He watched the world beneath him die without the slightest crack in expression. “Quarantine protocols will remain in effect for approximately six months Harrow time, after which my barriers will vent all fragments into the void and dissolve.”

The role of the Reaper was to eliminate a world without leaving such fragments behind, which could give birth to the most dangerous elements in existence. The best she could do was a messy approximation.

“Acknowledged.” She still didn’t leave.

She had six months to save as many untainted lives as she could.

Of course, that was Harrow time, which was notoriously unstable. This world had drifted from the Way, which governed the proper flow of time. She felt as though she’d been here for minutes, but another world may have seen days pass.

Ozriel could have done this in moments, but he was gone. For the first time, she felt a hint of personal resentment for that.

“After this reprieve, Makiel expects you to throw your full effort into the search for Ozriel. He wants results within a standard decade.”

Suriel turned to him, temper hot. Calling the power of the Way both demanded and produced inhuman self-control, but Gadrael was testing hers. Her Razor thrummed in her hand, sparking and hot.

“Do I have autonomy in this matter?” she asked coldly.

He had to see what she was doing, but he nodded once. “You do.”

Everything about her blazed as she flexed her power—hair emerald, eyes purple, Mantle and armor white, Razor a flickering blue. She burned with the colors of a celestial glacier, until even Gadrael had to conjure barriers over his eyes.

“Then this falls under the purview of the Sixth Division, not the Second. If you interfere before I have finished my operation, I will consider you to have violated the Pact and take action accordingly. Let it be witnessed under the Way.”

She couldn’t kill him, as he may have been the hardest man in all existence to actually destroy, but there were any number of ways one Judge could make life difficult for another. Schisms among the Court of Seven were not common, but they were known to happen. Suriel would not risk the stability of the Abidan on a personal vendetta, but Gadrael—and by extension, Makiel—were threatening her authority.

If she allowed that to happen, she would not be worthy to remain Suriel.

A curtain of rich, layered blue tore open on the starry canvas behind Gadrael, and he stepped back into it, arms still crossed. “Six months,” he said, “then you find the Reaper. We have set aside Iteration two-thirteen as a quarantine zone for your infected, so bypass Sector Control. A channel will be open for you.”

Makiel. He had known she would never leave the survivors, and had planned accordingly. Even before she’d come here, he had known.

The Way zipped closed, and Gadrael vanished.

[Four hundred sixty-two Grade Six anomalies and counting,] her Presence said. [Pursuit recommended before expansion threshold is reached.]

Suriel set thoughts of Gadrael aside. He was a loyal dog, collared and leashed, and she would gain nothing from a conflict with him. Makiel was the one writing the script, and his plans could span eons. She had to meet him face-to-face.

But first, she had a job to do.

A world divorced from the Way gave birth to chaotic distortions. These were nightmarish monsters, entities that strained the rules of existence. If Harrow was allowed to fester over the next half a year, it could give birth to thousands of these abominations. Once they entered the void, they would drift, until even Makiel couldn’t predict where they would emerge.

She had to destroy them now. At the same time, she had to reach as many of the two million survivors as she could, transporting them to Iteration 213. The world was known as Scour, the most inhospitable place she’d ever seen with a native population, but it should keep them alive.

On the north pole, a black spire shattered the ice, shooting thousands of kilometers into space until it stood out like a rigid hair against the surface of the planet. A featureless black tower, an obelisk standing so tall it shouldn’t be able to physically support itself. An anomaly.

Suriel gripped her Razor and blasted forward.

Like a dying animal, a world was most vicious at its end.

***

As Lindon hurtled through the blackened forest on the Thousand-Mile Cloud, chasing after a legion of monsters, he contemplated their greatest danger: thirst.

They flew for the rest of the first day and past dawn of the second, and Yerin skirted every Remnant or rotten beast they encountered. But they had no more water, and the few times they stopped at a likely pond or creek, they found the surface stinking and corrupt.

Whatever blight produced the black, rotten trees and the twisted dogs, it extended to the water. They didn't need to taste it to know it was poison.

Before long, Lindon's head pounded and his throat burned so that he could hardly talk. It frightened him how quickly he'd weakened without water.

So when the trees parted to show a pyramid in the distance, Lindon's first feeling was not a call to adventure or a sense of danger, but a heavy relief. A structure meant people, and people would have water.

When Yerin slowed the cloud at the sight, Lindon wanted to strangle her.

She choked out a word, swallowed, and tried again. Her words were simple and quiet, as though she meant to save water by speaking as little as possible. “That's it. Headed there.”

Between the thirst, the lack of sleep, and the tension of the past few days, Lindon was having trouble thinking past the possibility of food, water, and shelter. He grunted something that sounded like “What?”

Yerin stabbed her finger at the pyramid. “Aura.”

With an effort that felt like crossing his eyes, Lindon focused on the aura around the pyramid. The edifice stood as high as Elder Whisper's tower back in Sacred Valley and a thousand times wider at the base, but it was assembled from layers of house-sized stone blocks. It was brown as mud, its first few layers obscured by black trees, but the visible portion was enough to dominate the landscape like a mountain jutting out of a field.

A rainbow of vital aura rose over it, spiraling down into the structure like a narrow cyclone. The aura from miles around had been drawn here, which meant...

He finally caught up with Yerin's observation. If the aura was drawn here, then those trees at the foot of the pyramid would be swarming with Remnants and twisted beasts.

He nodded to show that he understood, even as she took the cloud a little higher. The cloud was meant to skim over the ground rather than fly, and it started to struggle at about ten feet above the earth. At fifteen, it stopped entirely, and Yerin's face tightened in focus as she held them there.

From their new vantage point, they surveyed the land ahead of them. Two things stood out immediately.

First, while they couldn't see any sacred beasts through the canopy, there was something swarming around the pyramid: people. Lindon glimpsed a distant crowd, the peak of a few tents, and even a wagon rumbling across a clearing. These people must hold the structure against the Remnants and sacred beasts. Maybe the pyramid was their home, and they were drawing in aura for some purpose.

But Lindon couldn't consider that for long, because the second feature of the landscape had snared his attention: a wide lake, bright as sapphires, just south of the pyramid. He could only see the corner of it through the trees, but it was obviously not as tainted as the rest of the water around. His throat convulsed involuntarily at the sight.