With a scream wholly unequal to the task of expressing what she felt Yaz turned and hurried to the bridge. Thurin was still standing on the ice just at the start of the arc that spanned the ravine. He stood with his feet inches from the edge, still hunched and leaning forward, staring into the nothingness beneath him. Yaz reached him and tried to bundle him forward without knocking him over or unbalancing him into the fall. She found his body as stiff as if it had been frozen, every muscle rigid.

Zeen was gone. Zeen! Vanished like Petrick into the dark fall. She tried to force it from her mind but the image of Erris’s hand clutching only torn skins refused to go.

Over the whooping of the Tainted rapidly closing on the bridge Yaz imagined she could hear Theus’s mocking laughter. She’d lost her brother despite all her efforts. Thurin was a broken-minded ruin that probably couldn’t feed or clean himself, and all she had was Kao, who she felt bound to only by a grudging sense of duty.

“Yaz!” Erris had caught her up again, forcing Kao ahead of him onto a bridge that they had once worried might not hold them singularly and now held four of them.

A spear sliced the air between them, shockingly fast, swallowed by the chasm. Yaz hadn’t seen it coming, hadn’t even seen it carried among the Tainted. She shouted again, a mix of rage, fear, and frustration, then grabbed Thurin to bodily manhandle him along the bridge. At the same time she willed her orbiting star to blaze, hoping to drive back any Tainted who might join them on the bridge. Behind her, panicked or hurt by the starlight, Kao redoubled his efforts to break free, even if it meant leaping from the bridge.

Thurin remained as if frozen, just a deep moan escaping him as she tried to carry him forward. He seemed unreasonably heavy and her efforts to move him slackened the light that she could drive from the star. With a grunt she managed to shift him a few inches across the slick ice. She saw something at the corner of her eye, a pale something where nothing should be. Expecting a spear to impale her at any moment she allowed herself a glance.

“Zeen!”

There, yards below them in the darkness, Zeen was rising. He fought it, twisting and spitting with fury, but foot by inexorable foot he was rising from the chasm. Suddenly Yaz understood. Thurin had hold of him. Thurin had reached out with his ice-work as Zeen fell and had taken hold of the water that makes up most of any person. What it had cost him Yaz couldn’t know but she did know better than to break his concentration. Instead she turned her focus to the star and flared its light back at those Tainted just gaining the bridge. Erris, lacking any space to get past her and Thurin, waited with Kao, all of them exposed to the next spear to come hissing from the dark.

Fortunately weapons of any kind were rare among the Tainted and if there were spears being held back in the gloom then the owners proved loath to throw them out over the chasm. In battle with the Broken it seemed that the Tainted must rely on the reluctance of former friends and family to skewer loved ones. That and the fact that they knew no one would follow them into the black ice.

To a rising chorus of howls Zeen came level with the bridge. Yaz knelt and hauled him up, getting a tight grip on his shoulder despite his clawing hands. A moment later he had his teeth in the meat of her forearm. She yelled in surprise. The pain was astonishing, and the fear that he would actually tear free and devour a chunk of her flesh overwhelmed her. She struck out in panic, pounding his head. Teeth slipped from blood-slick flesh and Zeen went limp, sliding soundlessly from the icy bridge.

“No!” But somehow Thurin had the boy’s wrist and was dragging him onwards.

Quickly they followed Thurin across and within twenty paces were back in the cavern where they had questioned Etrix seemingly an age ago but in reality less than a day earlier.

“Is he alright?” Yaz hurried to Thurin’s side to inspect Zeen. He hung bonelessly in Thurin’s grasp with blood running from his nose. A deep pang of guilt skewered her but as she reached toward him his eyes flickered open, showing not the near-white irises of the Ictha but crimson discs, and he lunged for her, jaw snapping shut just shy of her fingertips.

Yaz pulled her arm back, seeing for the first time the dark blood welling from the set of tooth-shaped holes Zeen had put there.

“If you can drive the demons out then do it quickly.” Thurin spoke with a rusty voice as if words had become strangers to him in just the short while since his capture. “They’re both dangerous until you do it.”

Yaz nodded. This was the part she had been dreading. If she failed here what would she do with them? Could she leave, and abandon her brother to the hell he had been enduring since his drop? Would death be cleaner? Or would she die trying and still leave him demon-ridden?

Thurin pinned Zeen to the rock while Yaz approached with her star in hand. The orb had grown noticeably smaller, her fist almost encompassing it. “How did they cure you?” Yaz asked Thurin, hesitating over “cure,” since they had left Theus wrapped around his bones.

“They staked me out on a bed of stardust and showered more on me. I felt the demons burn and die inside me. But it took days. We need something quicker if Pome and his hunter are still after us. Is Arka still fighting them?”

“I don’t know.” Yaz shook her head, shamed that she had given Arka no thought in an age. “How can I do it faster?”

“My mother said the demons could be driven into an extremity and cut out . . . or off.”

“Cut off?” Yaz’s blood ran cold.

“A finger . . . or a hand.” Thurin didn’t meet her gaze. Held in his grip Zeen stirred and started to howl while Kao began to roar and to struggle against Erris once more.

“Here.” Erris tossed something down beside her. “Tie them.”

Yaz picked up the rope. A cable of some kind, smooth and shiny like old leather, something from the city. She bound Kao’s hands and patted her hip for a knife.

“Let me.” Erris released Kao briefly and broke the rope between his hands. “There.”

Yaz took it, blinking. She saw that the rope had a metal core, an orangey red; her mind supplied the word “copper,” one of Erris’s. She tied Kao’s ankles as Erris held him on his knees, then she bound her brother similarly. He fell silent once she’d secured his hands, watching her instead with baleful eyes. She stood back to consider him.

“I didn’t rescue my brother to maim him!” The idea of cutting Zeen’s hand off turned Yaz’s stomach. “There has to be a better way.”

“Sometimes a clean cut is the kindest way.” Thurin let go of Zeen’s head and got to his feet. “Some cankers have to be carved out before they spread.” He led Yaz closer to the ravine where her starlight would keep the Tainted at bay.

“There may be another way.” Thurin spoke in a hushed tone so the others wouldn’t hear. “Eular told my mother that if you could get the demons to stay still and then hit them with a massive star they would be destroyed.” His voice lacked certainty. “She never really knew what he meant at the time. She didn’t have a star anything like the one you’ve got and she couldn’t have held it if she had. But you could do it.” He frowned. “It would be difficult though. If you’re using the star to drive them and trap them in an extremity they’d slide away while you were readying yourself for the final strike . . .”