The remains of her sisters, those whom Bee 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 hurt to see. Bee gathered them together to say goodbye, to let them rest peacefully under a blanket one final time, weighed down with hefty stones of windswept glass.

When Bee 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, flesh, and bone alike cleaved wide open. Yet he was healing. Bee noticed the edges of the wound cording back together. The blood coagulated far more quickly than she would have thought possible. Streaks of the silver liquid she had glimpsed so many times before slowly knitted his red meat back together.

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

“No.”

Bee swallowed a lump in her throat. A feeling of despair overcame 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. It would heal the same way he was doing. Apparently, the most dangerous freaks did that. They couldn’t stay here any longer. So Ay 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, weakly ascending and descending dune after dune for hours. This time, he managed to carry only a single bag of supplies, slung over a shoulder, as Bee staggered ahead of him, feet slipping in the relentless glassy sand. She brought the lance and managed an entire bag herself as well, 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 mid-climb. “You did the right thing.”

Ay grunted behind her, not saying any more. Bee came to a stop at the apex of a sandbank. There it was, ahead, the megapedal city of Acetyn. It dominated the horizon.

Each leg stood as a monument to the sky, many hundreds of feet tall. The closer segments of its body were titanic and statuesque, seemingly immovable. Yet, in the far distance, partially occluded by atmospheric haze and clouds, the pillar feet rose up one at a time. They clawed ahead, throwing plumes of dark dust high into the sky.

Its body, from below, seemed an inconceivable weight, a platform of flesh, metal, and bone supported by these colossal walking structures. Up there, amongst the clouds, Bee could see towering spines, keeps grown into the shapes of skulls, flutes, and chimneys that belched smoke and acidic vapours.

The city of Acetyn 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 progress of the feet drawing inexorably closer, each taking its turn to shatter the foundation of the world as the continent-body slowly advanced into the expanse. The movement of its legs was still so distant, yet so volcanically unyielding. All of the horizon shook with thunder and calamity.

Ay adjusted his weakened hold on his bag as they watched columns of dust climb miles into the sky together. Ahead of them, a slave army trawled the sand in the city’s wake for sky-wreckage, cast-offs from another age. They picked with claw and tooth, with 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 old structural steel buried in the dust, valuable but too heavy and strong to be stripped down and taken, not without the additional time Sestchek would have afforded the work crews.

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 beneath her feet. Much to Ay’s relief, Bee had remained silent for their descent. He lacked the energy for her conversation and worried about the attention their voices may attract.

Finally, Bee turned back as she walked to witness the setting sun. The wastes were finally behind them. With a deep breath, Bee then dared to look up at Acetyn overhead. The city menaced, dark, twisted and alien, dwarfing them and crushing down on them like calamity. She was filled with the palpable energy — the feeling that 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. Ay passed her and grunted wordlessly for her to keep up.

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 long 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. In that moment, it was quiet but for their passage. The heaving of their hearts and their laboured breaths seemed to carry on the wind.

Yet, to Bee, in that instant, all 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 a sandbank and out of the cover of wreckage, 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 had fallen still. A metal rampart, spiralling around the broad columnar limb, was filled with desperate beasts brought to a halt. 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 living world above shook with a deep, rumbling groan that echoed like thunder through a second sky. Metal and bone ground against each other with deafening fissures. More falling debris pitted the sand around them. The city was in pain.

Bee drew the blanket-turned-cloak that 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 stride of that colossal limb would surely obliterate anyone who still clung to the leg 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 remaining hand. Ay narrowed his gaze with contempt. Then, flying on engines that screamed fire in its wake, the beast broke into view 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 heads. Bee screamed in instinctive fright before Ay silenced her with 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,” Ay said quietly to her. “From Sestchek.”