She couldn’t be dead. The Engine had told him that she wasn’t dead. But what did it know of life?
And then he saw her. Curled up, wrapped in the foremost flagellum of the Dawn. Kara was breathing. And that horrible ending became something somehow beautiful, and he did not want to disturb it. But nothing beautiful lasts forever, and only pain could follow this. He touched her face gently and called her name. Her eyes flicked open and the pain within them was a greater hurt than anything that David had ever known.
His voice died in his throat.
“What happened to your face?” Kara said.
David shrugged, the pain was getting worse, but there was nothing he could do. Not here at the end of the world.
“She’s gone,” Kara said. “I’m sorry, she’s gone. I saw her, she was in the ship, the one that…”
It took David a moment to realise that she meant Margaret.
CHAPTER 52
She was a hero. And through her was the union of land and sky. She was my sister, but she became so much more. The greatest pilot, and that was only the beginning. If you have time, read. If you do not, make time.
She would be the greatest of pilots. And not for her loss, but for where it took her. Where it took us all. What finer vistas than Drift? We were so high and dismissive of the slights of the earth that we forgot to look up.
TEARWIN MEET DISTANCE FROM THE ROIL INDETERMINATE
“There,” David said, pointing at the wall, and leaning into Kara's shoulder. She knew his face must be burning; his jaw had swollen dramatically in the last couple of hours. “Just here.” He sounded so tired.
The passage back through the city had taken forever, or it felt like it — even without the threat of Quarg Hounds. David was barely able to walk, Kara hardly wanted to. The Dawn was behind them, dead. She would never see her Aerokin alive again. The only thing that kept any movement in Kara was that the Dawn had struggled to save her life: that she hadn't let her pilot die, and that David needed her so much.
She'd even entered her darling Aerokin one last time to find what was left of her healing gel, slapping a palmful of the stuff over his jaw, and storing the rest in a container at her belt. It must have been doing something, because it burnt, and though David had already suffered so much this was almost the worst of it. If Kara hadn't needed him so, he would have just sat down in the snow and died. If he hadn't needed her, he was sure she would have done the same.
Kara virtually carried him to the stony wall, a section just like any other, and quite close to the part that he and Margaret had clambered down. She ran a hand along the wall, and hit it hard with the meat of her palm. The stone rang out like a bell, and she stepped back, holding David upright as the sound died.
“Hollow,” she said. “So, we stand here, and…”
The stone parted, as though it were nothing more than a curtain, opening onto a tunnel and admitting a howling terrible wind that cut through their clothes, gnawed at their flesh, and nearly bowled them over. David shivered beside her like an old man.
“Another bloody tunnel,” Kara shouted into his ear.
“Yes, another one.”
They stood there a few moments, bent over against the gale as it did its best to knock them to the ground. But, unsteady as they were, they did not let it. “We better keep moving,” David said at last.
The journey through was dire. The wind only got louder and colder and stronger. It blasted against them until Kara thought she was going to die, frozen to death, hollowed out. Her bones felt frozen. Her eyes kept sticking closed. Only David was warm, she pulled him forward, kept him moving.
At the mouth of the cave, they looked out into the snow — it was already growing dark, and growing even colder.
“So this is what victory looks like,” David said, teeth already starting to chatter. Just hours ago he would have laughed off the cold, he would have created it. But he wasn't that David any more.
“We aren't going to last long out there,” Kara said, sounding like she didn’t care.
“We won't have to,” David said, and pointed.
The Collard Green cruised over the ice, low and fast. And Kara had never been happier to see a dirigible. Her great lights traced the wall of the metropolis. And then those lights shone upon them, blinding in their brightness.
Kara yelled at the top of her lungs. David did too. And the lights stopped, stayed fixed on them.
“Now,” Kara said, “we're going to need to get away from the wall, or she'll smash against it.”
She lowered him to the ground, the lights following them, and he sank in the snow to his knees. Kara dropped beside him, hands reaching under his arms. The snow actually felt warmer than the air.
“Keep moving,” she said, and she couldn't tell whether she was talking to him, or herself. So he did, one painful step after another. A hundred yards from the wall, Kara stopped. “This is good enough.”
The ship made her way towards them, dragging what looked like several anchors, her engines working loud and hard against the storm, the gondola passed over their heads, her lights washed over them.
Buchan looked down and he chortled.
“We found you. With nothing but two moons in a snowstorm to guide us, we found you,” he said, or, at least that's what David thought he said. David couldn't hear much of it. “Can you climb?”
David nodded his head.
“We can climb,” Kara shouted. “Or I can climb for the both of us.”
Rope ladders dropped to the ground, and slowly they made their way up them. At the top, Buchan hugged them both, pulling them inside, slamming the door behind them.
“Your face,” Buchan said. “What happened to your face?” He was already reaching for bandages, pushing them into place over the wound.
“It’s all right,” David said. “It hardly hurts at all. How did you find us?”
“A voice — the Engine, I guess — told us that it was safe to leave the overhang, and that we would find you here.” The gondola creaked, the airship jolted, headed alarmingly close to the great spikes of the wall. Buchan gave a frightened-looking grin. “Well, it was right about one thing.”
Already the Collard Green was turning, her engines roaring. We're not out of this yet, David thought.
Buchan looked at Kara. “The Dawn?”
Kara walked away, and Buchan left it at that.
David left Kara to herself.
“And what of Margaret?” David asked.
“I think you had better worry about your own health,” Buchan patted his back. “An iron ship passed back over the wall a few minutes after Kara left. It… passed the Dawn and raced south. I'm guessing that she was on it.
“But that doesn't mean that we can't get her back. After all, we've won, haven't we?” Buchan looked out into the maelstrom. “Cadell was right. I did not even begin to comprehend how awful this would be, the sort of destruction it would cause.”
David nodded his head, knowing too much, his own body numb with horror at the dreadful thing he had done.
“Not everything is destroyed,” David said. “There will be pockets, around the Lodes, or in valleys perhaps, that the Engine did not drown in cold.”
Buchan grimaced. “Really, would you want to be alive in this?”
“We are,” David said. A sudden Carnival pang slithered spiky and cold through him, he bent over with the pain.
Buchan grimaced. “Are you all right?”
“Just the Carnival.”
