"When the Ghosthead touched down in that continent, the force of it split the world right open, broke a fissure right through Bas-Lag. A split. Jagging in from the world’s rim for more than two thousand miles, splintering the continent.

"That’s the Scar. That crack. Teeming with the ways things weren’t and aren’t but could be.

"We were only a few miles away.

"It was a crevice in the sea.

"It was uneven, listing across us as we approached it, so the horizon seemed tilted. And because it was irregular, not guillotined but cracked, jutting a bit this way and the other, serrating back on itself here and there, there were places I could see over the edges. I could see the sides of the split. They were sheer.

"The ocean was choppy, a strong current heading north even though the wind went south. All the waves washed up past the city, carrying it along, and where they reached the edge of the Scar it was a wall, a clear wall. The water right-angled sharp and plunged down, vertical and split-smooth perfect as glass. Dark, moving water, pressing up against nothing and holding fast. And then…

"Empty air.

"A precipice.

"And way, way beyond it, scores of miles, a hundred miles away, only just visible on the other side of that empty gulf, there was a matching face. Hazy with distance. The other side of the crack.

"In between, that emptiness that I could still feel kicking out all manner of puissance. Welling out of the fucking lesion. The Scar."

"I can’t hardly imagine what it must have been like on the city. They must have been able to see it. Was there panic? Were you excited?"

Of course the Lovers did not answer.

"I knew what the plan was. In sight of the Scar we’d stop at five miles’ distance. And from there a dirigible would set out, and see if it could cross just that short distance to the Scar. And I was the lookout. Any sign of danger, I was to fire my flares, hang out my flags, call the airship back in.

"I don’t know what danger you thought we might face. You had no idea. I don’t think you knew what the Scar was. What did you think might happen? Did you think it might be crawling with Possible Beasts? Things that might have evolved but didn’t, patrolling?

"It was nothing like that.

"The scale of it. The scale of that fucking thing. It was humbling.

"The city didn’t slow," he said.

He was silent then, for several seconds. He had spoken his last sentence in the same hypnotic monotone he had been using for a long time, and it took Bellis a few heartbeats to realize what it meant.

Her heart spasmed and began to hammer.