POV: nomad
Summary
The rain in the dark zone, Nomad finds, is no worse than a brisk shower — nothing like the storms back home — and comes in brief sweeps as the hovercycle pushes deeper into the cloud cover. He notes the compass on the dash and reorients his understanding of the planet: the sun rises behind them in the west, chases them eastward vaporising everything in its path; ahead lies sudden sunset and this constant scattered drizzle, the afterbreath of all that flash-cooked water. The hovercycle has no headlights and no canopy, which tells him these people do not normally fly here. A refugee posture, not a raider's, he decides — pursued by the larger power, now huddled where it does not follow.
He notices the silver in the driver's black braid and the green of her eyes, and looks back at the same green eyes in the bound ember warrior strapped behind. He should have seen it sooner. The captive is family. An older sister, by the look of them. These people lost kin to the spear and have come back through the arena for one of them. He files that, files everything, and tells himself it is not his problem: he is here to take a power source big enough to leave this planet.
Connection settles into him as they fly — confirmed when the woman radios ahead. "Rebeke Salvage" identifies herself to a man named Zeal and gives an admittance code. Zeal asks after her brother Divinity; she answers, voice catching, that he fell. The conversation that follows tells Nomad, who is pretending not to understand a word, the rest: Rebeke broke the will of the Greater Good to go back for her sister, and the bound captive is named Elegy — a woman whose plan made the raid in the first place, bound now in case her ember-warrior state turns on them. Rebeke also reports a captive — Nomad — whom she paints, to his quiet indignation, as not much use in the fighting and possibly slow in the head. She mentions she also has someone called Thomos, whose family should be told.
The naming conventions register at last. Aux drops the conclusion in Nomad's ear: these are Threnodites. An offshoot of that culture they have wandered into. Nomad and Aux trade quiet astonishment at finding the people here at all, and Aux points out the obvious implication — that on the Threnodite homeworld the dead persist as shades under the right circumstances, that this group's red-eyed relatives should by rights already be among them. They have seen none, which suggests this branch split off well before whatever aftereffect took hold there.
Lights appear ahead under the cloud cover: a smaller hovercity than the one Nomad left, running impressively dark. Soft red hand-lanterns, masked engines, low and tucked behind black hills and rain. Rebeke locks the hovercycle into the city's side as a docking module the way her cycle docked in the larger city before. A handful of people wait in the drizzle, the closest carrying the red lantern: a tall, severe, dour man in a long black raincoat. Nomad pegs him for Zeal by his bearing. He is then surprised when "Zeal" answers from the mouth of a very short man — under four feet tall, normal head, short arms and legs — standing beside him.
Zeal is gentle with Rebeke. Dangerous, what you have done. She presses him: more dangerous than Elegy's plan? Did you recover it? He studies Nomad instead of answering, then tries hand signs at him, guessing him deaf. Nomad replies in Alethi with vague gestures and is taken for incomprehensible. Zeal and the tall man — whose full name turns out to be Adonalsium-Will-Remember-Our-Plight- Eventually, much to Nomad's delight — handle Thomos off to medics, then approach the hovercycle to call to Elegy. She growls back. They give up and decide to petition the Greater Good on her behalf. Zeal sets Adonalsium-Will-Remember-Our-Plight-Eventually to find Nomad guest quarters; the tall man tries to lead him politely off. Nomad declines, peels the man's hand off, and follows the other two instead. They let him.
Rebeke and Zeal cross the dark street to a building that is really a ship with a structure bolted on top. Nomad notes the entrance: a small antechamber of flat-black walls, less sturdy wooden construction than the metal floor and ceiling around it — a lightlock, plainly added recently to keep interior light off the street. Confirmation that these people have only lately gone on the run and burrowed in here. He notes too that Zeal keeps a hand in his pocket as they walk, ready, he suspects, to use the controller that still owns Nomad's wrists. He is led down a hallway to the room where he will meet the Greater Good. They turn out to be three old women.