Ayla took a deep breath, the cool air a balm on her scorched throat, and ran blind, losing her sense of direction almost immediately, brambles tearing at her clothes. More than once she caught a thin tree branch to the face, and it hurt like all hells, like being struck across the cheek with a riding crop, but she kept going. She ran until she could no longer hear the whooping and the war cries of the bandits, until she could no longer smell smoke in the air, and she kept going. She kept going. She kept going—

“Oh!”

She burst out of the tree line and caught herself, arms pinwheeling, right at the edge of a cliff.

No—a riverbank.

Of course she’d run in the exact wrong direction. She was standing at the edge of a short drop-off, the River Merra rushing along below, the water moving quickly here. Foaming white where it tumbled over a shelf of rock. Dead end. She allowed herself five seconds to catch her breath, to reassure herself she was still on solid ground, and then she took off again, racing along the riverbank. It was easier to run here, the moonlight weak but not blocked out by the trees. Ayla leaped over knobbly tree roots, the ground slick beneath her boots, mud and wet grass. She didn’t know where she was going, other than: Away. Away, away.

Away, until she heard voices. Cutting through the dark.

She froze, deerlike. Ears pricked.

“What about the eyes?”

Ayla crept forward. There, up ahead—a flicker of firelight. Had she stumbled across the bandits’ camp? What kind of horrible luck was that? She moved silently from one tree to the next, wanting only to make sure. The trees parted before her, giving way to a natural clearing. She could see the campfire smoldering at the center, three dark shapes sitting around it.

“Eyes can fetch a pretty coin,” said one, voice carrying through the trees. “Beautiful design, that is. All those vessels, each one thinner than a human hair.”

“Yeah, and what of the hair?” said a second voice.

They said something else, but Ayla didn’t hear it.

She was close enough to the see the whole clearing now. Three bandits. A pile of saddlebags, sleeping rolls. A roan horse tied to a thin, ghostly sapling. And.

There. Bound to a tree at the edge of the clearing.

Crier.

Somehow, Crier.

Ayla’s breath hitched. Everything went still. Inside her, around her. The leaves overhead stopped rustling. The forest stopped making its forest noises. Elsewhere, the river froze over, thousands of tons of rushing water turned to solid ice. Elsewhere still, the stars stopped wheeling; the sky, like the river, crackled with frost.

Ayla stared, thinking—she was wrong, this was some other girl, some other Automa girl—but no, she knew that face. Even in the darkness, firelight offering only the faintest glow, she knew that face.

Crier.

Crier, captured by human bandits in the wilds of Varn? Crier, arms bent awkwardly behind her, thick chains around her waist, her throat, chains strong enough to restrain an Automa? Not that it looked like Crier needed much restraining. Her body was limp, held upright only by the chains, head lolling sideways. Her eyes were closed.