POV: nomad
Summary
The whole city under Nomad does not break — it disassembles. Cracks open in the metal street and his captors calmly step across them. The plate shatters into hundreds of independent pieces, each rising on its own jets, each carrying a single building, each in fact a ship in its own right; the hovercycles that docked along the city's edge had not been parking, they had been adding their thrust to the whole. This is not one flying city. It is a caravan of vehicles that locks together, by convenience or defence, into the shape of a town and then takes itself apart again.
Most of the ships scatter on errands. Nomad watches several scatter something across the ground from low altitude and works it out: seeds. The Invested sunlight grows plants to maturity in hours, so a society that can sow at twilight and reap before the sunline can farm on a daily cycle and never settle. He registers the architecture of survival here in a few seconds and then beats his own curiosity back with a bludgeon — a terrible cynic, he tells himself.
His ship does not follow the farmers. It joins a cluster that sets down in a wide muddy ring on the ground, larger vessels stacking four or five high to form tiered seating on their front decks. He recognises the geometry. It is an arena. Glowing Eyes settles into a chair on the front balcony of an overbearing ship and turns to watch. Nomad's captors clamp golden bracers identical to the ember-people's onto his forearms and toss him twelve feet down into the rancid mud.
More ships open and shove thirty-odd ragged captives in after him. No weapons are offered. Three ember warriors drop in armed — machete, two whips — and the crowd cheers. The unarmed are meant to scatter and the ember people are meant to catch them. Nomad grasps the shape of it: not gladiatorial combat, an extended game of public tag in which whoever is caught will be marked for the next dawn execution. The captives' relief at seeing others taken is laced with grief; the ones taken are friends, or family, of those who survive.
He hauls himself onto an eight-foot crate by his fingertips, intending to be the most awkward target. The silver-streaked ember woman climbs up after him, ignoring every other quarry — machete, light-green eyes, a vein of blackness with a single glowing line down her left cheek. She wants him in particular. Nomad glances up at Glowing Eyes and reads the room correctly: this isn't a test, this is a public execution. The leader wants Nomad killed in front of everyone to undo the reverence the officers gave him for surviving the sun.
He leaps off the crate, drops into the mud, and comes up with a crowbar of Aux freshly formed in his hands — disguising the summon as something he dug from the sludge. The Torment lets him deflect her swing as long as he is purely defensive. He shoves her aside into the mud. He dodges her three more times in quick succession, blocks again, and finally hits her machete hard enough to knock it loose. He runs for the largest box, fifteen feet high, and barely grabs the lip with mud-slick fingers before a hand catches his wrist and hauls him up. A heavyset, gap-toothed peasant in dirty clothing has been hiding on top. He hauls Nomad up and gives him a friendly, dimpled smile. Aux half-translates a question of his as something about killing, and apologises that he still cannot follow the language.
On the ground below, the silver-streaked woman starts climbing the crate. Nomad asks Aux how heavy a mass of metal he can become without spending serious BEUs — about a hundred pounds, Aux answers. Nomad waits until the ember woman is mid-leap between boxes, then jumps to meet her, raising Aux as a barbell of the maximum weight as if to swing it. The Torment freezes his arms at the attack — but the barbell is a hundred pounds of inert metal, and the woman slams into it at full speed. They both drop. He lands on top of her with the bar across her chest and his elbow in her throat. She stays down, stunned, her ember fluttering like a tired eye.
The crowd goes silent. Nomad steps toward the balcony and shouts at Glowing Eyes about pitting Invested warriors against unarmed peasants. A piercing cold sweeps up his wrists from the bracers; his breath mists; his muscles lock. Glowing Eyes is holding a small handheld controller. Nomad calls him a bastard through chattering teeth and falls face-first into the mud, unconscious.