The cable car to Dawai was not like the one that had brought them to Merz.
The one that had brought them to Merz had been a working boat — salt-stained, crowded, smelling of fish and unwashed travelers. This was something else entirely. The cable car cabin was lacquered black, trimmed with brass fittings that caught the morning light, and the engine that pulled them up the mountain ran on black ore — quietly, steadily, with none of the grinding effort she had expected from a machine hauling passengers up a mountainside. Saad stood at the window and watched the ground fall away beneath them and tried not to think too hard about what it meant that a kingdom which had been a scattering of mountain villages two years ago could already build something like this.
Behind her, Suad was eating an orange.
"So," he said, appearing at the window beside her, "what do you know about Dawai?"
"What the reports say," she replied.
"Which is?"
She kept her eyes on the valley falling away below them.
"Five years ago it was twelve villages and a mountain. The Black Orb changed everything overnight. Now they have a capital, a functioning government, a trade surplus, and a cable car that shouldn't exist yet."
"Shouldn't exist yet," Suad repeated. "That's an interesting way to put it."
"Countries don't grow this fast without something cracking underneath," she said. "The wealth is real. The institutions are new. The people are happy now because everything is moving upward. The question is what happens when it stops."
Suad was quiet long enough that she glanced at him. He was looking at the valley below too, orange peel in his hand, expression unreadable behind the blindfold.
"They smell like hope," he said finally. "Countries that smell like hope are the ones worth worrying about."
Saad didn't answer. But she didn't disagree either, which was close enough.
* * *
The cold came before the capital did.
It rolled off the mountain in a clean dry wave the moment they stepped off the cable car onto the landing platform — nothing like the damp chill of Merz, this was sharp and bright, the kind that made the inside of your nose feel new. The capital sat at the peak, in a region of the world that was warm enough that snow was not the problem, but the altitude made up for it with a cold that was personal and immediate.
Suad set his bag down, pulled out his cloak, and wrapped it around himself with the air of a man who had planned for exactly this.
Saad watched him. They were soldiers. Soldiers did not advertise weakness by bundling up against a bit of mountain air. She had been trained in worse. She had endured worse. She opened her mouth to make this point.
A gust came through.
She shivered. Once. Involuntarily.
She closed her mouth, crouched down, opened her bag, and found her jacket. She put it on without looking at her brother. She could feel his gaze on the back of her head like a physical thing, steady and full of everything he was choosing not to say. She tightened her buckles. She straightened up.
She would take this to her grave.
"Are you perhaps the pilgrims from Namo?"
The man standing a few paces away was middle-aged, brown-skinned, black hair tucked beneath a turban that covered half his head. He wore the traditional Dawai gown — a long garment in deep blue and gold — and the material did not look thick enough to justify the complete absence of discomfort on his face. Saad found this unreasonable.
"Ah, yes," she said, still fastening her last buckle.
"No problem at all, please be comfortable. I am Asil — your guide throughout the capital. Welcome to Dawai Kingdom. You have arrived at a remarkable time, as the kingdom is currently in an extraordinary period of growth and innovation — the cable car alone you arrived on was built only eight months ago using the second generation of ore-powered engines, a significant improvement over the first generation which had certain stability concerns now fully resolved, and the palace which we are walking toward has been expanded twice since—"
"Shouldn't we get moving?" said Saad.
A pause. Asil's smile held. Something behind it adjusted.
"Of course," he said pleasantly, and began walking.
Suad fell into step beside her. She could feel his amusement like a warm draft on her left side and chose to ignore it completely.
* * *
The palace was not what Saad had expected.
She had formed a picture from the reports — large, newly built, functional in the way that new things often were before they had time to become themselves. What she found instead was color. The roofs were tiled in deep red and orange, covered in traditional Dawai carvings that curved and interlocked in ways that took a moment to fully see. Jewels had been set into the designs at intervals, not heavily but precisely, so that the surface shifted as you moved past it. The floors were shiba stone — pale and luminous, the joints between them nearly invisible — and they caught the mountain sun and held it.
It was beautiful in the way that things are beautiful when the people who made them loved what they were doing.
The courtyard was organized chaos. Inventors and merchants had descended on Dawai from every direction — some with genuine brilliance, some with obvious desperation, most with something in between. A man near the gate was demonstrating a machine that folded fabric automatically and was currently eating his sleeve. Two women argued in three languages over technical drawings. A boy of perhaps ten stood near the main entrance holding a wooden model against his chest with both arms, his expression one of complete seriousness.
Saad noticed the boy but kept walking. She had things to arrange.
"When can we get our passes certified?" asked Suad, watching a man try to convince the gate guards that his invention made queuing obsolete and therefore he should not have to do it.
"Right away," said Asil, his smile becoming more effortful. "Pilgrims from Namo are our highest priority."
Saad looked at the line. It was very long. The people at the back of it had the expression of people who had been there since before sunrise and intended to remember this.
"When can we meet Ashmar?" asked Suad.
Asil's smile didn't waver, but his eyes moved — a small, careful shift, like a man choosing a different road without appearing to turn.
"The great discoverer is quite occupied at present. But the king will see you right away."
"Busy doing what, exactly?" Suad pressed.
"The man who changed the world," said Asil smoothly, "finds that the world keeps presenting him with new things to change. Now — shall we?"
Saad glanced at Suad. He glanced back. The subject of Ashmar, it seemed, was not a door Asil intended to open.
They let it pass. For now.
The king received them in a hall that smelled of cedar and new stone, and he was genuinely warm — the kind of warmth that came from someone who had not yet learned to be performative about it. He gave them honors, a formal welcome, a place to sleep. He spoke about the pilgrimage with real respect. He asked about Namo with real curiosity.
Saad liked him. That surprised her.
She liked him less when she walked back through the courtyard afterward and saw the faces of the people whose audiences had been canceled to accommodate them. The inventor with the sleeve-eating machine. The two women with their drawings. The long line, still standing, two hours shorter on patience and no closer to the front.
She kept her eyes ahead and said nothing. There was nothing useful to say.
* * *
Asil had arranged their rooms for the night, and left them with directions to the dining hall and an offer to escort them anywhere they wished to go in the morning. Saad thanked him. She waited until his footsteps had faded down the corridor. Then she turned to Suad.
"Ashmar's house," she said.
"I already asked someone," he said, and produced a folded piece of paper from his pocket. "Down the mountain, near the old village center. Forty minutes on foot."
She took the paper. She looked at it. She handed it back.
"Let's go."
The house was easy to find and impossible to enter.
Not because of guards — there were none, which was itself strange for the home of the man who had handed the kingdom its fortune. Not because of locks, though the door was bolted. It was impossible to enter because no one was there. The windows were dark. The small garden at the front had been recently tended — the soil was turned, a few new cuttings planted — but the house itself had the particular stillness of a place whose occupant had been absent long enough for the air inside to settle into its own habits.
They stood at the gate for a moment.
"He lives alone?" Saad asked.
"That's what I was told," said Suad. He was looking at the upper windows. "No family. No servants. Just him and whatever he does in there."
Saad looked at the garden. The new cuttings. The turned soil.
"Someone tends this."
"Maybe him. Maybe a neighbor." Suad tilted his head. "Either way, he's not here."
She pushed the gate open anyway and walked to the front door. She knocked. The sound went into the house and came back changed — the particular echo of empty rooms, of space with nothing in it to absorb the sound.
No answer.
She walked around the side of the house slowly, not trying to enter, just looking. The windows on the ground floor showed a workroom — a long table covered in notes and instruments, shelves of jars containing dark material that was probably ore samples, a chair pushed back at an angle as if someone had stood from it in a hurry and not yet returned. A single lamp sat on the table, unlit.
Everything in the room had the quality of work paused rather than finished.
"He'll be back," said Suad from behind her. He had followed her around without her noticing, which she was used to. "Whatever he's doing, he left expecting to return."
"The guide didn't want us to find him," Saad said.
"No."
"Why?"
Suad was quiet for a moment, looking through the same window she was.
"Because some things," he said, "are only valuable while they're hidden."
Saad looked at the unlit lamp. The pushed-back chair. The notes spread across the table in a hand she couldn't read from here.
She didn't know what Ashmar had found in that mountain, beyond the ore and the orb. She didn't know what he was doing now, or where he was, or why the guide's smile had shifted the moment his name was spoken. She filed all of it away in the part of her mind that kept things for later, and turned away from the window.
"Come on," she said. "We're losing the light."
* * *
He was still there when they came back through the courtyard.
The boy with the wooden model, the serious dark eyes, the best clothes that were slightly too large in the shoulders. The line had moved, the courtyard had thinned, but he was standing in exactly the same spot he had occupied hours ago, holding his invention against his chest with both arms.
Saad stopped walking.
She wasn't sure why. She had a dinner to get to and a day to account for and no particular reason to stand in a cooling courtyard talking to a child she didn't know. But there was something in the way he was standing — the absolute stillness of someone who has decided to outlast the situation — that made her feet stop making progress.
"What is that?" she asked, nodding at the model.
He looked up at her. His mouth opened. A beat passed.
"It's a water carrier," he said at last. His voice was careful and very deliberate, like someone reading aloud in a language they were still learning to trust. "For the mountain villages. The ones that don't have the ore yet. You put it here—" he shifted the model to show her a channel carved precisely into the wood, "—and the snowmelt runs down without anyone having to carry it. The angle has to be exact or it doesn't work. I calculated it."
Saad looked at the model properly. The channel was clean. The joints were tight. The angle, as far as she could judge without instruments, was exact.
"How old are you?"
He held up both hands. Ten fingers.
"You made this yourself?"
A nod. Very serious.
She crouched so she was level with him. Behind her she was aware of Suad stopping, of the cooling air, of the courtyard emptying around them.
"Show the king," she said. "Not the guards. Ask for the king directly. Tell them a pilgrim from Namo sent you."
He stared at her.
"They won't let me," he said.
"Probably not today," she said. "But come back every day. Keep asking. Someone will get tired of saying no before you get tired of asking."
She stood. He was still watching her with those serious dark eyes, the model pressed to his chest, and she had the sudden unwelcome feeling that she was going to remember this face for a long time.
"What's your name?" he asked.
"Saad."
He nodded once, filing it carefully.
Then he turned back toward the entrance and took his place at the end of the re-forming line, model held steady, chin level, as if he had simply been waiting for permission to continue.
Saad watched him for a moment. Then she turned and walked toward the dining hall, and Suad fell into step beside her.
"He's going to spend years trying to get that meeting," Suad said.
"Maybe," she said.
"And by the time he does, the kingdom will be completely different."
Saad thought about that. About how fast everything here was moving — the palace, the machines, the shiba stone floors laid in fourteen months. How a ten-year-old could grow up calculating water channels and end up in a world his childhood had no name for yet.
"Let's eat," she said.
He didn't argue. But she caught him glancing back once at the boy, still standing at the end of the line in the thinning courtyard, model pressed to his chest, waiting.
* * *
The room they had been given was small and clean and smelled of cedar. Saad sat on the edge of the bed unlacing her boots while Suad stood at the window, looking out over the capital.
The city below was still lit and moving. New buildings half-finished, their scaffolding dark against the evening sky. Lights threading between them — people still working, still building, still going because there was too much to do and the days weren't long enough.
"It's a good place," Suad said.
"Yes," she said.
A pause. Below them the city kept moving, kept building, kept going.
She set her boots aside and lay back on the bed and looked at the ceiling. She thought about the boy. About the water carrier, the calculated angle, the ten fingers. She thought about the shiba stone floors and Asil's relentless voice and the king's genuine warmth. She thought about Ashmar's empty house — the unlit lamp, the pushed-back chair, the notes she couldn't read.
There was a lot she didn't understand about this place yet. That feeling was unfamiliar enough to sit with for a while.
"Get some sleep," Suad said from the window. "We have more to see tomorrow."
She closed her eyes.
"Don't tell me what to do," she said, and was asleep within minutes.