We live! her ancestors howled. The breach had fallen, the last of its containment crumbled. Her ancestors’ memories spilled into her waking mind and forced her from the seat of power. Her body moved without her will, struggling against Marie.

Isabelle had sworn never to give in to the temptation of the everdream, never to crawl the path her past lives chose for her. This life was hers, not theirs … except it wasn’t anymore.

As the outside world fell to pieces, she turned inward toward the everdream. As Bitterlich said, if she could not escape her progenitors, she must master them, not here but on their own ground.

As the crew of the Thunderclap pinned her down and bound her fast, Isabelle let go her flesh and leapt into the everdream.

CHAPTER

Thirteen

Jean-Claude crashed through twisted, thorny branches, smashed his arm against a stout limb, and whacked his head on something solid.

He must have blacked out, for he woke to find a gull jabbing at his face with its sharp beak, trying to pluck his right eye from its socket. The left side of his face was a boiling cauldron of pain and he could not see out of that side. Jean-Claude raised his hand to swat the bird, only to feel his weight shift and slide. He hung from a twistthorn tree, caught like a bit of wool on a thistle. Thorns poked through his coat and skewered his flesh, the chin strap of his hat tried to choke him. The twistthorn itself clung to the side of a tiny skyland, one of the reef-rocks surrounding a larger atoll.

He reached for the branch above his head, but that shift made the tree adjust its grip, and he slid a few more inches along, stripping off several of the long pointed thorns that held him in place. The wind whisked the fallen spines away.

The gull came back, with friends, determined to strip all the usable flesh from his bones before he finished his plunge into the Gloom.

Jean-Claude had lost his rapier and his pistol, but managed to draw his main gauche. Feeble and half-blind, he slashed and poked at the swelling flock of scavengers. Their indignant shrieks berated him for fighting back. Didn’t he realize he was wasting good meat?

“Bugger off,” he wheezed. Blackness swallowed his vision and then vomited him up again. The birds opened up more wounds in him.

Where was Isabelle? In his moments of greatest lucidity, he turned his head as far as agony would allow, but saw no sign of the Thunderclap. Had she rode the ship down to the Gloom?