Even the Cadre won't follow me onto the surface.

I look down, at the skinmark on the inside of my wrist. Two chevrons pierced by three vertical lines. I hear the voice of a boy I knew once. It means you are a friend to the SunChildren, he says. It means you belong to a coterie.

I hear him again, asking me to stay with him. And I hear him telling me about a certain vine, that if burned in the right way would give off a smoke that could be smelt from afar. A smoke that would bring the SunChildren.

We will pass this way again, at the season's end.

Spore Season is drawing to a close and Swell Season is coming on. Up above, the Season of Nights is dying and the Season of Dust begins: a time of harsh winds and terrible storms. The coteries of the SunChildren will be on the move.

The nights are becoming short. More and more, Callespa will be ruled by the suns that scorched me. The surface is an alien world in which I'm not equipped to survive.

But I've been through the Shadow Death. I stood in the gaze of the suns and I lived. So I'm going. I'm heading to a place with no ceilings and no walls, where the sky keeps on forever and you could go mad with the freedom of it. Perhaps it will kill me, as sure as the Cadre on my tail would.

We'll see.

1

That's when it hits me. The one thing I never considered, the one possibility that never entered my head, because I never stopped seeing the Gurta as the enemy. I hated them too much to believe anything good of them. I was so accustomed to seeing them as monsters that I forgot that they were people. That they also had children who were being killed on the battlefields. I forgot that, just like us, they might not want to see their loved ones coming home in pieces. They wanted an end to the fighting as much as we did.