Beside her, Robb stared up at the ship with his mouth agape. “I wish . . . I wish Jax could see this.”

“Me too,” she replied as they followed Elara into the depths of the Solani ark, so overwhelmed she didn’t notice the plume of inky smoke rising across Zenteli from the Iron Shrine.

Robb

The ship was dark from the vegetation and old trees that had sprouted between the remains of the ship to form a canopy above them. It smelled of moist earth. Elara took out an egg-shaped flashlight and shook it to illuminate the ruins around them. Ropes of creepers, ivy, and moss hung draped across tree branches and the ruined structure of the ship. There were remnants of doors and furniture and staircases and long-petrified wires, and some of the collapsed walls had a strange glittering, scaly texture to them. The longer he walked, and the crunch of leaves and roots and ancient ship dust echoed under his feet, the more he felt the distinct sensation that he was somewhere he shouldn’t be.

He hadn’t actually believed Elara when she said the Solani came here in creatures—it sounded like a fantastical story, something out of a fairy tale—but the longer he followed her into the bowels of the ark, the more he began to doubt his own judgment. The Solani weren’t from this galaxy. Their skin glittered as though they’d had been sprinkled with diamond dust. Jax could read the future.

Just a year ago, he’d thought the most fantastical thing that existed was an iron ore that rusted between his fingers, but as Elara raised her light to illuminate the heart of the ark, he began to realize just how little he knew.

Perhaps Ana was the Goddess.

And perhaps there was magic in the galaxy, after all.

In the center of the ark sat a platform with a gigantic crystal at its center, as tall as a person and the color of clouds. It made him uneasy as they approached. The crystal sat in the middle of a great spherical astrolabe. Or maybe it was an armillary sphere? Robb didn’t really know much about ancient navigational contraptions. Once, the spherical framework of rings would have turned around the giant crystal in the center, twisting as they rotated to map the coordinates of the stars, but centuries and vegetation had frozen them in place. There were words—letters—in the Old Language written on each circular band, but they were too faded for Robb to make out.

Elara slipped between the rings of the astrolabe and made her way toward one band that had come to a stop at her height. The bands dipped into troughs in the floor so they could rotate around the crystal at its center.

“What now?” Ana asked, her voice echoing in the cavern as she caught up with them.

Elara reached up to the ring and gripped it tightly. “Now,” she said with great bravado, “we wake her up.”

“Her?” he asked.