He’s heard my thoughts somehow, sensed this betrayal. But then he extends a finger, pointing beyond the wagon’s bow.

On the horizon, a small dark shape separates the blue sky from the bone-bleached earth.

I push off the rail. “Straight ahead!” I shout. “There’s something straight ahead.” I scramble for our gear, grab the binos. But even with them, we’re too far off to make any sense of the object. It’s darker than I expected the Verdant to be, more black than green, but maybe that’s just the distance contorting things. There’s a smoothness to the shape that bothers me, like a pebble rounded by a stream.

Harlie and Asher, busy watching the storm on our tail, twist toward the bow. Harlie shouts orders. Asher climbs down the mainmast at a dangerous clip and I move to the brake, my heart pounding in my throat.

With the Gods Touched sailing at full speed, we close in on the strange object. It’s no bigger than Zuly’s tanker, but is rectangular in shape, with a rounded roof. It’s dull gray, like scrap metal, but somehow not a single flake of rust graces its sides.

There’s no green surrounding it, not in any direction.

This is wrong, all wrong.

“It must be a marker,” I reason aloud, “a sign that we’re headed the right way.”

Harlie gives me a skeptical look.

“Let’s get as close as we can and stop a minute,” I say.

“The storm,” she warns.

“If this place holds directions that weren’t on my map and we pass it by, we’re doomed. We pause here.”

She turns us against the wind. As Asher and Reed lower the sails, I work the brake. We slow steadily, then sag to a stop a quarter click from the structure. I vault over the wagon’s sideboard and sprint ahead, pausing in the sand that has gathered at the base of the dark formation.

Its sheer size gives it away as Old World–made, a relic of the past. I walk around it, dumbfounded. It’s pocked and cratered up close, made of something more akin to rock than metal. Certain areas are darkened black, as though they’ve burned.

On the eastern side, there’s a recessed doorway, tall and wide enough to allow passage to the wind wagon, but it’s caved in. Rock and rubble are piled in the entranceway, sand and dirt blown between every crevice.

I don’t know what this place is, but it’s definitely not the Verdant.

But then I look up toward the roofline, and I freeze.

Above the collapsed doorway, four Old World letters are etched into the stone.

E D E N

Chapter Thirty-Three

Asher steps up behind me.

“Look.” I point to the letters.

“Like on our map,” he murmurs.