There was no up anymore.

  Only the crushing whirl of descent, a kaleidoscope of burning hull plates and screaming atmosphere. Hazahnahkah tried to breathe, but the air inside September 6th’s lungs came and went in ragged bursts that weren’t his own. The First Terror blurred his sense of self; half his thoughts were hers, half belonged to the sword, and none could decide which body was steering the fall.

  He caught flashes that weren’t real: an oven, a bakery, a windmill that stood above them. Three young men. A young girl beside them. A mother’s call. A white tiger.

  Then it was gone, replaced by the roar of Zalahak’s engines as the mechanical dragon plunged through clouds of molten vapor.

  Below, Serpent’s Ramble swelled like an open wound, pooling with gold clouds and emerald valleys. Whole continents of cloudwater and luminous sand drifted in violent spirals. The Waker Station—once a fortress—was now a meteor.

  Serpent’s breath! He’s going to destroy Serpent’s Ramble!

  The First Terror gave Hazahnahkah his wielder’s body, but her unconscious mind was still dreaming through it—dreams that bled into him as hallucinations. He saw the white and black head of Zalahak’s new dragon face flicker into that of the striped grimacing tiger scowl of Bankanzaku’s, Ysan’s silhouette twisting into a child’s.

  “Stay awake,” he muttered, voice trembling through her throat. “You have to stay—”

  The station shuddered again. They had just driven through the surface of Serpent’s Spill. Physics wasn’t behaving as it should have. It must have been those spheres. Water began spilling in despite the fact that they were plunging faster and faster. Zalahak’s frame tore through the upper decks, six wings blazing like falling suns. He didn’t give a Serpent’s ass whether or not he destroyed the megastructure now. His claws and body bent forward as he pushed harder. Adamantine beams simmered scarlet and amber, the very air popping and bubbling as it warped to the friction of their fall. Hazahnahkah twisted to his companions. Everyone had lost consciousness—Zalaster had fallen quiet, slumped over his crossbow. A faint maroon and iron scent coated their skin. Yurreth’s putrid smell burned like searing plastic.

  “Blood armor,” the Woman Painted White said, suddenly next to Hazahnahkah.

  Yurreth was completely unwounded despite the magnitude of the fight. Her skin glimmered with metallic crimson. Her scent was that of a woods touched to rot and hellfire. Raw organs that had been left out to dry.

  Hazahnahkah took a breath. It was like gulping sewer water. “Where were you?”

  Yurreth didn’t elaborate. “The holomatrixes are busy protecting Zalahak. I can’t pierce that. We’re going to need you,” she boomed at a figure on Zalahak’s back. “YSAN!”

  It was impossible, even for the sword, to make out the figure as Ysan. All his senses were betraying him as the atmosphere raced past them, and she was swathed in hissing steam. A constant coat of water was protecting her. The hymn of it was the lullaby of Serpent’s Spill. She was safe thanks to her Ramble. Serpent’s Breath.

  “I can’t get to Zalahak’s sphere!” she cried out.

  “You don’t need to!” Yurreth bellowed. “We’ll take the fall!”

  “No!” Hazahnahkah snapped. “Even if we live, this will obliterate the world!”

  Yurreth whispered to him, and yet still he could somehow hear her above the noise. “Disease. Rust. Hormones. Chemical substances and organic compounds. I can even take inorganic. Like you. My Ramble is the Ramble to take things into my body, and claim ownership of them.” Her eyes darkened. “Can you trust me, Creator Blade?”

  The Rapscallion was the only reason everyone who breathed still breathed, but she was also the reason they were a little less than zombies. Hazahnahkah didn’t think he could trust her, but this wasn’t about trust anymore. Zalahak was confronting him with an impossible decision. To choose the lesser of two evils. Hazahnahkah didn’t want to promise to do anything with September 6th’s body she would not want to do, but it was either that… or death. Surely she would have chosen whatever guaranteed the Orphanspawn to live, and the guarantee to continue her pursuit of Bankanzaku? The sword nodded with September 6th’s face.

  “You want to store me in your body?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “How will I fit?”

  “My real body is there.” Yurreth lifted her chin towards a pulsating sac of pods sitting on the mechanical dragon’s bottom right wing. It was nestled in the steel grating, hidden by scrap metal and broken things.

  Its molecular structure was also the most disharmonious rhythm Hazahnahkah had ever heard. In the pod beat more than a hundred million hearts. Hazahnahkah looked at Yurreth in a new light now. All the things Knife said about her were true. Just how many people had the Woman Painted White absorbed? She was at best a madwoman, and at worst a very intentional cannibal with far worse hobbies than just eating people.

  “How can you do this to your own race?” Hazahnahkah asked.

  Yurreth’s eyes widened. She leaned forward. “How could I not?”

  “Can’t you see it hurts them? They’re crying out! Your own followers!”

  “It’s only fun if they don’t want it. Don’t you agree, Hazahnahkah?”

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  Zalahak’s voice rolled out like a thunderstorm, interrupting them with crackling laughter and whining mechanical noises. “Discovering that tongues have more than two edges?”

  Hazahnahkah took Yurreth’s hand at this. She hurled him towards her true body—the flesh sack—and a sphere tried to bar him. Ysan grabbed it with her water arm. It blew up her shoulder, but Hazahnahkah took on the damage with September 6th’s body.

  “Transfer it!” Yurreth cried.

  Hazahnahkah didn’t need to think about this. September 6th did this for him. The next moment, Yurreth lunged to the side. She went skating along the dias, tumbling from the aftershock. She got up smoldering—but unharmed.

  Yurreth’s been taking damage for everyone through September 6th’s Ramble, Hazahnahkah had realized the Rapscallion and the Orphanspawn must have had a deal far before they had encountered Zalahak. The Rapscallion had been shielding everyone through the Orphanspawn's Ramble this whole time.

  And still we’re struggling this much.

  Hazahnahkah raced his way to the flesh pot with that thought, unable to use his Terrors, tripping on things that were falling apart and things that were not there. September 6th’s hallucinations were growing stronger. He managed to blink them away before he understood fully what they were. Yurreth had great endurance and stamina, but she could only buy Ysan so much time. She carved the blood out of herself and into spears. She hurled them at Zalahak’s spine and arms; the spears always dissolved halfway there, shredded by the distortion fields spinning off his armor.

  The dragon quaked. Hazahnahkah grabbed onto one of the flesh roots extending from the pod. He stumbled anyway, and September 6th’s foot went straight into a gap between two large chunks of scaled plating. They clamped shut. The limb, severed, then regenerated, then severed again. Yurreth’s leg vanished, then appeared, then vanished again. The Rapscallion was still taking damage for them, but Hazahnahkah couldn’t pull himself out. The fall screamed in his ears as his stomach rose into his throat.

  They had just smashed through another large piece of land in Serpent’s Ramble, but Hazahnahkah could not tell just how far they were falling, and when the crash would stop. He tried not to think about whether Zalahak had already plunged them past Serpent’s Spill and Black Garden, and tried to activate his Second and Third Terrors to set himself free. All six spheres were still on him. It was like trying to shove a boulder with his pinky. Even his Painter's Palette wasn’t working. The drone he had created earlier sat, motionless, dead on the burning platform.

  Zalahak bellowed.

  “I didn’t just die for her! I lived for her!”

  “Shut up!” Hazahnahkah yelled, trying to worm free. “You have gone mad!”

  “Ha! The Gardener found honey among his weeds!”

  Zalahak’s provocations sounded strained. Hazahnahkah looked up to see that the sky had changed. It wasn’t that they were falling anymore; something was happening… To The Leviathan Sky. Hazahnahkah’s heart dropped. They’d fallen so fast already, but no damage had been done. The hills, the rivers, the horizons of Serpent’s Ramble stirred around them in a cauldron of color and wreckage. They were plunging down, but the world…. It was rising around them! Hazahnahkah could sense it in the symphony of the atoms and particles, all the orchestral grains that composed the shorelines of the world. They weren’t being destroyed—they were being controlled. Someone—or something—was controlling them.

  Hazahnahkah twisted to Yurreth. It wasn’t her. This wasn’t the effect of a Ramble. It was a feeling he could specify now. It didn’t have the intent like a person’s Ramble did. It was like the tidal wave of being pushed back by those spheres. This was the effect of technology. An alarm blared across the megastructure in violent tunes and howling trumpets. A voice echoed over it all. “I’ve gained control of the Waker Station’s command systems, Zalahak. It’s over.”

  “LETHIAHENNE!” Zalahak roared. “YOU WOULD DARE—!”

  “Zalahak, I’m only following protocol. You know I’m very impersonal about this.”

  “LETHIAHEEEEEEEENE!”

  A cliff rose up from a flying island that had whipped around the space station as Serpent’s Ramble came crashing through into them. Zalahak’s scanners began whining and clicking in confusion as he tried to get a sense of what to do.

  The space station clearly wasn’t just a ship—it was an instrument that piloted all of Serpent’s Ramble. A sudden series of cliffsides that had once been over them suddenly swirled lower, blowing by like a whirlpool of sharp rock and sharper molten, blazing by the absurd speed of the storm. One of the cliffs speared Zalahak through the neck, then dragged the entire dragon with it. Tubing, wiring, and plating spilled into the air like the stomach of a hundred albino elephants. The dragon clasped the platform, trying to hang on as its fingers and wings bent back. Two extra layers unlatched from its four arms, revealing two more fingers for each one it already had hooked deep into the Waker Station. The hooks were bladed. They whirled and screamed, terrible noises, chainsaws on top of chainsaws, as if the nails of the great machine beast were bending back under its own weight, breaking themselves as Zalahak tried everything he had to claw himself onto the megastructure. The dragon was now more like a leech, clinging with the last of its life as the shifting currents of reality tried to tear it off.

  All of Serpent’s Spillage then crashed into him. It flooded the sky. Zalahak reattached the spheres to himself as a defensive measure. Hazahnahkah used his Third Terror to warp to Yurreth’s true body—the flesh pod. He shoved his hand inside. It rippled, shivered, then the soft web of mucus broke, and a fresh hand snapped out.

  No… it couldn’t have been…

  The hand…

  … it was December 11th’s face, wearing Yurreth’s smile.

  Hazahnahkah had so many questions, but he didn’t get a chance to ask them: a girl had leapt into the fray. She bounced off objects that should have eclipsed her, sewing and phasing through debris that would have broken every bone in a human body. Her speed was great, her sharp turns, greater. The girl sank into Zalahak’s metal frame as if it were formed from water. She swam through the steel like a fish, lurching up and cutting at key parts, sinking deeper into others, dodging the wing’s artillery by rising from hard-to-reach places. She was awake far too early! The next moment, she swam up, sliced off December 11th’s arm, and smiled, rapier in hand.

  “Guess who polished her Ramble,” she said.

  It was really her! Hwayoung! The girl’s grin spread.

  “Haz, didn’t I tell you I wasn't done with you yet?”