The sun had slipped below the mountain tops. The marks, the words, were fading. Xantcha turned in Ratepe's arms to face him.

"He's been wrong. All this time-almost all his lifeUrza's been wrong. The Phyrexians never invaded Dominaria! There was no Phyrexia until Gix and the Ineffable left here. Winners, losers, I can't tell. We knew that. We spent over a thousand years looking for the world where the Phyrexians came from, so we could learn from those who defeated them .. . and all the time, it was Urza's own world."

Xantcha was shaking, sobbing. Ratepe tried to comfort her, but it was too soon.

"Urza would say to me, that's Phyrexian, that's abomination. Only the Thran way is the right way, the pure way. And I always thought to myself, the difference isn't that great. The Phyrexians aren't evil because they're compleat. They'd be evil no matter what they were, and those automata he was making, he was growing them in a jar. Is it right to grow gnats in a jar but not newts in a vat?"

Ratepe held her tight against his chest before she pulled away. "The Red-Stripes and the Shratta were both bad luck for everybody who crossed either one of them," he said gently. "And so were Urza and Mishra. Any time there's only one right way, ordinary people get crushed-maybe even the Morvernish and the Baszerati."

"But all our lives, Ratepe. All our lives, we've been chasing shadows! It's like someone reached inside and pulled everything out."

"You just said it: the Phyrexians are evil. Urza's crazed, but he's not evil, and he's the only one here who can beat the Phyrexians at their own game. We wanted to find the truth. Well, it wasn't what we expected, but we found a truth. And we've still got to go back to Urza. The truth here doesn't change that, does it?"

"We can't tell him. If he knew his Thran weren't the great and noble heroes of Dominaria ... If he knew that the Thran destroyed Mishra ..."

"You're right, but Mishra would laugh. I can hear him."

"I can't believe that."

"It's laugh or cry, Xantcha." Ratepe dried her tears. "If you've truly wasted three thousand years and you're stuck fighting a war that was stupid four thousand years before that, then either you laugh and keep going, or you

cry and give it up."

CHAPTER 22

There was no laughter three days later over the Sea of Laments. The weather had been chancy since Xantcha had put the Argi-vian coast at her back. From the start, thick clouds had blocked her view of the sun and stars. She navigated against a wind she knew wasn't steady and with an innate sense of direction that grew less reliable as she tired. They hadn't seen land for two days, not even a boat.

Xantcha would have brought the sphere down on a raft just then and taken her chances with strangers. A black wall-cloud had formed, leaking lightning, to the northeast. The waves below were stiff with cross winds and froth. She knew better than to try to soar above the impending storm, didn't have the strength to outrun it, and didn't know what would happen to the sphere if- when-downdrafts slammed it into the ocean.

Ratepe had his arms around her, keeping Xantcha warm and upright, the most he could do. He'd spotted the storm but hadn't said anything, other than that he knew how to swim. Ratepe was one up on Xantcha there; the long-ago seamen who'd taught her how to sail had warned her never to get friendly with the sea. If- when-they went down, she'd yawn out Urza's armor. Maybe it would keep her afloat, though it never had kept her dry.

The storm was bigger than the wall-cloud, and fickle, too. In a matter of minutes it spawned smaller clouds, one to the north, the other directly overhead. The first wind was a downdraft that hit the sphere so hard Xantcha and Ratepe were weightless, floating and screaming within it. Then, as Xantcha fought to keep them above the waves, a vagrant wind struck from the south. The south wind pushed them into sheets of noisy, blinding rain.

The squall died as suddenly as it had been born. Xantcha could see again and wished she couldn't. The distance between them and the storm's heart had been halved and, worse, a waterspout had spun out. Rooted in both the ocean and the clouds, the sinuous column of seawater and wind bore down on them as if it had eyes and they were prey.

"What is that?" Ratepe whispered.

"Waterspout," she told him and felt his fingers lock into her arms like talons.

"Is it going to eat us?"

The waterspout wasn't alive and didn't really have an appetite for fools, but that scarcely mattered as they were caught and spun with such force that the sphere flattened against them. It flattened but held, even when they slammed into the raging waves. At one point Xantcha thought they were underwater, if only because everything had become dark and quiet. Then the ocean spat them out, and they hurtled through wind and rain.

Wind, rain, and, above all, lightning. Whatever the cyst produced, whether it was Urza's armor or the sphere, it attracted lightning. Bolts struck continuously. The air within the sphere turned acrid and odd. It pulled their hair and clothes away from their bodies and set everything aglow with blue-white light. Xantcha lost all sense of

north or south and counted herself lucky that she still knew up from down.

Every few moments the storm paused, as if regrouping its strength for the next assault. In one such breather, Ratepe leaned close to her ear and said, "I love you,"

She shouted back, "We're not dead yet!" and surrendered the sphere to an updraft that carried them into the storm's heart.

They rose until the rain became ice and froze around the sphere, making it heavy and driving it down to the sea. Xantcha thought for sure they'd hit the waves, sink, and drown, but the storm wasn't done playing with them. As lightning boiled off the ice, the winds launched them upward again. Xantcha tried to break the cycle, but her efforts were useless. They rose and froze, plummeted, and rose again, not once or twice, but nine times before they fell one last time and found themselves floating on the ocean as the storm passed on to the south.

The pitch and roll among the choppy waves was the insult after injury. Ratepe's grip on Xantcha's arms weakened, and she suffered nausea.

"I can't lift us up," she said, having tried and failed. "I'm going

to have to let go of the sphere."

"No!" Ratepe's plea should have been a shout; it was a barely coherent moan instead.

"I'll make another-"

"Too sick. Can't float."

She tried to ignite his spirit. "A little seasickness won't kill you."

"Can't."

"Waste not, want not. I'm the one who can't swim! I'm counting on you to keep me afloat until I can make another sphere."

Ratepe slumped beside her. His face was gray and sweaty. His eyes were closed. Whatever strength he had left was dedicated to fighting the spasms in his gut. A little bit of seasickness would kill them both if she released the sphere. And if she didn't release it?

Xantcha tried to make it rise, but lifting the sphere had always been something that simply happened as it formed and not anything she'd ever consciously controlled.

"Urza," Ratepe said through clenched teeth. "Urza'll come.

Your heart."

Urza had come when she'd nearly blown herself up with the Phyrexian ambulator, but now she wasn't in any immediate danger. The sky overhead was a brilliant blue, and the sphere bobbed like a driftwood log.

"Sorry, Ratepe. If he didn't pull us out of that storm we were riding, then he's not going to pull us out of here. I'm not close enough to dying to get his attention."

"Gotta be a way."