Read Chapter 18: The Fallen Astrolabe

The impact of Henri's body against his drove the breath from Fournier's lungs. They hit hard earth together, and Fournier tasted dust, felt a sharp grind of metal on stone beneath his ribs. The astrolabe. He scrambled, clawing at Henri's weight, but Henri held him pinned, both hands on Fournier's shoulders.

"Be still," Henri growled. "Look. Look."

Fournier stopped struggling. The vision of Armand had evaporated—the Parisian boulevard, the lamplighters, the smell of horse-dung and rain-soaked cobbles, all of it gone. What remained was a pale expanse of bone-dry earth, the sky a sullen brass overhead, and the other two men watching him with expressions he could not read through the grit filming their eyes. Bakary stood with his rifle half-raised, and Djimon had gone to one knee as if the ground had shifted beneath him.

The heat wind had stopped. The silence that followed was worse.

"What did you see?" Henri asked. His voice was hoarse.

"Armand. By the Pont Neuf. He was—he was waving to me." Fournier swallowed. The taste of chalk coated his teeth. "He wanted me to catch up. He was walking toward the water."

"You were walking toward nothing. Another thirty paces and you'd have gone into that ravine." Henri nodded past Fournier's shoulder. He didn't look. He didn't want to see it.

"Let me up."

Henri held him a moment longer, his grip hard through the wool of Fournier's jacket, and then released him. Fournier rolled off the astrolabe with a lurch of horror he could not fully name. It lay face-down in the chalk-dust, its brass rim caught the wan light. He reached for it with trembling hands and turned it over.

The crack ran through the glass like a bolt of pale lightning, from the outer rim to the center where the pinion should have been. It cleaved the face in two, splitting the engraved degrees and the hairline of the meridian line. A single shard had broken free and rattled loose inside the housing.

No. No.

"Give it to me," he said, though he was already holding it. He wanted to say something else. He wanted to say *fix it*.

"Fournier." Henri sat back on his heels. "You understand that instrument doesn't work."

"It did. It was working." Fournier turned it in his hands, listening for the tick of its mechanism. There was only the shard's rattle. "Armand calibrated it himself. He taught me to use it when I was nineteen years old, in the rue d'Ulm, in his study. He had a brass armillary on the windowsill and he would—"

"You've told me this." Henri's voice was careful, the way one speaks to a man on a ledge. "Many times. But you've also told me it was your father's, passed down on his deathbed. Which is true?"

Fournier opened his mouth. The answer sat there, just beyond his grasp, like a word on the tip of the tongue. He could picture the study. The armillary. The smell of Armand's tobacco. But the face of the man who had handed him the astrolabe blurred between two images—one with a graying beard, one with a sharp and youthful curiosity—and then both dissolved into a wash of heat.

He did not answer.

Henri nodded as if this were confirmation enough. "It's a relic. Not a tool. You carry it because it belonged to him, and because you believe if you find him at the lake, you can give it back. But look at it now." He inclined his head toward the instrument. "It's a broken thing. Like a prayer book with the pages torn out. You cling to the shape of it."

"I cling to the truth of it." Fournier heard his own voice as if from far away. "Armand is there, Henri. I know it. I can feel it."

"What you feel," Henri said, "is what this land puts into you. I've said it before and I'll say it again. Your mentor is not waiting for you at some lake. He is in the ground beneath our feet. He is in the dust we breathe. He marched this same path with the same certainty, and this country swallowed him whole, and I will not let it do the same to you."

The crack in the glass seemed to deepen as Fournier stared at it. The astrolabe had always been a thing of precision. Of regular arcs and measured increments. Now it held a fracture, and through that fracture he could see the layers of the instrument's construction—the rough underside of the rete, the dulled points where the pin rode against the plate. It was suddenly just an object. A crafted thing of brass and glass, no more magical than a cooking pot.

"Bakary says the wind carries dust of the dead," Henri went on. "If that's true—and I've seen enough in this country to stop doubting him—then what you saw, that man on the bridge, was not Armand. It was a picture made of ground bone and memory, put there to pull your feet off a cliff. That is what this place does. It does not kill you with fever or snakebite. It kills you with the shape of a loved one's face."

Djimon stirred. He had not looked at the astrolabe, but at the distant horizon, his face slack. "He is right," he said, in a voice dry and thin. "The pools—the sound of water beneath the earth—there is a mind in this land. It speaks to whatever you have lost."

Fournier's hands convulsed around the instrument. "Then why speak to me of Armand and not of my mother? Why not show me—" He stopped. His mother's face had been fading since the pools. He had not remembered, until this moment, that he had forgotten it. The horror of that realization broke against the hollow calm of the earth, and was absorbed almost instantly.

He wondered if a cry had been inside him, and whether the land had swallowed it.

"Put it away," Henri said. His voice had softened almost to tenderness. "Carry it if you must. But do not let it carry you. The instrument is broken, Fournier. What it measured is gone. And if you cannot trust your own eyes or your own instruments, you must trust us." He glanced at Bakary, then Djimon. "We are all you have left. Not the map. Not the dead. We are the only things this land has not taken."

The wind picked up again, faint and warm, and Fournier felt it brush past his face like a hand checking his pulse. He slid the astrolabe into the folds of his coat. The shard rattled as he moved, a small and constant reminder.

He stood. His knees ached and his palms were raw from the fall. The ravine Henri had mentioned lay thirty paces to the west, a black gash in the pale earth. He had seen no ravine. He had seen cobblestones underfoot and the iron railings of the bridge. The seam between what the land showed and what the land kept from him was widening, and he could no longer find the stitch to hold it closed.

"Which direction do we march?" Henri asked.

Fournier looked at the sky, but the sun had no position he could parse. He looked at the shadows, but they ran in directions that disagreed with one another. He felt for the map inside his jacket; it was there, but when he tried to summon its lines in his mind, they blurred the way Armand's face blurred, the way his mother's face blurred, the way the memory of his sister—if he had had a sister—blurred.

He saw Bakary watching him. The rifle in his hands was pointed at the ground, but his eyes were not.

"Toward the lake," Fournier heard himself say. The shape of the words felt borrowed, like a coat hung on a hook and taken down again. "The land slopes westward. The water collects where the ground falls. We'll descend until we reach it."

"That's not an answer," Henri said quietly.

"It's the only answer I have." Fournier began to walk, and after a moment the others fell in behind him. He did not turn around. He did not want to see whether the ravine had been real, or whether it still yawned there behind him, waiting to prove which of his two worlds was the hollow one.

The shard rattled against the side of the astrolabe with every step.