Page 66 of The Sunlit Man

Ah, that’s right, the hero realizes. You can’t speak up here. How special…how delightful. I can talk, and you can’t interrupt? You know, for a lowly valet, you certainly do monopolize a great deal of the speaking opportunities.

More annoyance. So much annoyance.

Lovely! Well, I’m going to assume you remember. It’s not a thing one forgets lightly. You walked right up to them and essentially turned yourself in.

Nomad had mistakenly assumed that they wouldn’t be interested in him because he no longer held the Dawnshard. He thought he’d send them on their way, misunderstanding cleared up. Storms, he’d been a fool. It was a similar attitude that had originally landed him in the army on Roshar, carrying siege equipment.

Do you ever miss the way you were back then?

Indifference. No, that naivete had almost gotten him killed so many times. In the case of the Night Brigade, he’d completely missed the danger. He’d soon learned that, with their twisted arts, they could kill him and fashion a spike from his soul that would lead them to the person he had given the Dawnshard. To them, Nomad was a crucial link in a very important chain. And he was far more useful dead than alive.

Yeah, I thought you wouldn’t want to go back to the person you’d been. And you know, I don’t miss those days either.

This surprised him, and he sent that emotion. He thought for sure that Auxiliary regretted what he’d become.

What’s life about, if not growth? I don’t like the person I was back on Roshar either, before we knew each other.

I like change, Nomad. My kind were too static for too long, particularly we highspren. And sometimes the way you talk makes me think you believe, or can pretend, that you are an entirely different person now.

But you aren’t. You’re still that man. The capacity for what you’ve become was always there. I guess that sounds depressing or negative, but I don’t mean it so. If we pretend that we’re a different person each day, then what good does it do? It implies we can’t truly change. That we don’t learn. We just turn into another being. Does that make sense?

Barely.

I just want to say…I’m glad to be here. Seeing this all with you. Even with the cost, I’m glad to be here.

Something about that twisted Nomad up inside. Auxiliary was barely there, a fragment of the being he’d once been, so brilliant and capable. What kind of damaged individual would begladto have gone through what he had?

But then again, the view from atop the world…looking out over infinite clouds, with stars overhead…

Storms. Nomad couldn’t be proud of who he was now. He was a man who couldn’t ever go home—not because of the army that chased him, but because…because he would never be able to face his friends as the person he’d become.

No, he wasn’t someonedifferent. He was, indeed, stillhimself. That was what made it painful.

Auxiliary always had been the perceptive one. But he also oftenmisunderstood people. And that was certainly the case with Nomad just then.

He activated the steam jet again, turned, and drove back down into the atmosphere until he could change the engine over to its regular configuration.

By the time he arrived at Beacon, they were ready, excess weight jettisoned, new engine components in place. He’d be going back up that mountain again, this time with a hundred and thirty-five people relying on him not to doom them to a silent death.

“Throttle is righthere,” Jeffrey Jeffrey said, scratching at his beard as he moved down the control panel, explaining it to Nomad. “And here, this will let you rotate the city. We only have one primary thruster set to move you laterally. The engineers said that should be enough.”

“We don’t have to move far forward,” Nomad agreed. “Most of the distance we need to cover is vertical.”

The two of them stood in the cab of his ship, a smaller room off the main chamber where he’d done his research earlier. They’d positioned his ship in a strange location—locked right on top of the hub, above the Chorus. Underneath his feet, through the metal, those shades were now accompanied by tens of people packed into the space surrounding the Reliquary.

Through the windshield, he could see a forlorn, reduced version of Beacon. A mere twelve ships, arrayed in a circle around thehub—three of them being the giant water-container ships at the outside. He’d imagined it as a flying disc when they’d been assembling it, but “disc” misleadingly evoked a shape too elegant, too smooth, too intentional. No, this was more like a flying barge made of bulky, warehouse-like ships.

It was vaguely circular, with a central bump one story taller than the rest of it. And he was at the top, such as it was. Jeffrey Jeffrey showed him how to rotate his ship in place, whichwashandy. He could turn the windshield to look back toward the horizon, or keep his eyes forward, aimed at the mountains. A little white-and-green radar screen showed him their proximity to the mountain.

“Here are the controls to drop the water ships once they’re empty,” Jeffrey Jeffrey said, indicating a control panel that was newly wired in place. “That should be everything.”

“What are those controls?” he asked, gesturing to a group on the left of the panel.

“Those control the prospector device underneath your ship,” Jeffrey Jeffrey explained. “Not relevant now.”

Right. Elegy, before becoming a Charred, had been an explorer. A woman who pushed the limits, both socially and physically. She’d struck out into the shadows with an entire city relying on her. Her ship had been a prospector, intended to help her find signs of Investiture in the great maelstrom between the sun and the darkened land they now flew through. “Thank you,” Nomad said. “You should run along now and get someplace safe.”

“I could stay,” Jeffrey Jeffrey said. “We had time, so we sealed your room as well—best we could. It will leak more since we made your door able to open easily. But thereshouldbe enough air in here the entire flight…”

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