The remains of her sisters, those she could find, were crushed by the fall. They lay dead and still, hot under exposure to the equatorial sun. Their maggoty forms were twisted in ways that it hurt to see. Bee gathered them together to say goodbye, let them rest peacefully under a blanket one final time, weighed down with hefty stones of windswept glass.

When she returned, Ay was slumped against the remains of the wagon. Only the two of them had survived. He had a terrible wound, a deep gash along the length of his body, plates and flesh and bone alike rended wide open. Yet he was healing; Bee noticed the edges of the wound cording back together and the blood coagulating far more quickly than she would have thought possible.

Lance in hand, Bee carefully approached. Then, standing over him, she asked quietly, “Will you die?”

“Not yet.”

Bee swallowed a lump in her throat. Her long tongue was dry, arms and legs aching, a feeling of despair overcoming her as she regarded his broken state. To one side of the wreck, the carcass of the scavenger lay on its back, a massive hole punctured in its chest and abdomen, steel ribs exposed and slack, wet guts pouring out of the injury.

The monster wouldn’t stay down long, Ay explained to her. They couldn’t stay here any longer. So he tore some of the furs in the savaged bone carriage and tied them tightly against his injury, covering it from the lashes of sharp sand carried on the wind.

They took to the desert on foot, such as they were. Ay slithered in wide arcs for hours, ascending and descending dune after dune weakly. He managed to carry only a single bag of supply, slung over a shoulder, as Bee staggered ahead of him, feet slipping. She brought the weapon and managed an entire bag herself but needed to stop for frequent drinks.

“Stupid of me,” Ay wheezed. “They were already dead. Would have left. Shooting it, made it need to kill us... To be safe.”

“You tried,” Bee gasped, struggling to get her breath in the climb. “You did the right thing.”

Bee came to a halt at the apex of a sandbank. There it was, ahead, the megapedal city of Acetyn. It reached over the horizon.

Each leg stood as a monument to the sky, hundreds of feet tall. The closer segments were titanic and statuesque. Yet, in the far distance, partially occluded by atmospheric haze and clouds, the pillar feet rose up one at a time and clawed their way ahead, throwing plumes of dark dust high into the atmosphere. Its body, from below, seemed an inconceivable weight, a platform of flesh, metal and of bone supported by these colossal structures. Atop it could be seen towering spines, keeps grown in the shapes of skulls, flutes and chimneys that belched smoke and acidic vapours.

Ahead, the city carved a coastline of broken machines, abandoned hatcheries and old ruined hives. The ocean - once here, long ago - was gone. Only bedrock and shorn cliff edges remained, crumbling.

Bee could see the stamping of the feet drawing inexorably closer as the continental body slowly moved onwards. The movement of its legs was still so distant yet so volcanically unyielding. All of the horizons shook with thunder and calamity. They watched as columns of dust climbed miles into the sky.

Below and ahead of them, following the grave path of the city, The Bone Lord’s slave army trawled the sand for sky-wreckage and mineral-stone, cast-offs from another age. They picked with claw and tooth, long tools of recycled metal and hardy nets, searching for treasures. Ay duly recognized many of the camps and lost dwellings built and abandoned for the same reason - the months’ slow passage of the twin cities, cut short by the death of Sestchek.

Carefully, they made their way down, wary of the plunderers and their sieves. The rubble was enough to cover them from distant eyes, this far from the city. Bee saw that what remained was already trampled or stripped, nothing more than remnants. Soon they passed through a shallow maze of metal parts and old structural steel, valuable but too heavy and strong to be stripped down and taken.

The danger came from those thralls who were hungry and desperate enough to attack two injured travellers. Bee kept Ay’s lance close to hand, occasionally using it to steady herself as sand slipped. Much to his relief, Bee had remained silent for their descent. He lacked the energy for conversation and worried about the attention their voices may attract.

Finally, they crested a final rise and looked back at the setting sun. The wastes were finally behind them.

Bee dared to look up to Acetyn overhead. The city menaced, dark, twisted and alien, dwarfing them and crushing down on them like calamity. She was filled with the palpable feeling: they couldn’t escape. Standing in silence, the child was terrified by the enormous shadow. It was different to the city she was created in, in subtle and wrong ways, conjuring a sense of dread.

Light flickered through the hide of the titanic creature above, through cracks in its bony plates and where its skin was thinnest. Then, as the sunlight died, Bee felt as if she was somehow casting shadows in the dark, looked down on by a nightmare of bloodshot eyes.

The desert maze did nothing to hide her from above. In fact, it felt like it displayed her here, a treasure amongst the rust. The heaving of their hearts, their laboured breaths, seemed to carry on the wind. Yet, to Bee, in that instant, the sound seemed muted upon the desert ridge, nothing but vast space on all sides, leaving her feeling disembodied and lost.

Bee tried to remind herself why she had come. She had to make her mother proud.

Sliding down the other side of the dune, they approached Acetyn’s rear-most foot. The city above shifted. Rubble and ash fell around them. Freaks gathered in a crowd around its base, great climbing elevators and a spiralling metal ramp filled with desperate beasts. Countless carriages, laden with salvage and supply, blocked passage upwards.

Ay saw the blockage for what it was. Above them, access to the city had been brought to a halt. He craned his head as the world above shook with a deep, rumbling groan against the sky. Metal and bone ground against each other with deafening fissures and falling debris, pitting the sands around them. The city was in pain.

Bee drew the blanket she shrouded herself in tight around her body, hiding her head from any who might cast their gaze her way. The freaks here, barely specks of dirt compared to the vastness of Acetyn, a world unto itself, were urgent in their need to ascend before this section of the city moved. The forces involved would end the lives of those that still clung to the leg instantly, without so much as a moment’s notice from the titan. That much was evident by the sheer scale of cracked earth and crushed ruins where it had tread.

Overhead, a dragon roared, and the crowds turned to see it. Bee gasped, covering her mouth with her stump. Ay narrowed his gaze with contempt. Then, flying on engines that screamed fire in its wake, broke the horizon and tore a path through the sky, crossing the desert towards them, before drawing a line parallel to Acetyn’s body and streaking towards its distant head. Bee screamed in instinctive fright before Ay silenced her with a grunt and a hand on her shoulder. He watched keenly until it disappeared into the falling night, leaving only flashing lights in the distance.

“Came the same way as us,” he croaked quietly to her. “From Sestchek.”