POV: marasi
Summary
Marasi, arm and leg still aching from the portal fight earlier, undoes the last latch on the heavy metal hatch and shoves it open. The army that the Wayfarer Community feared never arrived; with Entrone captured, the Set's local soldiers stood down, the lord mayor ordered everyone else to quarters, and the cavern town is now waiting in suspended breath to see what comes next.
Armal climbs the ladder behind her, whispering that they should have noticed before now: the hatch was full of metal, which by the Community's own rules would have drawn the lethal *mutants* — and the bar across the lid was therefore never meant to keep the mutants out, but to keep the villagers in. To make sure no one ever walked up here unsupervised.
The chamber at the top of the ladder is not, as Marasi half-expected, the projection room she visited earlier in the day. It is a simple circular space with one flat wall — and that wall is alive with the image of a destroyed city in slow ashfall, the same image the Community has been raised on for generations. Opening the hatch triggered the system. Now that Marasi knows the trick, she can pick out the slight flicker that betrays it; for anyone seeing it for the first time it is bewilderingly convincing — an image that simply hangs on the wall, with no beam of light cutting the room to give it away.
She helps Armal and the others up through the hatch one by one. All four stop where they are and stare. In the next room they find the secret: a projector set up to throw the picture onto the back of a sheet, which from the chamber side looks like a window onto the end of the world. They put their hands between the projector and the sheet and watch their own shadows fall across the dying skyline.
While they handle the equipment, Marasi finds another door — a small one, on the far wall — and opens it. The mist pours in. Outside is a quiet street in a nondescript warehouse district, and beyond that a great deal of city, twinkling with electric lights, going about its night. Armal and the others gather behind her in the doorway and look out. The building they have just stepped out of is small, plain, painted no different from its neighbours.
Marasi starts to apologise — for the lie, for the years — but Armal cuts her off and asks instead whether Marasi has appreciated it. *These seven years,* she says. *Have you used them? Have you appreciated them? I spent them wishing for one more day of my old life — to show my children a world of lights and life instead of stone and shadow. Please. Tell me you lived those years.* Marasi hesitates. There has been Allik, who has been wonderful. There has been her career, in which she has accomplished much. But was that what she wanted, in the end — or only what she had agreed to want?
She thinks of all the things the Ghostbloods and Moonlight knew years before they shared a sliver of them with her. She and the people Moonlight works for had been pulling against the same yoke for years, and she had not been told. People suffer, she thinks, when the truth becomes a commodity to be speculated upon.
She looks up into the mist. High over the city, blazing through the haze like a lighthouse, the floodlit crown of the Shaw burns in the distance. As she watches, something flashes up there, and the lights — in a sudden explosion — go out.