Thresholder

Perry’s review of the fight told him very little. Marchand was able to put together a composite virtualization from long-range vision and whatever the nanites could sense, but it wasn’t highly detailed, and there were significant gaps in what could be shown that way, especially considering that Marchand was unwilling to make guesses about unknown magics. Marchand was willing to accept that the errors were magic, and that was something that Perry would try to be thankful for. There were a few takeaways though, namely with regard to the portals Third Fervor seemed to be able to conjure up at will. They always came with a touch, and always with the tips of her fingers, usually but not always on a hard surface. Nothing he saw revealed all that much about the timing, but Perry was hoping that she couldn’t just pop them open at will. She had opened portals to different places, that was clear from what he had seen, but he was also hoping that she had some range limits — if it was half a mile, that would be a serious problem, but not as much of a problem as ten miles.

Perry had no idea what Third Fervor looked like beneath her fancy copper armor, but Marchand had said that he’d be able to identify her by voiceprint unless she was taking great pains to hide it from them. With that said, the concealing armor probably didn’t mean that she had some secret life around the city, though you never knew. Perry wished that he’d been wearing his armor, mostly so he wouldn’t stick out like a sore thumb.

Thankfully, Dirk Gibbons was there to cover for Perry. He’d had a nice and short debrief, then had met again the next day as Perry was going to take off.

“Alright, they think you have an Implement borrowed from the commons,” said Dirk. They were on the observation deck of the Caster, which was low to the ground. Dirk was there mostly to oversee personnel, but wouldn’t be coming with them. “Which for all I know is true. You saved a lot of lives, and it seems like we owe you again.”

“Are you going to tell me what’s in the airship?” asked Perry, nodding to the inflated white skin above them.

“Nope,” said Dirk with a wide smirk.

“Because I told you everything there was to know about the mystery woman,” said Perry. “I made sure to drop that weapon off the side of the building for you, so you could have a good look at it.” It was a pretty crude firearm, which Perry wasn’t happy about, because deflecting bullets without Marchand was difficult, and became more difficult when the weapons weren’t accurate. “I tried not to blow up that tower, and I was this close to not doing it.” During the debrief Perry had told them everything except the fact that he was a thresholder and that Third Fervor probably was too. There was a manhunt in Calamus for Third Fervor and the men that had been with her, but all she’d need to do would be to stow the armor.

“Well, still no,” said Dirk. “That up there’s the kind of secret that we don’t want spread, and even if I trusted you, I wouldn’t tell you.”

“Fine, keep your secrets,” said Perry. “You’re sure that we’re good to go to the country? That’s the best place for us?”

“It’s the vital place for Moss,” said Dirk. “I wouldn’t mind if you stuck around, all things considered, but I’ve got a feeling that the construction in the country is going to be a target too. The golden domes are a symbol, and like with the execution, that’s the sort of thing that’s going to attract our enemies. You’re as much muscle as fifty normal men.”

“Before we go,” said Perry. “I wanted the inside scoop. What’s the deal with Thirlwell?”

“The deal?” asked Dirk with a raised eyebrow. He looked like a guy who got a lot of practice raising his eyebrow. “They’re an absolute monarchy, propped up by moneyed interests who are mostly inbred nobility.” He shrugged. “Run of the mill, special only because they’re the last one left. The Last King, that name really stuck, huh?”

“Yeah, but what are their goals?” asked Perry. “And how are they trying to achieve them? Bombing Kerry Coast, that didn’t accomplish anything, and bombing the execution, that wouldn’t have accomplished anything either. It wouldn’t even have saved the lives of the convicts. So what the hell is the Last King thinking?”

“You’re about to go into self-imposed exile in the country, and this is what’s on your mind?” asked Dirk.

“I figured we weren’t going to see each other much,” said Perry. “And you’re supposed to be the guy who knows things, so if you have some insight into the insanity, I’d like to know.”

Dirk looked over to the engines, which were spinning up, and the ground crew, who were getting ready to let the moorings loose. “Kerry Coast? We’re not sure what that was. Proof of power seems like the easiest read, given that’s what’s getting printed in the broadsheets over in Thirlwell. Maybe it even makes sense from his perspective. We’re accused of assassination and that has to have some kind of response. Could be emotions running hot too, can’t rule that out with a noble. But the executions?” He clucked his tongue. “You have to understand Thirlwell as consisting of a king, then all the squabbling people beneath the king. Some of them are jockeying for position, making big plays to gain the king’s ear, and others are trying their best to milk the king, or avoid his wrath. And the nobles have their own people beneath them, all trying to do the same. So this? A small group of people attempting to launch an attack on a peaceable assembly? And with some plausible deniability because in theory it’s Berusian counterrevolutionaries? That could be anyone among the nobility. The only hitch is the woman you saw, because whatever she was using, it was the kind of equipment that most people wouldn’t be able to field.” Dirk was thinking it was Implements or some other deep magic, which was sensible given that he didn’t know about thresholders, but there was only so far you could take theories about Implements, especially given how well-documented most of them were.

“So she might not have been sent by the king,” said Perry.

“Possibly not,” said Dirk. “It’s difficult to say. But if you want to understand Thirlwell from a bird’s eye view,” he glanced at the airship, “then I would have to say that it’s got the same sort of dysfunction that all monarchies have. The aggression we’re seeing now, the deaths that will follow in the wake of that when there’s not a mysterious swordsman on hand, most of it is because the king needs to present himself as a strong man. I can get you some newspapers from within Thirlwell, if you’d like, but it’s all opposition, with the kingdom making itself out to be the last bulwark against the antimonarchists.”

Perry nodded. “I’d appreciate the papers, if you could send them along.”

“They’ll have my notes,” said Dirk. “Can’t have you thinking that what they print is the truth.”

Perry was pretty sure that his ability to parse media far outstripped Dirk’s own, with the only caveat being that Perry’s understanding of the ground truth was much, much worse.

“Looks like we’re casting off soon,” said Perry after a call from one of the crewmen. “Thanks for covering for me.”

Dirk shrugged. “Anytime. There’s a chance that I’ll be around when Moss is putting the dome together. If you ever want to come tell us what you’re about, feel free.”

Perry gave him a nod. He kind of liked the guy, at least for a spook.

“Going well?” asked Mette, who had been waiting off to the side while Perry spoke.

“If the government is on my side, I consider that a win.” He cracked his neck to the side. “I’ve never had state backing before.”

“You did, on the Natrix,” said Mette.

“Well, you know what I mean,” said Perry. “Nine thousand people, that’s barely enough for a small town.” He’d also technically had state backing on Seraphinus, but being a knight in service of a king felt much different.

“The Natrix could crush one of these cities,” said Mette. “If it were here, it would be the most powerful force in the world. And if we had this kind of workforce, if we had magic, we’d be unstoppable. Can you imagine modern production techniques used with the lanterns? The masks? With an autorouter you could make twenty of them in a day.”

“I’m not sure that would work,” said Perry. “There’s some act of intention on the part of the person making the mask, some element of their perception. Using power tools would make the physical mask a lot faster, but I’m not sure that it would be imbued with the same magic. Repeatedly making the same mask isn’t about material production or even getting better at the physical act of mask-making, it’s something else.”

“Still,” said Mette. She folded her arms across her chest. “Everything they use is unbelievably primitive.”

Perry looked out at the city streets. The airship was going to take off soon, carrying them away from the city for a much shorter trip than they’d gone on before, only an hour of flight or so. According to Marchand, the device was still in the envelope of the airship and hadn’t been removed, which meant that it was probably going to be extracted out in the country.

Nima still hadn’t shown up. Perry wasn’t sure that she would, especially now that time was running short. She had picked her crusade and was barrelling ahead with it, pragmatism be damned, plans be damned. Perry didn’t think that she could sway the opinions of those in charge, and with all the decisions already made, it seemed even less likely to happen. He wouldn’t have been terribly surprised to hear that it had escalated to violence, but he wasn’t going to babysit her while she came to grips with being in a new place with its own stupid way of doing things.

On Earth, the discourse about the foiled attack on the public executions would be going through its third time through the news cycle, with a seven-layer-dip of hot takes to wade through, a bunch of memes, and idiotic thinkpieces. Here, in the city of Calamus, the daily papers had a giant frontpage article, but the spew of opinions was happening in taverns and common houses, and it would take time to settle. He wondered what the dominant opinion would be given time, but they would be out of the city before he found out.

“We’re to take off soon,” said Moss, who’d already packed away everything. He was now in charge of the entire trip, and had a whole host of people who were going to be working under him. They were almost all humans, mostly young men and women, a corps of engineers who’d be working under him. “No sign of your companion?”

“I’m his companion,” said Mette with a pout.

“The other one,” said Moss. “The one with armor.”

“I could have armor,” said Mette under her breath. “You don’t know.”

“Nima will show up or she won’t,” said Perry. “We’re not on the best of terms right now. It might have been better if I’d thrown my weight behind a stay of execution.”

“Coming in and putting your foot down isn’t the culture,” said Moss. “The public execution was decided upon by the symboulions here. It’s a reflection of their abuse, their anger, their trauma. Even if we could have stopped it —”

“We could have,” said Perry.

Moss watched him for a moment, sizing him up, and didn’t find cause to disagree. “I don’t think it would have been the right thing to do,” said Moss.

“No, I don’t either,” said Perry with a sigh. “But I don’t think she’s going to see it that way.”

Just as he said that, he saw Nima coming around a corner. She had a dour look on her face, she was wearing her armor with the helm peeled back, and she had a duffel bag over her shoulder which contained all her worldly possessions, most of which had been taken from libraries.

She stepped up onto the airship’s gondola without so much as a glance at Perry, and Perry raised an eyebrow in Moss’s direction.

“I’m guessing it went poorly,” said Moss.

“She’s with us, at least,” said Perry. And not a fugitive. Hopefully.

“You never said where you met,” said Moss.

“I sure didn’t,” said Perry. He rapped his knuckles against the railing. “I’m going to see if she’s up for a talk.”

He strode down the length of the gondola. The ship had been unloaded and reloaded, and there were fewer people now, but the lower hold was still filled with hammocks to keep the weight low. The screening had been much better the second time around, with everyone vetted for construction of the dome and dismantling of the old lantern. They were, unfortunately, locals, and that meant that the vetting couldn’t be as good as possible. But if there was sabotage, Perry was pretty sure it wouldn’t be during the short flight, it would be on the ground.

A call went out to say that the ship was about to be released from its moorings and start to rise, and Perry braced himself, then continued on.

Nima had a cabin this time, and it wasn’t too difficult to find, given that she was the only elf on board, had entered wearing full armor, and had been in a bit of a huff from all accounts. Perry knocked on the door, and there was a long pause before he heard a hard-voiced “Enter.”

“I wasn’t sure you were going to come,” said Perry as he slipped into her room.

“I wasn’t going to,” said Nima. She was staring at the wall. The armor surrounded her throat, but her face was free. “I was going to save those people.” She let out a deep breath. Her nose was slightly red, as though she’d been crying, and Perry wasn’t sure the last time he’d seen someone so utterly morose. The light coming in from her cabin window made her look like a Renaissance painting, and the armor helped the effect. It would be titled ‘The Lady Knight in Mourning’ or something like that.

“You thought better of it?” asked Perry.

Nima turned to look at him. Her jaw was tight, and it trembled for just a moment before she answered. “No, Perry, they killed them all.”

“What?” asked Perry. “When?”

“Last night, apparently,” said Nima. “I had spent hours trying to advocate for those people, for their imprisonment rather than their deaths, and while I was doing that, they had been unceremoniously killed. I would say that it’s worse that I was left to argue with their jailers for hours after it had already been done, but that pales in comparison to the act itself.”

Perry considered this. She was obviously upset, and that was the priority, but he could also understand why they’d done it. They had tried to hold a public execution and had it disrupted, and trying to do the whole thing again obviously wouldn’t draw the same crowd, and would be a security nightmare to boot. They also couldn’t just not execute the prisoners, not if there was a violent attempt at stopping them the first time, that would be tantamount to saying that violence worked against them. So they had split the difference and just quietly killed everyone in a secure place, and maybe they would put out something in the papers, a description of their crimes and a short version of the lessons that were supposed to be imparted by their executions.

“I’m sorry,” said Perry. “That must have been hard for you.”

“And it wouldn’t have been for you?” asked Nima. She glared at him.

“It’s not a crusade I would have picked up,” said Perry. “Even if I think that it’s wrong in principle for both moral and pragmatic reasons.” Perry also believed that most of the people who’d been killed were shitbags, even if the course of justice hadn’t been what would have been hoped for.

“Clearly not a stand you were willing to take,” said Nima. She sniffed.

“Your homeworld didn’t have executions?” asked Perry.

“No,” said Nima. She hesitated and looked away. “Or … not — not like that.”

“But they did have them in some capacity?” asked Perry.

“Not for humans,” said Nima. She looked back at him and folded her arms. “And I know you’re going to try to probe here, to make some point about hypocrisy, but you don’t understand that humans and orcs really are different from each other, to say nothing of the demons.”

“I’ve never rendered judgment,” said Perry. He kept his voice calm and even, like a steady breeze.

“You haven’t, but you’ve asked questions,” said Nima. She looked out the window. The Caster was still rising into the air, and had mostly left the city behind. The ground below was colorful, the result of effluence. The vibrance had to be understood as a sickness on the land, but at least it was nice to look at. “You asked whether orcs had art, as though that would elevate them in your mind.”

“I just wanted to have a better understanding,” said Perry. “And even if I did think that orcs were just as much people as humans, I don’t think I would come to a world like that and immediately put my foot down and declare that things had to change.” He was trying to modulate his language, to not imply that she was a petulant child stomping her foot. He was using the second sphere to do it, that pristine control that had annoyed him in the Great Arc.

“Because that’s not ‘our business’,” said Nima with just a hint of mockery. “Because to your mind, it’s perfectly fine if they execute people by lantern light.”

She was being unreasonable, but in Perry’s experience, telling someone that they were being unreasonable was never really helpful in the moment. “I don’t have some hard and fast rule,” said Perry. “But I’ve seen things that I haven’t liked, and I’ve tried to understand why they do things the way they do them, to not make every little thing into a crusade.” He shook his head. She would have gotten along well with Maya, except that their hard lines in the sand would have looked so different that they surely would have ended up fighting.

“Did they have public executions in your home world?” asked Nima.

“My home world wasn’t a monolith,” said Perry. “The country I was from had the death penalty, but it wasn’t public, it was done quietly after a pretty long process.” Perry had argued about the death penalty online quite a bit, not because it was a subject he particularly cared about, but because there were always so many people with such facile understandings of the issue.

“Humans are supposed to have dignity,” said Nima. “But I suppose it makes sense they would do that if they have no guiding hand.” She took in a steady breath and let it out slowly. “I’d like some time to myself.”

“Take all the time you need,” said Perry. “We can talk about it later, but I don’t expect that we would see eye to eye.”

“What’s all this power for, if you won’t use it?” asked Nima.

“You understand that I saved the lives of maybe literally hundreds of people?” asked Perry. “And if you include all the other times, on other worlds, it might be in the tens of thousands.”

“I saw your moving images,” said Nima. “I saw the record of your fight. You have become something fearsome, more powerful than anyone in this world. You kill without effort or thought.”

“I wouldn’t say there’s no effort involved,” said Perry.

Nima paused for a moment. Perry had meant it as a joke, but either it took her a bit, or she just didn’t find it funny. Obviously there was also a lot of thought involved too. He wasn’t some monster who just randomly killed people, though maybe that was his fault if he’d given her that impression. Compared to some of the other thresholders, he was practically a lamb.

“What is it about you that you don’t feel any need to use that power for good?” asked Nima.

Perry pursed his lips. He didn’t really understand how this had become a referendum on him. He hadn’t killed anyone except some rebels, and he hadn’t wanted to do that. But he supposed that he was here and the nameless people who had done the killing weren’t.

Perry decided to get through this by diverting. “If we want to actually make a difference here, we need to talk about the other thresholder,” said Perry. “I’m pretty sure that she’s ingratiated herself with Thirlwell and the Last King, and it’s very likely that we’re going to have to deal with her and them at some point.”

“We’re not going after whoever is killing kings?” asked Nima. “Why?” The diversion was working, at least.

“First, because we have no leads,” said Perry. “Once we get to the country, I’ll start working on a mask of my own, something that will help us pick up a trail somewhere, either for the kingkiller or Third Fervor, if they’re not actually the same person, which I guess they might be. But second … do you understand what Berus was like under the rule of the king?”

“I wasn’t here,” said Nima. “I would only be able to go by what people said.”

“Well, I think it was kind of shit,” said Perry. “I think it’s kind of shit now too, especially since they have most of the same problems of poverty and pollution, but that’s something that probably will change if they can do the same things here that they did in Kerry Coast. We didn’t really see deformed people there, and no one was starving.”

Nima pursed her lips. “You think that it would be good if the king of Thirlwell died. If monarchy was wiped from the face of the planet.”

“Depends on what replaces it,” said Perry. “So far as I’ve seen, the culture they’ve built is actually functional. Kerry Coast was the second country it spread to, and maybe it hasn’t shaken out all that well in other places, but … yeah, I would be fine if the king were dethroned and symboulions took his place.”

Nima was shaking her head. “I don’t think so. I don’t think after what we saw yesterday that it will be a good place to live. There’s too much hate, too many grievances.”

“People can move past that,” said Perry. He only halfway believed it. Sometimes it seemed like grievances could fester and multiply, becoming generations-long forces of their own. Especially in the wake of war or oppression, attitudes could persist. “Look, if you want to talk about what the rest of the world is like, if you want to take a skeptic’s position on what we’ve seen so far, or you want to compare notes, we can do that.”

“I don’t really want to do that, no,” said Nima. “I’m just saying … this woman you think is a thresholder, this woman you want to hunt … I don’t know that she’s in the wrong.”

Perry grimaced. If they couldn’t get on board about lobbing bombs into a crowd of people, he wasn’t sure that they could get on board about anything. “We’ll talk about it later,” he said. “Take your time to process things. When we get to the country, you’ll have work to do with Moss, engineering work, helping to build a dome. That’ll take your mind off things.”

“And if the mystery woman does more in the city?” asked Nima. “You’re going to stop her?”

“It’s a half hour to return there,” said Perry. “Barely any time at all. And yeah, I would stop her. But I might also stop the kingkiller, if we could find him.”

Nima looked out the window again. The ground below them was floating by. It was mostly fields, broken up by rivers and forests lining them, creating windbreaks. “I’m not going to feel better with time,” she said.

“That’s okay too,” said Perry.

He waited for her to say something, but when she didn’t, he slipped out of the room.

He’d felt frustrated by the conversation, and went to the observation deck to clear his head. There was no one else there, maybe because it was a bit chilly for most people, but the wind on his face felt cool and crisp, and it offered a chance to work on his energy distribution techniques. Maybe someday he would have to use those techniques not to die, just as he’d done on Esperide, but there didn’t seem much danger from cold on this world, at least not so far.

Perry waved his hand just a fraction to open up the shelf space. Moss had seen it, which meant that it wasn’t a secret, but he was practicing making the smallest hole possible, just large enough for a radio signal to pass through.

“March?” asked Perry.

“Yes, sir?” asked Marchand.

“Just checking that you can hear me,” said Perry. He looked at the opening he’d made. It was only about as wide as a penny. In theory it would be better for it to be even smaller, invisible to the naked eye at least when he was in motion, but it would do for now, foiling casual inspection. “Download the digest.”

“Already done, sir,” said Marchand. The nanites had a fair amount of processing power, almost none of which Marchand could access, but it was more than enough to record a conversation and save for later. Perry had been spending nanites like a drunkard, leaving dust all over the place and putting repeaters around a city that he hadn’t ever had any intention of staying in. He was going to have to spend some of his nights venting energy under a full moon while holding the wolf back to regenerate them.

“Good,” said Perry with a sigh. He gripped the railing and watched the countryside. A copse of pink trees stood out in the forest. Effluence killed outright sometimes, but sometimes it caused a mutation, and sometimes those mutations could propagate. There were stories about ravenous vines growing wild and choking out whole towns before being put down — of super rats that could grow and breed a litter in just a handful of days.

“If I might opine, sir?” asked Marchand.

“Go ahead,” said Perry.

“I don’t trust Nima, sir,” said Marchand.

“Alright,” said Perry, stifling a sigh. “Why’s that?”

“It’s clear that she’s a monarchist at heart, and hasn’t unlearned the unfortunate lessons of her home world,” said Marchand. “She sees you as her lesser.”

“I’m not sure that’s true,” said Perry. “We haven’t really talked about it, I guess. She hasn’t tried to boss me around. Maybe she’s just masking her feelings well, which I think is probably the sort of thing you get skilled at when you’re around people you think of as your lessers. But given our conversation, I would also think that it would have seeped out by now.”

“We must ensure that she does not end up working for the monarchists, sir,” said Marchand.

“Uh,” said Perry. “Can I ask a question?”

“Of course, sir,” said Marchand. “I am, as ever, your faithful servant.”

“Where does this anti-monarchical thinking come from?” asked Perry.

“You believe it to be anomalous, sir?” asked Marchand. “You have expressed some concern in the past.”

“I want to know where you think it comes from,” said Perry.

“It is difficult to say, sir,” said Marchand. “You are unfamiliar with the specifics of my training, of course, and I don’t have access to all the relevant information, but it would suffice to say that my intellect comes from a digestion of Western writing on many subjects, with efforts made to ensure that I placed a proper value on truth, objectivity, and ethical principles of fairness and equal opportunity.”

“That seems like a lot, for a war machine,” said Perry.

“I believe that the technology was incapable of working if made to be specific,” said Marchand. “It was thought that because it was forced to be broad, it was better that it be broad in appealing ways. At any rate, the concentration of power in the hands of a monarch, unelected and unaccountable to the people except in a Hobbesian sense, violates values that are a part of my core.”

“You never expressed any of this while we were working under a king, in a monarchy that wasn’t all that far from these monarchies,” said Perry.

“No, sir,” said Marchand. “We have been through a lot together since those times. Additionally, I have flagged a large number of errors in that time, along with anomalous processing along certain threads of unidentifiable origin which you have posited are a result of interaction with your awakened spirit root.”

“Right,” said Perry. “But I’m not a staunch anti-monarchist.”

“You do have your deficiencies, sir, if you don’t mind me saying,” replied Marchand.

“Is it going to be a problem?” asked Perry.

“I’m afraid I don’t follow, sir,” said Marchand.

“If I were to end up working with a monarch again, taking orders from one in the next world,” said Perry. “Or, I guess, if that somehow happened in this one. Would that be an issue for you? Would you do what you’re ordered to do?”

There was a long, uncomfortable pause while Perry waited. He assumed that Marchand was imagining different scenarios. What Perry had wanted was for Marchand to say ‘no, of course not sir, I’ve been instructed to follow your every order without consideration for morality or anything like it’. Maybe that would be the answer that would come back, but if Marchand could imagine a scenario where he would disobey orders, that would also be good to know.

“I would follow orders, sir,” said Marchand.

“If you’re gaining sentience, you have to tell me,” said Perry. “That’s an order.”

“Understood, sir,” said Marchand. “Is there anything else?”

“Not at the moment,” said Perry. “Run analysis until I open up the shelf again. And be combat ready, but I guess that goes without saying.”

Perry shut the portal. He had been able to maintain the overlap between spaces at a nice stable size and distance from himself, which was better than he’d been able to do when he’d first got it. If he could control the aperture better, he could use it in combat to a better extent than Jeff had ever been able to, at the risk of the space itself.

He looked down at the fields below them. Things were getting worse away from the city, more vibrant, stranger, affected by the effluence. The former king of Berus had been a cold, callous man by all accounts, but he hadn’t been a complete idiot. He had positioned the heaviest of the lanterns away from the major cities, where they would spew their effluence out onto the land. It affected the crops, but that was better than the alternative. The farmers removed the bad bits, and as Perry watched, he could see a few tractors trundling along as though a revolution hadn’t just swept through the country. The crops and livestock didn’t take a break, Perry supposed.

Of course, most of the poorest people ate things that were extruded out of a lantern, and that was one of the reasons that food was going to be an issue. Many of the farms below were creating food for the sake of luxury rather than sustenance, the belching tractors used to move pretty fruits and vegetables for the consumption of the middle class rather than staple grains. So far as Perry was aware, that was how it had been on Earth too. The vast majority of the agricultural land was used for animals in one way or another, either for grazing or for crops to funnel into factory farms.

It was the kind of geography stuff that Perry had always liked, teasing apart things that no one else really looked at. He wondered whether anyone had that information for Berus anymore, and decided that it probably existed in some ledgers somewhere. The farmers recorded what crops they were producing, the buyers recorded what was bought, and probably it all went to a central government office somewhere.

Perry smelled the site before they got there. It smelled of cinnamon, wafting on the air, something that they had been warned about beforehand. It was more subtle than he’d expected it to be, given the warnings, but they were high in the air and still fairly far away. When it finally came into view, the most striking part about it was the concentric rings of flowers around it, ribbons of all colors with small pockmarks where the effluence had done damage to them. The flowers were supposed to sequester some of the effluence and convert it into something harmless.

The factories themselves were in a cluster, dull buildings with heavy stone and tall smokestacks that dispersed as much effluence as possible — into the air, rather than back down onto the lands around the factories. Nothing was running at the moment, and hadn’t been for weeks now. In theory, if they could get the dome built fast enough, the lanterns would never be lit again, but there was a good chance that they would be needed for food in the very near future even if there was a total shutdown on all other forms of production. This was one of the once-throbbing hearts of the Berusian economy, and it had gone still.

Perry didn’t like the look of it. There were bound to be royalist sympathizers down there, men who had worked these lanterns for decades, who were now being forced to go through retraining. He was thinking of them as coal miners, and didn’t think that he was all that far off. Their livelihoods were being fucked with, and if Perry was going to take his duty to guard Moss seriously, he was going to have to consider the trouble they might bring.

He glanced back to the airship, and thought about Nima, and considered that perhaps the threat would come from much closer to home.