On the day she was driven from Noreela, the voice of her unborn daughter fell silent. But Lenora had always nurtured that hate, and she had made a silent promise that, should the chance arise, Robenna would burn at her hand.

As they drifted south she wondered whether her daughter would be waiting for her on the beach.

ALISHIA AND THE fledge miner came down from the mountain slopes and headed west. She was shocked at how long they had slept—the afternoon had faded into evening by the time she screamed herself awake—and she suddenly felt unsafe remaining in the foothills. There were things in the mountains that had stalked Trey, killed his friends and family, and now as night approached she feared that they would come aboveground, hunting through the dusk as they had slaughtered their way through the eternal darkness belowground. The miner had remained silent on the matter, sitting atop Alishia’s horse, bent forward and hugging its mane as he sobbed through his grief. If this is what meeting a Nax did to someone, Alishia had no desire to stay close to where they might surface.

And there was something else moving her on. The thing that had reached out for her while she slept the fledge sleep. That utter darkness, a void, repulsing her and fascinating her in equal measures. Instinct tore her away and told her to flee, while her intellect demanded to know more. Her fear, remembered from the dream like a taste or a smell, had been the purest fear of her life. Knowledge from books did not impart that level of emotion. Erv had disconcerted her, and some of the things she had seen in Noreela City had sometimes made her scared to wander the streets, but she had never before been as truly frightened as in that dream.

Upon waking, the screaming still stinging her throat, she had already begun to deconstruct and analyze the fear.

As a child she had nightmares when she was ill. She could never explain them to herself, let alone to others, although thinking about them still disturbed her even now. There had been a sense of space so huge that it belittled her and her existence, made her less than a gasp in a storm. She stood on a hill and the space closed in around her. Nothingness itself took on a weight and a pressure, grinding her down even though she was nothing, taking her away from the center of things so that she regarded herself as meaningless, an insignificant pollutant in the purity of void. As she grew older she tried to ally this space, this endless, pressing void, with the experience she lacked. A whole world sat around her and she had seen nothing of it. But however much she suspected this, in truth she knew that it was not the case. Her knowledge may be secondhand, but that was no reason for her to fear the world.