“I thuh-thought … I thought … y-you …”

“Shush. We need to keep moving.”

Arm in arm, they pass through a ruined network of corridors, following the trail kicked by the others across the dust-limned floor. After so many terrors, further fear seems ludicrous, and yet Mimara finds herself breathing against yet another clammy premonition. “How?” she finally asks. “We had the light … How could they run so far without us?”

“Because they saw that,” Achamian replies, nodding at the darkness before her.

She sees it: the outline of an arched entranceway washed in the palest of blue. Even from this distance, a deep sense of recognition suffuses her, a wave of depleted exultation. She knows this light, in ways that run deeper than her waking soul. It was the light her sires were born to, all the way back to the beginning …

The light of sky.

Slim shadows move across the entrance. She hears a voice calling her name—Soma. A sudden fury burns against her exhaustion, in the way of wood soaked in mud.

As though reading her thoughts, the Wizard says, “All men are traitors in a place such as this …” When she glances at him, he adds, “Now isn’t the time for judgment.”

His face is beyond haggard in the arcane glare. Its network of ruts and wrinkles are inked black with dust, as are his cheek and temple—across all the flesh rawed by the salting. Even still, intellect and resolution glitter in his eyes, with the merest hint of gallows humour. The old Achamian is back, she realizes, even if he’s propped up by the qirri like her. Returned from the paths of the dead.

The surviving Skin Eaters are animated as well, so much so that for an absurd moment Mimara has the sense that she stands with a troupe of players dressed and painted to play a shattered company of scalpers. But it is as much the turn in their fortunes as it is Cleric’s nostrums that has heartened them.

They have found their way out of Cil-Aujas.

“I know this place,” the Wizard rasps. “Even among the Nonmen, it was a wonder.”

“Cleric called it the Screw,” Galian says hoarsely, staring up like all the others. He looks different with days of growth across his jaw and chin, less like the cynical wit and more like his brothers. “The Great Medial Screw.”