Just act normal, Jace silently begged from his sheltered hiding place.

  He crouched behind a set of crates, watching the pier from a position of safety. He maintained a veil, keeping his core quiet, and the restrained breathing was making his head light with the effort.

  Today, the pier bustled with activity. Scavengers milled about, most of them having ditched their upper body armour and helmets, and only wore their identifying ponchos as cloaks. It was too warm to wear full armour, especially in the direct sunlight, while they offloaded crates of cargo from the repeller-skiffs.

  The vehicles were long, open-top repeller-cars with spindly steering vanes at their stern and a sharp, pointed prow. A vent chuffed back starcoal smoke out the side, and a tiny furnace-boiler array powered the vehicle’s two thrusters. They carried crates across the sea from a point off toward the center of the island.

  Now morning, the tide had retreated, leaving a giant swath of sandy beach, rocky shoals, and tidal pools with bright coral and sea life still thriving within. When the skiffs skimmed over the beach, they kicked up trails of sand and mist.

  Farther down the pier, Lessa and Kinfild negotiated with a skiff pilot. They both wore their full scavenger armour, the disguises Jace had gathered for them last night, and Lessa shifted back and forth, clearly uncomfortable.

  Jace would’ve been too, if he had to hide a tail beneath a poncho, all while wearing a full suit of space armour, and try to survive the blazing sun. He just hoped her wax wouldn’t melt too easily.

  Finally, the skiff pilot bowed his head and backed away, and once the scavengers had opened the skiff’s cargo crates and retrieved an angular, golden metal object from inside—treasure from the dungeon, whatever sort it was—he allowed Kinfild and Lessa to step aboard.

  Kinfild took the skiff’s controls—a set of levers at the bow, with a control console in between. With a lurching start, the vehicle lifted up above the pier and hovered.

  Now was Jace’s chance. He had to get aboard.

  When a cargo starship roared overhead, everyone on the pier looked up at it. There had been light-freighters approaching the pier all morning, docking at the hanging landing pads and depositing their cargo, before disgorging a swathes of scavengers and soaking up some of the treasures.

  Now was his chance. As acrid exhaust smoke washed over the pier, Jace charged through the dark mist and vaulted over the skiff’s gunwale, then crouched down at the stern, hidden behind the bulwarks.

  “Kinfild!” Lessa hissed, her helmet’s voice modulator active. “Jace is aboard! Let’s go!”

  Kinfild rammed both the levers forward, and the skiff’s thrusters roared. It shot off the side of the pier and dipped, until it hovered only ten feet above the beach and tide-pool expanse.

  Jace peered over the gunwale, looking back at the wharf and pier. The Wrath still sat on its landing pad, its boarding ramp sealed, with Err-Seventeen to look after it. To preserve their coals, they’d shut the furnace down completely.

  The skiff kept accelerating, and Jace had to grip the gunwale just to keep standing. It was faster than he’d been expecting. The stilt city whisked away, shooting back toward the horizon until it disappeared.

  When Jace adjusted to the speed of the skiff, he turned around to face Lessa and Kinfild. “Everyone alright?”

  “I think you’re the only one with space-legs.” Lessa grinned.

  “Yeah, you knew what I meant.”

  Kinfild didn’t look back, but he said, “These controls are awkward, but I will manage. Don’t expect brimming conversation with me, though.”

  “Do you know where we’re going?” Jace asked.

  “It’s marked on the control console,” Lessa said. “The scanner will guide him. The other scavengers said it’d be about ten minutes until we reached the mine entrance.”

  “How’d you get them to give you the skiff?”

  “We told the same story we gave to Neikir. Well, Kinfild told the same story. I stood there and looked scary.”

  Jace chuckled. “Real scary.”

  “Hey! Do you want me to make you your next card or not?” She hoisted her pouch with the engraving needle and soldering equipment. While Jace had made breakfast and Kinfild had locked down the Wrath, she’d gathered up her equipment—including her rifle.

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  “It’s not a bad thing to not be scary, Less. I hope I’m not scary.” He pulled open his backpack, then retrieved a coil of soldering wire and a blank technique card, then set them down on the skiff’s metal deck. Jace was expecting it to be vibrating and shaking, but the flight was awfully smooth.

  “By the Split, I need to come up with a nickname for you.” She activated the engraving needle. “Can’t just take off the err at the end, make it Jac. Jay? Does that work?”

  Jace laughed softly again. “If you want.”

  “Ehhh…I don’t hate calling you Jace either.”

  Jace pressed the card flat against the skiff’s deck, and held it in place. “So…out of curiosity, how is this going to work? Before, I needed your help to even manifest the quest-making ability. I needed you to help illuminate the Split for me, I guess.”

  “The first time, yes,” she said. “But now you know what the link feels like, right?”

  “I…I know the impression the quest-making technique left, yeah,” he said. “I hunt for an object in the Split, using the mesh, and as long as I can envision the object, I should be able to find it.”

  “And the card will automate the process,” Lessa said. “First, I’ll try to make it do what I did. It’ll be a utility card, sensing your surroundings, and bringing you just a little closer to the Split. Then, your hyperspace Aes will do the rest, but the card will control your will and channel-opening processes for you.”

  Jace nodded in understanding. “That way, I can use the seeking technique and not worry about concentrating my will. Like other cards?”

  “Exactly.” Lessa activated her engraving needle and bent down over the card. “Most techniques, especially high-level ones, require such complex channel opening patterns that they’re difficult to use in battle—unless you have a card for them.”

  “Now, you’ll need something to script, right? A template?”

  “Ah…yeah. Something a little strenuous on your will, getting your channels open and your Aes moving, so it’ll illuminate the right runes and scripts for me. If I remember the right runes.”

  “Well, before, you were looking at my skill tree, right? The thing in the dreamspace plane, which had my card socketed in the roots?”

  “But you have no card to socket.”

  “Yeah, but…” Jace scratched the back of his head, then chewed the inside of his lips. “What if I used the technique again and held it? It’d show you the right runes and script patterns, right?”

  “That should work.”

  They used the same process as before, in the scavenger headquarters on Braka—with Lessa concentrating on him, sensing him, and viewing his abilities through the Split—and with him focussing his will on an object and pushing Aes out of his body.

  He concentrated on this next target: the dungeon entrance. If it was anything like the corrupted dungeon on Maehn, the split would’ve registered it, and known exactly where it was. He could form a quest.

  Sure enough, a sheet of pale blue hyperspace Aes manifested in the air ahead of him, swirling up into a sheet of particles and light. [Subquest available: Find nearby dungeon entrance. Reward: None].

  The sheet dispersed in seconds, and when he passed his hand through the dust, it swirled around his hand, striking with a physical presence like a sleet storm, or dust in the wind. He kept pushing, willing it to show him the destination, and a two-foot long compass needle of blue Aes erupted out in front of him, pointing directly ahead.

  At least Kinfild was going the right way.

  As he concentrated his Aes, he had to cycle, forcing Aes in patterns through his channels, and illuminating the process for Lessa.

  She pressed her engraving needle and soldering needle down, carving runes in the card’s central tab or drawing new patterns of enhanced, rare copper wire down on the plastic. He fed lengths of the wire into the needle, lending her a hand as she worked.

  As they prepared the card, the skiff climbed slightly as the shore’s elevation rose. The tide pools faded, a sandy beach replacing them. Ahead, a tropical coast rose like a wall of mountains. Green slopes reached abruptly up toward the sickly blue-orange sky, and faint clouds hovered above it. Palm trees and tropical shrubs lined the coast, shrouding the paths and any settlements.

  “Kinfild,” Jace said between concentrated breaths, “I think you need to turn left a little bit.” His Aes arrow pointed to the side, angling ever so slightly. The dungeon entrance wasn’t straight ahead anymore.

  “Stop talking,” Lessa said. “You’re making the runes dim.”

  “Sorry…” He glanced down at her again and kept feeding her soldering needle wire.

  When they rose up over the hills, Kinfild adjusted the levers, and the skiff turned slightly, its thrusters whooping and steering vanes straining.

  Ahead, the tropical hills formed a valley. Trees shrouded the slopes, rising up the sides and blanketing the slopes until they reached abrupt, rocky peaks with blunt juts.

  The skiff travelled straight down the center of the valley, and the Aes needle kept pointing straight ahead. In a matter of seconds, the hills widened and expanded, leaving an open swath of jungle-covered land with a river down its center.

  A complex of ladders and metal trellises stood at the valley’s center. It reminded him of an oil rig, and was about the same size, too—as best as he could tell from pictures; he’d never actually been to one. Smokestacks chuffed black ash into the air, floodlights blazed even in the bright morning daylight, and workers scampered around the levels of the rig.

  Hundreds of skiffs descended down to landing platforms all around the structure, then picked up cargo and took off again. Jace couldn’t see the entrance beneath all the extra metal, but it had to be there.

  “And done!” Lessa exclaimed, hopping to her feet and holding up the card. She shook it to cool it off. “There you go!”

  “Thanks,” Jace said with a smile. “And just in time. We’re here.”