Chapter 180: Don’t Sit Down

"We can’t stay," I said.

It was dawn. The sky over the northern sea had gone the color of old pewter, and the guard on my forearm had clicked back to life with a soft, smug *tick,* three notches, three minutes, all mine again. Everybody sat around me in the cave mouth with their eyes half shut. Dunstan’s two survivors were asleep against the rock. Emmet had his head on Kaelen’s shoulder. Tamsin’s face was grey and slack.

"It’s the ridge," I said. "It hunts what rests. We’ve been lying around on its back for six hours and it hasn’t touched us, but I don’t want to find out why."

*It hasn’t touched us,* Aurelix said thoughtfully, *because it’s listening.*

"To what?"

*Her.*

I looked at Linnet. She was sitting at the very edge of the group, knees drawn up, humming under her breath, and every few seconds the thing in her chest gave a slow, soft *thud.* The rock around her feet was warm. I’d noticed it an hour ago and decided not to think about it.

"Then we walk," I said. "Keep moving. We talk while we walk."

"I can’t walk," Tamsin said mildly.

"I’ll carry you," Dunstan said.

She opened one eye. "You’ll *what?*"

"You heard me." The big man didn’t look at her. He was looking at his own scarred hands, as if they belonged to someone he’d just met. "Ansel would’ve. So."

She didn’t argue. I thought that was the nicest thing I’d ever seen her do.

---

We went east along the coast, in the grey light, with the sea on one side and the ridge on the other.

Wren walked beside me with Nox tucked inside her coat, a tiny black head poking out of the collar. She hadn’t stopped touching me since the beach. She’d hold my sleeve, then let go, then take it again, as if she were checking I was real. Kaelen walked on my other side. They hadn’t spoken.

"So," Wren said, in a very pleasant voice, "who’s the barbarian?"

"Kaelen. Daughter of Borka."

"*The* Kaelen." Wren’s smile was dazzling and terrible. "The one who kissed you in front of an entire mountain."

Kaelen didn’t miss a beat. "And you’re the girl who waits in the keep."

"I don’t *wait.*"

"You *wait,*" Kaelen said, with enormous satisfaction. "I’ve heard about it. All winter. He talks in his sleep."

I stepped on a rock. I stepped on it extremely hard.

*Oh,* Aurelix whispered, delighted, in my collar. *Oh, I’m going to enjoy this island.*

"Wren," I said desperately. "News. What’s happening outside?"

It worked. The glare faded, slowly, and something in her face tightened.

"Bergis is fine. The steward’s holding it." She chewed her lip. "But the Empire’s closed the whole northern coast. Nobody sails. I had to come in through the fog."

"What fog?"

"The one the ships make." She glanced at me sidelong. "Valerian. I flew in over *twelve* of them. Black ships, no flags, anchored in a ring about five miles out. All around the island. They don’t move. They don’t signal. They have these big ballistae on the decks, and every single one was pointed *at the island.*"

I stopped walking. Everybody behind me almost walked into my back.

"At the island?"

"Not at the sea. At *you.* At anything that comes out." She swallowed. "It’s not a prison. It’s a cage. They aren’t guarding it from outside. They’re keeping something *in.*"

I thought about the Doctor’s gift. About a ship that had landed a fourteen-year-old girl and two demons on a beach with a bead and a book. About the sailors who’d run from the shore like it was a furnace.

*They want it fed,* Aurelix said quietly. *They want it* growing.

"They want a monster to come out of it," I said, "and they want to be standing at the door when it does."

---

We didn’t stop. I’d like that on the record. We walked all morning, a ragged line along the grey shore, with Dunstan carrying Tamsin on his back and Kaelen carrying her axe like a baby and Emmet keeping pace with the girl. She’d taken his hand without asking. I don’t think he’d noticed.

Wren dropped back until she was walking beside Linnet.

"You tried to kill him," she said.

Linnet looked up. Her silver eyes were very wide.

"I was told to."

"Do you still want to?"

"No." She considered. "I think I want to *stay* with him. Is that bad?"

Wren was quiet for a long moment. When she spoke, her voice had changed.

"It’s not bad," she said. "It’s what I did. I didn’t trust him, either, at first." She looked straight ahead, at nothing. "He picked me up off a floor once. He didn’t say a word. He just *carried* me, like I weighed nothing, like I hadn’t spent a month snarling at him."

Linnet stared at her.

"He does that," Wren said. "He’s *terrible* at it. He’ll do it to you until one of you dies." She shook her head, a small, crooked, helpless smile. "I’m still not used to it."

"Wren," I said, behind her. "You know I can hear you."

"*Good,*" said Wren. "I’m not being quiet."

The girl smiled. It was a tiny thing, shy and crooked and brand new, and she looked away fast as if it had surprised her.

---

It was almost noon when Aurelix hissed, *Valerian. A sail.*

I stopped.

We’d come around a bluff of black rock, and a long arc of beach lay spread below us, grey and empty and glittering in the sun. It was the same beach, I realized. The Hunger Shore. We’d walked in a circle. Out over the water, a dark ship was cutting through the fog, long and narrow and without a name, with oars like the legs of an insect.

"Another one," Kaelen breathed.

"Two," Dunstan said hoarsely. "No. *Three.*"

Three black ships were drawing in toward the shore, slow and low in the water. On the decks, I could see long lines of figures in grey rags, chained at the wrists, and the glint of spears behind them. They looked tiny. They looked like children.

New convicts.

A cold fist closed around my heart.

"They’re going to land them on the sand," Tamsin whispered. "They’re going to *tell* them to get off."

"They won’t know the rule," Wren said. "Nobody told us."

*The captain did,* I thought. *He only said it once.*

The first ship ran aground. The ramp dropped. Sailors drove the first line of prisoners down onto the beach with their spears, laughing and shouting, and the prisoners stumbled off, some of them crying, some of them cursing, and every single one of them, every single one, *stood.*

"No," I said.

"Valerian—"

"*No.*"

I was running. I don’t remember starting. I took the slope in a series of long, skidding leaps with Kaelen yelling behind me and my boots throwing up sand, and I was screaming at the top of my lungs, "*DOWN! GET DOWN! LIE DOWN! EVERYONE LIE FLAT—*"

They didn’t hear.

The sand began to ripple.

---

The first arm came up out of the dunes like a white snake, and the first convict screamed. A line of sailors on the ramp turned and fled, dropping spears. Chains clattered. A man in the front row was lifted bodily into the air, kicking, and I heard the *snap* from a hundred yards away.

But one of them had stopped.

At the very back of the line, on the ramp of the third ship, a tall, lean figure in grey rags had turned his head. He’d seen me. He was a boy about my age, with ink-black hair and a long, narrow, intelligent face, and a split lip, and a black eye. He stared at me, running, screaming, empty-handed, down the dunes. He looked at the other prisoners, standing, being plucked off the beach one by one. He looked at the sand.

I saw him think. I saw the whole thing go across his face in under a second, like a man solving a riddle.

"*Pollux!*" Castor bellowed. "*DOWN!*"

"What?" A second figure, short and wiry, her fists chained together and a delighted, bloodthirsty grin spreading across her bruised face. "Castor, is that *Valen?* Is that—*Valen!* VALEN!"

"*Down, you lunatic, down—*"

He tackled her.

They went over together in a clatter of chains. For a moment I couldn’t see them. Then the first arm swept across the ramp where they’d been standing, and Castor’s hand came up out of the heap, and he was *pointing at me,* at a boy running along a beach in broad daylight, and Pollux stopped screaming mid-word.

"*Oh,*" she said, in a very small voice. "It’s the *sand.*"

The ramp shuddered. A white shape rose out of the dunes and swept over them. They lay absolutely still, their cheeks against the wood, side by side, and I stood halfway down the slope with my heart in my throat and understood two things at the same moment.

The Terza twins were alive.

And the Doctor was sending *everyone.*