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designed to foam and swell upon contact with some silently administered catalyst vapor.
    Rachel cursed her own foolishness and she cursed that bastard Meer for his treachery. Why had she trusted him? Why had she trusted
anyone
in this godforsaken town?
    The Spine would have anticipated that she would hear their footsteps in the hall outside, and they had used her recent excursion to prepare this trap. And now they knew she must try to escape through the window. Hacking through the walls or floor would take too long.
    Holding her breath, Rachel threw open the windows, then leaped quickly aside. The expected flurry of bolts did not appear in the ceiling above her. Were there
no
Spine in the street below? No crossbows trained on the tavern? What did
that
mean? She had not yet breathed and yet she was already disturbingly confused and disoriented. A poison designed to permeate the cornea? She turned towards Dill, but the young angel had already collapsed and lay sprawled on the floor beside the hissing metal missile.
    She dragged him closer to the window, not knowing if he was already dead or not, desperately hoping that the lack of a secondary attack meant that the temple assassins had decided to take their quarry alive.
    He was heavier than she expected. She noticed how much his wings had grown, what a broad wake they left in the dust-covered floor. And then she was forced to drop him and lean out of the window to take a breath. A whiff of poison gas reached her nostrils, and she gagged; she didn’t recognize the toxin.
    Something new?
    From the effect that one tiny sniff had on her senses, it was more virulent than anything she’d experienced before. Sandport harbor swam before her eyes, a swarm of lights upon the dark river. She saw boat masts brawling, buildings melting into one another, the last blush of sunset. She heard the distant hum of an airship at high altitude.
    They flew high so I wouldn’t hear their engines,
she thought. And then consciousness left her.

2
    THE HAUNTED CITY
    T HE SPINE WARSHIP thundered over furrows of brown smoke clouds, her envelope flashing like a polished steel shield under the blue sky. In her wake came a flock of carrion birds: crows, eye-picks, and blackgulls, all shrieking and feeding on the corpses suspended from the ship’s aft deck and ballast arms.
    She turned to starboard. Sunlight slanted across her gondola, granting the scrawls and abrasions in the metal hull a moment of crisp definition. Portholes gleamed dully like old men’s eyes. Sandstorms had stripped her deck timbers of any varnish, had scoured the arcuballista, net, and grapple guns down to their metal bones.
    With her rudders hard to port and twin propellers blurring, the vessel turned until her bow faced east. Then she waited, her cooling engines ticking, while the crew moved inside to prepare their air scrubbers for descent into the turmoil below. Fumes tumbled under her gondola, curling around the feet of the hanging corpses and reaching across the empty decks, cables, and rails—lingering, it seemed, at the locked portholes and hatches.
    The ship’s engines growled with a sudden surge of power. Elevators slammed back into dive position. Birds scattered, screaming, from the gruesome ballast.
Reclamation Ship Twelve
shuddered, purged air from her buoyancy ribs, and then sank into the boiling clouds.
    Darkness engulfed the warship. Buffeted by turbulence, she rolled and pitched in upwards-rushing eddies of smoke. Cables shivered and moaned under the stress; her envelope shook and creaked. Ten heartbeats passed, then twenty, and then a thin, grainy light suffused the air. Three whistles shrilled within the gondola. The sound of thumping pistons rumbled through her superstructure, as engines pumped hot exhaust back into the ship’s exterior ribs. Her envelope swelled, slowing her descent.
    She emerged in the amber twilight beneath a brooding ceiling of cloud, a hundred yards above the Deadsands, dragging corpses