Once the fire was crackling I gave some thought to our position—that is, the physical position of Vox relative to the coast of Equatoria. In my day Equatoria had been a settled outpost in the New World, the planet you reached when you sailed from Sumatra through the Arch of the Hypotheticals. If Vox was making for Earth she would have been headed toward the Equatorian side of that same Arch, aiming to make the transverse journey. So I wasn’t surprised when the peak of the Arch began to glitter in the darkening sky just after sunset.

The Arch was a Hypothetical construct, built to their incomprehensible scale. Back home, its legs were embedded in the floor of the Indian Ocean and its apex extended beyond the atmosphere of the Earth. Its Equatorian twin was the same size and may even have been, in some sense, the same physical object. One Arch, two worlds. Long after sunset the peak of it still reflected the light of the sun, a thread of silver high overhead. Ten thousand years hadn’t changed it. Treya looked up steadily and whispered something quiet in her own language. When she had finished I asked her whether the words had been a song or a prayer.

“Maybe both. You might call it a poem.”

“Can you translate it?”

“It’s about the cycles of the sky, the life of the Hypotheticals. The poem says there’s no such thing as a beginning or an ending.”

“I don’t know anything about that.”

“I’m afraid there’s a lot you don’t know.”

The unhappiness in her face was unmistakable. I told her I didn’t understand what had happened to Vox Core but I was sorry for her loss.

She gave me back a sad smile. “And I’m sorry for your loss.”

I hadn’t thought of what had happened to me that way—as a loss, something to be mourned. It was true: I was ten irrevocable centuries away from home. Everything known and familiar was gone.

But I had been trying for most of my life to put a wall between myself and my past, and I hadn’t succeeded yet. Some things are taken away from you, some you leave behind—and some you carry with you, world without end.

*   *   *

Come morning Treya gave me another hit from the apparently inexhaustible supply of pharmaceuticals she carried. It was all the consolation she could offer, and I accepted it gladly.

5.

“If help was coming it would have come by now. We can’t wait forever. We have to walk.”

To Vox Core, she meant: to the burning capital of her floating nation.

“Is that possible?”

“I think so.”

“We have all the food we need right here. And if we stay close to the wreckage we’ll be easier to find.”