Iris readjusted her collar, eventually giving up and undoing a button, hoping a bare clavicle or two might let off some of the heat. As well ventilated as the Steel Whale was, there was little masking the fact that the entire ship was built much in the same way an oven was. Never was this more apparent on a sunny day made worse by the Queen’s passing. By now, radio channels were reading off broad extrapolations based on what Sidosian meteorologists could provide.

  Beside her, Evalyn checked her weapons, a regular ritual even Iris was familiar with by now. She went over her rifle, cleaning the metal and loading rounds into clips one after another.

  “Here,” she said, turning around and tossing something Iris’s way. In the darkness of their empty crewing room, she couldn’t make out what it was until it landed in her hands. A pistol similar to Evalyn’s but more modern. Still, it carried the universal language of firearms; Iris could work it easily.

  “Guns won’t hurt whatever’s in there,” Iris said, waiting for Evalyn to toss extra magazines.

  “We don’t know who else is involved with our suspect. If any of them end up on an autopsy table…at this stage of this mess, we’d all rather the public not ask more questions.”

  Iris nodded, catching the magazines and sliding them in her beltline, the handgun itself into the seat of her pants.

  She and Evalyn made up team eight of eight, the irregular duo that rounded up the twenty-three assigned to the task. Their assignment was a portal they were vaguely familiar with, one that had once run through the Great Library.

  “Tony should’ve arrived by now,” Evalyn said, racking her rifle’s chamber closed and slinging it over her shoulder. “We should get going.”

  “Do you think he’s going to stay here?” Iris said. “On the ship?”

  Evalyn bobbed her head from side-to-side. “At least until things calm down. It’s a dangerous position he’s in.”

  She walked past the bunk bed Iris sat on and to the narrow doorway leading onto an iron-grate catwalk. “Who knows? This might be the home of the Great Library until it’s safe to set up shop in the city.”

  The thought of the library locked away on a military base irked her. For how few people frequented the library on its good days, its stint as a refugee centre had given it notoriety. She couldn’t help but feel Tony would be lonely.

  Iris followed her out of the room, trusting Evalyn’s knowledge of the ship to get them where they needed to be.

  An escort officer met them at the mouth of an unmarked elevator which, once the grid was closed, took them deeper into the bowels of the ship, where sunlight and open space were a distant memory.

  Here, the corridors were narrow, the light was weak and often red, and the gentle hiss of pressure valves was the only sound to permeate an otherwise quiet environment besides the occasional creaking buried behind walls of pipes and wires.

  “To our right,” the escort said, turning the volume down on their voice box as they did so. They turned, presenting to the two of them something that could not be more out of place.

  A wooden door. Perhaps the only organic material they’d seen besides themselves for twenty minutes. But even in the dim red light, Iris recognised the polish of the wood and the sheen of the brass handle, and her heart skipped a beat.

  She reached out first, and seeing as nobody stopped her, she opened it.

  A familiar smell. A familiar warmth. It might’ve been only a single room, barely a fraction of what had once been, but it was better than nothing. Leagues better than nothing.

  “You’re here,” Marie said, eyes meeting Iris’s and smiling warmly. There mustn’t have been the confidence Iris thought there was behind her eyes. Having been so close to the Queen, Marie would be more concerned than anyone. But in that moment, perhaps it was wisdom, but there was something deeply reassuring in her expression.

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  She continued into Marie’s arms, holding her tight around the waistband as she reciprocated.

  “Strong girl,” Marie whispered, caressing Iris’s hair.

  The room held only a small selection of books; relics lined on spacious glass shelves occupied most of the three walls. Each had a purpose Iris couldn’t ever hope to guess at, but being in their mere presence immersed her in a dull, humming Aether pull. The portal itself, a mess of copper and brass cables ancient in its own right, occupied the fourth.

  “Glad you could make it,” a familiar voice called from the bureau in the room’s centre. Iris turned and could help the faint smile drawing across her face. It had barely been a day, but she felt like she hadn’t seen Al in years. With Tony right beside him, she felt that if she just held her breath, she could live in denial of their current situation just a little longer.

  “Sire,” Evalyn said, making her own approach. “I’m glad to see you’re safe.”

  “No sire yet,” Al sighed. “Not until I’m crowned. For now, I’m just a liability.”

  Evalyn didn’t seem entirely sure how to respond to Al’s self-deprecation and instead left the floor open for Marie. The lieutenant-general checked her watch and noted the time.

  “A minute to go. Tony, if you would please.”

  Tony nodded their head, the solemn air from that morning still hanging about them. The characteristic soft glow shuffled out from underneath their scales, and the portal behind her sparked in great loops around its inner edge.

  “The quicker you do this, the better,” Marie stressed. “The situation is moving fast—we’ll send messages by hand through the portal but expect things to change drastically while you’re inside.”

  Evalyn approached the portal entrance, the fabric of the Queen’s realm weaving itself across the air into itself. Iris followed her, noticing a small, cylindrical set of dials ticking over with the seconds.

  “Four thousand five hundred and twenty-three years—”

  “One hundred and fifty days, sixteen hours, twenty-three minutes and four seconds. Time since the realm was created. Should be a matching counter on the other side.”

  “What’s the time over there?” Iris asked as the portal completed itself and Tony closed their eyes.

  “Thirty-one years, two hundred and sixty-five days, three hours, twelve minutes and two seconds.”

  “Queen parsed an entire empire’s rise in less time than I’ve been alive,” Evalyn muttered. “Just the thought makes me shiver.”

  “Old hag couldn’t live out a full lifespan with the amount of magic other Spirits gave her,” Al said. “Was never living long in the first place, even though she would never admit it.”

  There was fondness in his words, despite his wording. A relationship and time span that words couldn’t do justice, crushed in one fleeting moment.

  “Let’s go,” Evalyn said, tapping Iris’s shoulders. She couldn’t tear her eyes away from the bookkeepers, mind trying to imagine what she never could unless she had several thousand years, and somebody to share all that time with.

  Her thousands of years were spent alone. Perhaps that was a cruel sort of mercy in and of itself.

  She stepped through the portal behind Evalyn, the familiar sluggishness sinking its hooks into her muscles and joints.

  “God,” Evalyn whispered as the space before them seemed to unravel before their very eyes.

  They stood knee-deep in swaying Geverdian grass, the green stretching a hundred metres in all directions before the landscape abruptly changed at a faint, blue border rising into the air. To their left was a rainforest, their right a sweltering desert, and behind them the cross-section of a cut-off mountain range. The different environments seemed to swirl around one another, like patches of fabric held together by fraying strings.

  The unending patchwork even crossed the horizon itself as biomes stretched over their heads like a quilt woven by gods.

  “Are we in the right place?” Iris asked, although thankful the place their portal led to was infinitely more forgiving than some others in view.

  “Should be,” she said, turning back towards the portal, undamaged if not a little worn by the passage of time. “We calibrate from the outside, so theoretically, even if the land below us is different…”

  “Deity Unit QR-8 to team eight, please respond, over.”

  Evalyn retrieved from inside her jacket a small, black neckpiece she hung across her nape. “Team eight to QR-8, loud and clear.”

  “Copy Team 8. Landscape looks good from up here; coordinates are lining up, and I’ve got eyes on you.”

  Iris gazed up and found their Deity’s Eye circling low enough to make out a dark blotch against the busy patchwork sky.

  “Could you please check your compass, please?”

  Evalyn dipped her hand into her coat pocket and this time fished out a small, silver ring encrusted with a single gem, almost identical to the one on Iris’s finger.

  From it came a beam of light that pointed forward, directly opposite the portal. Their orientation was correct; that was a good sign for starters.

  “Clockwise from here,” the Deity’s Eye said. “I’ll redirect you to turn if you veer off course, so focus on the search.”

  “Copy,” Evalyn said, the markings across her body glowing a brilliant orange. “Could you take care of the transport, Iris?”

  “Okay,” Iris said, dismantling her hair and feeling the familiar sensation of cold, purple plates against her skin. A small island of familiarity in an ocean of variables, from the very land she stood on to the mission she was charged with, to the future, to her family.

  There was safety in her armour, a kind of safety she never thought she’d have to find within it, what was once such a source of torture. That fact alone seemed to speak to the situation better than words ever could.