The wild-caught ones were still dangerous to anyone not a Jouster or a dragon boy. Someone visibly injured might well be considered a possible menu item . . . and the injured were well aware of that and made a great effort to appear perfectly fine. It might have been funny, if it hadn’t been so tragic.

The only times when he did stop and pick someone up were when he found children wandering alone, or—more tragically—infants with dead parents. Then he stopped, caught them up, and carried them to the next group with children or infants. He never gave the impromptu guardians a chance to object either. “We are all Altans,” he would say bluntly. “We will care for our own. Tend to this little one.”

No one refused. Maybe they were afraid to. In any event, when he checked back with groups with which he had left children, they were caring for the foundlings as well as their own. In a couple of cases, he found a woman in the party cradling the child possessively, and he wondered, had he united a bereft mother with a replacement for the child she had lost?

Ari was the first to return. Kiron spotted him coming in from the south, and went to meet him. By then, Aket-ten was in the air, had presumably dealt with the people at the harbor, and was working the interior of the First Ring, guiding people through the maze of broken buildings and toppled statues to the one causeway still intact—a floating footbridge made of raft sections lashed together, a replacement for a causeway that had collapsed in an earlier shake.

He didn’t even need to say anything, he just pointed at Re-eth-ke hovering in the middle distance, and Ari practically went limp with relief. He straightened immediately, though. “We saw Re-eth-ke rise from the Healers’ Court!” he called. “I thought I was having a vision at first. But Seft’s own chaos was breaking loose, so we landed and each took a sick or wounded Healer out.”

“It’s getting w—” Kiron began, when another shake interrupted him.

By now, there wasn’t much left of the Central Island, and with this shake, buildings were beginning to sink on First Ring as well. Ari took in the damage with widened eyes.

“By Hamun’s horns!” he exclaimed. “What is happening here?”