Zeen followed close on her heels. After his purging he had hugged her like a much younger child and had not wanted to let go. Yaz had held him just as tight as though he were an anchor to her old life and somehow together they might follow the chain back to better days. At last she had had to pull away from him and explain that they needed to hurry and to keep silent.

Yaz took them through the outer fringes of the Broken’s caverns where the air grew colder, the ceilings lower, and the stars fewer in number. She wasn’t sure how much Zeen remembered or if he fully understood where they were. She hoped that his experiences remained a bad dream and that his youth would help him shrug them off. But Mother Mazai had always said that the hurts done to us as children cast shadows as long as our lives.

The outer chambers proved echoingly empty—no distant sounds of combat, no bodies, blood, or discarded weapons. Moving through them Yaz could imagine that she was the first to have ever come here, and that when she had moved on it would be as if she had never been. An unearthly beauty haunted these places, these dark, star-speckled voids miles deep beneath the ice. On their own slow timescale they were as fleeting as bubbles in water. Something about the majesty of them encouraged silence.

“Where are we going?” Thurin asked.

“To the city.” Yaz smiled. It was the first bit of curiosity he’d shown since they set off. She’d wondered if he were too afraid to ask about their friends in case she told him they were dead. No doubt the vision of Petrick falling from the bridge still haunted him. “We’re going to escape with the iron collection. Quell and Maya are gathering what we’ll need for our journey on the ice.”

Thurin stayed silent at that. He’d never been out in the wind before, up there, beneath the open sky, never seen the sun or the true stars. Yaz supposed that in its way the prospect was as daunting to him as being thrown into the Pit of the Missing had been to her. Part of her wanted him to ask about Quina but he didn’t.

“Maya?” Kao rumbled. They had crossed a wide chamber in the time it had taken the name to sink through whatever introspection was tying up his thoughts. “Maya, trying to scavenge while there’s a war going on down here? She’s too little. She’s just a—”

“She’s deadly,” Yaz said. “An Axit spy here to steal the priests’ secrets. She was the one that rescued me and the others from the black ice. Worry about yourself. That one will outlast all of us down here.”

She led them on through the frozen chambers and they asked no more questions.

* * *

“STOP.” ERRIS CAUGHT her shoulder. They weren’t far from the city now, crossing a freezing, low-roofed chamber reachable only through worm tunnels twisted and squeezed by the flow of the ice. A handful of small stars and a band of glowing dust provided faint illumination. Close at hand a small clutch of red-ball fungi clung to the rock, where they looked to be losing the struggle to prove that life will find a way.

“What is it?” Yaz asked.

“Listen.”

She heard it then, in between the creaking of the ice. A faint noise, hard to make out, attenuated as if it were reaching them from some distance.

Zeen showed his first interest in proceedings, pointing at one of the tunnel mouths. “It’s coming from there.”

“Sounds like sobbing,” Kao said.

Yaz pursed her lips. She wanted to get to the city. She didn’t know how long they had before the collection was due but knew that it couldn’t be too long. She couldn’t carry the whole world on her shoulders. She took a step forward in the direction she’d been going, then stopped. It could be Quina. “Let’s find out.”

She led the way, letting her stars range ahead of her in the blackness of the tunnel. The passage had been squeezed to a concave shape and at the turns it grew tight enough that Kao had to struggle. If they were attacked in here there would be no running away. Even turning around would be difficult.

“Definitely crying,” Thurin said behind her.

Yaz made no reply. Here and there the ice bore long smears of blood.

At each turn the sounds became clearer. Not a child, or a woman. A man’s grief. Yaz scrambled up an incline, slipping on the ice and only just able to make progress. The sound ahead stopped abruptly.

“They’ve seen the light,” Kao hissed unnecessarily from behind Thurin and Zeen.

The next turn revealed their quarry. Two of the Broken, both black-haired, one collapsed in the lap of the other, a young man, his handsome face deathly pale. The other hunched about him, shivering violently. Blood had run across the ice, more of it than anyone could endure losing. There was something familiar about the dying man.

“We’re here to help.” Yaz summoned her stars back to her hand.

The one cradling the bleeding man raised his face, framed by a tangle of red-black hair. Where the other had been handsome this one was beautiful in a way that stopped the breath in Yaz’s lungs. “Kaylal!”

“Exxar.” He tried to lift his friend. “It’s Yaz.”

Exxar’s head flopped to the side, his gaze fixed. Yaz crawled forward and set her hand to Kaylal’s arm, corded with muscle from his work at the smithy. “What are you doing here?” She wanted to ask how he had got so far from the ravine where they’d last seen him in Arka’s band. Kaylal’s parents had thrown him into the pit as a baby because he’d been born without legs. They must have thought that the longest journey he would make unaided in his life was the vertical one they set him on.

“Pome’s side caught us. They wanted us to work the armoury again. We escaped on the way to the forge pool.” Kaylal moved Exxar toward her. “Can you help him?”

“Kaylal, it’s Thurin.” Thurin squeezed forward, his head now at Yaz’s shoulder. “Who did this?”

“We need to get out of this tunnel first.” Yaz pushed against him. “Everybody back to the cave.” She took Exxar’s feet. “Can you guide his head, Kaylal?”

The smith nodded. He kept Exxar’s head in his lap and put on barbed metal gauntlets that he had beside him, lined with fur to keep his fingers unfrozen. With the traction provided he scooted himself along after Yaz.

Yaz maintained the fiction that Exxar might still be alive, fearing that it was the only thing that could draw Kaylal from his hideaway. The hope in his face hurt her, but its inevitable death would hurt her more. She wondered how she would feel in his place with Quell in her lap. Would she burn as fiercely? Would the quality of her grief differ? What if it were Thurin’s or Erris’s body she clung to in the dark, long after whatever had made them them had departed?

The rest of the group had to back awkwardly out of the tunnel until they reached a wider section, all save Zeen, who was able to squirm around where he stood. It took them a while to reach the cave where others were able to help with Exxar. Kaylal flinched when he saw Erris reaching for his friend; the Broken knew all the adults under the ice, so a stranger was a big shock. Even so, with Yaz’s reassurance he let Erris take Exxar.