Page 73 of The Sunlit Man

The knight doesn’t understand why Rebeke is glaring. After all, this is exactly the sort of stupid thing Nomad says all the time.

“Well,” Rebeke finally said, “we’re alive.”

“Agreed,” he said, looking over the gathering group of sore, partially suffocated, emotionally battered people. “For now. Let’s go find the engineers. We’re going to want to find out how badly I’ve wrecked your city.”

“You want to knowhow bad it is?” Solemnity Divine asked. “I’d offer that we’re somewhere between ‘Oh, shades, what a mess’ and ‘I didn’t even know that part could come off!’”

They stood inside the hall surrounding the Chorus’s mist-filled enclosure that had blessedly remained intact. The usual team. Jeffrey Jeffrey, Zeal, Rebeke, and the Greater Good. Compassion sat on the ground, wrapped in a blanket, while the others stood.

Having jettisoned the previous building they’d used for meetings, they had picked this one for some insane reason. Perhaps it was seen as official or something. Or maybe it had just been the first of the chambers to be evacuated following the wreck.

“Lay it out straight, if it pleases you, Solemnity Divine,” Confidence said. “How dire is our current situation?”

“Six engines locked up completely and will need a full injector replacement,” she said. “Mud rammed into all the downward-facing jets. Smashed-up intakes on three junction points, and some of the clasping mounts were broken by the crash. I’d suggest we flyseparately from here on out, as I can’t guarantee the integrity of the whole.”

“That’s not…too bad,” Jeffrey Jeffrey said. “Is it?”

“Depends,” Solemnity Divine said, spreading her hands wide. “My team can fix this. Wemighteven be able to do it before the sun rises.”

“We have extra time,” Contemplation agreed. “Because of the mountains. Though we’ll need a corridor of shadow from the sun to escape—so we can’t hide here forever.”

“Two and a half hours, maybe a little more,” Zeal said. “That’s what the navigators told me. Any longer than that, and we’d have to cross a field of fire to get back into the dusk.”

Two and a half of their hours. Those mountains were extremely tall for the size of the planet, giving quite a shadow to shelter Beacon. Particularly with the slow rotation of the planet, he could understand where that much time came from.

It was still a frighteningly small amount of time to solve their problems.

“I already have the Chorus fabricating parts,” Solemnity Divine said. Indeed, sounds came softly from the center of the enclosure. More unnervingly though, Nomad wassurehe heard someone whisper an echo to her words each time she spoke. “And in the time remaining, I might be able to get the ships into flying shape. Except they won’t move, even once they’re repaired.”

“Sunhearts,” Nomad guessed. “We’re out of power.”

“The engines burned hotter—but less efficiently—than we’d hoped,” she said, nodding in agreement. “We’ve got almost nothing left. It’s a miracle we landed—only four of the engines fired, and with many that didn’t, it was because their sunhearts were depleted.”

“So,” Compassion said from her seated position, “we’re stopped. Frozen.”

The word seemed to carry more weight for them, burdened with context that Nomad could guess at. This was a world where being frozen, being stopped, was death.

“We’re going to have to steal some souls,” Zeal said with a firm nod. “If it pleases all, I shall gather my team. Do we have enough power to fly one ship on a raid, then back?”

“Yes,” Solemnity Divine said. “But…who are you going to raid?”

“You can’t go south, Zeal,” Jeffrey Jeffrey said. “Not unless we want to try to cross evenmorehighlands.”

“North is the Cinder King,” Rebeke said softly, from where she stood just outside their circle. As if she weren’t sure she was wanted or not.

“He’s got plenty of sunhearts to spare,” Nomad said, “after feeding your captive friends to the sun. Won’t those be coming up soon? The sunhearts that were made the first time I stood in the sunlight?”

“First time?” Rebeke asked.

Nomad nodded upward with his chin. “Up there, the sunlight struck me on the deck of Beacon, but didn’t do anything. I’m still trying to figure out why…”

They all regarded him with reverence.

“It wasn’t me being Sunlit,” he said. “The ship didn’t melt either.”

That didn’t help their looks of amazement. As if they thought he had protected the entire ship—as if he had the power to shield them all from the sunlight somehow.

You know, the knight says with a wry sense of amusement, youalways complain about the legends you start. Then you say things like this…

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