She presses her hands against the street and pushes her torso up, arching her back to peer across the model. Dyeawan looks to the edge of the Capitol, to the Bottoms beside the ocean. There’s a giant stone pool beneath the surface of the model there that’s filled with real seawater. Miniature ships bob atop it, most anchored at the docks, although some have been left to drift out in the open water.

Riko watches her oddly. “You don’t miss it, do you?”

“No.”

“Then why are you looking at it?”

Dyeawan’s straining shoulders give the scantest shrug.

“Things were always easy for me to figure out there,” she says.

“Oh.” Riko nods, sagely. “I get it.”

As she moves her gaze over every minutely captured detail of the docks, the absence of something familiar gives Dyeawan pause.

“Where are all the hulls of the ships?” she asks.

Riko doesn’t understand. “Huh?”

Dyeawan points. “Near the ship yards, there. They store rows and rows of ship hulls there, upside-down. They have since I was born. They were on the model before. They’re almost all gone now.”

“Well, the surveyors are responsible for changing the models when new things are built in the Capitol or old things are torn down. They must have taken away the hulls.”

“But… there were people… people live under those hulls. What did they do with them?”

“Um… I don’t know about the people, but maybe they finally used the hulls to build new ships? That’s what they’re for, yeah?”

“They couldn’t have finished building that many ships that fast.”

“I’m really sorry, Slider, I don’t know what happened. Did friends of yours live in them?”

“Not friends, just… people like me, a lot of them. And I…”

Dyeawan remembers telling Edger about the stockpile of unused hulls in the Bottoms, and about those who used them as shelter and to hide from Aegins. She’d thought nothing of it at the time; they were just talking, and the subject of their discussion wasn’t even aimed at the Bottoms or its homeless residents. He hadn’t asked her about either, in fact. She certainly didn’t feel as though she was being interrogated.

“Maybe you could ask Edger,” Riko suggests.

“Edger can be funny with answers,” Dyeawan says without really thinking.

“What do you mean?”

Dyeawan looks from the miniature world of the Bottoms to Riko still hanging above her head.

“I think… sometimes there’s a lot more truth in what Edger doesn’t tell us than what he does tell us.”

Riko shrugs. “Talking in riddles is another way of testing us, yeah?”

“Maybe. Unless… unless we have to figure out what the riddle is for ourselves first. Does that make sense?”

Riko shakes her head. “I’m not sure what you mean.”