Mav never remembered the inside of the funnel clearly.
There was gray cloud, cold and wet, with a roar that pushed into his ears until he couldn’t hear his own voice. Stones and water flew past him. Once, he saw the goat, still tied to its rock, turning slowly in the air. He kept his hand closed on Tamsin’s wrist the whole time. He could feel Ronald’s fist on his belt, and he held on to that feeling.
He didn’t know how long it lasted. It might have been a minute or an hour. He was afraid, but there was nothing to do with the fear except hold on.
Then the gray turned white, and they fell out of it.
They landed on grass. It was hard, short grass, flattened by the wind. Mav hit it with his shoulder and rolled until a rock stopped him. He lay on his back for a while, looking at the sky, which was the wrong color. It was pale and very high, with a huge white sun in it.
"Tamsin," he said. "Ronald."
"Here," Ronald groaned somewhere to his left. "I think my arm is on backward."
Tamsin was lying a few steps away, with her slate still pressed against her chest. She sat up slowly. Her face was white, but she didn’t seem to be hurt.
"Where are we?" she whispered.
Mav stood up and looked around.
They were on an island of rock, perhaps half a kilometer across. It was covered with flat grass and a few twisted trees, all of them leaning the same way. The wind blew across it without stopping, hard and steady, like a river of air.
He walked to the edge of the island, and then he stopped.
There was no sea below it. There was no ground at all. The rock simply ended. Below it, very far down, a floor of white cloud went on in every direction. Other islands floated above that cloud. Some were small, no bigger than a house. Others were huge, with forests on them and white waterfalls pouring off their edges into nothing. They all moved slowly in the wind, like boats on a calm lake.
Tamsin came up beside him. She looked down, and then she sat on the grass very quickly.
"We went through a vortex," she said. "Quill talked about them once. They’re tears between Worlds. They open and close, but nobody knows where they lead." Her voice shook. "Mav, there’s no arch."
He had already understood that, but it was worse to hear it.
Every World that he had ever been to had an arch. It was the door back to the Nexus, and the Nexus was the only way home. An Awakened couldn’t go home through his own Manifestation. His Subjects could, in an instant, but he couldn’t.
"So how do we get back?" Ronald asked. He was holding his arm against his chest, and his face was gray.
Nobody answered him.
-----
Mav put Ronald’s shoulder back first, because that was something that he could fix. Ronald shouted once, then swore for a while. Afterward, he admitted that it felt much better.
They sat in the shelter of a rock and tried to think. It was hard to think in that wind, because it never stopped pushing.
"The arch on the cliffs closes at sunset," Tamsin said. "When we don’t come back, the clerk at the landing place will write it down. After a few days, Gravemoor will send a letter to our families." She swallowed. "People go missing on Orphan Worlds all the time. Nobody looks for them."
Mav thought about Juno opening that letter, and about his uncle reading it over her shoulder.
"Then we’ll have to come back on our own," he said.
"How?"
"I don’t know yet. We’ll find out what this place is first."
Ronald looked at him for a moment. Then he laughed, a short, tired laugh. "You always say it like that," he said. "As if it’s a plan."
"It is a plan. It just isn’t finished."
He borrowed Scent before he did anything else, because he wanted to know what else lived on this rock.
[You have borrowed a skill: Scent.]
The wind brought him the smells of the island all at once. There was grass and wet stone, with the sharp smell of the goat somewhere close. There were birds’ nests in the twisted trees. Under all of it, very faint, there was something else. It was dry, like old leather and dust, and it came from the rocks near the edge of the island.
He followed it with his nose, bent low, while Ronald watched him as if he had gone mad. The trail was less than a day old. It stopped at the edge of the rock, as if whatever had left it had simply stepped off into the sky.
’Something walks here,’ he thought. ’And it can fly.’
He didn’t tell the others yet. Tamsin had enough on her mind, and he didn’t know what it meant.
-----
Then Mav cast his Manifestation.
He did it carefully, in a hollow near the center of the island, where a ring of rocks broke the wind. He was afraid that it wouldn’t come. He had never cast it in a World with no arch, and he didn’t know whether that mattered. But the dome of water rose out of the grass exactly as it always did, 50 meters across, with the wind tearing spray off its top.
He reached for his Subjects, and they came.
Two came first, followed by the needlefish in a silver rush. Then Seven, Six and Birch arrived, with all the others behind them. Mav felt every point in his head click into place, and he was so relieved that he had to sit down.
"Where are we?" Two asked.
’I don’t know yet.’
"The sky is wrong," Two said. Then he added, "But the water is ours, so it’s all right."
Ronald and Tamsin cast their Manifestations beside his. Ronald’s boars came out onto his gray hills, put their noses into the wind and snorted. Tamsin’s moths hung from her trees with their wings folded tight.
They still had their Subjects, at least. Whatever else happened, they would have food and water. Mav held on to that thought.
-----
The goat was still alive.
It had fallen onto the island too, a few hundred steps away, with its rock still tied to its back. It had chewed through the silk and was standing near the edge, shaking its head. It looked as confused as they were.
Mav was wondering whether to catch it again when something flew past the island.
He only saw it for a second. It was long and gray, like an eel as long as Seven, with four thin wings along its body that beat so fast that they blurred. It came out of the cloud below them, rose past the edge of the island and closed its jaws on the goat.
It didn’t stop. It went on past, and then it was gone in the white.
Half of the goat was left on the grass. The wind was already pulling at it, rolling it slowly toward the edge.
None of them spoke. Ronald’s boars had all turned to face the edge with their heads down. Mav could feel his own wolves trembling in his head.
"That goat was rank D," Tamsin said at last, in a very small voice. "The list said so. It fought Ronald’s boars for half an hour."
Mav looked down at the white cloud where the gray thing had gone. He thought about how easily it had bitten through a rank D beast, without even slowing down.
The beasts here were rank C.