The North Gate was a graveyard of silent ash. The Raiders were gone, but the air still tasted of the void Kiron had summoned.
Nyra knelt in the metal filings, her arms wrapped around Kiron's torso. He was terrifyingly heavy—not with the weight of a man, but with the density of a mountain. His skin was a mottled, marble grey, and when her fingernails brushed his arm, they made a faint clink against the surface.
"He's not breathing," Taz choked out, hovering over them, his face streaked with soot and tears. "Nyra, he's turned to rock. He's gone."
"He's not gone," a voice drawled from the shadows of the gate.
Nel-Eak approached, sheathing his twin daggers. He looked down at the petrified boy with a grim curiosity. He reached out a gloved toe and tapped Kiron's boot. It sounded like stone on stone.
"This is the Stasis of the Unready," Nel-Eak said. "His soul used the 'Authority' to delete that Taint-Eater, but his flesh couldn't pay the toll. So, his spirit retreated into the marrow and pulled the shutters closed. He's essentially a statue holding a dying spark."
"How do we wake him?" Nyra snapped, her eyes burning with a fierce, protective light. "You pushed him to this. You held the 'Trial.' If he stays like this, I'll find a way to make those scales of yours bleed."
Nel-Eak didn't smile, but his eyes narrowed. "I didn't push him to anything. I merely opened the door. He chose to walk through it to save your 'Void-Drifters.' If you want him back, we need more than a Gear-Doc. We need the Echo-Walkers."
Nyra went still. The Echo-Walkers were legends told to frighten children in the scrap-heaps—nomads who had traded their physical sight to see the "Shadow-Path," the bridge between the living world and the Underworld.
"They haunt the Whispering Vents at the edge of the Wastes," Nel-Eak continued, looking toward the horizon where the violet smog was thickening. "They are the only ones who can enter the 'Stone-Sleep' and guide his spirit back to the surface. But they don't work for credits."
"What do they want?" Taz asked quietly.
"A memory," Nel-Eak replied. "They feed on the things people want to forget. And looking at the three of you, I'd say you have plenty of those to spare."
Nyra looked down at Kiron's frozen face. Even in stone, he looked exhausted. She thought of the "March," the blood-symbol in the mountain, and the way he had looked at her before he swung the sword.
"Pack the gear," Nyra ordered Taz. "We're carrying him."
"You're carrying a three-hundred-pound statue through a desert filled with drones?" Nel-Eak raised an eyebrow.
"We have a sled in the shack," Nyra said, her voice hard as the boy she held. "And you're going to help us pull it. You wanted to see if a King could rise from the trash? Well, a King can't rise if he's a garden ornament. Move."
For the first time, Nel-Eak let out a short, sharp bark of a laugh. "Fair enough, Little Wolf. Let's see what the Echoes think of your 'Highness.'"
They strapped Kiron to a heavy, reinforced skiff-sled, wrapping the sword Lament in thick, lead-lined blankets and placing it at his feet. As they hauled the sled out into the shifting dunes of the Rust-Wastes, the wind began to howl through the scrap-valleys.
Inside the stone shell of his body, Kiron was not asleep.
He was standing in a hallway of mirrors, and every reflection was a version of himself he didn't recognize. One was a king in gold; one was a corpse in a shroud; one was a boy crying in the mud of Koda.
Which one are you? the mirrors whispered in a thousand overlapping voices.
Kiron reached out to touch the glass, but his fingers were made of grey dust.
I am the one who survives, he tried to say, but he had no mouth.
Above the Wastes, a single, golden Vulture-Drone dipped its wing, its lens locking onto the heat-signature of the three travelers and the cold, dead mass they dragged behind them.
The hunt hadn't ended. It had just slowed down.