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was often the case in areas afflicted by a great deal of pain and death, but there was nothing.  The air was as vacant as the sky.  Structures oozed pitch, open manholes spilled rancid fumes, slabs of blackened cloth whipped tight from flagpoles in the bitter breeze.  A sense of foreboding surrounded them as they dragged the sleds along the cobblestone street.  Danica watched the eye-holes of the buildings, half-expecting something to launch out at them at any moment. 
    Her spirit circled them like a hound.  He stayed close, scalding the air as he flew a tight perimeter.  Now and again she sent him out further, scouting for those life-signs he’d detected before: they were still there, deeper in the city, close to the remains of the old hospital headquarters of the Southern Claw.
    Danica shivered.  The air chilled them, and frost smoke rose from the ground.  Her alien arm scraped hard against her skin – after months spent getting used to it she expected that pain to subside, and most of the time she didn’t notice it, but now and again the metal shifted at just the wrong angle, the edges ground against her scapula or else rubbed raw on her flesh and she had to bite back a grunt of pain.  Memory of losing her arm sometimes came when she used her magic, flashes of the blade, Rake watching on, Geist’s eyes.  Some wounds never healed.  She was not and never would be whole.
    All of us are missing something.  She and Cross had lost more than most, yet there they were, maybe the last two people in the world.  It was staggering to think of all they’d been through together.  They’d traveled hundreds of miles through burning desert and crippling cold, across forlorn seas and hostile wastes.  They knew each other so well they didn’t need to speak.  And yet they were both pensive: both knew the dangers of growing too attached to people.  They’d both lost those they loved, which was why Danica had tried to tell herself for so long it couldn’t work between them, that it shouldn’t work.  The less they had to lose the easier things were.  But that’s a lie.  A life with nothing to lose isn’t a life. 
    They pushed on.  Cross nodded towards a junction near the center of the city, close to the old residential district where he used to live before he’d formed the team and purchased the manor.  They weren’t far from the shop district, though Danica didn’t imagine there would be much left to salvage, not at this point. 
    How long had they been gone?  It was hard to remember when they’d last been in Thornn – it was after Cross had left, when the team had warned Pike of an impending Ebon Cities attack – but they’d only been away from Southern Claw territory for a few days. 
    Or so we think.  Translocative magic had been used to transport their airship all of the way to Nezzek’duul, thousands of miles to the south, and such magic was known to bend time as well as space.  Adding that to the fact that they still had no idea how Shiv had enabled Creasy’s dying spirit to transport them back across the world, the truth of the matter was they might have been gone for decades, or longer. 
    The city was dim and still and gripped with the smell of pitch.  Everything looked grey, as if the once red stones had been cast in pallor.  Shadows stretched and bled like wax.  She and Cross gently set down their charges – Ronan and Shiv were so tightly bound to the man-made sleds they looked like bundles of cloth themselves, their eyes barely visible beneath the face-wraps, their arms bound tight to their chests to keep them from sliding off – and looked around. 
    “What do you think?” she asked.
    “ I think this place looks more like it was abandoned than conquered,” he said.
    “ That’s what I think.  My spirit still has those lifesigns in his sights.  No trace of any undead.”
    “ This is just...weird,” Cross said as he turned around in a circle.  “We should probably find