Beq, on cresting the ridge, raced to the edge of the road with an excited squeak. She scrambled up a large rock and started clicking the dials on her spectacles. For a moment Maya, hurrying after her, couldn’t quite parse what she was seeing. There was a city, a loose grid of streets and buildings, closed off by a wall on three sides. On the fourth side, an enormous thing stretched out of the ground, a cliff face leaning dangerously outward over the city—

Then her mind sorted the dirt and trees from the smooth, clean lines of unmetal, and she knew what she was looking at. Even half-buried in the earth, the silhouette of a Chosen skyfortress was unmistakable. There were drawings of them in her copy of the Inheritance, floating amid fleets of lesser skyships like cloud-bound whales. A skyfortress looked like a flattened teardrop or the business end of a spade, rounded at the back and coming to a point at the bow. All the workings and weapons were inside the unmetal hull, leaving the outside a smooth, unbroken curve of brilliant white.

This skyfortress had driven itself into the ground, bow-first, at about a forty-five-degree angle. Maya could only imagine what it must have been like on the day it fell, because the thing had hit hard enough to punch through the soil and into the valley’s bedrock. Four hundred years later, it remained where it had fallen, jutting out of the earth and trees that had filled in around it. The stern hung in the air, hundreds of meters above the streets of the city.

Looking closer, Maya could see that the skyfortress’s lines were not entirely intact. In places the unmetal skin had broken, peeling outward like the petals of a flower. She glanced at Beq, who was still staring fixedly at the thing.

“Isn’t it beautiful?” Beq said. “There isn’t a skyfortress in the whole Republic that’s so well preserved. The Harmony in Judgment lost its whole stern section, so it’s only the bow that’s in the city square in Carvoria. And of course Faith, Certainty, and Generosity were lost over the sea in the Last Contact. They say Purpose is somewhere on the other side of the Shattered Peaks, but no one knows exactly where.”

“I … uh … did not know that,” Maya said, glad to see Beq coming out of her funk. “Do you know a lot about this one?”

She nodded eagerly. “It was called Grace in Execution—they named the city after it. Its last captain was Ghaea-Ven-Tilophani, and she brought the ship down herself. They’d been boarded by ghouls and plaguespawn, and there were barely enough Chosen aboard to keep the ship in the air. This was late in the war. Grace was the last skyfortress, you know, the last of the eight to fall.”

“What damaged it, where the skin is broken?”