The Juno finds me there, watches over us both while the connections reset and the saddle pumps me full of stims. Two are drugs I recognise: ModAlign and Neuregen. You can’t reboot a human being, but you can get close. They flush me down a tunnel, cloud my vision, wash my skin in shivers and sweat. Then they snap me back, root me in place. The counter flickers in the middle of my eyes, and the rest of the world filters in around it, like it’s using the little light as an anchor. The numbers come to rest where they should be, but they’re a long way short of the limit. I know we were higher when Salt breached.

Seems there’s a reason they put a cap on it.

“Rook?” is the first sound I hear for certain, followed by the dull rumble coming in through our feet. Hail stands in the middle of our vision, looking down on us.

“Lost you there for a second. Everything okay?”

“OSEv,” I croak. Operator Strain Event. It’s when a jockey hits the wall and dips into shock for a heartbeat or two. It isn’t a lie, but it isn’t quite the truth. I’m not about to tell her that I’ve been running past the limiters.

I clear my throat, force myself to breathe. “It’s under control.”

Her shell nods. “We’re in the clear. Take it easy.” There’s a pause, and something that might be a sigh. “You’re going to need it.”

Why—

The word doesn’t make it all the way to the tip of my tongue. The Lighthouse opens up above us, galleries spiraling all the way to the top of the tower we saw outside, framing a distant spot of the passing sky above us. The wind flows in through the gap, and follows the corkscrew down to the ground. An eternal hurricane spins around us, powered by the Eye itself.

It’s moulded the floor around us into a bowl. A small patch of stone shows right in the middle of it, but the dust climbs up against the wall, giving everything an awkward slope. Drawing us toward the centre.

A hunk of Sigurd steel lies in the sand—a narrow capsule, sealed tight and covered in company glyphs. It isn’t alone.

A statue stands over it, buried to its shins in the ruddy sand. It’s made of the same stone as everything else in this place, features ground down by the perpetual whirlwind. It has two arms: one ends abruptly, shattered at the elbow, and the other has a hand with six long fingers, wrapped around the handle of something that could only be a sword.