Caledonia did as instructed, dressing quickly in the near dark as cold nipped at her bare skin. She added a second shirt to cut the chill, laced her boots, slid her fingers into thin gloves of old-world clothtech, and she was ready to go. She joined Triple just outside, expecting to see the camp in motion after her hasty summons, but everything was still. Quiet. No one else was yet awake.

“What—?”

Triple raised a finger to cut her off, then led her toward the dark woods behind the camp.

A trap. That’s what this was. Pine’s arguments had swayed Triple, and he was waiting for them some distance away. They would kill her or somehow compel her to leave and tell Sledge she’d done something terrible or run off to join the colonists.

No, she told herself. That’s a Bullet move.

These were Blades, and she could trust they would do nothing without her consent.

A quarter moon lit their way over the frost-covered ground, the only sound the delicate crunch of fern fronds beneath their boots. Caledonia had spent very little time in the woods since her flight from Pine, and she found the experience of walking within them both stifling and disorienting, not unlike being underwater. Except here she kept only a vague sense of direction, and in the water she always knew she could travel up and find the sun again.

When they’d gone some distance from camp, she finally broke the silence. “What is it you need to show me?”

Triple paused long enough to toss a curious smile over her shoulder. “Everything,” she said simply.

The land was rocky and soon turned steep and difficult to navigate. At least, Caledonia found it difficult. Her thighs burned, her feet slipped over moss-covered rocks, and she was sure each breath she took was more shallow than the last. She could focus only on the next step and on nothing beyond. If this was part of the “everything” Triple wanted her to see, she was missing most of it.

When at last they broke free of the cover of trees, the sun was high, throwing honeyed rays over a small meadow. On the other side of that meadow, a steep protrusion of rock towered over them.

“More climbing?”

“C’mon, seagirl,” Triple answered with amusement. “You haven’t come all this way to give up now.”

They began the climb, and Caledonia found she had to reconsider her definition of steep. This required hands and feet and promised a treacherous fall if you trusted your weight to the wrong perch. That danger was exhilarating, reminding her of the feeling of climbing one of the four masts of her ship, racing toward the sun with the wind at her back.