Bellis could not see it clearly. She was watching over the irregular contours of Armada’s roofs, all those flats and slopes in grey and red, slate, concrete, iron. She could just make out the vessel’s progress through oily morning sunlight, past the other vessels tied up carefully in the harbor, out through the gap in the city’s ship matter. She could see the woodsmoke it vented as the strong, strange currents of the Hidden Ocean took it away.

A little way from Bellis, the Lover was watching.

His eyes were so raw with tears it looked as though they had been rubbed with dust. And of course, his cheek had only its old scars.

The boat powered on. It moved with an undeviating speed that Bellis had never witnessed on the Hidden Ocean. Without fuss, without a fusillade of shots or fireworks, it headed north, directly away from the city, slipping into Armada’s wake and heading for the horizon, toward the Scar.

A long time after that, after it had disappeared from sight, Uther Doul came back to the Grand Easterly, alone.

Doul stood below the mast on which the Brucolac was crucified, the vampir’s early-morning shrieks beginning weakly with the sun.

"Cut him down," said Uther Doul with authority to a nearby group of men and women. They looked up, startled, but did not question him. "Cut him down and take him home."

And on that extraordinary morning, while the city felt its way toward new rules and nobody knew what was permissible or normal or acceptable or right, Uther Doul’s merciful order was obeyed.

Not the Lover anymore, thought Bellis suddenly. She stared out toward the horizon’s rim, where the little vessel had disappeared. She thought of the Lovers’ argument, and of the new wound-a newborn scar that tore across the Lover’s face, re-creating and separating her. You’re not the Lover anymore.

Bellis tried to reconceive of the Lover, out there at the helm of her ship, heading toward the most extraordinary place in the world. Bellis tried to rethink her, to be clear, to give credit or blame where it was due and think about the woman piloting that lost vessel toward the edge of the world according to no one’s plans or desires but her own.

But Bellis kept thinking of her as Lover Lover Lover, even as she tried not to.

She did not know the woman’s name.

Coda: Tanner Sack

Coda: Tanner Sack

It’s been bloody mad here. You’d never believe what I’ve been doing.

We ain’t heading for the Scar no more. We’re heading back for waters way back the way we came. We’re going back to how things were.