Raziel didn’t respond, merely grabbed him by the arm and sprinted across the street. They made it into the space between two buildings when the one they’d just left exploded from the hit. The force of the blast nearly drove Blaine to his knees, but Raziel kept him on his feet, kept dragging him forward.
“Keep moving,” she said, not looking back, never letting go.
Blaine matched his stride to hers, breathless by the time they made it to the end of the alleyway, onto another street. He pulled his arm free of Raziel’s grasp, trying to orient himself. “I’m getting Caris.”
Raziel cut him a vicious look. “The entire fort is a blast zone. You really want to risk it?”
He didn’t look at her, attention on the sky and the hideous sound of the fort under siege. The warning sirens were still going, a ceaseless, skin-crawling noise that hadn’t yet been cut off. “I have no choice.”
The star gods meant for Caris to be queen. They’d tasked him to stand as witness. Blaine was the tie between the past and the present and a future Eimarille was doing her damnedest to burn.
He couldn’t let it all be for nothing.
“You risk dying.”
“I’mgoing,” Blaine ground out. To the laboratories. To save Caris. To find a way to get her off this island the same way he’d gotten her out of Amari, no matter the impossibility of the task.
This was his road. He would not leave it.
Couldn’t leave her.
The Westergards hadalwaysprotected the Rourkes.
He started down the street, heading in the direction he knew the laboratories to be, when Raziel swore behind him, footsteps loud on the cobblestones. She grabbed him by the elbow and spun him about, jerking her head in the other direction. “You go straight there and you’re liable to get blown to pieces. We’ll go around and aim for one of the other entrances.”
“I thought there was only one entrance into the laboratories.” Delani had said as much when she’d taken them below upon their arrival days ago.
Raziel shook her head and headed the other way. Blaine didn’t hesitate to follow. “There are others for safety purposes. Tithes don’t know about those. Not until they’re wardens. And do you think we’d give up all our secrets?”
He didn’t want to think about why tithes would want to find an escape from below. “All right.”
Raziel led him away from the center, heading toward the fort walls. Blaine could see the spiderlike automatons patrolling the ramparts, Zip guns aimed outward and going off with a heavyrat-tat-tatthat was a nonstop counterpoint to the sirens.
There wasn’t any cover to be found, and the wardens they passed were heading for the walls to fight, though what good they’d do, Blaine didn’t know. It wasn’t until they turned a corner and he staggered midstride at the sight of what was walking toward them did he realize the wardens were better equipped than he thought.
The two-story-tall, human-shaped automaton made out of metal and gears walking on two mechanical legs toward the fort wall at a steady pace had Blaine rearing back. “That’s a Solarian sentinel-class automaton. How do you even have one of those here?”
“We need them to guard Rixham.”
“Rixham isn’there.”
Raziel dragged him out of the street so the automaton could pass. Blaine looked up, seeing a warden seated in the torso of the clockwork machine, working various levers as it maneuvered forward what was essentially a war machine to protect the fort. Blaine had only seen a sentinel-classed automaton once before, on a trade run to Calhames, where the machine had stood guard in front of the Legion’s military headquarters.
“Solaria tithes gear just like all the other countries.” Raziel picked up the pace, not even close to being out of breath. “Let’s keep moving.”
More wardens were choosing the fort wall over looking for cover, if the stream of people heading for the fight was anything to go by. Blaine swallowed against a dry throat as he followed Raziel, hunching his shoulders every time a bomb fell within the fort, praying to the star gods none would fall where they ran.
An explosion outside the walls had Blaine’s head snapping up as an airship flew high overhead, the hull of theCelestial Spritecutting across the sky. The doors of the bomb bays on either side of the hull were open, which meant it had already dropped a payload.
Relief coursed through Blaine with a sudden punch, but it was a momentary high because theCelestial Spritewas the only airship in the sky on their side.
Another bomb launched from beyond the wall found its target, hitting close enough the ground shook. Blaine kept looking at the sky for falling debris as the building a block and a half away lost half its structure from the hit. “Where exactly is the nearest laboratory entrance?”
“Close by, just keep running,” Raziel called out.
She knew the fort better than he did. Blaine only hoped they got to where they needed to besoon. They turned a corner and reached another street, this one wider than the others, and the fort’s outer wall loomed high to Blaine’s right. He didn’t know where they were in relation to the main laboratory entrance, but he didn’t see any building that had a vault for a door. All he saw was a smaller fort gate, guarded by half a dozen wardens on the ground and a cluster of automatons up on the rampart. Two of the wardens were crouched next to a third, who appeared to be wounded.
This gate wasn’t the main entrance to the fort that led to the docks or the airfield. Blaine didn’t know what it led to, but it certainly wouldn’t take him where he needed to go. He realized seconds later, when Raziel unholstered her pistol and shot her fellow wardens in the back, that he was nowhere close to where he needed to be.
