Tanner Sack and I-we see each other, from time to time. He has begun to work again, under the city. He never mentions the time I took him to the little room and spurred a rebellion.

Did I do that?

Was this mutiny my doing? This city heading southward again, toward the waters we have passed through before, to the places that mean something to me-was this my doing?

And does that mean that I have won?

Perhaps she made it safely, the woman, and moored herself at the water’s rim, and lowered her equipment into the chasm and extracted all the energies she needed, and is now as powerful as a god.

Perhaps she fell in.

Perhaps there was nothing to fall into.

Hedrigall is ill, delirious from his ordeal, we are told, somewhere in the innards of the Grand Easterly. When I hear that I think: we were not told the truth.

The woman was right. What kind of stupid, idiot coincidence would we have to believe-what chain of unlikeliness-to think that our Hedrigall leaves, and in a nigh-world another stays, and is lost-and found again, in the whole of the sea, by us. We have not been told the truth.

I remember the look Doul gave me.

He looked for me and found me, on the Grand Easterly, and told me with his eyes to come, listen, and finish this. He told me so much with that glance, and left so much unexplained. So much was clear: What he had done. His games, his manipulations.

I picture him, meeting with Hedrigall, the loyal cactus-man frightened and appalled by the Lovers’ plan. Doul, making his suggestions. Hiding Hedrigall somewhere secret and quiet. Slipping out silently as only he could move, cutting the Arrogance free; bringing Hedrigall out again, later, to terrify the populace with his stories of canyons in the sea. So that Doul would have to say nothing. Safe in his loyalty.

Or perhaps it was Fennec who suggested that Hedrigall hide: a plan in case the Crobuzoner rescue failed to turn us back to home waters.

But I saw Doul’s look. If all this was Fennec’s doing, then Doul knew of it, and helped it run.

I think of all the times that Doul told me things, and hinted to me, letting me know where we would go, what we would do. Knowing that I knew Silas Fennec, Simon Fench, knowing that I would spread the word to him. Angry only when I spread the wrong sedition.

Spending time with me, and bringing me close. I came close. Using me as a conduit.

I am agog with how much he knew, and watched. I wish I could know when it started-whether I have been used for many, many months, or only in the final days. I do not know how much of what Doul does is strategy, and how much is recoil. Certainly he has known far, far more than I had thought.