“Now Noreela ends,” Trey said. “Everything that happened no longer matters. I almost envy my family and friends, dead down there from the Nax. At least they died at home. And here I am, a miner, flying toward my death high above the surface I never should have seen.”

“This can’t be it,” Kosar said, but he knew the childlike naïveté of his words. “Hopeless,” he muttered.

“There’s something about her,” Hope said.

Kosar turned and saw the witch standing above Alishia. Her face was stern, molded by sorrow and anger. “What do you mean?”

“I mean apart from the obvious, the fact that she’s a girl instead of a woman now. However impossible that is, there’s something else. She’s not as ill as she was. She’s looking better. Less asleep. And for a while down there . . . just for a while . . . she was awake.”

“Meaning what?” Trey asked. He leaned in close across Alishia as if to protect her from the witch.

Hope stepped back. “We’re going somewhere,” she said. “Have neither of you thought of what’s happening here? The machine is still flying. Magic is still guiding us. Thief, you saw the machines in the valley falling still as soon as we left, their use ended. This flying machine . . . magic must know that it still has its use.”

“I don’t care,” Trey said. “We couldn’t keep the boy from the Mages, and the four of us will never get him back. That’s for certain.”

Hope looked at Kosar and smiled, shrugged. The expression did not sit well on her face and he turned away, perturbed. Was that hope he had seen there? Greed? Rage? He could not tell. Her tattoos had hidden her true feelings, as always, and she was as much an enigma to him now as ever.

“No matter,” Hope said. “Time will tell. We’ll be in Kang Kang soon.”

Their conversation ended there, and each of them withdrew into their own thoughts. Kosar sat back against a rib and nursed his wounded hand and bleeding fingers. He licked the blood from his fingertips, bearing the brief pain before the soothing sensation overcame them, just for a time. A’Meer had been able to soothe that pain. Sweet, mysterious A’Meer.

He drifted to sleep reliving images from the past, but time treated them differently. He fought the Monk in the village instead of hiding away. He refused to help A’Meer and fled north to the Cantrass Plains. Rafe drowned crossing the San, their journey ended by the wretched faults in nature, not by those that had caused those faults in the first place. And each dream fed into the next with the same sense of incompletion.

WHEN KOSAR WOKE up it was still dark. He saw Trey and Hope standing at the far edge of the machine, staring out through the tattered hole in the ribs.