“No, not that. Only it isn't we. It's you.”
“What?”
“I needed to get you here. Just you. I needed to make sure that you would survive the journey here and go through that door. But the rest is up to you. You and the Engine, of course.”
“And you did this, why?”
“Because I had no choice. I never expected to die on the Dawn. Don't look at me like that, David. None of you people do, and me, I had even less reason to; after all, I had managed not to die for thousands of years. I'd been so good at not dying that I believed it couldn't happen. Well, I was wrong. I'd always meant to take someone here, just not you. After all, I'd promised Medicine that I would see you to safety, and I meant it.”
“Why didn't you choose Margaret?”
“I meant what I said about her. I don’t trust her. Perhaps I was wrong not to. But I couldn't be sure. Just be happy that I didn't kill her.”
“So what do I do?”
Cadell opened his mouth to answer, and then he wasn't there any more.
“That's not his role,” the Engine said. “That cannot be his role. He is gone. And you, the flesh and blood, remain. You have to choose.”
The Engine moved sinuous and direct, not like ice, but something more fluid, light grown cool and slow.
“You’ve made it to me, David,” it said. “You must be very pleased.” “My friend beyond the door. You have to let her in.”
“I’m sorry, that’s not how this works.” The Engine shook a finger in his face. “We don’t have to do that. We don’t have to do anything. You’ve choices to make, and that isn’t one of them.”
“And if she dies…”
“She dies. She dies, and you can spend your life grieving for her. If you are capable of grieving for anyone.”
“Let her in.”
“No,” the Engine said.
David opened his mouth, and the Engine slapped him hard. Knocked David down with the blow, lifted him back up.
“I could pull out your lungs before you opened your mouth to scream. There isn’t time,” it said.
David’s head pounded with what he would have considered, before today, to be the most horrible headache possible. He wiped his face and his fingers came away sticky with blood, much more than last time: it spilled from his nose, his lips, and his ears. His clothes were covered in blood, and vomit. His whole body had become a bruise or a wound.
“I'm sorry,” the Engine of the World said, helping him to his feet. “There isn't time to clean you up. There isn't much time for anything. You've done well to get here. Cadell did well to get you here, but that is not enough. This last great choice must be your own.” It pointed to a cage that sat in the middle of the room, dark metal, hooked and barbed as the walls to Tearwin Meet had been.
David looked at that cage.
“I guess I have to go in there,” he said.
The Engine nodded. “Most cages are a prison, this is a liberation. If you make the choice to enter it.”
David took a deep breath. “I'm ready,” he said.
“Are you? I think not. There is much you do not know, let me illustrate. The Witmoths are not of the Roil, at least, they weren’t at first.” The Engine paused. “David, this world was made with the raw matter of another. Minnow technology, microscopic machinery did the making. The Witmoths were just our most perfect creation. We designed them as a weapon to be used against the Roil itself, to link our troops more effectively, to bind them in strategy, and instead, it was absorbed, and after that the Roil began to think.
“There's all manner of secrets and secret histories and histories of secrets.”
David pulled himself together, got unsteadily to his feet and stared dubiously at the cage.
“And what does that do?”
The Engine laughed lightly. “It engages me,” the Engine said. “It releases all that I am. The memories in you and the memories in the ring.”
“It releases Cadell again?”
“In a way, yes,” the Engine said. “History is a very different thing in this world of ours, David. Not at all what you might expect of it. It bears a rather peculiar weight. Over and over the cities have been remade. The people rebuilt, the Roil beaten back. It is in this city that all your memories are stored, cleaned of all but a vague knowledge of the Roil, then returned to their cities — in bodies rebuilt by minnow machinery.
“It is history as a set of ever diminishing circles. Repeating and repeating, and I’m afraid to say, I don’t think it can contract any more.”
CHAPTER 48
Death was coming. Just no one knew how. Nor that it would be so pervasive. I remember those last days clearly, even before the earth began to shake and those last Roil machines came over the horizon, on their titanic legs, all rage and fire. There’d been a quality to the air, a light positively elegiac.
THE OUTER WALL 2098 MILES NORTH OF THE ROIL
Buchan and Whig sat around the fire, heads almost together, and Buchan’s hands nearly touching the flame. They looked up at the dark walls that Margaret and David had crossed almost half a day ago. “All this effort, and here we wait outside,” Buchan groaned. “Everything that we have done and once again, we’re left waiting.”
Whig patted his arm. “We made it this far, don’t discount that. We saw the pair of them to the edge of the wall.” He pointed at Kara, who sat hunched over, polishing her boots. She’d been polishing them since she’d brought the Dawn back down. Polishing and polishing, not saying a word. Whig said, “It's much harder for her.”
“But still, all this waiting.”
“Quiet,” Kara hissed.
“I did not mean-” Buchan said.
“I said, quiet. Another one’s coming, an iron ship,” Kara said; she ran from cover. “Fourth one today, and it’s coming back.”
Buchan and Whig followed her. They watched the ship curve around the valley, then shoot straight up into the sky. It dipped, then plummeted beyond the wall.
“That’s it,” Kara Jade said. “I’m going up there.”
“And what are you going to do? David said to-”
“I don’t remember David paying me to go on this expedition,” Kara said, sliding her fingers into her gloves. “I’m a free agent. And they’re my friends.” “But-”
She looked at Buchan significantly. “You want to come?”
Buchan shuddered. “No, we will guard the base of the wall. Just in case.” Kara cleared her throat, and spat on the ground. “Yes, just in case. I understand.”
She strode across the gravel, boots gleaming in the red light of sunset. At the edge of the overhang, she turned, and this time there was no mockery in her expression. “Good luck, gentlemen.”
“Be careful,” Buchan said.
Kara laughed, loud and clear in the cool air. “If I was ever careful, ever cautious, I would never have come here, neither would you.”
Buchan couldn’t argue with that.
She was hardly free of the overhang when the ground shook, and ice tumbled from the great wall. A piece that was almost the size of her crashed to the stones nearby and shattered. Kara ducked back under cover as more
