The crossing between the crater rim and the floating monolith of the Anchor Stone felt less like walking and more like dreaming while awake.
Ren Prime held Mira’s left hand tightly in his own, his right hand gripping his oak staff. With every step across the empty air, Apostate Ren’s void stone carving paved a transient, shimmering disc of indigo force beneath their boots. A pocket of zero-gravity pushback that held their weight for half a second before dissolving into starlight.
Behind them, Unit Ren marched with heavy, deliberate driving force. He carried the fifty-pound crate of star-fallen brass in his single iron arm. Vane Vale walked behind the machine, his face white as lard, both hands clutching Unit Ren’s dorsal exhaust pipe hub like a drowning man holding a spar. And at the rear, Ren-the-Cinder crawled on all fours along the force-discs. His eyes closed was tight, whimpering prayers to four different gods of carpenters and stonework.
They landed on the broad, flat surface of the Anchor Stone. A three-hundred-yard expanse of cracked dark rock covered in patches of pale blue alpine moss.
Yet as Ren straightened. It caught his breath in the thin, ozone-scented air, a faint sound reached his ears over the whistling wind.
