Page 67 of The Sunlit Man

“Too dangerous,” Nomad said. “I can handle this.”

“And her?” Jeffrey Jeffrey nodded back to the main chamber of the ship, where Elegy was still chained in place. At least now she could sit down in the corner, rather than being held flat against the wall.

There was no other good place to keep her. They’d jettisoned the ship that had doubled as a jail. He didn’t like the idea of letting her stay in a room with innocents.

“She’ll be fine there,” Nomad said. “Her Investiture should let her survive without oxygen for a while, if it comes to that.”

“All right,” Jeffrey Jeffrey said. He lingered, looking out through the window—all other windows on the other ships had been covered with steel, welded into place, out of concern that the seals at the corners of the windows wouldn’t hold the pressure. So this was Jeffrey Jeffrey’s last sight of the outside world until, hopefully, they touched down on the other side of the mountains.

“Adonalsium’s fortune gaze upon you,” the man said to Nomad. “And…may you always outrun the sun. In a very present and immediate way, Sunlit.”

He left, and a few seconds later, Nomad saw him enter one of the other ships. The door closed, but they’d leave the intakes open until Nomad indicated they needed to seal themselves in.

The city had become a ghost town. A black, huddled collection of structures, lit only by emergency lights. Occupied only by the silent and the dead.

He took the controls and started Beacon upward in the darkness. In the shadow as they were, there wasn’t much to see of the mountain, but the radar gave him enough to fly by. He mostly just went up. There was no need to hug the slope.

This feels…more boring than it should.

“Good,” Nomad said, watching the throttle—keeping them flying on regular engines at close to full power. “We want this all to be as boring as possible.”

How long has it been, the knight asks, since you’ve been in command of this many people?

“Command? Don’t call it that. I’m flying a ship.”

You’re in charge right now, which makes you captain of this ship. That’s a command position.

“Not the same thing.”

It isn’t your fault, you know, what happened. Events were largely outside your control.

“Never said they weren’t.”

You still carry that burden.

“It’s a small one.”

And yet you’ve always avoided being put into a leadership position again.

“Seems best for everyone that way,” he said, nudging the ship a little farther along to the east, up the slope, away from the sun. Still climbing. He waited to see what kind of issue Auxiliary would raise next.

Instead a voice came from behind him.

“You have someone in your head too, don’t you?” Elegy asked.

He glanced over his shoulder at her, sitting cross-legged, wrists chained together and hooked to the wall. Her cinderheart glowed a soft red-orange.

“I can see it in you,” she said. “The others say you’re praying. But you’re not. You’re talking to someone in your head. You can hear them, like I used to.”

“Yes,” Nomad agreed. “It’s similar, I guess.”

“Does the voice tell you who to kill?”

“He’s told me to jump off a cliff a few times,” Nomad said with a smile. She obviously didn’t get the joke. “No, Elegy. The voice is my friend. The tool I summon on occasion? That’s his body.”

“Why is he in your head too?”

“It’s complicated. These days, though, he calls me his squire or his valet.” At her confusion, he explained further. “Auxiliary—my friend—has a body, but he can’t control it…directly. Instead he sits in my mind, like a passenger. So he jokes that I’m his valet—his palanquin carrier, you might say—to move him wherever he wants to go.”

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