Things move quickly after that.

  Atrax doesn't fully understand what we're doing, but after a few minutes of browbeating from Theo he's happy to throw his weight behind the plan. Clanspeople scurry hither and yon, getting our supplies together. Fortunately for my conscience, Agni and I have the only really dangerous part; if anything goes wrong, the clan can write us off and lose only a few bits of equipment.

  The cutter, as I'd recalled, contains several sacks of uniforms and other clothing looted from the . Agni roots around in them and enlists the aid of some clan seamstresses to make her something appropriate, and there's plenty of the ill-fitting prisoner's garb for me. Looking at it gives me a frisson of doubt; after all my efforts to get , am I really going back voluntarily? I briefly contemplate having both of us pose as guards, but long experience tells me it would never work -- I wouldn't be able to pass under even basic questioning. If I was running a game back in the City, I'd spend a month gathering information about the guards and the mine to craft a decent persona, but we don't have that kind of time. We need Agni to get us inside, we need me for the actual theft, and only one story accommodates us both.

  I comfort myself by going over the plan for getting . Quarter, Raz, and Theo promise to work on repairing the cutter while we make our play in the mine. Quarter's sure he can polish it up to pass as a Navy ship again once they get all the spikes and blood off. That'll be our exit, when the time comes. Atrax makes arrangements to have someone waiting for our signal, day or night.

  The trip to the mine will take five or six hours, Theo tells me, so we arrange a small convoy of trikes and head out late in the evening. I'm exhausted enough that I can catch some sleep, even with the roar of the engine only a foot away. By the time Theo shakes me awake again, the nightsun has set and the first of the day suns is over the horizon.

  We stop on the sunny side of a dune, shadows stretching long all around us. Agni, Theo and I get down and climb to the crest, looking west.

  The first thing that startles me is an . A few miles further on, the desert just . It's as though I were looking at the edge of a great cliff, so tall that the bottom is out of sight -- there's just the blackness of empty sky, stretching on into infinity.

  It is, of course, the edge of the world. But it's one thing to know that there

  an edge -- everyone knows that, the world is a flat oval so of course it has edges -- and another thing to actually see it. The City, nestled among the world's highest mountains, often gives the feeling of being at the bottom of an enormous bowl; here, I abruptly feel like I'm perched on top of something narrow, precariously balanced and in danger of sliding over.

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  Neither of the others seems bothered. They're focused on more practical things, like our target.

  From the outside, the Edge Mine looks more like a fortress than a hole in the ground. A semicircular wall made of giant sandstone blocks secures a half-oval hard up against edge of everything. A single gate pierces it in the center, enormous iron doors designed to let a ship the size of enter the courtyard. Mounted at intervals atop the wall are a mix of machine guns, fire-throwers, and larger cannon, while scorchmarks on the stone and bits of rusted wreckage below attest that the threat from Slaughterborne and his ilk is more than theoretical.

  Of the buildings behind the wall, we can see little. A single white tower rises to half again the wall's height, with a lookout post and an antenna on top. Theo looks at it and frowns.

  "We'll have to wait until dark to leave," she says, "or they'll spot the dust cloud."

  Agni nods. Theo gives a grimace and shrugs.

  "Beats being tied to a wall in the Butcher's camp, I guess." She looks at me. "I guess it's too late to ask if you're fucking sure about this."

  "Not at all," I say. "But I don't have anything better. Agni, still on board?"

  She's wearing a hard look, and I feel a wave of guilt for involving her. I don't know if she's doing this out of obligation to me or to Mercy or both, but it's my plan and I'm about to get her in way over both our heads. Finally she gives an indifferent shrug of her own.

  "Bit late for second thoughts," she says.

  We return to the trikes and change clothes. After selecting our disguises, Theo put them in a roach pen overnight to be trampled, torn, and crapped on. Now they look battered enough to be the garb of two people who spent the past couple of days roughing it in the desert. We take one of the trikes, stripped down to a bare minimum of gear.

  I stow my old clothes -- well, really the new clothes I got from the clan -- in my sack. For a moment, glutton for punishment that I am, I stare at the skull.

  "Anything useful to say?" I ask Gray.

  this is an unwise choice. I'd love to say he was desperate, but he actually just sounds annoyed, like a parent telling a child for the hundredth time that yes, stove will burn you too. this does nothing to help us reach the goal of a revolution against --

  "I told you I'm not starting a fucking revolution."

  He doesn't reply. I toss the sack in the back of Theo's trike and shake my head. Agni is already in the driver's seat of our own ride. One of the clanspeople finishes the disguise off with a makeshift bond around my wrists -- nothing so tight I can't get out of it -- and I climb aboard. With a last look back at me, Agni guns the engine and takes us over the dune toward the fortress.