“They’re excited,” I tell Meroe, as we leave another band of eager hunters behind.
“Shouldn’t they be?” She’s back in one of her long green dresses, with an asymmetrical silver band on her right arm. I’m wearing my Deepwalker armor, crafted to show off the blue marks on my skin. Meroe says it improves morale.
“My morale’s not improved,” I say. “Who rotting knows what that thing is?”
“Whatever it is, we’ll deal with it.”
“You have no way of knowing that.”
She gives me a sly grin. “You worry too much.”
“You don’t worry enough.” I can’t help but smile back, put my arm around her shoulders, and give her a squeeze. She leans into me, and for a moment my morale is improved.
“Besides,” she says, lowering her voice, “you’re not making any progress on getting the ship back to Kahnzoka, are you? So any change has to be for the better.”
I suppress the urge to say, Unless we all die, or something similarly cheerful. I can tell when I’m not being helpful.
We make our way back up to the tower that evening, once Meroe has assured herself everything is in readiness, while the gray wall draws ever closer. The door there is the only remaining opening to the Garden, and the guards are ready to slam and bar it at the first sign of a crab onslaught. I’ve given that duty to Thora and Jack, and they greet us cheerfully as we approach.
“Deepwalker!” Jack gives a low bow. “Clever Jack reports a strange phenomenon indeed. Behold!”
I barely have time to duck as she hurls a snowball at me. It shatters against the wall behind my head, melting rapidly in the heat of the Garden, and Jack cackles. Meroe looks delighted.
“It’s really snowing?” she says.
Thora nods. “Just a little bit so far, but getting heavier. Here.” She offers a pair of heavy blankets. “If you’re still set on going out there.”
“You can trust Jack and lovely Thora with the watch,” Jack says. “You may be needed below.”
“I should be on the tower.” I’m not sure why I think this—some vague notion, maybe, that if strange Eddica powers are afoot I may be able to influence them. And, of course, I want to see, even if there’s nothing I can do. I take the blankets from Thora and hand one to Meroe. “Thanks. If anything goes badly wrong—”
Thora nods. “I’ll shut the door.”
“After I rescue the two of you,” Jack says gallantly.
Meroe and I go out onto the deck. Snow filters down, nearly invisible against a sky that’s white with cloud from horizon to horizon. Meroe stands, arms spread, staring upward with wide eyes. A fat flake lands on her forehead, and she flinches, then giggles.
“I didn’t think it would be so soft,” she says. “It’s beautiful.”
“You’ve never seen snow before.” I hadn’t put that together until now.
“In Nimar it only snows up in the highest mountains,” she says. “When I was a girl, my father told me about getting caught in a blizzard on a hunting trip, and I didn’t believe him.” She turns to me and cocks her head. “Does it snow in Kahnzoka?”
“Not much. A few times a year.” I shrug, uncomfortably. Bone-deep memories rise from my years before, on the streets of the Sixteenth Ward. Snow didn’t mean beauty and wonder, it meant a real chance you’d freeze to death before morning. “In the city it just piles up and turns to brown slush.”
Somehow, she gets what I’m thinking. There are times when I wonder if Meroe is a Kindre adept. She takes my hand, and our cold fingers lace together.
Climbing the tower is considerably harder in the chill, the cold metal sucking the warmth from our hands. We wrap ourselves in the cloaks when we get to the top, and I stick my hands in my armpits, trying to coax some life back into them. Meroe’s precious instruments have already been moved safely inside the Garden, so the top of the tower is empty except for us. Meroe walks in a circle, trying to get her blood flowing, then delights at the crisp footprints she leaves in the fresh snow.
My attention is focused on what’s ahead of us. Soliton is still headed directly for the gray light, and I’ve had to revise my estimate of the thing’s size yet again. It has to be huge, a circular dome several miles in diameter and half a mile high. Not a ship at all, even a ship as big as Soliton, but more on the scale of a mountain. It dominates the view directly ahead of us, but to either side it’s still possible to see a snowy landscape stretching way into the gray distance. The water is crowded with icebergs, and they scrape and crash against the great ship’s hull, though they don’t impede its progress.
I can feel the currents of Eddica energy, more powerful than anything I’ve encountered aboard Soliton. It has a strained, hard quality, as though the magic were as frozen as the rest of this country.
“Nearly there,” Meroe says, joining me at the rail.
“Yeah.”
A few minutes, at most, before Soliton’s Bow touches the light. And then Blessed only knows. I stare at the top of the dome, as it gradually eclipses the cloudy sky overhead. My hands have gone tight on the cold metal rail, and I pry them loose with an effort. After a moment, Meroe’s fingers slip through mine again.
“Kiss me,” she says. “Just in case.”
The tip of Soliton’s Bow disappears into the solid wall of gray. I turn to Meroe hait Gevora Nimara, First Princess of Nimar, and kiss her as thoroughly as I know how, my body pressed close to hers as we slip into the unknown.
* * *
There’s a moment of pressure, and then release, the feeling of vast energies suddenly relaxing their grip. Then a gust of warm air, cutting the chill like the breath of a hot stove. Meroe pulls away from me with a gasp, and I reluctantly open my eyes.
The snowy landscape is gone. The clouds are gone, the icebergs are gone. All the gray has changed to gleaming blue—the sun bright and hot in a perfectly clear sky, the water a brilliant cyan. Steam rises from Soliton’s deck as the new hot wind blows across the cold metal, the ship’s coat of snow slumping rapidly into streams of clear water.
Ahead, there’s a shore, a riot of green that’s almost painful to look at after so long in the gray-on-gray world. Huge trees stretch skyward, trunks tangling into a dense forest canopy. To either side, rocky beaches curve outward as Soliton pulls into a vast bay, but directly ahead of us the forest is broken by a line of enormous structures. They look like walls made out of metal spiderweb, the tops taller than Soliton’s deck, arranged in a regular pattern—
I match Meroe’s gasp when I realize what I’m looking at. The huge things are docks, rectangular cradles stretching from the shore into the sea, built for a ship the size of Soliton. Not just built for—the titanic berths are lined up one beside the other, and several of them are occupied by gray leviathans. Not twins to Soliton—the shapes are different—but at least siblings.
I look at Meroe. Her eyes are shining, joyous. Her mind must be whirling away already, fitting all this into her theories about Soliton, who built it and why. There’s nothing she likes better than figuring things out. Looking back to the docks, I can’t help but feel more apprehensive.