CIRCE

xiv

The palace is beautiful. Granger can't help but admire the intricate paintwork on the sandstone as they creep behind the halls, detailed patterns of reddish-orange and indigo blue and pale yellow that arc and curl. The tapestries and rugs are pristinely fine, hand-weaved with reeds and the dull glimmer of silver.

They slip through back to the air conditioning room, clinging precariously to the cut wall. Slowly, they descend and return to the ground floor, the only place where they're out of sight. It will have to do for now, as impermanent as it must be. Still, even in the swathe of shadows, Granger's skin itches. They longer they're here, the longer they're motionless, the more likely they are to be caught. They need to move, and they need to move now.

Marlowe fishes out her pager and attempts to reach Odysseus Outpost. Granger assumes it's to get eyes in the sky to help them find the Labyrinth. However, Marlowe shakes her head.

"No Kit," She signs.

That's not surprising, yet a little buoy of hope still sink in Granger's chest. Presumably, all spacecraft have been confined to Eijoan airspace. The situation of espionage between UNISED and the nations of Circe is too sensitive for a UNISED spacecraft to be seen outside of expected territory. It would only fuel suspicions further as the finger of accusations makes its rounds again.

Granger shakes his head. No use to dwell on it. They need to be moving.

"Princess said the - " Granger's hands freeze. What's the sign for Labyrinth? He fingerspells it instead. "L-A-B-Y-R-I-N-T-H is north. Half a day's journey."

Marlowe nods and gestures to the door. Time for them to go. Though the unease he holds toward this mission doesn't wane, Granger's at least relieved of his restlessness as they slip out of the palace.

✧ ˚ · .

The humdrum of the desert gets to a point that Granger is beginning to think that they've gone the wrong way. His compass points north, but they've been traveling for almost five hours now, trudging across open sand as his boots eat callouses into his ankles and the heat beats his skin into a tan, and they've seen nothing. Just empty, rolling dunes and pallid sky for as far as the eye can see.

However, as they crest upon the sixth hour of traveling, silhouettes appear on the horizon. Silhouettes in the sky, Granger realizes as they trudge closer. Silhouettes that take a crumbling shape as they become shades of brown and green. Crumbling shapes of brown and green that become the hovering chunks of earth in the sky, a cluster of floating islands above the sand, orbiting around the largest cluster which holds a vast building of sandstone.

"Holy shit," Granger mutters.

Floating islands. In the sky. Floating. Islands.

"Let's find a way up," Marlowe says.

As Marlowe marches forward, Granger hesitates. Maybe they shouldn't, he wants to say. Maybe they should turn back, return to the Outpost, and leave the ardeans be. This isn't their home after all. This isn't theirs to explore. However, by the time he finds the strength to put his worries into words, Marlowe is already far ahead, moving with intention. A woman on a mission.

A mission that Granger just can't sit with, no matter how hard he tries.

He trudges after her with eyes on the horizon, scouring the skies for any foreign body. This isn't their home. It's someone else's, and regardless of how quiet it is, the ardeans could pop up at any time. If they're spotted, then not only is that mission failure but either arrest or outright death.

The desert sand dips down into a shallow crater of brindled stone, jagged and tiered as though some mighty, taloned creature had ripped up the islands from the earth itself. There are fractures in the stone that cut endlessly down into the pits of the planet, from which a powerful breeze rushes up, curling and weaving between the floating chunks of dirt and stone like the tendrils of a leviathan.