The narrow slot opened up into a great wide bowl. Numberless waterfalls bounded down from high cliffs, splashed into cliffside pools, and slid down glistening stone to plunge at last into the bottomless sky below. With the water came a profusion of greenery—creeping vines and broad-leafed plants of the type that never saw a day of frost. Below the high bluffs were a series of natural terraces down to a rocky shoreline.

“There.” Similce spotted it first. Isabelle followed her pointed finger to a narrow ridge several mast lengths above the skyfall edge.

There like a cast-off carcass of some immense leviathan lay the wreck of the Conquest. Its aged corpse was little more than a set of bleached-white ribs and a bonekeel spine more than half consumed by the creeping greenery.

Unfortunately, they were not the first ones to arrive. Four cargo skiffs had been pulled up on the shore, but of their occupants there was no sign. Nor, despite her hopes, was there any sign of Jean-Claude.

Isabelle brought the Saint Asne in and anchored it to the sky cliff, then sent out landing parties to check for enemies and ambushes. They reported no people present but signs of a beaten-down trail leading off into the sweltering green.

Isabelle stepped from the gangway to the shore. After so long aloft, her legs wobbled at the sturdiness of the land. The wet heat of the green stuck to her skin, but the thing that struck her most was the quiet. Aside from the rippling of the wind, the place was silent. With a forest that thick, there ought to be birdsong or some sign of life, but the only things that moved on the rocky shoreline were glossy black beetles and other crawling things.

Travers and Hasdrubal had been here and gone, and she had no idea how much of a lead they had. She ordered an expeditionary party prepared. She would lead the vanguard ahead, with Malgiers and half the marines. Similce would bring up a supply company afterward, and a detachment would be left to guard the ship.

She had just finished dispatching orders when her perimeter scouts shouted an alarm.

Isabelle looked up with everyone else. Down a treacherous switchback path from the cliff wall came a man in sailor’s garb, carrying a bloodied white rag on a stick. Isabelle lifted her glass and focused.

“Jean-Claude!” Isabelle shouted. “It’s Jean-Claude!” She whooped and rushed to meet him. Her new Fenice muscles responded to her joy, and her stride lengthened until she was covering eight meters a stride. She was moving so fast, she nearly caromed off the cliff wall before hurtling up the switchback trail like a spring-loaded mountain goat.

Jean-Claude’s one flesh-and-blood eye grew wide as she leapt up from the trail below to land beside him.

“Isabelle,” he said, astonished. “You’ve changed.”

“I’ve changed,” she said, “a cocoon, a chrysalis choosing new challenges and a choir of churlish characters over catatonia and cognitive calamity, and you…” The alliteration game was one they had always played.