She needed help to walk, and her voice wavered as she spoke. And yet there was a strength to her. The strength of someone who had bowed to the years, but not yet surrendered to them. A strength he understood, and respected.

"We were just," Compassion continued, "making our affirmations to die rather than return to the Cinder King. Is this not at least a tiny hope more than that? Our ancestors came to this land and survived against all reason and possibility. Do we not owe it to them to attempt whatever survival we can imagine, no matter how dim?"

"We searched the entire region," Confidence said, "and didn't find the door."

"It's near the place we looked," Compassion said. "It must be. We will find out where, and search there instead."

"And if the Refuge truly is just a myth?" Confidence asked. "If it's not real and never has been, as this man implies?"

The others fell silent.

"We need a miracle," Zeal whispered, standing up from his chair. "And I live for those, Greater Good. Even without the mountains…even if we had sunhearts…our path would be one of death without a dream. Without a dream, he will wear us down eventually and destroy us, no matter what we do. So yes, I'd prefer to trust a myth, Confidence. Instead of just stopping and embracing the sun."

Others nodded, and Nomad's stomach twisted. He looked down. Earlier, he'd been bolstered by their confidence, but now he found it strangely condemning. Of him, and the false opportunity his presence offered.

Try to believe, he thought to himself, like they do. Try to pretend, at least, there is a hope for them. Who knows? You've been wrong before.

"We're going to do it," he promised them, looking up. "We're going to cross those mountains and fly all the way around this cursed planet. We're going to loop back to where we started. And this time, we're going to open that doorway. It's better than lying down and dying."

"It is," Contemplation agreed. "Is that why you keep running?"

"So far," he said.

Confidence sat and nodded to herself. And he realized that perhaps she'd been playing a role. Expressing her true feelings, yes, but also offering the argument that needed to be made—so it could be refuted. Pushing them to a solution by vocalizing the fears they all felt, giving them shape, and letting them be neutralized.

"We'll do it," Compassion whispered. "For our children. For our families. For ourselves."

Great. Now he just had to reengineer the basis of their aviation technology—retrofitting the engines of an entire city to work in a near-vacuum environment—in just a few hours.

He'd rather get beaten up again, because this would require the old him. The one who had failed so many times.