POV: nomad
Summary
No one disturbs Nomad where he lies on the cabin floor as Beacon reforms and the casualty reports come in: fifteen captured, roughly a tenth of the population, dragged off to be left for the sun. The council convenes around him as if he were a sleeping dragon. Aux finds the chair-arrangement around his sprawled body delightful. The full Greater Good sits — Confidence, Contemplation, Compassion — along with Zeal in his role as a sort of field commander and special-ops planner, Jeffrey Jeffrey as the bearded administrator who supplies continuity between incarnations of the council, and five others Nomad does not know. They have come to take stock of a disastrous attempt to find a legendary refuge.
Confidence stands first and speaks plainly: they are dead. It is time to make peace with Adonalsium. She is the optimist of the trio, but her duty is to express what she knows true, and she sees no way out. Compassion confirms the strategic case quietly — the corridor they have been pushed into has carried mountains for five years; they will encounter the heights soon, and there is not enough heat in the sunhearts to fly for much longer. Even if they pile every soul onto a handful of ships they cannot make another rotation; they have gone too long without harvesting and are running on cold souls. Jeffrey Jeffrey, soft, asks whether they must after all surrender to the Cinder King. Zeal hammers the table — he would rather die a cold death and leave his soul to the mud than donate it to a tyrant.
The room turns to Contemplation. She admits she has no plan beyond dying with pride and the knowledge that Elegy would be proud of them for not folding. The silence holds. Nomad is about to push himself up and try one of his master's rousing speeches when the people in the chairs around him start standing of their own accord, each saying it in their turn — we go on, we go on. He sits up and watches them gather strength off each other. They do not need his speech. They do not even need a soldier. They need a man he used to be: the one who could fix problems. He stands.
His pitch is personal: the Cinder King broke an oath to him, and so he intends to topple the kingdom on his way out as a parting gift. Confidence retorts that he does not yet understand the real problem; Zeal explains it. The northern flank is now saturated with the Cinder King's scouts and outposts — every subject he has, called up — so they cannot retreat the way they came. South are mountains. East are mountains. Nomad blinks: but you have flying ships. Zeal smiles thinly. Their engines die in the heights, and so do the people in them. How tall? Nomad asks. A thousand feet, Zeal says.
A single thousand. That is when Nomad realises: math is going on. He demands a pad and a clock, and uses his internal sense of time to convert their hours to standard — about half — and from there to a rough planetary diameter. The numbers line up. Their world is comically small for the gravity it carries, which means something dense and Invested at its core; and its atmosphere thins to lethal at a thousand feet, which is precisely why their ships hover thirty or forty feet off the ground. He sketches an engine: intakes at the sides, the sunheart superheating the air, a compressor maybe even generating plasma, downward jets. They fly by displacing air, and at altitude there is no air to displace. Aux objects that he is, by substance, an embodiment of physical forces and should already know this; Nomad retorts that being made of meat doesn't make him a primate anatomist either. A single woman in the room — oil-stained gloves, no other distinguishing dress — follows the equations. She concedes the principles and tells him, plainly, why a refugee culture has no time for them: they have to keep what works running, and that is all.
Confidence asks the question he has not answered: even if a miracle gets them over, even with more sunhearts somehow, what is the final objective? Nomad falters. She has him. Compassion steps in: they were a moment ago resolved to die rather than surrender; is this not, at minimum, a tiny hope more than that? Their ancestors crossed worlds against reason; they owe them the attempt. Zeal stands and says he lives for miracles. Nomad's stomach turns, because he is not sure the hope he is offering them is real. Still — he tells them they will cross the mountains, and loop the planet, and come back to look for the door again. It beats lying down. Contemplation asks, quietly, whether that is also why he keeps running himself. So far, he says. He asks for the workshop, a quiet room and tools, and — for relevant tests — Rebeke's sister. Now all he has to do is retrofit the engines of an entire city for near-vacuum flight in ten of their hours, with the help of the man he used to be: the one who failed so many times.