Page 137 of Ship of Smoke and Steel

With a shriek of twisting metal, conduits and pipes all over the room tear themselves away from the walls, animated by the wild pressure of the Eddica flow inside them. They converge on the Scholar, jagged ends lancing toward him like spears. His scream rises as he’s pierced a hundred times over, disappearing in a matter of moments inside a compacting sphere of broken, twisting metal. After a few seconds, the bottom of the sphere begins to leak blood, thick and red.

Hagan tries to rise, stumbles, and falls to his knees. His body still flickers with distortion, growing fainter by the moment.

“Hagan!” I rush to the pedestal. “The doors. You have to close the doors!”

He looks up at me and nods, face clear for an instant before the distortion sweeps over it again. I feel a rumble through the floor, the sound of metal shifting far below.

“Thank you.” I reach out a hand to him. “Are … are you…”

And then he’s gone, fading into a spray of gray light that dissolves like mist. A quiet settles over the room. The angel is still, the bent and torn pipes fixed in place. The Scholar’s blood drips metronomically into a spreading puddle.

I pick my way out, past the splayed metal, past the still bodies of Erin and Arin. In the corridor, in spite of the pain all through me, I start to run.

They’re waiting for me. The ones who are left.

Meroe meets me at the bottom of the stairs, wrapping me in a hug tight enough to send spikes of pain through the burnt skin of my back. I ignore it and hug her back, just as tightly. Her braids are crusty with blood.

“You did it,” she says. “Gods, Isoka. You did it.”

I blink tears out of my eyes, and look past her.

The long curve of the door is closed, the unfolded steel sheets sealing off the entryway. I can hear crabs banging on it, distantly, but the metal doesn’t even shiver. They’re locked out. And we’re locked in.

Inside the door, bodies are piled in heaps. Crab bodies, blown apart or fried or cut to pieces, and human bodies, torn or slashed or mangled. Blood in every color imaginable has soaked into the soil, churned now into thick mud. There are dead hunters, the men and women I fought alongside on the way here, but so many others, too. Scavengers and servants, porters and children, lying in drifts like windblown sand.

“They came back to help,” Meroe says in my ear, as I walk forward. “Not just the fighters. Everyone who could hold a blade or a spear.”

“You wanted to save everyone,” I say, my eyes locked on the corpses.

Meroe squeezes my hand. “We saved everyone we could.”

The living are gathered just upslope of the carnage, sitting in stunned knots on the grass. A few are at work on bandages, helping the injured, but most just sit and stare at the closed doors, unable to believe that the nightmare is finally over. I see a few of the hunters, pitifully few. Aifin, Thora, and Jack are sitting together. Thora’s asleep, head resting on her lover’s shoulder, but Jack is awake enough to give me a little wave. I see Zarun, protesting feebly as Sister Cadua goes at him with her needle and thread.

Karakoa lies on the hillside, on his back, eyes closed. At first I think he’s asleep, too, but then I see the deep cuts in his coat, the crimson stains that surround them. The cuffs of his sleeves are scorched from powerburn, and I shudder to think what the flesh underneath must look like. His lover, the young man I’d seen at the officers’ council, kneels beside him, prostrated in an attitude like prayer.

“He fought to the last,” Meroe says quietly. “Sister Cadua told him to fall back, to get help, and he refused. You could smell his skin burning. When the doors finally closed, he walked back here and just … lay down.”

“Oh.” I put my arm around her shoulders, pulling her tight against me.

“Deepwalker.”

I turn, reluctantly. Shiara is standing between two tired-looking hunters, her kizen frayed at the edges, her makeup slightly smudged. By her standards, she might as well be naked.

“What?” I ask her.

“Where is the Scholar?” she demands. “He was seen going up the stairs.”

“Dead.” No need to elaborate on how.

“Oh.” She seems to deflate a little, then squares her shoulders. “What happens now?”

“What do you mean? We’re safe.”

“For the moment.” She waves a hand. “Will the ship keep going, past the Rot? Where does it stop? Will the doors open again, or are we trapped in here?”

I feel eyes on me, from all directions. Stares. Even Meroe is watching me.

What makes them think I have the answers?