“It’s called a trial run, boy. Make sure things work in a real-world setting before the true test comes. And what about the infected? You may have known about the machinery and the Bergs, but certainly not the infected. It seems blasphemous to our teachings and our ways, does it not?”

The Orphan didn’t nod. It seemed a question that had no good answer.

“In the fight against evil, you must sometimes use the evil against them. I want you to ponder these things, boy. The more you realize on your own, the more valuable you’ll be in the coming days. Locked up in here, you can’t see the outside world as we fly. Think about that as well. We’ve sent all but two of our Bergs ahead to scout and make preparations.”

A few seconds passed, neither of them saying a word. The Orphan felt a trickle of sweat slither down his cheek, leaving an icy trail.

The Grief Bearer stood up. “I’ll give you a hint, lad. We’re not going home, not for a very long time. So settle in and we’ll talk more soon.”

The door opened with a metal shriek. Griever Barrus, the man in the mask, stepped outside. The door closed with a metal shriek.

Belatedly, the Orphan nodded.

He was lying down, on a thin mattress—a bit narrow and a little bumpy. His hands and feet were chained to the railings of the bed, maybe to protect him in case he had a bad case of the sleepwalks. Or, another idea might be that he’d been captured by a giant dinosaur of a machine with wheels and spikes and claws—someone had called it a Grief Walker—and was now imprisoned in a Berg with a bulbous belly and modified containment cells.

Sadina had a cot of her own, right next to Isaac, only a few centimeters of a gap in between. She lay on her side, watching Isaac, not taking her eyes off him even if he closed his own for a while. Trish was on the other side of her, pressed close, arms wrapped around her stomach. It was a sweet sight within the rattling, clanking, jostling, impossibly loud hellhole of unsweetness that was this Berg. No one else was in the room.

All of it, all of it, made for a very unpleasant day. With every twitching muscle in his body he wanted to be back home, back on the island, squirreling his way through the streets and down to the beach, to the Forge, where he could singe his hair and soak his skin with sweat and beat the living daylights out of red-hot, very large things.

“What are you doing, Isaac?” Sadina asked him in a slightly irritated but mostly kind voice.