He was losing something. Something was slipping from him. Bellis watched a connection as vital as an umbilicum attenuate and wither in him, and dry up and snap. Flailing, raging, terrorized very suddenly, alone for the first time in many years, he tried to say more.

"We can’t do this; we can’t. You’ll lose us everything…"

The Lover watched him, and her face set dead cold.

"I thought more of you," she said slowly. "I thought I’d made my soul whole."

"And you have, you have, you did," said the Lover frantically, so pathetic that Bellis turned her face away in shame.

They brought Hedrigall up from below decks, draped over the shoulders of the cactacae who had gone after him, and he was greeted with a wave of welcoming joy.

Everyone shouted questions at him that he shied away from and could not answer. People danced and shouted and called his name while he stared at them, drunk with what seemed disoriented terror. Cactacae, untroubled by his thorns, grabbed him and rode him on their shoulders, where he bobbed unsteadily and stared bewildered about.

"Turn!" shouted Tanner Sack. "We turn the city! Get the Lover! Get someone who knows how. Get crews to the rein-winches. We’re sending a signal to the fucking avanc; we’re turning." Buoyed up, the throng looked around for the Lovers, demanding that they tell how it was done, but the Lovers were gone.

In the crush surrounding Hedrigall, in that carnival, the Lover had turned fiercely and run back toward her room, the Lover behind her.

And watching them carefully, following a little behind them, getting ready to take a different route, for one final time to try to understand what she had done and what had been done to her, was Bellis Coldwine.

As she stepped into the passageway, she heard another exchange.

"I rule here," she heard the Lover say, his voice thick and careful. "I rule this place; we rule it. That’s what we do; that’s what we fucking are… Don’t do this. You’ll lose it all for us."

The Lover turned to him, and Bellis was suddenly in plain view. But the Lover took her in for only a second, then turned her scarred face away, uncaring. Not giving a damn who heard.

"You…" she said, touching the Lover’s face. She shook her head, and when she spoke again it was with great sadness and resolve. "You’re right. We don’t rule here anymore. That was never why I was here.

"I won’t ask you to come with me." For a second, her voice almost broke. "You’ve stolen yourself from me."

She turned, and with the Lover pleading with her, begging her to listen to him, to hear reason, to understand, she walked away.