“I came to the city a very long time ago. The ice followed me a while later.” Another smile. Yaz guessed him to be around Thurin’s age. Handsome. Strong features. “I wasn’t supposed to, of course. All our laws forbade it. For our own safety, they said. But how many our age are going to ignore a city of wonders on our doorstep ‘for our own safety,’ I ask you? It wasn’t just that law keeping fools and dreamers away though. The city had its own defences. Much stronger back then. The script would turn anyone away in those days, though it was most effective against quantals like you.”

Yaz tried to hide her surprise in a question. “Why didn’t it stop you then?”

Erris shrugged. “That was my talent. You quantals might get all the fire and the glory, but we marjals sometimes manifest curious talents. Nobody ever stopped me going anywhere. Not locks and doors. Not ship-tech security. Not even a Missing script wall.”

“Eular said the marjals had lesser magics . . .”

Erris’s smile showed all his teeth. “There’s no such thing as magic. If a thing is part of the world, part of how it works, then it’s real and obeys laws just like gravity and electricity do.”

“I . . . don’t know these words.” Yaz shook her head. “And magic is real!”

Erris held up his hands, a placatory gesture. “You win.” He looked around, a sadness entering his eyes. “I loved it here. Out in the countryside. I never knew it at the time. It was the kind of love that you grow into, familiar, taken for granted. Like a mother’s love. You feel it most when it’s gone.”

“But it’s not gone.” Yaz saw something white and yellow among the green at her feet and crouched, fascinated, finding more of the small wonders. “What are these?”

“The grass? Oh, you mean the daisies. They’re flowers. A type of plant. Have you really not seen . . . No, well, I suppose it’s all ice and snow now.”

From the treeline black dots rose, a swirling cluster of them. “Gulls?” Yaz ventured.

“Birds. Gulls are a type of bird. Those are starlings, I think.”

The starlings swooped over, shoaling like fish, sharp calls piercing the air. In their wake Yaz became aware of a world of other sounds that her overwhelmed mind had paid no attention to. A myriad of birdsong, some raucous, some lilting, some rising in breathtaking complexity, the notes a shower of liquid joy.

The beauty and strangeness of the place reached into Yaz and twisted something deep within her chest. She found her eyes misting, ridiculously close to tears. She gritted her teeth against it. “I don’t understand. How can this be here?”

“It’s not.” Erris walked past her to stare at the distant ruins. “I made it for you.”

“I was falling!” The assault on her senses had somehow driven that fact to the back of her mind. She got hurriedly to her feet.

“Would you like to go back?” Erris asked. “It’s nicer here. We could stay. I could show you the world that was. It’s as missing now as the ones who built those towers over there.”

“I want to stay.” Something fluttered past her, like a bird that was all wings, no bigger than her palm, bright and filled with colours. “But I need to go. My brother is in danger—”

“Those others are safe enough. It was only you the city took against.”

“Zeen wasn’t with them. He’s somewhere else. Somewhere worse.” Yaz frowned. “And why me? Why did those symbols come? What did I do that was so wrong?”

“The city is very old, very damaged. It mostly sleeps. When it acts it’s instinctual more than anything. The script is its voice. Once it was enough to keep away anything—people, rats, even flies and ants and things too small to see. But all that’s faded away, gone by the by. Just the headlines remain, the most important directives, and those were always to keep away whatever was most like the Missing, whatever might be capable of following them.”

“I’m like the Missing?” Yaz looked down at herself just to check she hadn’t changed in this strange place. “And why would they want to keep themselves away?”

“The ones most like them have the most potential to abuse the power left in the cities. For humanity that means quantals. The city tried to keep you out because you’re a quantal. It should have worked too. The real question is, why didn’t it?”

“I want to go back now.” Yaz was far from sure that she did, but duty led her tongue. She knelt again, running her fingers through the grass, touching the complexity of the daisies, pressing the warm soil beneath. Now that her eyes had begun to accept the sights, and her ears the strangeness of the sounds, her nose started to register the scents of Erris’s world, rich and varied, a melody in themselves, as varied as the birdsong. “I have to go back.”

Erris turned to look at her, lips pressed against regret. “I don’t know if I will ever be able to bring you here again.”

Yaz bowed her head. The sun warmed her neck. Something black and orange and no bigger than her thumbnail buzzed lazily past. “I can’t stay.” She couldn’t explain it to him. It was more than Zeen. She had been a part of something her whole life and now she was a broken piece, unable to go back, unable to move on. She wanted to ask him why he had done this to her, offering her a happiness she didn’t deserve. She didn’t know how to dream on her own, she had never allowed herself to. Dreams were selfish, a luxury the Ictha couldn’t afford. And yet here she was, in the middle of one so golden she could never have imagined it. She would give it back if she could. It was too beautiful. A poison that would sit in her heart, aching through the years. “I have to go back.”

In the next moment Yaz’s hands were against dusty stone, the same stone that pressed against her knees. Her fingers remembered the grass. The green world still filled her mind. She lifted her head and stood. A chamber of the Missing, lit by a light that cast no shadows. Unlike the rooms Arka had led her through, this one was crowded with objects, all of them unfamiliar, all grey with dust. Scores of . . . things . . . some larger than the largest man, some smaller than a child, many of them complicated with dozens of parts, wheels, rope-like attachments, glassy panels . . . many of them looked broken, though quite what made her think that Yaz couldn’t say. She found herself standing in a clear area at the centre of the room with the chaos heaped toward the four corners. Set in one wall were three rectangular windows spaced evenly in a row between floor and ceiling, each giving a view into a blackness so complete that it seemed to suck at the light.

“Erris?”

Yaz. The word pulsed through the chamber.

“Erris?” She turned, trying to identify the source of the voice.

I’m here. In the void.