Needing a distraction, something to help clear his head, he reached to the chain around his neck and pulled out his father’s pocket watch. He stared down at the dial. Earlier, the second hand had been spinning rapidly as they neared the city. Now it had stopped. He turned in a slow circle, but the needle refused to spin again. He shook the watch. Still nothing.

“Jake, what are you doing?” Kady asked.

“When we were landing here, the second hand was spinning wildly.” He pantomimed it with a fingertip atop the crystal face. “Almost like it was responding to something here in the city.”

Kady looked over his shoulder. “It’s not moving now.”

“I know that,” he said with a touch of exasperation. He placed a palm against the stone wall of the cell. “I think all this rock is blocking the signal. We have to get back to the surface. Follow where the watch leads.”

“How?” Pindor asked. “Even if we could get through this door, that wingless grakyl with the knives waits between us and the sun.”

Jake pictured the brutish dungeon master. The snick-snick of him sharpening his blades had grown to feel like spiders climbing up and down his spine.

Jake tucked away his father’s gold watch. “We’ll have to look for any chance to escape,” he said lamely, recognizing that it wasn’t much of a plan. He shook his head in defeat. “If only I still had my flashlight from before, the one that got turned into a freeze ray when it was fused with that blue ice crystal …”

Bach’uuk spoke by the door. He stretched up on his toes to stare out the window and sniffed the air. “No good,” he said. “No crystals here. Only fire and smoke.”

Jake didn’t understand what his Neanderthal friend meant. Bach’uuk settled back on the ground and stared at Jake with his sharp blue eyes.

Then it struck Jake, too. He remembered Bach’uuk staring at one of the wall torches. Back in Calypsos, the townspeople had used glowing crystals—called hearth-lights—to illuminate their homes. The stones had been powered by the energy given off by the crystal heart in the center of the great temple. But since landing here, Jake had not spotted anyone using crystals. Even the huge windriders were nothing more than clever pieces of engineering powered by a naturally combustive source, namely those firebombs.

But what did that mean? Had these people lost their knowledge of alchemy when Ankh Tawy fell? Or were crystals forbidden?

“Maybe those stones don’t work here,” Kady added.

Jake wasn’t buying that. He touched his throat. He could feel the subtle manipulation of his vocal cords. There was some energy here that allowed them to speak All-World. If that worked, crystals must, too.

Or he could be entirely wrong.

“If we had a crystal,” Jake said, “we might be able to test your theory.”

“I have one,” Marika said, stepping forward.

Jake swung toward her. “You do?”

She reached into her pocket and tugged out a chunk of green crystal. She held it out toward him. It was the size of a chicken egg, only broken in half. The other half of the crystal—carried by another—would vibrate in tune with its twin, allowing communication, like a walkie-talkie.