It wasn’t like I was going to let Lantern-Eyes know she was right, though. It’s bad to let cops know when they’re right. Inflates their egos. “Anyway, someone called the city when they saw us out there; they wouldn’t let us walk back along the cliff-edge to the staircase and we had to wait while someone got ropes and nets and carried us back over.” Brigid, I think, had been a little relieved that the fire brigade had shown up with their protective equipment; as thrilled as she’d been by sitting in the eyrie, she’d been nervous about scooting back down the tiny ledge of rock to the safety of the stairs. I could’ve talked her into it, but I hadn’t wanted to; I could’ve left on my own, but there wasn’t a chance I’d leave her behind. So I’d stayed with her in the nest. I could picture a moment from that day clearly in my head, as clearly as if I were there again; a sunlit day, so different from the darkness of the Nameless; a sunlit day and the fields and the far-off sea and two of Kystrom’s moons pale beside the sun, and Brigid on a nest of twigs and colored string, staring out into the gasp of air over the cliff’s edge, the wind tearing her golden hair forward and obscuring her face.

Always obscuring her face.

“Darrington’s Aerie?” Indigo said suddenly.

I missed my next step on the tightly spiraling stairs, which on examination was not entirely my fault; part of the metal mesh was entirely missing. At least the gravity was so light that I could catch myself before I fell. “Yeah, that’s what it was called,” I said. “How’d you know that?”

“Darrington’s Aerie is outside of Itaka.”

“Yeah, Itaka, the town I grew up in on Kystrom.”

Tamara’s exhaustingly rapid climb stuttered. “So you were there,” she said to me, and I had to pull up quick so I didn’t run into her back. “I mean you were at ground zero when the Ministers attacked.”

I couldn’t figure out why they both seemed shocked. “You knew I was from Kystrom.”

“Itaka was the only city the Ministers attacked,” Indigo said. His tone was flat, but aggressively flat, tamping down on emotions like trying to close the lid of an overflowing box. “The rest of the planet fell without resistance, after Itaka. But Itaka was totally destroyed.”

Itaka was totally destroyed.

I heard Lantern-Eyes’ voice through a weird warping, like a bubble closed over my head. “I didn’t think there were any survivors.”

Itaka was totally destroyed. Fire in the streets, and a distant screaming, but mostly quiet, horribly quiet. It had been loud in the first hour, when I was hiding, halfway between school and home; it had been quiet after that, quiet with pockets of shrieking terror, but mostly quiet, like I was the only thing still living in the streets—

“There were very few.” Indigo’s voice was very quiet. “For the most part, they were brought back to Maria Nova.”