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Akanah frowned. “No.”

“And we can’t be followed.”

“No,” she agreed. “Can you cloak us?”

“I can disguise our appearance. But we have to do more than that,” Luke said. “You need to erase the message.”

Even without looking at her, he felt her reluctance and resistance. “It’s the only way to be sure this trap has been disarmed,” he added. “Can you erase it? Can it be done at all?”

“Scribing opens a tiny breach between the real and the unreal,” Akanah said with a slow nod. “It’s easier to collapse it than create it.” She hesitated, then sighed. “Wait for me outside.”

She did not keep him waiting long.

“It’s done,” she said, taking his arm as she joined him. “But, just to be certain no one can undo it, please knock it down.”

“Are you sure?”

“Please,” she said. “I’m never coming back here. Bring all of it down.”

Without moving from where they stood, Luke complied. A twist of a corner, a push in the middle of a long wall, opened a spiderweb of cracks. The cracks widened in turn, until the stonework fell in and the roof collapsed atop it, kicking up a billow of yellow dust.

“We’d better hurry now,” Luke said.

“There’s one more thing,” she said. “You need to go inside your mother’s cottage.”

He shook his head sadly. “There isn’t time.”

“Take the time,” she said. “I’ll hide us, so you can stay open while you’re there.”

“Akanah—”

“A few minutes won’t matter to the outcome,” she said. “The nearest friend of the men you killed is either very close already, or a very long way away. But those few minutes may matter a great deal to you. Go.”

Luke sat in the middle of what had been the floor of the ruined cottage and whispered his mother’s name, as if to ask the broken stones whether they remembered it.

“Nashira,” he said, but the sound fled into the dark corners and vanished.

“Nashira,” he called, but the echoes escaped out through the cracks and fissures in the walls.

He brushed the litter aside and pressed the palms of his hands to the floor, drew the dusty air deep into his nostrils and tasted it on his tongue, slowly scanned all around him for anything that might have belonged to the last person to make a home of that space.

“Mother,” he said, and the reality of the moment welled up inside him. It was a point of contact, after so many years without one. She had been where he was now.

It did not matter that he could not find her touch lingering on the rude substance surrounding him. The knowledge alone was enough. Where before he could only pretend, now he could imagine, and imagination overleaped the time that separated them.

She had slept here, laughed here, retreated here for sanctuary, cried and sought peace here, perhaps loved and grieved here, moving through this space as real as life and as human as the rush of longing Luke felt in that moment.

He could not see her face or hear her voice, but, even so, she was more real to him in that moment than she had ever been before.

It was not enough, not by half, but it was a beginning.

The village was in shadow by the time Luke emerged from Nashira’s cottage and rejoined Akanah. The sun had dropped below the hills, and the breeze had a softer edge.

“How long was I in there?”

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “Are you ready?”

Luke nodded. “You were right,” he said. “Thank you.”

“I knew it was important. But we’d better hurry now. It’ll be dark before we reach the airfield.”

Neither had anything more to say as they returned to the cart and climbed atop it for the return trip. Luke checked it closely for any sign of a tracker or tampering, then raised the vehicle a meter off the ground. “No bumps this trip,” he said with a small smile. “But I’d still hold on. What do they call those carrion birds here?”

“Nackhawns.”

“That’s what we are, then. A big, ugly nackhawn.” Luke swung the cart in a wide circle over the hills enclosing Ialtra, scanning for any other vehicles. He found none, and wondered how the Imperial agents had followed them there.

But Luke shook off the thought, and sent the cart arrowing toward