Ao takes off the bear badge and throws it into the mist. “Go on,” she demands.

It feels strange to unpin the badge. El wonders if it wouldn’t be smart to keep the needle, but she can’t dig it out of the wood, and Ao is glaring at her.

“Do it! You promised!”

So El throws her badge into the mist too. The moment it vanishes into the darkness she’s glad, even though it meant losing the needle. They’re free, whatever comes next.

They walk as the moon sets and the stars wheel. By now it isn’t just her feet that sting but her chest as well, a restless ache that won’t ease even when they rest off the roadbed, on the embankment.

The sun rises. South lies only the road and the White Sea. They can still see the rise of the nameless land to the north. It’s too close, so they trudge on and on into the heat of the day. They hear a distant horn. Ao cries in fear. El thinks that probably soldiers will come after them because atoners must not be allowed to break their covenant with the masters. If atoners can escape, then who else might think to rebel?

Sometime later, they hear the horn a second time. They pick up their pace but, all too soon, they reach the end of the road, where both roadbed and embankment are severed as if by a flood or an earthquake. They are trapped on a dead end. Just as El feared.

The roadbed rises a bit here, the embankment built up beneath it, and then it just … ends, as if someone snapped off the next bit. Ao sits at the cleft with her feet dangling over the edge. She sighs, letting go of her hopes. “Oh well. It will be the knife, after all.”

El sighs too, at first. But then she really studies the scene before them, because it’s odd. The road is broken, yes, but the White Sea changes here in a way she doesn’t understand and hasn’t seen before. The White Sea lies heavy on either side of the roadbed they stand on, so thick a fog that the ground can’t be seen beneath it. Beyond the broken edge of the road, ahead of them, a gap of lower ground extends off in either direction, exactly like a river’s channel if it had run dry rather than being full of water.