Chapter Thirty

"Throttle is right here," Jeffrey Jeffrey said, scratching at his beard as he moved down the control panel, explaining it to Nomad. "And here, this will let you rotate the city. We only have one primary thruster set to move you laterally. The engineers said that should be enough."

"We don't have to move far forward," Nomad agreed. "Most of the distance we need to cover is vertical."

The two of them stood in the cab of his ship, a smaller room off the main chamber where he'd done his research earlier. They'd positioned his ship in a strange location—locked right on top of the hub, above the Chorus. Underneath his feet, through the metal, those shades were now accompanied by tens of people packed into the space surrounding the Reliquary.

Through the windshield, he could see a forlorn, reduced version of Beacon. A mere twelve ships, arrayed in a circle around the hub—three of them being the giant water-container ships at the outside. He'd imagined it as a flying disc when they'd been assembling it, but "disc" misleadingly evoked a shape too elegant, too smooth, too intentional. No, this was more like a flying barge made of bulky, warehouse-like ships.

It was vaguely circular, with a central bump one story taller than the rest of it. And he was at the top, such as it was. Jeffrey Jeffrey showed him how to rotate his ship in place, which was handy. He could turn the windshield to look back toward the horizon, or keep his eyes forward, aimed at the mountains. A little white-and-green radar screen showed him their proximity to the mountain.

"Here are the controls to drop the water ships once they're empty," Jeffrey Jeffrey said, indicating a control panel that was newly wired in place. "That should be everything."

"What are those controls?" he asked, gesturing to a group on the left of the panel.

"Those control the prospector device underneath your ship," Jeffrey Jeffrey explained. "Not relevant now."

Right. Elegy, before becoming a Charred, had been an explorer. A woman who pushed the limits, both socially and physically. She'd struck out into the shadows with an entire city relying on her. Her ship had been a prospector, intended to help her find signs of Investiture in the great maelstrom between the sun and the darkened land they now flew through. "Thank you," Nomad said. "You should run along now and get someplace safe."

"I could stay," Jeffrey Jeffrey said. "We had time, so we sealed your room as well—best we could. It will leak more since we made your door able to open easily. But there should be enough air in here the entire flight…"

"Too dangerous," Nomad said. "I can handle this."

"And her?" Jeffrey Jeffrey nodded back to the main chamber of the ship, where Elegy was still chained in place. At least now she could sit down in the corner, rather than being held flat against the wall.

There was no other good place to keep her. They'd jettisoned the ship that had doubled as a jail. He didn't like the idea of letting her stay in a room with innocents.

"She'll be fine there," Nomad said. "Her Investiture should let her survive without oxygen for a while, if it comes to that."

"All right," Jeffrey Jeffrey said. He lingered, looking out through the window—all other windows on the other ships had been covered with steel, welded into place, out of concern that the seals at the corners of the windows wouldn't hold the pressure. So this was Jeffrey Jeffrey's last sight of the outside world until, hopefully, they touched down on the other side of the mountains.

"Adonalsium's fortune gaze upon you," the man said to Nomad. "And…may you always outrun the sun. In a very present and immediate way, Sunlit."

He left, and a few seconds later, Nomad saw him enter one of the other ships. The door closed, but they'd leave the intakes open until Nomad indicated they needed to seal themselves in.

The city had become a ghost town. A black, huddled collection of structures, lit only by emergency lights. Occupied only by the silent and the dead.

He took the controls and started Beacon upward in the darkness. In the shadow as they were, there wasn't much to see of the mountain, but the radar gave him enough to fly by. He mostly just went up. There was no need to hug the slope.

This feels…more boring than it should.

"Good," Nomad said, watching the throttle—keeping them flying on regular engines at close to full power. "We want this all to be as boring as possible."

How long has it been, the knight asks, since you've been in command of this many people?

"Command? Don't call it that. I'm flying a ship."

You're in charge right now, which makes you captain of this ship. That's a command position.

"Not the same thing."

It isn't your fault, you know, what happened. Events were largely outside your control.

"Never said they weren't."

You still carry that burden.

"It's a small one."

And yet you've always avoided being put into a leadership position again.

"Seems best for everyone that way," he said, nudging the ship a little farther along to the east, up the slope, away from the sun. Still climbing. He waited to see what kind of issue Auxiliary would raise next.

Instead a voice came from behind him.

"You have someone in your head too, don't you?" Elegy asked.

He glanced over his shoulder at her, sitting cross-legged, wrists chained together and hooked to the wall. Her cinderheart glowed a soft red-orange.

"I can see it in you," she said. "The others say you're praying. But you're not. You're talking to someone in your head. You can hear them, like I used to."

"Yes," Nomad agreed. "It's similar, I guess."

"Does the voice tell you who to kill?"

"He's told me to jump off a cliff a few times," Nomad said with a smile. She obviously didn't get the joke. "No, Elegy. The voice is my friend. The tool I summon on occasion? That's his body."

"Why is he in your head too?"

"It's complicated. These days, though, he calls me his squire or his valet." At her confusion, he explained further. "Auxiliary—my friend—has a body, but he can't control it…directly. Instead he sits in my mind, like a passenger. So he jokes that I'm his valet—his palanquin carrier, you might say—to move him wherever he wants to go."

And you're a very ineffective one, I must say. Rarely ever do what I tell you. Maybe we should get you one of those cinderhearts. Then perhaps you'd be more pliant.

"Why don't you fight?" Elegy asked.

"Who?"

"Everyone," she said. "The voice held me back, most of the time, then let me loose when there was someone to fight. Now…I want to fight everyone. You said you feel it. I can see you feel it. So why don't you fight?"

"I choose my fights," Nomad replied. Outside, the air was thinning. He didn't need to check the pressure gauge when the engines were so obviously laboring. He gave the order, and the people sealed themselves into their cabins, closing the vents.

He had about two hours, from this point, until they started to run out of oxygen.

"I don't understand," Elegy said. "Choose what fights? How?"

Can't you just explain to her that there's more than fighting, the hero asks.

He could. But if there was one thing his master had taught him, it was how to lead a conversation. He still did it as naturally as he performed a spear kata.

"I don't want to fight the people here," Nomad said. "There's no challenge to it, for one thing. For another, I want nothing from them."

"I want the fight from them," Elegy said. "If you let me free, there would be nothing for me to choose. I would fight you. I'd fight everyone on this ship."

"And then what?"

"And then…" She trailed off.

"Then you'd die up here in the cold," Nomad said. "Alone. Great. What have you earned? What have you accomplished?"

"I…"

"You're going to have to learn to find something else to live for, Elegy."

"Something…else…?"

"A reason," Nomad said. "A purpose. Once you have that, you'll know when to fight, and why. You'll fight for something." He met her eyes again. "You aren't going to be able to recover who you once were. I'm reasonably certain she is gone, like a book burned to ashes.

"But you can't merely be what you are now. If you keep on this way, you'll end up dead. Probably fast. You'll howl in rage to the sun, unsatisfied, because the fight was short and pointless. But that fire inside of you isn't going to go away either. So find something to care about, a reason to channel it. That's my best advice to you."

"Then what is your purpose? Why do you live?"

Damnation. He'd walked right into that. Perhaps he hadn't digested Wit's lessons as well as he'd thought.

"I used to live for my friends," Nomad said softly. "But those days are gone. Then I lived to protect the cosmere—for a brief time harboring one of its most dangerous secrets. Now…now I live to run."

She frowned. "And that's…satisfying, why?"

"It isn't," he admitted. "I guess I'm still trying to learn the same lesson."

"So that's why you understand," she said and settled back, closing her eyes. "I see. Yes, I see. Thank you."

Storming woman. He had the sense that, before all of this, she'd probably been outrageously self-righteous. Her memories might not have survived, but some of that attitude did.

I'm embarrassed, the knight admits, how much better she just did my job than I have lately.

"Your job?" he asked in Alethi. "Since when has it been your job to moralize at me?"

Since forever, Nomad. You threw out your conscience years ago, I know, though I never had a chance to meet her. That left the position vacant, regardless, so I appointed myself to fill it. I'd ask how I'm doing, but…well, you are clear evidence of how much of a rookie I still am.

Nomad grunted, smiling despite himself, and checked the elevation. They were barely moving now. So he took a deep breath and engaged the new engines. The entire city jolted as if it had been struck by a giant hammer. Then it started upward again.

He released his breath, and he, Elegy, and Auxiliary flew for a time in silence. He felt oddly at peace as they did. He was still running, of course, still being hunted. Yet he could pretend this was a lull, with nothing to do but climb. After a half hour or so of this, however, he noticed their elevation wasn't matching up to projections.

They were moving more slowly than he'd anticipated. He pushed the engines to full power, and though they started moving a little faster, the acceleration soon tapered off.

Around them, the cloud cover was falling away, the mountainside coming into full view. Ringlight bathed the landscape.

Are we even moving?

"We are, but slowly," he said, checking other readings.

He silently urged the ship to rise. And it did, with increasing slowness. He'd miscalculated somewhere. Theoretically they should be going faster with each passing moment, as they burned away more water and ejected it from the ship. Instead they were slowing. Not rapidly, but enough that he doubted they'd make the summit before their water ran out.

Nomad? Auxiliary asked. What's wrong?

"I don't know," he admitted, checking the throttle controls to make sure they weren't jammed or something. "It could be any number of tens of things. Maybe the seals we used don't work in extreme low pressure and are starting to leak. Maybe this method puts too much strain on the engines, making them overheat. Usually you discover these kinds of quirks through stress tests and numerous prototypes. But…we didn't have time for any of that."

He watched the ominous horizon in the rear distance. Light started to stain it, the sun creeping from its den, hungry.

He felt like the worst of the ten fools in that moment. He'd led these people to their deaths, and he didn't even know where his miscalculation was. He knew from sad experience in engineering that these kinds of little problems were numerous—and when one cropped up in an early test, you usually had to use the wreckage to work out what had gone wrong…

Then a wave of relief hit him as he remembered that he'd built in a failsafe for this. He reached over, hitting the button to jettison the first empty water-carrying ship. It tumbled free, and the larger collection of ships jolted at the sudden loss of mass. Beacon's gyroscopes accounted for the sudden change in the ship's shape and mass, keeping them level as their speed increased.

Not quickly enough. He checked the water gauges and found that the second container ship was also basically empty. He hit the button to eject that one.

Nothing happened.

He hit it again.

Nomad?

"The unlocking mechanism is jammed on that second ship," he said, peering through his windshield to see it still latched in place. "We need to jettison it immediately and hope that drops enough weight to speed us up."

Okay. But…how? Can you hotwire the system?

Nomad took a deep breath. "No. We're going to have to go out and do it by hand."