“This tether is not like the others that have been created throughout our history,” she said. “It was not forged by death, and so need not be broken by it. If one has the courage. To fall again.” She looked up at the sky. “But she must live the rest of her days on this planet. She cannot return to the City.”

“What?” Leela cried.

Sera felt a heady sense of relief at odds with a crippling sorrow inside her.

“You can’t,” Leo said, and the pain in his voice was palpable. Sera’s heart swelled. How selfless of him, to insist that she go. She could hardly recall the selfish, shallow person he had once been.

“Sera, you don’t need to do this,” Agnes said. “You should go home.”

But Sera remembered a fleeting bit of Leela’s memory, of the dream she’d had when Mother Sun had visited her as a will-o-the-wisp.

Home is not always what we think it is when our journey begins. And it can change along the way.

The word she’d seen written on the temple doors when she’d returned to the City held new meaning now.

Home.

“Home can be many things.” Sera touched the moonstone hanging around her neck. “I think . . . I think I have found a new one here.”

“As long as you have a moonstone, you will be connected to the City Above the Sky,” Wyllin said. “You will never truly lose your people, your friends, or your mothers.”

Sera’s heart was glad to hear it. Leela’s eyes shone with tears.

“It will be all right,” Sera said, though she wasn’t sure those were the right words. It was all so bittersweet—no matter what choice she made, she would suffer loss.

But the City needed to move. And she had sworn to herself that she would set it right, that she would break the tether even if it meant falling again. And at least this time, falling did not mean dying.

The High Priestess seemed almost like the woman Sera had known all her life, confident and wise and strong. “If the City is to move,” she said, “it will need a new leader.”

She walked up to Leela and held her gaze for a long time. Sera had the sense that there was something akin to a blood bond taking place between them. Leela seemed so much older now, taller even. She stood proud and unafraid, facing down the City’s oldest and most deceitful High Priestess where once she had been scared to sneak out of her house at night. Sera could not have been prouder of her friend.

Then the bond broke. The High Priestess removed her circlet and held it out with trembling hands.

“This belongs to you now,” she said. “The City’s new High Priestess.”

Sera waited for Leela to protest, to insist that she was not meant for such an important role.