Death was coming. Just no one knew how. Nor that it would be so pervasive. I remember those last days clearly, even before the earth began to shake and those last Roil machines came over the horizon, on their titanic legs, all rage and fire. There’d been a quality to the air, a light positively elegiac.
THE OUTER WALL 2098 MILES NORTH OF THE ROIL
Buchan and Whig sat around the fire, heads almost together, and Buchan’s hands nearly touching the flame. They looked up at the dark walls that Margaret and David had crossed almost half a day ago. “All this effort, and here we wait outside,” Buchan groaned. “Everything that we have done and once again, we’re left waiting.”
Whig patted his arm. “We made it this far, don’t discount that. We saw the pair of them to the edge of the wall.” He pointed at Kara, who sat hunched over, polishing her boots. She’d been polishing them since she’d brought the Dawn back down. Polishing and polishing, not saying a word. Whig said, “It's much harder for her.”
“But still, all this waiting.”
“Quiet,” Kara hissed.
“I did not mean-” Buchan said.
“I said, quiet. Another one’s coming, an iron ship,” Kara said; she ran from cover. “Fourth one today, and it’s coming back.”
Buchan and Whig followed her. They watched the ship curve around the valley, then shoot straight up into the sky. It dipped, then plummeted beyond the wall.
“That’s it,” Kara Jade said. “I’m going up there.”
“And what are you going to do? David said to-”
“I don’t remember David paying me to go on this expedition,” Kara said, sliding her fingers into her gloves. “I’m a free agent. And they’re my friends.” “But-”
She looked at Buchan significantly. “You want to come?”
Buchan shuddered. “No, we will guard the base of the wall. Just in case.” Kara cleared her throat, and spat on the ground. “Yes, just in case. I understand.”
She strode across the gravel, boots gleaming in the red light of sunset. At the edge of the overhang, she turned, and this time there was no mockery in her expression. “Good luck, gentlemen.”
“Be careful,” Buchan said.
Kara laughed, loud and clear in the cool air. “If I was ever careful, ever cautious, I would never have come here, neither would you.”
Buchan couldn’t argue with that.
She was hardly free of the overhang when the ground shook, and ice tumbled from the great wall. A piece that was almost the size of her crashed to the stones nearby and shattered. Kara ducked back under cover as more pieces fell.
“Something’s happening,” Buchan said.
“You don’t say,” Kara said. “The Engine,” she said, and her smile was wide, and grim. “It has to be.”
“And you?”
“I'm still going up. Four iron ships, I reckon there’s a path into the city.”
The Collard Green had already been dragged into the darkness, but the Roslyn Dawn had refused to go into the dark, and Kara couldn’t blame her. There was something ominous about that space beneath the wall despite its warmth. For all David’s declarations that it was safe, it threatened her. Kara was of the sky, as much as her Aerokin. Wide open spaces welcomed her, but that dark, it was old; it seemed to know something and seemed ready to swallow her without hesitation — perhaps the stories that David had told about the Downing Bridge and its malevolent spiders had affected her more than she’d thought.
She folded her arms and walked back to the Dawn.
Buchan shouted after her. “Do you have a death wish, girl?”
Kara Jade smiled. “I think you have me confused with Margaret. The Dawn will keep me safe.”
The Dawn ’s doorifice was already opening. Kara could see Buchan’s large form in the dark beneath the overhang, and could just make out Whig’s slender figure behind him; touching his shoulder, talking to him quietly, no doubt, but with a strength that all Whig’s conversations possessed.
She stroked the belly of her Aerokin. “Just you and me,” she said.
The Dawn sighed, released her grip upon the earth and began to fly, rising high and fast. Outside it was cold and dead, but here, wrapped in such perfect life, Kara felt warm, she felt like she was home.
All alone in her Dawn. Finally alone — and never alone.
She couldn't help smiling. Death wish, no! This was all about life!