Bellis looked down at her cupped hands. They were full of thousands of minuscule ratchets and gear wheels and ossified springs, like the innards of inconceivably tiny clocks. Each particle of wreckage a grain like sand, hard and sun-warmed, smaller than a crumb. Bellis let them sift from her hands, and her fingers were stained the dark blood color of the shoreline-painted with rust.

The beach was an imitation, a found sculpture mimicking nature in the materials of the junkyard. Every atom from some shattered machine.

When does this age from? How old is this? What happened here?thought Bellis. She was too numb to feel any but the most tired awe. What disaster, what violence? She imagined the seafloor around the bay-a reclaimed reef of decaying industry, the contents of a city’s factories allowed to collapse, pounded by waves and sun, oxidizing, bleeding with rust, breaking into their constituent parts and then into smaller shards, thrown back by the water onto the island’s edge, evolving into this freakish shore.

She picked up another handful of machine-sand, let it dissipate. She could smell the metal.

This is the flotsam Hedrigall meant, she realized. This is a graveyard of dead devices. There must be millions of secrets moldering here into rust-dust. They must sift through it, and scrub it clean, and offer the most promising bits for trade-two or three pieces picked randomly from a thousand-piece puzzle. Opaque and impenetrable, but if you could put it together, if you could make sense of it, what might you have?

She stumbled away from the rope ladder, listening to the crunch of ancient engines underfoot.

As the last of the passengers descended, the guards kept careful watch on the horizon, muttering. A little way from Bellis, the pen of livestock had been winched to the ground. It stank like a farmyard, and its inhabitants sounded noisily and stupidly into the still air.

"Close together and listen to me," said the Lover harshly, and she was surrounded. The engineers and scientists had been scattering, dumbly running their fingers through the metal shale. A few, like Tanner Sack, had gone to the sea. (He had submerged briefly, with a sigh of pleasure.) For a moment, there was no sound except little breakers foaming on the rust shore.

"Now listen, if you want to live," the Lover went on. People shifted, uneasy. "It’s a mile or two to the village, up those rocks overlooking this place." They gazed up at them; the hillside looked empty. "Keep together. Take the weapon issued to you, but don’t use it unless you’re in immediate danger of your life. There are too many of us here, and too many untrained, and we don’t want to start shooting each other in panic. We’ll be flanked by cactacae and scabmettler guards, and they know how to use what they’re carrying, so hold fire wherever possible.