At the end, with the ground around it stripped to the bedrock and air still condensing in an endless spiral from above, the hole whistled itself into oblivion. It was a hiss of gushing air that Trey recognized from the mines—sometimes breezes would come from and go to nowhere, sources and destinations both mysteries—and it gave him a shiver to realize that these things may be the cause. The hole’s final breath could even now be exploring the underworld, fingering through passageways and caverns untrodden by humanity, blowing dust against things ancient, unknown and unknowable, passing by sleeping or waking Nax, eventually even reaching the stiff body of his dead mother and querying her demise.

“Are we going to see?” he said eventually.

“No. It’s too uncertain. We’ll skirt around it.” Alishia’s initial excitement seemed to have faded to a mild interest, tempered by her realization of how dangerous this thing could be.

“It’ll be dark soon.”

She nodded. “We need to camp as far away from here as we can. Maybe it hasn’t quite finished.”

They headed south to pass by the swallow hole, finding evidence of its presence as they moved farther away: uprooted trees; shredded shrubs; areas of stripped ground where the bedrock peered through. Two hours later, with the sun setting ahead of them and the life moon a waning silver against its more sinister sister, they spied a fire in the distance.

“Someone else on the plains?” Trey asked nervously. Alishia was the only topsider he had met and strange as she was, at least she had grown familiar. And besides, he owed her for saving his life. But to face others?

“Yes,” she said. “People. We should go to them. They’ll have food and water, and I’m sure they’d trade some for a crumb of your fledge.”

“How can we be sure that they’re friendly?”

Alishia was silent for a long while, staring across the darkening plains at the winking light. “We can’t be sure,” she said. “But there’s a part of me that craves company right now. That swallow hole . . . I’ve read about them, but actually seeing something like that, something that is proof of the land changing, winding down and giving out on us . . . I want to be with other people. I need to talk. And besides, they may know a lot more than we do.”

“About what?”

“Magic.” So saying, Alishia strode off, heading for the fire, shrugging her backpack higher.

Trey held back. Alishia’s comments about the swallow hole and what it meant had made him think of the Nax mind he had touched on so briefly and terribly. Something had been wrong in there, an understanding that things were amiss and that it had to wake to take action.

And now Alishia was talking of magic.