Night in the Sunken Crater was not dark. It was an ocean of slow, blazing bright violet twilight.
The floating barge St. Mira hung suspended thirty feet beneath the dark rock underbelly of the Anchor Stone, held in place by four steel mooring cables that Unit Ren had bolted into the rock. On the open deck, three hundred refugees slept beneath canvas tarps and patched blankets, exhausted by their escape from the hanging cradles. The air down here, warmed by the earth-heat vents of the volcano bowl floor, tasted of crushed mint, sulfur, and electric-shock ozone.
At the center of the cargo deck, lit up by a single copper animal fat lantern, Apostate Ren knelt before a three-foot slab of polished slate.
In his blackened, frostbitten fingers, the Astrologer held a piece of white tailors’ chalk and the broken rings of his brass star-compass. With sweeping, fluid strokes, he was sketching a massive sky diagram across the dark stone. A spiral of overlapping ellipses, intersected by seven outward vectors that came together upon a dense, blackened circle at the bottom of the slab.
Ren Prime sat on an overturned nail-keg beside him, his mammoth ivory awl resting across his knees. Beside Ren, Mira sat cross-legged on a coil of hemp rope, her charcoal shawl draped over her left shoulder. Her right arm, uncovered to the elbow, rested upon the slate. The smoky quartz of her forearm caught the lantern light, pulsing in a slow, steady beat of three beats per…
