The Savages line the hillcrest, staring down into the unknown depths. Evie, Brio, and the Elder Company are joined by a scraggly collection of almost twenty others who survived the late-night ambush by the Sicclunan masks. All of them seem content to follow the commands of the Elder Company, who are, at least for now, following Evie’s lead. Unfortunately, most of them are spindly sneak thieves and sickly old or infirm Bottoms residents who fled the moment they saw the first flaming arrow. Evie estimates there’s scarcely a fighter among them, perhaps a handful of battle-hardened Savages. She cursed herself for measuring their worth by that yard, but she also knows their journey will be a bloody one.

Fortunately, half a dozen members of B’ors tribes join them. They all agreed to make the trek with Evie’s band in force, at least for the time being.

Bam dips the end of his mallet’s haft into what is immediately revealed as mud-soft ground. The end of the haft quickly becomes its middle as the wooden pole arm slides easily into whatever substance the soil has become. Bam halts, despite the obvious fact the unnatural depression could swallow his weapon whole. When he extracts the haft of the mallet it clings to the pit with tendrils of black tar.

“What in the light of the Fire Star is it?” Evie asks no one in particular.

“What’s left,” Mother Manai answers her simply, offering no more.

“What was it before?” Evie presses. “And how did it become… this?”

“The machine,” a withered voice offers from somewhere down the line.

Evie leans forward and peers across the dirty, rune-stained faces of the surviving Savages.

The speaker is a scrawny man of middle age, his long hair and beard overtaken by more gray than brown. He has a hawkish-pointed nose and deep-set eyes that seem to be ever staring at something Evie and the rest of them can’t see. Evie quickly realizes he’s not looking into the pit, he’s watching something illusory far beyond it, perhaps the past.

“What machine?” Evie asks him.

“The machine. The Crachian machine. I was a worker for Gen Terran before… well, just before, is all. They had one of the mining concessions along the front. This is what we left behind when we’d stripped the land to its guts. This is how the cities get fed, how life is so good for so many folk. It’s why we keep pushing and pushing and pushing the front, eating every patch of ground and always needing more. Crache feeds on the bones of the rest of the world.”

The ghost of the man’s words seems to linger in the air between them all like the echo of distant thunder.

“What’s your name?” Evie asks him.

“Doesn’t matter anymore.”