The company men wore sturdy clothing, trousers like Dusk’s but far better tailored, shirts and rugged jackets. Jackets? In Patji’s heat? These people bowed to Vathi, showing her more deference than Dusk would have expected. They drew hands from shoulder to shoulder as they started speaking—a symbol of respect. Foolishness. Anyone could make a gesture like that; it didn’t mean anything. True respect included far more than a hand waved in the air.

But they did treat her like more than a simple scribe. She was better placed in the company than he’d assumed. Not his problem anymore, regardless.

Vathi looked at him, then back at her people. “We must hurry to the machine,” she said to them. “The one from Above. We must turn it off.”

Good. She would do her part. Dusk turned to walk away. Should he give words at parting? He’d never felt the need before. But today, it felt … wrong not to say something.

He started walking. Words. He had never been good with words.

“Turn it off?” one of the men said from behind. “What do you mean, Lady Vathi?”

“You don’t need to feign innocence, Winds,” Vathi said. “I know you turned it on in my absence.”

“But we didn’t.”

Dusk paused. What? The man sounded sincere. But then, Dusk was no expert on human emotions. From what he’d seen of people from the homeisles, they could fake emotion as easily as they faked a gesture of respect.

“What did you do, then?” Vathi asked them.

“We … opened it.”

Oh no …

“Why would you do that?” Vathi asked.

Dusk turned to regard them, but he didn’t need to hear the answer. The answer was before him, in the vision of a dead island he’d misinterpreted.

“We figured,” the man said, “that we should see if we could puzzle out how the machine worked. Vathi, the insides … they’re complex beyond what we could have imagined. But there are seeds there. Things we could—”

“No!” Dusk said, rushing toward them.

One of the sentries above planted an arrow at his feet. He lurched to a stop, looking wildly from Vathi up toward the walls. Couldn’t they see? The bulge in mud that announced a deathant den. The game trail. The distinctive curl of a cutaway vine. Wasn’t it obvious?

“It will destroy us,” Dusk said. “Don’t seek … Don’t you see…?”

For a moment, they all just stared at him. He had a chance. Words. He needed words.

“That machine is deathants!” he said. “A den, a … Bah!” How could he explain?

He couldn’t. In his anxiety, words fled him, like Aviar fluttering away into the night.

The others finally started moving, pulling Vathi toward the safety of their treasonous fortress.