“Vora? Are you a ghost?”

  “I'm a construct – the Mbuntu construct – Vora Mbuntu's mind recreated in mnemonics. I live in the wreath on your head.”

  “Where's the real Vora?” Molly asked.

  “Vora Mbuntu is dead,” the Mbuntu construct said, and Molly began to cry. “You must move on from this place, Molly. They'll come for Vora's body, and they'll be looking for the wreath.”

  “Who will?”

  “The Hale Guard. They killed Vora, and if they find you, they'll kill you, too.”

  “I don't care,” Molly blurted through her tears. She sat down where she stood, drew her knees in close to her body, hid her face, and cried.

  “You should care,” Vora's ghost said. “Sugar Music depends on you now. You carry it in the wreath along with all the work Vora has done. If you're killed, then there's no chance of the city you saw ever growing from the earth.”

  “I don't care,” Molly repeated. She closed her eyes tight, but Vora's ghost was still there behind her eyelids.

  “You've got to finish what Vora started, Molly.”

  “But I can't do what Vora did! I'm not a witch. I can't make the city grow right and not turn into sand. Even you... even Vora couldn't do it. I can't!”

  “There is another Stitchlife to the South. You will bring the wreath to her. She'll find a way to make Vora's city grow and stand forever.” Molly did her best to stop crying, but she couldn't until the Mbuntu construct said, “If you and your family had lived in one of Vora's cites, then they'd still be alive.” Hearing those words, Molly felt her face harden, and her tears were gone.

  “What do I have to do?” she asked.

  “Protect the wreath and bring it South. I'll tell you where to go.”

  “But how?” Molly asked. “I'm just a little girl.”

  “You're not, Molly,” said the man in the magic suit. “You possess certain qualities that make you special, qualities shared by many of the great men and women who shaped history.” A second ago he wasn't there, but now he stood next to Vora, a ghost like her. “And Vora made you into a witch-sped blade.” His pompadour puffed high and shined blue-black in the sun.

  “General, are you a ghost, too?” she asked.

  “Molly,” the General said, “I'd like you to meet someone else.”

  A man in a perfectly smoothed black suit that darkened the air around him appeared next to the General and Vora. He smiled, but his eyes were frightening. “Hello, Molly. I'm the Fin Singh construct. Or his ghost, as you like to call us.” He bent down on one knee in front of her, and asked, “Molly, do you like to play with fire?”

  Fin Singh's ghost told her to walk into the dry, sun-baked grasses that covered the rolling hills of the Outer 'Fills. When she'd gone half a mile, he told her to take the wreath off and set it in the grass. It tingled before it came loose, and when she set it down, little blue sparks danced and arced off its bone leaves until they made the dry grasses around it take flame. Then she snatched up the wreath from where she'd set it down, put it on her head again, and walked South, a harbinger to the fire that followed her.

  Embers floated on the unbroken wind, and within minutes, fires broke out everywhere across the low hills. Molly was surprised to see flares of bright green flame jetting upwards in the middle of the burning landscape like little geysers of green fire. In the places where the grasses burned away, the green jets continued to flare out of the charred earth.

  “What's that?” Molly asked, pointing at the green flames.

  “It's landfill gas,” Vora's ghost said. “Mostly methane. It's the product of sub-surface, anaerobic decomposition of bio-materials. When it mixes with oxygen in the surface atmosphere, it becomes flammable.”

  “It's beautiful,” Molly said, and she smiled for a brief moment watching the landscape of burning hills and the spurting jets of verdant flame. Molly turned her head to share the moment with Vora's ghost, but she was gone. The Singh construct was gone, too. Only the General remained. Flames danced all over his magic suit, and the burning hills that showed though him made him burn from the inside with a frightening light.

  “Yes, it is beautiful,” the General said. “Good girl.”

  *****

  Fin Singh's chameleon-skinned command tent blended itself into the bleak landscape outside the dead city. He threw the door-flap aside, exited, and strode across the flash-melted blackstone. He left Hassam, his second-in-command, in charge of the search for Vora Mbuntu's lost wreath and headed for the tent sheltering the extra bloodhound beasts they'd brought with them by galloping wagon in a bone-jarring night ride.

  The bloodhounds' noses were useless in their search for the Stitchlife's wreath. Everywhere they sniffed, they smelled nothing but Vora Mbuntu's blood. The wreath had no smell besides her – nothing to distinguish it from the ruins that she'd covered in her scent. If they were going to find the wreath, Fin Singh told his second-in-command, it would be with eyes. So Fin Singh left Hassam in the tent, wearing a witch-bone helm, searching with copper-blood eyes as the hounds pawed through the city's rubble and ruin looking for the wreath and stolen Sugar Music.

  Fin Singh enjoyed the thought of Hassam searching for something he'd never find. Vora Mbuntu's wreath wasn't in the city. Not anymore. He was sure of it.

  While his second-in-command had been immersed in the chase, Fin Singh sent a single, helm-bound hound down into the Stitchlife's hidey-hole. He saw with its eyes, smelled with its nose, and tasted with its tongue when it entered her abandoned lair.

  Vora Mbuntu's wreath was nowhere to be found, but he discovered something unexpected – a single word scratched on the wall, written in block letters – 'MOLLY'. Once he saw the telltale quality of the handwriting, he knew it was written by a child, a little girl. There had been a little girl in the shelter with Vora.

  And now, she had the wreath. And Sugar Music.

  He made the bloodhound scratch the name off the wall with its claw-footed paws, and kept the secret for himself. The wreath and Sugar Music were being carried somewhere by a little girl named Molly.

  He knew Vora Mbuntu had stolen his own mnemonic construct from the Archive, and the fire that burned in the 'Fills to the South was just the sort of trick it would use to cover Molly's scent.

  Fin Singh commandeered a pack of bloodhounds, sampled their cells, and bound them to his own helm. He sent his pack through the fire-scorched 'Fills to hunt the girl down. There was a still a chance, he thought – a chance to find what the Stitchlife had stolen without Vargas Hale knowing about it.

  Chapter Eight

  Sacrifice

  As Molly walked, the winds blew from the North and drove the fire behind her. The smoke seared her lungs and made her eyes water, and she was glad when Fin Singh's ghost told her to change direction.

  “This fire should help cover your tracks nicely,” he said as he strolled next to her. “There's a river bordering the eastern edge of the 'Fills. We'll go East for a while until we reach it. Until dark, I should think. Then, we can go South again.”

  They made their way together across the rolling, pock-marked hummocks of the 'Fills. Vora's ghost appeared again and explained to Molly how the bald spots in the grasses and the concavities that scarred them were from people digging up what had been buried here many centuries ago.

  Molly reached the banks of the great, gray-green river by nightfall, just as Fin Singh's construct had predicted, and by that time, the scars of excavations far outnumbered the patches of remaining grass, and the hills were more sun-baked mud than anything else.

  At the river she turned South again and walked along the muddy banks, close to the water. The ground there was little more than water-soaked silt and sediment that rose and sucked at the soles of her soft, wasp-spun boots. She slogged on for hours before she stopped, walked away from the river, halfway up a stinking mound, and sat down with the stubbornness and resolve of a jerkline mule that had gone as far as it would go.

  Vora's ghost manifested itself before her, stepped forward without leaving any footprints in the mud, and said, “Eat. We have a long way to go.”

  “Where?” Molly asked, for the first time wondering what was to the South and where she was going.

  “We're going to a city. One of the few.”

  “Is it like where I came from?” Molly asked.

  “It's much bigger than the walled town where you came from, Molly.”

  “Why are we going there?” As she pulled a pouch of Vora's cultured proteins and yeasts from the tiny sack she carried, the General appeared, too.

  “There,” the General said, “you will find someone for us. Someone to help us.”

  “A witch? Like Vora?”

  “Yes,” Fin Singh's ghostly construct added, “And there will be other things there we need you to do. For Sugar Music. For Vora.” He smiled, and it gave Molly a chill. “I have a plan.”

  *****

  Molly walked for hours more until the sun hung red over the hills. The ghosts kept to themselves until Molly caught sight of figures setting up a camp for the night around the bend of the great gray-green river, just beyond a set of mounds not more than a quarter-mile away. Fin Singh's ghost told her not to go any closer.

  They wore rotting cloth and strange, dirty, blue material, tied at the waist with braided rope made of the same stuff. Their flapping tents were made of it, too. Molly could smell them from far away. The people in Little Falls had been dirty, but not like this. These people all smelled with the sulfurous stink of the freshly dug 'Fills, and they all had an oily film smeared over them that made their skin look like wrinkled and stained leather.

  “Who are they?” Molly asked.

  “They're Zabbas,” Fin Singh's ghost said “They dig in the 'Fills for whatever they can find and float it downriver on that.” His ghostly hand pointed to a crude barge, no more than a long, wide lash-raft, piled high with twisted rust-metal and tied to a stake driven deep into the muddy banks. “It's a barge,” he said. “And you're going to steal it.”

  Molly waited and watched. All of the ghosts agreed that she was fast enough to steal the barge whenever she wanted it, but they told her it would be easier in the end if the Zabbas didn't give chase and follow it downriver, so she waited for the scavengers to sleep.

  *****

  The fire turned the North edge of the 'Fills into a landscape of low, rolling, charred hummocks, and Fin Singh's bloodhounds could smell nothing there but combustion and ash. There was no trail to follow with nose or eye or probing, tasting tongue, but their master had sent them South, so South they went through the char and ash until they found a trail.

  The bloodhounds almost missed it. It was only fifty-feet-long – traces of a single, human scent preserved on an island of grass and mud the fire had burned around and somehow missed. The trail pointed East.

  On the muddy banks of the gray-green river, they found the scent trail again. They swirled their tongues in the mud and tasted it, too. It was strong and fresh, and they followed it for miles.

  Then, the winds changed to blow from the South and carried the scent to them so strongly that all the bloodhounds pulled their noses from the dirt, stood up on their hind legs in the thin moonlight, and breathed the smell in deeply. They salivated and growled with anticipation. Then they fell down on all fours again and bounded across the 'Fills as fast as they could.

  *****

  Darkness fell, and the Zabbas sank bamboo poles into the 'Fills. They touched fire to them, and green methane flames burned out the ends. Their gas torches burned for hours as the Zabbas' camp fell to sleep. Molly lay still, hiding in the hummocks and waiting for Fin Singh's ghost to tell her it was safe to slip through their riverbank camp quietly and steal the Zabbas' barge.

  The sole sentry sat on the same mound where the gas fires burned. The General said that with his night-vision ruined, he could see nothing beyond the green gaslight's glow. Fin Singh said that she should kill him quietly to be sure she got away cleanly. Molly was about to say she didn't want to, but Vora's ghost cut her off.

  “The wreath can sense the sparks of other minds in the hills, Molly.” Molly looked left and right and saw nothing. “Behind you,” Vora said.

  When the first of the Hale Guard's bloodhounds appeared between two scarred hillocks close by, its haunches were high, and its nose was pressed close to the ground. Its paws made no noise in the stinking mud, but between the alarmed and rapid beats of Molly's heart in her ear, she heard the sound of the air being sucked in and blown out of its wide, half-canine nose. She froze at the horrific sight of it. More followed. The first of them saw her, rose on its grotesque rear legs, and let out a howl to its pack brothers.

  All three constructs shouted at her to rise and run for the barge.

  Molly ran over the top of the hill she'd been hiding behind, over another, and into the Zabbas' camp. Their gas torches still burned, and she saw more bloodhounds were already there. All around her in the green, methane glow, frenzied nightmare beasts sank their teeth into human-shaped bulges trapped under collapsed tents held fast by the weight of their attackers. As she ran through the terrible scene, they all moved so slowly that they looked like sculptures, like the Red-Cloaked Rider's men had when she and the General killed them in her coma dreams. Molly realized time had slowed down for her, just like when the cups and the spoons Vora threw at her had hung in the air between them for so long.

  The three ghosts were all that kept pace with Molly's mind, and they pointed towards the barge, yelling, “Run! Run! Run!”

  Molly ran through the horrors of the writhing, blue tarps and the beasts on top of them. Blood squirted and spurted through the tooth-torn tears to hang in the green glow air as she ran.

  She reached the river in a heartbeat. Splashing into the waist deep water slowed her down, but she reached the safety of the barge and pulled herself up out of the water. She looked back at the bloodhounds and the Zabbas. Jaws that had been reaching for throats were now clamped around them. Blood that had been a tight spurt hanging in the air was now spreading wide into spatter. All of the Zabbas that weren't already dead or being ripped to shreds were running towards her. Molly realized they were running to the barge, hoping to escape. “Cut the rope,” Fin Singh's ghost told her.

  “But some of them might make it to the barge.”

  “Waiting for them is too dangerous. The bloodhounds are everywhere. Cut the rope.”

  Molly cut the mooring line and watched the terrible scene and the look on the doomed Zabbas' faces as the barge floated away and the fast current carried it downriver.

  *****

  Molly walked around the makeshift barge and pushed a long, bamboo pole at the gray-green river's muddy bottom to keep them from drifting towards the banks. The General followed her and looked out over the river and the tarnished silver, moonlit landscape passing on either side. The bloodhounds had padded down the river's banks after them for hours, but they were gone now.

  “Why'd they stop chasing us?” Molly asked.

  “Because whoever wears the helm they're bound to decided they already know where we're going.”

  They drifted in silence for several minutes while the mosquitoes bit her, and Molly let them. “Three hundred years ago,” the General said, “we used rafts like this in the Delaware Archipelago during the campaign against the Lees.” The tone of his voice had changed, and Molly knew he was telling her a story and that she shouldn't interrupt. “That was a long campaign,” the General said. “No allies for most of it. No golem giants or witch-bred beasts to do the fighting for us, either. Not back then. Just muskets and sabers then. And men. But never enough of them.

  “We heard there were Jovite survivors from the routing the Lees gave them, and we went from island to island looking for friends to swell our fighting ranks. On one island we found three hundred Jovites hiding from the Lee Militias. They'd been hiding for months. They had powder and ball, but there was nothing to eat on those islands, and all of them were weakened with hunger – in no shape to fight. They said they were willing to fight if they just had enough food. They told us that on the next island over there were six hundred more Jovites that still had a little food, but had had enough of war.

  “I asked the leader of the first band of Jovites why they hadn't killed the second, larger group and taken their food so they might continue to fight. He said he'd sooner die than let war turn him into that kind of monster.

  “A good man, but no General. He didn't understand Sacrifice.

  “We left them and paddled our rafts to the next island that night. We killed his six hundred friends, took what food they had, and gave it to the first band of Jovites we'd met. It gave them enough strength to march with us. They always knew where the food came from, and they hated me, but they hated the Lees more. They followed my banner all the way to Harpers Ferry, all the way to the end.

  “I tell you this story, Molly, because I know you didn't want to cut the barge's mooring line and leave the Zabbas to die any more than I wanted to kill the Jovites. But you had to.”

  “But.. I took their barge. If I didn't, then they might have lived. It's like I killed them.”

  “If you really want to look at it that way, then you could say that you first killed them when you hid nearby and drew the bloodhounds there. You killed them again when you stole their barge.” Molly began to cry. “But that's not a good way to look at it,” he said. “That's not what happened. None of them were going to make it to the barge, Molly. The Hales' bloodhounds killed the Zabbas, not you.”

  “But Vora made me witch-sped – faster than the bloodhounds. I could have killed them like you taught me to. With the knife. But I didn't. I ran away. Just like I di-”

  “Your goal now isn't to save a few Zabbas. It's to help millions of people by making Vora's cities a reality. What you carry in your wreath is too precious to be risked saving a few scavengers. Sugar Music has the potential to change the world. It's too important to be risked like that. Yes, you could have saved the Zabbas, but you didn't. Instead, you stole their barge and left them to die. I know that seems ugly, and you might hate yourself for it, but sometimes, Molly, if you want to help people, then you have to do ugly things... things people might even hate you for doing. But you do them no matter how it makes you feel. This, Molly, is Sacrifice.”