The eastern signal began to fade before Mercy reached it.
Nadia watched the silver line on the gauge thin beneath the needle. The bell traveled beside the train in its own gold ring, green metal catching the cold light from the fragments ahead. Each time it rang, the answering note came weaker.
“Faster,” she said.
Oliver’s hand tightened on the throttle. “The route is narrowing.”
“Then use what remains.”
He glanced at her. “That may tear the boundary.”
The gold seed under Nadia’s ribs gave a hard, bright pulse. The bell’s boundary shivered beside the rails. Nadia pressed her palm against the cab window, feeling the distance between them as a pressure in her bones.
“The bell chose the route,” she said. “I chose to give it room. I’m not choosing how far it carries us.”
Oliver studied the gauge. His face had the fixed concentration he wore whenever the fuel needle moved. “Mercy can spend the blank region.”
“Do it.”
He pulled the brass lever marked with the train’s name.
The engine answered with a deep metallic breath. The silver route widened ahead, cutting through a field of floating stone. Mercy surged forward. Behind them, the source’s black threads spilled into the corridor, catching on abandoned doors and tools as it pursued. The objects began to turn in its wake, dragged toward the eastern light.
The bell rang.
This time the answering sound came with voices.
“Hold the west line!”
“Get the children under the cistern!”
“Who is ringing?”
The words scattered across the rails and died in the furnace heat. Nadia moved closer to the window. Beyond the drifting stone, a fragment emerged from the dark.
It was larger than the quarry piece they had freed, a long shelf of earth turned on its side. Terraced houses clung to its upper face. Orchards hung beneath it, their roots exposed to the sky. A road had split down the middle and curled upward like a loose strap. At the fragment’s far end stood a tower with an open belfry.
The tower bell was gone.
A woman stood in the empty arch, striking an iron rail with a hammer.
The sound reached Mercy as a thin, desperate note.
“There,” Edrin said over the speaking tube. “The signal is human.”
Next
With Tava aboard and the source gripping Veyr Reach’s unsupported sections, Nadia must return to the fragment before its remaining people are sorted into abandoned cargo.
Nadia saw another light beneath the settlement, buried in the exposed rock. It pulsed in time with the woman’s hammer. Each pulse pulled the fragment a little farther out of alignment.
“The signal has a second source,” Oliver said.
The light under the rock brightened. A voice rose through the rails, layered with dozens of others.
“Return what was given.”
The houses on the fragment lurched. Loose carts slid toward the lower edge. People ran along the broken road, reaching for ropes and each other.
The woman in the belfry saw Mercy. She stopped striking.
“Train!” she shouted. “If you can hear us, answer!”
Oliver opened the speaking tube. “This is Mercy. State your need.”
“Gravity!” the woman cried. “Our anchor is being taken!”
The buried light pulsed again. Black lines spread through the rock, following old seams between the houses. The source had reached the settlement through its anchor, claiming the names carved into it.
A slate slab rose from beneath the earth. It was broad as a carriage and covered in rows of names. The names glowed one by one.
The woman in the belfry seized the hammer with both hands. “That is the Memorial Stone. It holds the names of everyone who left. The source says they abandoned us, so it owns what remains.”
“Did they abandon it?” Nadia asked.
The question carried through the speaking tube and into the fragment’s rattling streets.
The woman looked down at the stone. “Some went to other fragments. Some died. Some told us they would return.”
“That wasn’t my question.”
The woman’s grip shifted on the hammer. Behind her, a child appeared in the belfry doorway, clutching a coil of rope.
“No,” the woman said. “They did not give us permission to surrender their names.”
The source pulled.
A row of houses tore free from the earth. Their foundations opened into white cracks. The people below scattered as furniture and roof tiles drifted upward.
Nadia stepped out onto Mercy’s forward platform. Wind streamed past her face, carrying dust from the floating fragment. The bell’s gold ring came alongside, close enough for her to see the frost breaking away from its inscription.
MERCY OF BRACKEN QUAY.
The bell faced the settlement.
“Can you warn them?” Nadia asked.
The bell gave a low note.
“I can warn,” it said. “I cannot hold.”
Nadia looked at the fragment’s exposed underside, the Memorial Stone, the people scrambling among the broken terraces. The old instinct rose cleanly inside her: take the stone into the boundary, take the people with it, become the point that kept everything from falling.
The core burned beneath her breastbone.
She reached for the gold seed and stopped before touching it.
“Oliver,” she called, “how much can Mercy support?”
“Not the whole fragment.”
“How much?”
He checked the gauge. “A local path. Maybe three terraces. If the people choose their own supports.”
The woman in the belfry had heard him through the tube. “What does that mean?”
“It means we can give you room to choose,” Nadia called back. “We cannot decide that your settlement stays whole.”
The woman stared at her. Below, another house slid from its foundations and began drifting toward the source’s black lines.
“What happens to the rest?”
“They follow their own answers.”
The woman looked toward the people on the road. Her mouth moved, but no sound crossed the gap.
Nadia knew that silence. It was the moment when responsibility tried to disguise itself as command. She had worn that disguise at the cradle. She had called it protection while the source waited to call it ownership.
“Ask them,” Nadia said. “Ask each person what they will support.”
The woman climbed onto the belfry ledge.
“Listen!” she shouted. “The train will make a boundary. It will not save the whole fragment. Choose what you will stand with.”
A man beside a toppled water tower raised both hands. “The cistern!”
An older child near the orchard shouted, “The south terraces!”
A voice came from the broken road. “My sister!”
Another answered, “The schoolhouse!”
The voices tangled. Fear ran through them faster than the falling earth.
Harn’s uncertain light appeared in the cab window, pale and steady. “They’re choosing under pressure,” he said through the tube. “That matters.”
Pella’s voice followed. “Pressure does not erase a choice.”
“Nor does it prove one,” Harn replied.
Nadia raised the seed.
“Then we leave room for both.”
She drove the seed into the air between Mercy and the fragment.
Gold unfolded in a broad arc. It did not wrap around the settlement. It marked three terraces, the cistern, the schoolhouse, and the orchard where the child had called out. Each chosen point became a separate light. The lights joined by narrow paths while the people remained visible between them, each voice distinct.
The Memorial Stone resisted.
Its names flared white. The source’s voice rolled over the fragment.
“THEY WITHDREW. THEIR WEIGHT IS UNASSIGNED.”
The stone rose higher. The terraces tilted toward it.
The woman in the belfry struck the iron rail again. The bell beside Mercy answered, its note cutting through the source’s declaration.
“Names are not permission,” it rang.
The words crossed the gap. The woman lifted her hammer.
“My name is Tava Ors,” she shouted. “I choose the belfry and the people who can reach it.”
One by one, others answered. Some chose houses. Some chose relatives. Some chose the road. A few gave no answer and crouched beside the exposed roots, holding on while the new boundary passed around them without taking them in.
The gold paths settled.
The Memorial Stone dropped back into the earth with a concussion that shook Mercy’s carriages. The black lines snapped away from the chosen terraces. The houses stopped sliding.
The rest of the fragment continued upward, carrying its unanswered sections toward the dark. Its people were still there, separate from the supported terraces, holding ropes and doors and one another wherever they could.
Oliver released the throttle. Mercy’s wheels locked against the eastern route.
“The source is coming,” he said.
Behind the fragment, black threads gathered around the drifting stone. The source had lost its claim on the Memorial Stone, yet the abandoned sections remained within its reach.
Tava climbed down from the belfry and crossed the new gold path toward Mercy. She carried the child’s rope over one shoulder and a brass plate in her hand. A name was engraved on it.
“Where are you taking us?” she asked.
Nadia looked at the eastern lights beyond the settlement. More signals had appeared there now, scattered across the fragments like lanterns answering one another.
“Where your warning can be heard,” she said.
Tava looked back at the houses that had not joined the boundary. Her face tightened.
“And them?”
Nadia turned toward the rising dark.
“We ask them next.”
The first black thread touched the edge of the settlement. The bell rang, and Mercy began to move.