As she disappears beneath the Capitol once more, Dyeawan finds her gaze drawn to the forgotten corners of the city she once occupied in fear and isolation every day of her life. She can even see the finished ship hulls she spoke of to Edger. They’re perfectly re-created in miniature form, stacked neatly beside one another just off the port and covered in swatches of tarp.

For the first time since waking up in the Planning Cadre, Dyeawan looks past the wonders of their inventions and imaginations. She looks past the marvels of Crachian technology and innovation those things yield. She looks past it all and asks herself a very simple question.

If they can create all this, why are there still people like her left to rot in the streets only to be swept away by Aegins to who knows where?

It’s a question she’d very much like to ask Edger, but she doesn’t, not out of fear, but out of certainty.

She knows whatever he tells her would be a lie, even if he believes it.

STEEL FIELDS OF RUST AND ROT

THEY MOVE EVIE AND THE others out the morning after seeding them with blood coins. There are no chains, and no armored soldiers of the Skrain ride out with them. They merely shepherd Evie and her newly marked Savage peers onto plain wagons without cages and point the caravan north from the Capitol along a largely disused road that winds through mostly rough country.

A few days later, Evie watches the Fourth City rise far in the distance off the caravan’s right. It remains far in the distance until it disappears entirely behind them before dusk. It is clear to her then that they will avoid major cities, even smaller towns, as much as possible on their journey to wherever.

That part she still hasn’t been able to discern, but a week later and with no end to the road in sight, she’s beginning to suspect they’ll travel far beyond everything she or the others know of Crache.

The Savage Legion keeps a cold camp, serving their new brothers and sisters dried and salted fish atop rice that tastes as though it were cooked three days before. They all finish their small cups quickly and take to their bed rolls early, most of them still finding their only solace in the hours they’re given to sleep, even if they do so while shivering against the biting frost.

Evie has never cared for the little death of sleep.

She finds Laython squatting in the bushes on the perimeter of their sparse camp. He’s flipping through wood block tiles carved with various physically improbable images of fornication and other debauchery.

“What do you want now, Savage?” he asks her without looking up from his literary pursuit. “Complaints about the food? Questions about your sleeping conditions? Wagon too bumpy during the day?”

“When are we issued our weapons?”