POV: nomad
Summary
Nomad's thrown sphere meets the bullet in midair — a stunt he can land roughly one time in ten, and which he candidly tells Rebeke as much when she asks. The blast becomes a small firework on the parlour carpet. He summons Auxiliary back as a plain sphere and tells the Cinder King he had been seriously considering the offer until the king gave him a reason to look forward to killing him. The two Charred at the doorways block the exits. He throws Rebeke through into the pilot's cabin and slams the door behind her, then turns to find a streak-faced Charred grinning at him; he raises his fists by reflex, his Torment freezes them in the air, and the man drops him with three clean punches.
He scrambles up anyway, dodges the pile-on, ducks into the cockpit and seals the door with Auxiliary as a clamp-on guard. The wooden door will not hold long against people with guns, but it does not have to. Rifle rounds begin punching through around the doorknob as he hurls the pilot's metal stool at the windshield, cracks it on the first throw, bounces it off on the second, then shoulders through the frame himself and rolls out onto the deck. Rebeke comes after him. The cycle, chained at the side dock, has not been sabotaged; Aux as a crowbar pops the chain, Rebeke takes the controls, and they drop off the deck with the Cinder King firing wantonly after them.
Aux warns him he is at just over ten percent Skip capacity and expanding the shield to cover the whole cycle will eat that down further. Nomad tells him to do it anyway. The shield grows to five feet across just in time to intercept rifle fire as Rebeke dives. She is steering for the second cycle, peeking out from beneath the rock overhang where they hid; Nomad has to shout her down — the Cinder King has switched to a rifle and is picking at them from above, and stopping now will get them killed. With obvious frustration she pulls up and abandons the second cycle. Up on the deck the king slams something to the floor — Nomad suspects the fake key — and stalks back to his cabin. Aux surmises, drily, that he has put the swap together.
Once they are out of range Nomad takes the front seat himself. Rebeke, sat behind him, refuses to put her arms around him even through clothing; her people do not touch comfortably. He locks her in with a brace of Auxiliary across her legs and radios Contemplation: the Cinder King has worked out that the door is not where he claimed, and is calling up his subjects. Contemplation admits her prospectors have found nothing and that those who claim to have seen the opening cannot pin its position against a landscape that resets every rotation. He tells her it is time to retreat to the dark. She replies, quietly, that she is just so tired of running. He answers that he understands that better than she can guess. She cuts off to take the question to the rest of the Greater Good, asking only that he keep Rebeke alive — not the Lodestar Elegy was, but a symbol now to a people who have lost her siblings.
By the time he gets back to Beacon, the city is in fact organising the retreat. Down here near the dark, the plants are growing visibly under the receding shadow — moss across every surface, thickets reaching toward the rings, a cluster of gazelle-like creatures with faintly golden eyes startling away from his jets. He docks the smaller cycle and slots into the formation as they swing south and away from the sun. For a brief interval he allows himself to think they may have got out.
Then they reach the rim of the cloud cover, where even reflected sunlight does not penetrate, and on the other side of that line he sees dozens of burning red lights waiting in the dark. The Cinder King's ships boost out to meet them.