From what Sedgwick had told her about the way the eye worked, and from the fact that Jean-Claude had been seeing through Ivar’s eye when he was obliterated, there ought to be a channel leading away.

At last she found a tangle of loose silver threads that had once been connected to a plate that just wasn’t there anymore. The plate had been on a rocker. She flipped the rocker to its other position and found another contact plate. This must be how the primary eye controlled which view the secondary eye saw, but since the primary eye was annihilated, there was nothing to flip the switch back.

Carefully, she began attaching the silver threads to the newly exposed plate in the same configuration that they came out of the junction node. She had to stretch the wires a bit and weld them in place, but as the last one made contact, the whole eye began to hum and click. Gears whirled, axles turned, and springs wound.

She slipped back into her body, gave Falconé’s ghost a hug for her good behavior, and turned her attention outward.

Jean-Claude shook his head. The clockwork eye tracked with his natural eye, his pupil glowing blue at its center.

“So how does it feel?” she asked.

“You did it!” He laughed. “I can see.”

The world stuttered again. Isabelle clicked her timepiece. Everyone came to a halt as they found themselves in the middle of a city, but one like they had never seen. The buildings seemed to have been grown rather than built, stone teased up in trellises and twisted into living shapes. And there were people here. A man in breeches and boots goggled at them and was gone.

Or mostly gone. Images of the grown city remained, suspended like vaporgrams in the air for several seconds before fading away.

Isabelle checked her timepiece, called out the time to Marie for safekeeping, then set it ticking again.

“Was that place real?” Malgiers asked. “I mean, are all those other places out there somewhere?”

“I don’t know,” Isabelle said. It was one of a thousand things she didn’t know.

“It looked real enough to me,” Jean-Claude said.

“Keep moving,” Isabelle said. There was no other choice.

They reached a branch in the trail. Bitterlich had left a marker to indicate which way they should go, but even so the new path suggested either Travers’s party had split up, or they weren’t the only ones making paths in the forest.

“It could be the bugs,” Jean-Claude said. “I saw some that were as big as a cart.”

“So we don’t know precisely which way Travers went,” Isabelle said.

Jean-Claude said, “We’re not looking for Travers. We’re looking for the Vault.”

“Yes, but I don’t want to end up with him behind me.”