* * *

  Kera came-to with a jolt, gasping for breath.

  Voices swam feet away, energetic and loud but indistinct, against a backdrop of distant gunfire. The airship cabin shook, forcing her further into lucidity, and fear surged as she thought at first that she’d been captured by the enemy.

  But then she heard the soft edges of a familiar kindness. Words, in a language she understood. A form neared in her still-blurry vision.

  “Shhh, there, Ker. You’re safe.”

  Memories flooded back.

  Virgil came into full focus, as he continued dabbing her forehead with wet cloth. At first she thought it was his touch that burned, before realizing her whole body hurt the same way in some strange uneven pattern. The cabin shook again, rattling every loose rivet as the shockwave swept over the vessel’s hull.

  “…but it’s now or fucking never,” growled a heavy bass on the deck above. “Get us underway, or everyone aboard this ship…”

  Shouts gave way to a commotion, then a weighty thud alongside a cry of pain.

  Kera forced herself out of the cot, despite Virgil’s protestations. It was clear he’d worked to mend her with his vis while she’d been unconscious: moving hurt in a new and different manner, though not altogether worse than it had lying down.

  Two patrol officers pinned a still-struggling man to the deck, she saw, when she climbed up through the hatch above decks. Captain Tanhkmet stood at the helm, acquainting himself with the vessel’s controls.

  “Cut the mooring lines, priority," he ordered a sailor working the ship telegraph. "Crowd the envelope. Engines to full ahead. Cast off, cast off! All hands, cut the lines!”

  Kera started toward him, but staggered, ambushed by sudden weakness. Tanhkmet lunged to catch her fall.

  “You need to rest, Iumatar.”

  Climbing up through the hatch behind her, Virgil grunted in agreement.

  “You— you believed me…“ she said quietly.

  After a reluctant pause, Tanhkmet shrugged.

  Dawn rose behind the stormclouds. Gunfire was still petering out in the middle distance, but simple quietude had not come to replace the once-constant din of rifle and cannon. Beneath the other transports, desperate evacuees shouted, pleaded, kicked, and climbed over each other to make their way aboard.

  The sky brightened, before the explosive impact of a massive shell erupted just a few hundred yards from their mooring, launching dust into the air. Another thunderous shockwave rocked the deck, forcing Kera back to her knees. Wailing screams returned fresh when the impact’s echo left.

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  “GET THOSE FUCKING LINES CUT!” Tanhkmet cried, with vigor then twice as intense.

  Tears welled in Kera’s eyes, as she confronted the crush of bodies, and the battle further behind.

  “You’re leaving them...”

  The words fell numb from her mouth.

  She felt Tanhkmet’s cold regard without looking. She didn’t mean to blame him, she realized. Anger had deserted her.

  Her stomach dropped.

  “Where’s Theodora?”

  But the captain’s expression only darkened, and he said nothing.

  Instantly, the rage she’d thought missing returned.

  She staggered back upright, weathering a head rush. Virgil grabbed her shoulder, holding her back.

  “She saved my life. I wouldn’t— you wouldn’t— Theodora… she saved my life.”

  Another terrible volley thundered. The impacts erupted nearer than the last, and more below screamed.

  “Then it will have been twice, sergeant,” said Tanhkmet. “The majority of the whole force remained behind, including her, to enable our withdrawal.”

  The cacophony of suffering filled the silence between them only poorly.

  “That’s the job, sergeant,” he finished.

  Kera knew she should hold her tongue, then. But she couldn’t stop herself.

  “And Virgil? He’s a soldier like any of them. But he made it aboard. Someone made sure of that.”

  Tanhkmet’s mute stare reflected her own bitter reproach in equal measure. Then he turned away, but not quick enough to hide a flicker of shame. Without another word, he resumed directing the yacht’s departure.

  Kera’s tears redoubled as she fell back to the deck. Virgil pulled her into an embrace, holding her tight in spite of all she’d just said.

  At last the deck lurched. Above, the canvas envelope tautened with a whiplike crack. The earth finally moved.

  Those still beneath came into fuller view. Under the nearest other vessel, so many hands reached out in vain for the boarding ladders as they retracted. Dozens more ran alongside the hull as it lifted up and away.

  There were so many still down there.

  Only two of the other three yachts followed suit with their own departure. The fourth was slower. It was still taking on passengers in misplaced compassion when the sky flashed again, and an invisible spear from above tore off the rear third of its hull. Secondary explosions of detonating steamboilers pushed the two new halves farther apart, and the vessel’s backbroken structure fell back to earth, blanketing the crowd below in an inferno of burning debris. Ballistic remnants of that last ship sailed through the night sky as their three surviving yachts gained speed away, and the sporadic gunfire of the forlorn hope went silent at last.

  It had been what she’d wanted, she thought.

  She’d known it to be the right course of action with such visceral, fiery conviction those days ago. And even back then, in some abstract sense much easier to ignore, she’d known it would involve those terrible harms, inseparable from its undertaking.

  But in the utmost gruesome detail, she saw her consequences, then. Comrades and civilians, burning to death in pure terror.

  On the path onto which she had led them.

  That she had maneuvered them, manipulated them, into following.

  Wherever righteous that path might lead, she saw before her then only an unbearable weight of suffering. Perhaps but a fraction of it, in fact, and even that much a crushing, suffocating, impossible burden. The icy horror of success gripped her heart, confronted by that final passing portrait of the battlefield, as she sobbed in Virgil’s arms.

  But then, before the burning wreckage had even disappeared from view, her tears had ceased, and she cried no longer.