The Greywater didn't fly through the storm so much as thread it.
Ira's voice became the ship's new nervous system—a calm, relentless stream of commands that defied all logic.
"Starboard ten. Now descend fifty feet. Not sixty. Fifty."
Rust's knuckles were white on the wheel, tendons standing in sharp relief. Every instinct screamed against each order. Descending toward a boiling patch of ocean that shimmered with oily rainbows? Turning into a curtain of hail that rang against the hull like a thousand church bells? But he obeyed. Because when Ira spoke, it wasn't guesswork. It was cartography.
"Feels wrong, doesn't it?" Ira said, his voice low, almost conversational beside him, yet never taking his eyes from the viewport where reality itself was coming undone. "Your body remembers a world that follows rules. Gravity. Consistent weather. Linear time."
Rust grunted, spinning the wheel against a sudden pressure shear that wanted to roll them. "My body remembers not being the one driving it, Finch. This ain't helping."
A beat of silence. Then, quietly: "I know. But your hands are your own now. And I need them."
It wasn't an apology. It was a statement of necessity. But it was the first time since the chapel that Ira had acknowledged the ghost in the room—the puppet, the strings, the darkness Rust had been trapped in. Rust said nothing, but his grip on the wheel tightened in a different way.
The world outside the viewports was a lesson in the Swap's cruel mechanics. This wasn't weather; it was memory. Different versions of reality, different timelines of climate and physics, bleeding together in a violent, discordant chorus.
They passed through a pocket of absolute silence where snow fell upward, each flake a perfect geometric crystal that drifted toward a sky the color of tarnished silver. The temperature dropped so fast the metal of the bulkheads sang with contraction. Rust saw his own reflection in the frosted viewport—a ghost captain steering a ghost ship through a dead world's winter. He remembered a story his grandmother told, about a winter so still you could hear the stars frost over. Was this that winter, stolen from some other world's memory?
Then, with a lurch that rattled teeth, they burst into a zone of hyper-saturated color. The air outside glowed with emerald phosphorescence. Rain fell in slow, syrupy droplets that contained swirling galaxies of microscopic life—creatures that had never evolved on this version of Earth. The ocean below was wine-dark and thick, moving in lazy, gelatinous waves. The ship's instruments went mad, needles spinning, compasses pointing in four directions at once.
"The dampeners, Zadie!" Ira's voice crackled over the ancient intercom, strained for the first time. "It's trying to sync with the bio-rhythms! Counter-phase the secondary oscillator!"
In the engine room, Zadie fought her own battle. The air was thick with the smell of ozone, hot metal, and the faint, sickly-sweet scent of the alien rain seeping through the seals. The lift-core—a pulsing sphere of contained energy at the ship's heart—wasn't just overheating. It was dreaming.
As the rift-storm's conflicting realities washed over it, the core began to oscillate at frequencies that matched the alien biology in the rain, the strange magnetism of the silent snow zone, the screaming pressure gradients of the lightning fields. The control board in front of her was a symphony of warning lights, a Christmas tree of imminent death.
Her hands flew across the manual controls, a pianist playing a sonata of survival. She didn't understand the math, but she understood rhythm. She could feel the wrongness in the ship's vibrations—a harmonic dissonance that travelled up through the deck plates and into her molars, promising catastrophic structural failure.
"Secondary oscillator is at its limit!" she shouted into the intercom, her voice raw.
"Then bleed power from the forward array and feed it back through the tertiary coupling!" Ira shot back instantly, no hesitation.
She blinked. The tertiary coupling was a theoretical bypass, mentioned once in the ship's archaic manual as a "last-resort maneuver likely to induce cascade failure." He shouldn't know it existed. But he did. The map wasn't just showing him the storm; it was showing him the Greywater's own schematic, overlaying it onto the chaos.
With a curse, she threw the switches. The core whined, a sound that made her hair stand on end, then smoothed into a lower, steadier thrum. It worked. He was right.
And the fact that he was right, that his connection to the map gave him knowledge she could never have, felt like a door slamming shut. He was leaving them behind. Not out of malice, but out of elevation. He was becoming something else, and what use were a sailor's instincts or an engineer's feel for metal to a man who could see the seams of the world itself?
Sweat stung her eyes, mixing with something hotter. Her muscles burned. And with every labored breath, her resentment toward Ira curdled into something colder, harder. His pride. His trust. His damn map. Up in the bridge, he was playing navigator god while she fought to keep their hearts beating in this metal coffin. He'd changed. The trials hadn't just tested him; they'd replaced something fundamental. The man who'd held her on the mountainside, who'd whispered promises against her hair, was buried beneath layers of chilling certainty. The map wasn't just a tool he used; it was becoming the lens through which he saw everything—including them.
Another impossible command from above: "Hard to starboard! Full reverse on port thrusters! Now, Rust!"
The ship groaned, metal screaming in protest. Through a shuddering porthole, Zadie saw why. Ahead, the very fabric of space seemed to fold. A mountain range—jagged, black, and dripping with glacial ice—hovered in mid-air, intersecting with a swath of desert dunes that blew sand in a silent, sideways hurricane. Between them was a gap, a shifting, shimmering seam of normal air no wider than the ship's wingspan. The Greywater shot toward it, sideways and backwards, missing the phantom mountain by what felt like inches.