Once or twice, when he’d been too sublimely bored to think straight, Rector had opened up one of the Bibles lying around the orphanage. The words inside had been arranged funny, like they were spoken by someone in a play, but he got the stories anyway—and he learned about how a man after God’s own heart had lied, cheated, killed, and schemed … but went down in history as a great king all the same, all because of a lucky shot that knocked down a giant.

Maybe Maynard Wilkes had arrested half the people inside that prison. Maybe on another day, the occupants would just as soon have shot him as name a saloon in his honor. But it was those big stories people remembered, in the end.

And now the job of sheriff belonged to Maynard’s daughter. She wasn’t half the hero Maynard was, in Rector’s somewhat biased opinion; but if anybody had to call the shots, it might as well be her. Just like it might as well be Yaozu running the Station and the sap, and it might as well be Captain Cly turning away from pirating and setting up the docks inside the city.

How much did they choose—and how much was chosen for them by coincidence and lore?

Rector shrugged off the question. How much had he chosen, when he’d come inside the wall? And how much had he only been driven to?

Out through the huge round Vault door and under the streets the two boys dashed. They paused to spread the word to everyone they met, an assortment of men whose names Rector forgot as soon as he heard them. Along the damp corridors and muddy halls braced by mining timbers and railroad ties, the boys continued until they reached the ladder that would take them up inside the fort. Rector realized he almost could’ve found it on his own, a fact which surprised and pleased him, and made him wonder if his brain hadn’t cooked up like a boiled egg quite as bad as he’d thought. He was still capable of learning his way around, and that was something.

Up the rungs they went, and into the gloomy yellow-gray air.

Zeke headed directly to the main yard with its half-built docks at the east end and called out for Captain Cly or anybody from the Naamah Darling. No one answered. At first Rector thought the fort was a dud, but then a man stepped out of the fog. He was wearing a mask with a hole cut in the back for his ponytail, similar to the way Houjin wore his. This newcomer dressed halfway between a Chinese man and an airman, so Rector knew it must be somebody from the Naamah Darling, but he couldn’t recall anybody’s name except for Cly and Troost.