"I guess the bit about honey makes sense; you probably can't access Parabola from here. Crystallized Hours is very new. Starlight makes you go crazy? I thought I knew things about stars but I didn't know that." 

"Yeah. It fills your head with weird new thoughts. Sense of doom, wanting to break stuff and kill things, insignificance, being wrong-shaped, feeling like you don't know how the world works, guilt and doubt, weird fever-dreams, hallucinations. Depends on the person. I mostly get a sense of doom. Saw all the stars as eyes once after being out too long though. Creepiest thing, didn't come out of my room for a week." She shivers.

"That's weird, stars aren't mostly eye...hm. I wonder if this is a weird interaction with souls. Do rattus faber have the same problem?"

"No clue, we don't have any on the Lucky Strike. Our driver Gyla lost her soul in a bet and she still feels it, I think? And sky-suits help too. It matters how much reaches your skin, not how much you see."

"Hmm. Well, it's good that mountainlight fixes it. You said wrong-shaped, is there a sense of what the right shape is?"

"...Bein' made of fire. Or light. Not having a stupid slow icky body at all. Or so I hear."

"Sounds about right. Did you know that souls are basically star-spores?"

"...No?"

"It is apparently true. It wasn't common knowledge in my London but word was spreading. Possibly that might have been mostly my fault? Stuff that's snobby about humans will usually talk to me." 

"I don't know anything about souls except that devils like 'em. Should we maybe, uh, get going?"

"Yeah." 

She gets up and goes out and explains the change of plans. 

Well, not like they're going to argue with the glowing Power, are they.

The navigator-cum-captain has gathered up most of what was recently stolen into a big box. The captive Tackety girl asks for a gun. The navigator hands one over willingly. She says it's trash but it'll shoot at least once and nods at Lucy.

And Lucy strips and climbs out of the train and transforms. 

It probably isn't possible, from the vantage point inside the train, to see her entire body. But the giant quasi-arthropodic legs that cling tightly to either side of the train are most distinctly visible. 

And then they start going VERY VERY FAST. 

It takes about half an hour to get to the site of the Tackety wreck. 

(...They relight the firebox but don't try to go anywhere halfway through the journey. It was getting a bit chilly.)

The Tackety wreck is a smear of steel and splinters and bodies across the local patch of sky. The main body of the wreck is a chunk of engine section connected to about a quarter of a shattered wooden cylinder by a single twisted steel beam. It looks a bit like a popped balloon. The Tackety girl dons a sky-suit and brings Lucy's dress outside the marauder engine when she clambers out.

"CAN YOU HEAR ME?" She shouts, muffled by the suit and the winds.

Lucy turns back and accepts the dress. 

"YES I CAN," she calls back, somewhat louder than the other woman, her voice taking on the slightest hint of tumbling crystals. 

Well, they can get to the business of collecting up bodies and the most valuable bits of wreckage. The Tackety counts and confirms that everyone is accounted for, and stares at Lucy in something like awe as she maneuvers through the void much, much easier than she can manage. When they find a couple of intact sky-suits the pirates can help, too. It doesn't take long all things considered.

"The Mountain wasn't born in the Neath," she says cheerfully in the face of awe. "I'm made to navigate the High Wilderness." 

"Definitely amazing. I don't know much about the Neath though. Except I remembered a story - the Khan! The Khanate moved to Eleutheria and built the Zan- Built some kind of artificial moon and the city of Eagle's Empyrean, a city of electrical light!"

"Oh, yeah, we had the Khan in the Neath, they're descended from survivors of the Fourth city." 

"Why was London the fifth city? Huh - wonder if there's a Sixth now..."

"Probably. London was the fifth because the Bazaar was taking cities from the Surface and London was the fifth one it took." 

...She shakes her head. "The surface I know even less about. This is - all too big. I know boilers and engine-building. I don't know mountain-people and the long march o' history."

"Well, all you need to know about mountain-people is going fast and healing stuff." 

"Well. I wanna see my dad again and I'm sure these pirates wanna go... Somewhere. Do you think you could cut down a big kinda-sorta-metal tree? I think you probably could. And then we could handle the carving bronzewood into a new engine part."

"Sounds doable! Bronzewood is also new to me, can you tell me more about it?"