Hephaestus had an almost fractal sense of time. He experienced it at various scales, and acted differently on them all. He could wait for years and not become bored, impatient, or tired. At what humans would consider "normal" speed he could similarly reason, cause things to move or stop moving. And on the microsecond level, he could react to the most transient of events. Whether he could effect change to mitigate those events was of course dependent on what hardware he might be connected to, its physical distance from him, and its own intrinsic reaction speed, but he could ask for it. So he viewed Aloy's fall from the wire as taking what would seem like an age for a person, and he pondered the potential outcomes of all the possible courses of action he had at his disposal. Having first detected the activity of her Focus, and then partly hacked its protocols some time back, he had been able to monitor much of Aloy's communications and sensor data. Hep had been inclined to destroy Aloy if at all possible; after all, she had rendered him impotent, unable to manufacture new machines, and even had the gall to steal the ability to override them herself. Regrettably, this said impotence prevented him from actually being able to perform such a deed, so he was reduced to following her exploits as if he were viewing some fictional story unfold in front of him. But now, in this moment, he realised that if he allowed her to die, then the block on his control systems would never be lifted, and that therefore he needed to have her intact. She had fallen from 7 metres above the lake, and was a mere three centimeters from her certain death when Hephaestus send the network message to Cauldron Beta's power management system to shut down, and the massive sets of relays mercifully responded in milliseconds.

Aloy hit the water hard - not a huge drop, but flat, and enough to wind her. In that small time interval of impact, she had resigned herself to dying. It was not so much that she did not fear death; more that, no matter how serious her predicament, her skills had always been able to pluck her from the jaws of the cruellest fate. She trusted her ability to think and act rapidly, and so whenever she had some semblance of control, death was merely a possibility, never an inevitability. But now, having clung to a thread and had the thread cut, there was only gravity to argue with, and a lake loaded with the power of many furnaces, and mere fractions of a second to ponder. There was nothing more to be done, and so she accepted her fate.

The splash was larger than she had expected, and it sent ripples of pain up her back due to the flat landing on dense liquid. She gritted her teeth, awaiting the massive electric shock that would surely destroy her. But it never came. Acrid, salty water splattered into her mouth and eyes, the taste was awful - saline to the point of bitterness - and her corneas burned. It rapidly found its way into every cut, nick and graze on her skin too, and it was agonizing. But she did not sink. Instead, she bobbed almost ridiculously to the surface, held up by the super-saturated saline, coughing and retching but very much alive. She instinctively tried to swim, but due to the increased buoyancy it didn't work too well, so she paddled tamely to the shore through the almost oily liquid and stumbled out, gasping.

Aloy heard a sharp noise not too far away and looked up. The air shimmered for a second, and within a flash she had cued up her bow. With a twang, two Shock arrows flew into the centre of the scintillation. The Stalker dropped out of stealth mode and fell to the ground, stunned. She bounded over to the felled machine, grabbed her hunting knife as she ran, and drove it hard into the gap between its front legs and armoured carapace, screaming. It shuddered, and then lay still.

The other Stalker had been pinned to the ground by falling masonry, and then cloven almost in two by a sharp concrete reinforcement beam. It lay broken with its internals hanging out, trying desperately to move and failing. Not far away, Bavall lay directly where he had fallen. Blood was oozing from his mouth and his ears, and he was covered in plaster and brick dust. He looked up at Aloy in a distant fashion, did his best to lick his lips, and spoke hoarsely. "Sorry I was late, Huntress. I needed to find wire and it took - " he coughed blood " - too long."

Aloy looked at him pitifully. "It's okay. You did what you needed to. I thank you. Without your help I'd have died out there."

He nodded, painfully. "Did you find what we seek, Aloy?"

She smiled in a forced way, knowing very well that his life was draining from him. "Yes. Yes I did," she lied.

He smiled back. "Then my work is done here. Now you must return to Meridian with haste. As we discussed, you should leave me here to defend the lake against all those who wish to swim in it." His face lit up at his attempt at humour. "Go now, young lady. King Avad and the Sundom need you."

Aloy nodded in return. "Do you need ... anything?"

He replied stoically. "No, I'm good. May you always walk in the Sun, Aloy."

"May you always walk in the Sun, Bavall."

She stood up, choking back tears, bowed to him, and turned to run back to Meridian.

After the funeral, Avad had spent a long time sitting in his private quarters, watching the city go about its restoration work without saying anything, doing anything, eating anything or sleeping. The ceremony had been short, but poignant. He realised that he had not known Petra long. She was no childhood sweetheart with whom he had exchanged naive letters of undying love; she had been a woman who was strong enough to support him when he needed it, smart enough to give him wise counsel when he needed it, a suitably ferocious lover, an icon to the people, and a political means to an end. To have to say goodbye to her, so soon after he had said hello, was galling to him in so many ways he could hardly enumerate them. He knew that, in his absence, these moments of stunned indecision, Marad was running the show effectively enough. But making Meridian tick wasn't just about just getting by. It was about having a vision not only for the city but the lands beyond, about charisma and passion - two words that didn't sum him up at this moment in time. So he was taking a gamble. Taking the time to find his center of power once again, in the hope that the patience of people, other politicians and even his enemies didn't wear out and instigate a revolution. So far, it was not working. He sat with a random bottle of local wine from the cellar, sipping meekly at a glass of it, still dressed in the same black robes he had buried his would-be bride in, smelling of sweat and looking more like a bum than a king.

Aloy found him like this when she arrived back in the afternoon, nine days after her departure, and immediately felt quite afraid. She was going to have to deliver some bad news to a man who had already been kicked to the ground. One look at his expression filled her with more fear than she had ever felt, even when a Thunderjaw's hot exhaust breath had crisped loose hairs on her head. There was so much pleading in his eyes that she felt the desire to lie again. She had comforted Bavall with the same falsehood, why not the King?. She smiled at him mechanically, and immediately feared that it would be seen through and make things far worse. Luckily, Marad turned up whilst the first round of pleasantries were just beginning, and he drew Aloy aside to warn her.

"You have returned alone, Huntress. This is not the best sign we could have hoped for. Did it go well otherwise?"

"No Marad. It did not go well. Bavall didn't make it back. He died saving my skin."

"And the code?"

"Lost, Marad. Forever, as far as I can tell."

Marad's face sagged at the news. "That is poor tidings. I fear that the King would not greet this disclosure with reason or philosophy. He has depended upon it to turn the tide which has somehow risen up to try and drown him."

"I'm sorry Marad. I did my best. It's just that... It's just that the sands of time have submerged so many secrets down the ages, and this is one of them. I thought that the Ancients were smarter than that - dumb enough to destroy their own world, but in their own way clever. They always kept multiple copies of important things. You feel almost like a few years down the line you may stumble across one in some place you walked past every day and kick yourself that you didn't see it... sorry, I'm rambling. I guess I feel I've let everyone down."

"Nobody rational will blame you, Huntress. But rationality is in shorter supply in the region these days. This news is as dangerous as any weapon, Aloy. It could detonate the city and have repercussions way beyond its borders. I counsel that we sit on it for a day or so and deliberate what we can possibly do. But I warn you, time is short. Avad has called in allies from Sunfall as a fighting force to train new troops to replace those who fell. We cannot tarry long. Mutiny, war, civil war, anarchy: all are possible outcomes."

"So what should I do now?"

"Slip out to your chambers. Give the matter some thought. Speak with those who you trust can keep a secret. I will send for you when we need to break the news to the King. Meanwhile, I will manage his expectations as best I can."

Aloy put on a grim smile and left for her room. In her absence it had been immaculately tidied. The possessions she had not taken to Cauldron Beta had been arranged neatly on her shiny lacquered chest-of-drawers. Elisabet Sobek's globe took pride of place, its chain gleaming in the afternoon sun. She picked it up and held it, feeling its weight in her hands as if it were the actual Earth itself. "I won't give up on you yet," she whispered to it, and held it briefly to her lips.

She looked up, catching a glance at her reflection. The corrosive lake water had burnt her skin, and there were raw red and white scaly patches on her face, hands and legs. Salt crusted just about everything else, absurdly triggering memories of childhood falls in snow – although then they had been accompanied by the carefree laughter of childhood, not the crushing weight of responsibility she had been born into. She undressed - the clothes had glued themselves to her skin, bonded by dried saline, and she had to be super careful not to rip chunks out of herself. Her body was more bruise than healthy flesh, partly as a result of the falls, but also the toll of her cellular degradation continuing its inevitable path. "You're looking beaten up, girl," she chided herself.

Aloy had an uncharacteristically dreamless night, and awoke the next day feeling achy and still quite drained after the failed trip to the east. Some of her bruises had morphed from yellow to purple, and she looked quite oddly dappled in the early morning sunshine. Getting dressed hurt quite a lot, and she didn't even want to think about fixing her hair at this point in time. Huntress she may have been, but she was also a proud woman. To see herself degrade in this way was difficult, and she felt a sudden longing to be a little girl again, nestling in Rost's strong arms without a care in all the world, let alone the fate of it in her hands (or indeed the sensation of it slipping inexorably away). But that was soon countered with the sure knowledge that - if history had played out that way - she would not be alive here now to contemplate it. "Nothing makes much sense," she said to herself, and meant it.

The city seemed to be finding its feet again. The sounds of restoration had again resumed (a little diminished, she thought. Many construction workers had signed up to train for the military forces, which most likely explained that.) It was reassuring to her that at least this was something positive, that the process of rebuilding was still ongoing. It would have been a supremely bad sign if people were idle, unmotivated to do anything except fester until the pressure burst the sore. Looking from the balcony, there were many visible differences from the last time she had looked out. Scaffolds were in place in several locations, and builders were raising bricks and blocks on hoists to repair and even extend and improve the damaged sections, as well as construct entirely new facilities. The pain of recent events was less evident from afar, but she feared that close up, the story would be far less straightforward. Marad had implied strongly that her presence might not be so welcome amongst common folk, especially now that she had failed to return with the Voynich crack. So she was a virtual prisoner here, for the time being, with the verdicts of the masses and the unstable and unpredictable Sun-King still pending. It was very tempting just to slip out, to disappear without trace, run to the mountains and let the world get on with its self-destruction. She had nothing to lose now. Except her honour, and in the end that would die with her.

She almost slapped herself with anger at that thought. Rost had taught her much, and he had certainly instilled the idea that you never give up whilst there is still breath in your body and pulse in your veins. Since she certainly had these, there was definitely something she could achieve, and the first thing she could do was talk to Sylens. Because he always knew more than he let on. She checked one more time in the mirror, raised her hand to her face, prodding at the sore spots. She brushed the activation switch of her Focus, and the augmentations popped into view. Sylens' upgraded software highlighted cellular damage, and she could see immediately that it had both spread and deepened in her skin. He had said that continual exposure to the sun would aggravate it, so she had been careful to cover up as much as she could, but the journey east had taken its toll. Scanning the rest of her body, there were signs of the malaise starting in her arms, legs and hips. Also her mouth was sore and her gums prone to bleeding, and there were brightly coloured augmentations showing in her mouth. "Not so good," she remarked, and moved to flip the Focus to standby when something caught her eye.

The small globe that she had recovered from Elisabet Sobek's remains was sitting back where the palace maid had left it after cleaning. Usually inert objects did not produce any augmentation on her Focus display, but clearly, this trinket was not inert. The lines of latitude glowed, fine but brilliant threads of white that pulsed gently every few seconds. Curious, she picked up the item and rotated it in her hand, and as she did, she noticed that once in a while, one of several dots would flash, out of phase with each other. Why had she not seen this before?

She quickly switched on the comms. "Sylens!" she snapped. "I've found something - it's probably nothing, but it's definitely something. I know that makes no sense but please pick up."

Sylens replied immediately, as if he had been waiting for her to make the call. "What is happening, Aloy?"

"Check this out Sylens," she exclaimed, holding the globe up by the chain and letting it slowly spin, like a real Earth.

"Pretty," he remarked.

Aloy's spirits fell at his dismissal of her find. "So what is it?"

"It's probably just a bauble, Aloy. Where did you come by this?"

"I found it on Elisabet Sobek's tomb, Sylens."

Sylens went quiet for a fraction too long, and gave away his sudden raised interest level. "Curious," he continued. "Let's see if we can probe what this is."

Aloy's Focus suddenly upped its power output. It quickly felt warm on her head. "Don't be alarmed, I have just increased the Focus' ability to see inside objects. It may get warmer yet -"

"May?" she interjected.

"Don't worry, it will not explode or burn out, provided I keep this short, so the less we talk, the more I can analyse."

It was almost as if the globe had been peeled. The outer surface had become translucent, and now she could see perhaps half a centimetre into the ornament. What she saw was a complex, dense set of ridges and channels that were packed in geometric patterns. Small amounts of energy were running through this matrix like rivulets of tiny beads. Sylens tweaked the energy again, and peered into another layer. It was very similar, again a multitude of mathematically precise channels pulsing to the beat of an as yet hidden drum.

Sylens was intrigued. "This is a highly compact device, Aloy. It is no trinket. It is capable of storing a considerable amount of information. I might hypothesise that Ms Sobek did not carry this as an affectation, but as an archive of vital data that perhaps she wished to pass on to a future generation. She probably did not trust Ted Faro with APOLLO, and this device - whilst it could not contain all the information, might store a vital subset of it."

"Including the key encryption for the Cauldron lock-outs?"

"It is possible, though speculative in the extreme. There's one more thing you may want to know. I have been doing some research of my own. 'Voynich' refers to an ancient code, or at least it was assumed that it was a code, nobody really knew. It was an ancient document that contained words and pictures which made no apparent sense. Some of the finest minds of the ancient world tried to determine if there was a hidden message in the manuscript, but all failed. Either it was a code so fiendish that none could unravel it..."

"...or it was just nonsense all along," finished Aloy. "Point taken. So what now? Can we find out if there is anything useful in the globe?"

"I will need some time. Since it would take too long to get the device to me, the simplest solution would be for you to remove your Focus and let me examine this globe remotely. If I may be so bold, Aloy -"

"Go on," she encouraged.

"- in your current predicament, stalling for time is the only course of action that you can sensibly make. This discovery legitimately buys you some breathing space. Make the most of it."

"Understood. Sylens -"

"Yes?"

"They know about you."

He sighed. "Yes, I am aware of that. I am also highly capable of defending myself. Do not worry for my sake, Aloy. They will not spare the person power to hunt me down at this point in time. But it does prevent me coming to you physically. I must carry on my work here. So let us make some haste. Come back in a few hours. I will report what I've found, but as you said, it may be nothing."

Aloy removed her Focus - it was warm to the touch - and placed it in front of the globe. It began to scan the object.

Sun-King Avad looked better than he had done the previous day, which made Aloy relax a little more. She and Marad were sitting with him around the dining table in his quarters, as he picked at a bunch of red grapes in a bowl. "So your journey was partly successful, Aloy?" he probed.

"It was. We have recovered an artefact that will assist us in our endeavours." She could barely believe that she was having to lie, to procrastinate in this way. And she hated it. But she also hoped she was doing it effectively, because if she weren't, if he sensed he was being misled, the consequences would be awful.

His eyes lit up. "So we have a key to open the Cauldrons?"

Aloy shook her head. "We don't know. We think it's possible, but the artefact is complicated and will require some time to understand."

"Can I see it?"

Marad interjected. "No Sire, it is currently under examination and so cannot be removed from its current location. But it appears to be a kind of palimpsest, in which ancient knowledge is piled upon knowledge. There is so much contained within it that it will take time to find out the nature and scope of what is contained within. Aloy's technology is now working on interpreting the contents."

Avad nodded. "How long will this take?"

Marad looked at Aloy, who shrugged. "We do not know, maybe days. Maybe longer."

Something changed in Avad's disposition, just a micro-shift of his muscles, but enough to worry both Aloy and his advisor. "Days? In days we could be picking ourselves from the rubble of Cauldron Rho's vengeance upon us. In days machines might march and raze our kingdom to the ground and we shall have no army except some rag-tag Oseram, disillusioned drunken Nora who don't know one end of a cannon from another, and our own troops who are either still traumatised after the attack on my - our - wedding, or a gang of trainees who have never seen combat."

Marad did his best to calm the anger rising in Avad. "Sun-King, there is every reason to think that Brin is as powerless to build a machine army as we are. And all he has now are his Nora followers, for I am sure that if he could send more of his beast-servants against us, he would have done so. We do have days, and we have an artefact he does not. It is us - you! - that has the upper hand, Sun-King Avad. Now you must show the patience you are famed for so we can discover what we need to do next. 'Days' we most certainly have."

Avad did not seem to be completely appeased by Marad's words. "You speak of certainty, yet here we find ourselves once more, pinning our future upon but a single hope. Can we do no better?"

Marad smiled comfortingly, though Aloy found herself staring at the red patches on the backs of her hands. "Sire we have hope where yesterday there was none. That is a thing to be welcomed, not a lowly insect to spit upon!"

Avad chewed a grape and stared into the distance. A flicker of a smile passed across his mouth. "You are right, Marad. I need to listen to you more, and not my mind's wayward rants. Carry on the work, and let me know when there is something to know. And - I apologize for not saying so sooner: Meridian once again thanks you, Aloy, for finding reason to welcome rather than dread another day.

"If I may ask, how is your health? You do seem to have sustained some punishment from your quest."

"I'm a little bruised and scraped, Avad, and I can't stop tasting salt, but it will heal," she lied.

"Well you must allow it to heal, so please, rest here in the palace."

She nodded appreciatively, and they rose with a bow and left the meeting.

"That went about as well as could be hoped," she said when out of earshot.

"I agree, Huntress. For a moment, daylight broke through his thundercloud. That is encouraging."

They stopped at her chambers. Marad looked at her seriously. "There may come a time when, rather than sunlight returning, that thundercloud breaks upon our palace and floods the city beyond. Bathe, eat, rest for now. But be wary. If we should fail, you will need to make your escape swiftly and secretly. Come to me and I will assist."

"Thank you Marad, I understand."

"Do not mention it Aloy. It is the least we can do in return for all your services to the realm."

The Stormbird came once again to Aloy's dreams that day. This time, she was not carried in its maw, but she rode upon its back. The machine was hovering over a hillside, rolling grassy slopes vanishing to the horizon in every direction. Its jets vectored it carefully to remain completely static, a few metres above the ground. The avian was looking down, and at the centre of its gaze was a vast patch of flowers - not purple this time, but yellow, nestling at the edge of a tarn, surrounded by a cluster of woodland. A gentle breeze ruffled them delicately, almost seeming to hypnotize the raptor as they swayed back and forth. The dream faded.

Rather than sleep - even though she felt tired - she spent the afternoon replenishing her weapon stock. As well as having burnt several of her arrows to stay warm on the islet, her bows had all been damaged by the falls she had sustained and the saline water. Marad had kindly arranged to have the raw materials she needed sent to her on request, and she was able to re-craft them all to even higher tolerances than they had been originally. This gave her a great deal of satisfaction, and distracted her enough from the politics of the situation as well as the discomfort (psychological as well as physical) of her condition. She was finishing a final coat of dark lacquer on her war-bow, when there was a loud squeal from the far side of the room. She jumped up, immediately realising that it was her Focus. She bounded over to it, picking it up and then fumbling it because it was now really quite hot. She had to press a piece of cloth between the device and her skin to stop it scalding her, and she flicked on the augmentation and the comms. Sylens was there immediately.

"Aloy! Look!"

Sylens had downloaded an intelligent search node to her Focus, and once he had understood the storage format, had been able to instruct it to search for records containing particular strings of text. She could see one of the results - a single page, containing about forty lines of symbols which didn't look like anything at all, let alone words. But the page had a title, an almost illuminated caption, that made her mouth drop slightly open:

"Voynich"

"So that page is what we're after?" asked Aloy, not quite understanding what she was looking at.

"Yes, and unfortunately no," was the obtuse response from Sylens.

"What do you mean?"

"The text is gibberish. I can perceive no pattern in the characters. Which means that either this is junk, a placeholder or a red herring even -"

"Or?"

"- or else it is itself encrypted".

"So a code inside a code inside a code?"

"Possibly."

"Can we crack it, or is it every bit as hard as Voynich itself?"

"Given who wrote it, I imagine it is closely related to the cypher that Ted Faro implemented on his first generation automata."

"And that took GAIA a long time to break, so the chances of us doing it in a day are not good?"

"No. However, there remains a glimmer of hope. If it was Elisabet's intent that this item was to be found, then what would be the point of storing data on it no-one could read? It would be wasteful and make no sense. If that is the case, then a recipient of the globe should be able to decode the information using a kind of password that maybe only they and a select few could know."

Aloy looked blankly at the orb. "And how do I recognise the password?"

"I don't know, Aloy. Perhaps there is a clue in the rest of the data. We will need to continue the search."

"So we're pretty much back to the starting point with this now. There's a code, and we don't know how to break it." She threw her brush on the floor in frustration, spattering drops of lacquer onto the floor and carpet, and sat dejectedly on the end of her bed. A stream of random words shuffled through her mind, as if the one magic word would leap out like a salmon from the mountain stream straight into a waiting net.

Contrarily, Sylens didn't sound at all frustrated. "Keep your head high, Aloy. We have strong reason to think we are looking at something related to the Voynich code. A few days ago you nearly died on a mission to find it that failed, and that has led you to discovering that the answer isn't in a long-derelict computer server, but an artefact right under your nose. There is some beauty in there, is there not?"

"I'm not sure Bavall would agree," Aloy replied darkly. "And I'm damn sure his wife and children wouldn't. People died unnecessarily for this. That's no cause for celebration."

Sylens did not reply.

Aloy went to find Marad and bring him up to date on progress - such as it was. She found him in the library, poring over a legal manuscript. He nodded, perhaps not quite understanding the gravity of the discoveries. He pushed Aloy harder.

"So whoever was meant to find this should have known, or been able to discover, the means to unlock it? Who then would that person be? Would it be you?"

"Surely not specifically. But she may have given a sign to anyone that might find it, provided they knew what they were looking for. Maybe -" Aloy suddenly became excited "- maybe she programmed GAIA herself to leave a clue?"

She bolted out of the library and returned to her room so she could continue the conversation with Sylens in GAIA prime. "Sylens! I have an idea. Suppose that Elisabet put the key to Voynich in a form so bizarre that no-one would ever think to associate them?"

"How do you mean?"

"She knew the world was going to end so she had to bury the key and have it resurface when it was being put back together. And suppose that there isn't just one key, but several keys, just to make it super-hard to reconstruct the passcode."

"Okay," said Sylens. "It sounds like you are at the point of epiphany."

"I am, I think," Aloy said with sudden confidence. "The key has also been under my nose - for months now." She smiled. "Metal flowers."

She paused for dramatic effect, but didn't let Sylens get a word in before continuing. "I collected thirty of them before the Spire battle, sold them in Meridian to one of the weirder merchants there. Thing is, each one of the flowers gave up a kind of poem or saying when I scanned it with my Focus. I didn't have a clue what that was about, thought it was some artistic expression of GAIA, like her favourite books or whatever. But maybe there's more to it than that. Maybe the poems are clues. Or maybe it's not as arcane as that - maybe the flower text is the key?"

"Do you know what's really weird though, Sylens? I've been having dreams about Metal Flowers. It's like something has been manipulating me from a distance, in my sleep. Something wants me to find this stuff out." A shudder went through her spine at that thought, which pained her considerably. She lay back down and found a comfortable pose.

To Aloy's surprise, Sylens had gone quiet. He was already building the software update to try a number of hypotheses out on her Focus. Every time she tried to speak subsequently, he shushed her, so eventually, she closed her eyes in order to rest. But her heart was beating fast with the sudden possibility of reprieve, and the sense of things that she had never understood were suddenly resolving into view, crystal-sharp in the light of day.

Aloy and Marad entered the king's chamber three days later, just after noon. The Sun-King was looking pale and tired, and still had not removed his black attire. He smelt strongly of stale sweat, and the odour permeated the room. Avad looked up at them as if they were enemies, but softened slightly as recognition slowly dawned upon him. "So do you bring news, or mutiny?" he snapped.

Marad smiled. "We bring news, dear Sun-King. Good news, at that. We have Voynich."

The Sun-King stared blankly at them for a few seconds, then began to laugh. At first just a suppressed chuckle, but then breaking out into a guffaw. But it shattered after several seconds, and he collapsed on the floor in tears. Marad turned to the servants. "The King is overcome with emotion. But he can rest now, and we can begin the work required to instigate a defence of this city. Bathe him, feed him, and let him sleep. Call Rifky too, she will give him a healing draught. Let us put this short but miserable episode in our history to the sword." The servants nodded, and went to attend to Avad. Marad turned to Aloy. "We have an appointment in the dungeon, I believe. Bring what tools you need."