This entire planet was an alien artifact, and no one knew now what race had created the bridges, made of an impervious glass the color of deep, deep murky water shot through at rare intervals with striations, spears of light that moved through the glass as the watcher moved, changing according to their perspective. From this height, Niko could not see them, but she could see the tiny figures of the Spisoli, hunched humanoids with what looked like lumps on their shoulders, forcing their heads forward and down. The silhouettes were distinctive in the light of the two low-hanging moons, and Niko watched them cross one landing then descend a staircase, bound for one of the buildings that stood along the edge of the rift, shaped like vast upward-spiraling, conic seashells and made of the same dark glass.

Those buildings had been explored and picked over hundreds of times since their creators left them. The Spisoli would surely discover nothing new.

Niko turned away from the window. “I’m going for a walk, Dabry,” she said. “I need to think, and this room is making my head hurt.”

The room in question was in a building on the opposite side of the rift; it rode the top of one of the seashells and was itself a flattened bubble, with openings in the surface providing large windows admitting the shrill winds that haunted the edge.

Dabry sat with all arms folded, seemingly half dozing where he leaned against the wall. At her words, he opened his eyes. “By yourself, sir?”

“There’s nothing to fear,” she said. “Lots of people all through here.”

“Less worried about you than them, sir. Sometimes when you’re frustrated, you get a bit sharp.”

“And don’t I have occasion for that?” She ran a hand through her hair, tugging at its familiar knots, pulling at it and letting it spring back, a habitual gesture of frustration. “Unless we have a representative capable of meeting the specifications—who can both speak Ladderan, an ancient language known only to obscure scholars, and is capable of marching over a narrow span through almost blinding winds to deliver a speech in it … this accord fails and the Holy Hive Mind has every reason to absorb first the Paxians, then the Spisoli. And with our best hope delayed—”

“As though they wanted it to fail,” Dabry said dryly.

She released her hair. “We’ve had this argument before. Might as well argue about something that matters, like the fact that your ass is on my dispatch case again.”

“The stone is cold,” he said. “And you don’t need it right now.”

“I need to be able to know that your ass hasn’t been on it!”

“Technically,” he said with dignity, “there’s a layer of cloth separating the two.”

She snorted and went out the door.