“And did you… sing to all the lead sarcophagi you came across?”
Noam’s face turned red. “There’s no rule against singing in front of a Power generator!”
Arienne thought of teasing him about it, then decided against it. She didn’t want to stress him more than she needed to. She didn’t like the way he became blurry before, when she pressed him to remember. “Why was Lysandros even here?”
“Please don’t say his name like that. It’s disrespectful.”
Arienne suppressed a laugh, imagining what Noam’s face would look like if he figured out that she had killed Lysandros.
“Fine. Why was theGrand Inquisitorhere?”
“I don’t know, really. He just arrived one day, unannounced. The prefect was nervous because he didn’t know how to express his gratitude for Mersia’s liberation.”
“Gratitude for Mersia’s liberation?”
“It was thanks to the Grand Inquisitor that Mersia was liberated from the Grim King’s grasp and joined the Empire. That was why he was promoted to Grand Inquisitor of the Office of Truth… But he didn’t even attend the reception the prefect had hosted for him, he only visited the Power generator chamber.”
A Power generator chamber? Of course—even minor cities like the capital of Arland had Power generators, so it only made sense that a large city like Danras would as well.
“There’s a Power generator chamber here? That means Tychon wasn’t the only generator, right? And you were in charge of that generator as well?”
“Yes, Class Three Power generator Fractica. The Grand Inquisitor brought it when he first came here. All of the streetlamps and Powered machines in Danras city proper used Fractica.” A note of awe entered his voice. “Fractica was over a hundred years old by then. Other than the ones connected to the Circuit of Destiny, Fractica is the only generator that has been used for so long withoutdeterioration. The Grand Inquisitor actually used it like a workhorse at first, you know. A Class Three generator pulling a cart!”
Noam laughed for the first time. Arienne, meanwhile, was putting the pieces together. The monster that had pursued her on the surface could have been a mobile platform carrying its Power generator. Those were common in the legions. Was the generator within the monster Fractica? Didn’t its name come up during Noam’s disoriented speech earlier, too?
“That other Power generator… Fractica, you talked like you had a problem with it. Did something happen?”
Noam shook his head. “Never. There was no problem. I told you, it’s one of the most stable generators in all of the Empire.” He began blurring slightly.
“You’re lying!” Arienne snapped. “Before, you were lost in memory, saying there was something wrong with Fractica!”
Noam’s agitated face was getting blurrier, as was the rest of his body. “Did I…? No, it wasn’t a real problem… Just a brief malfunction. Probably a routine sort of mishap. If I can fix it before the Grand Inquisitor comes back from the Capital, I can—”
“A brief malfunction! It’s been a hundred years, and that thing is still gallivanting around Danras, wreaking havoc!”
Noam’s eyes widened; then he fell back into despair. “Oh… right. Then Grand Inquisitor Lysandros…?”
Arienne paused to choose her words carefully. She wasn’t sure what the best way to say this was. Maybe concision was best.
“Dead.”
Noam bowed his head and sighed. “Well, I guess it has been a hundred years. Even if he’d changed half his body to machine, he couldn’t be alive for over two hundred years…”
Well, he actually did and was. But then I killed him.
Before he could ask for more details, she continued with her questions. “So, whatwasthe problem with Fractica?”
“Light was leaking. Not the violet light of Power but… a strange color. And the sound of the engine was off. It kept going over the output of a Class Three and falling to as low as that of a Class Six and back again. And the space and time lattices kept warping. I tried to turn it off and examine it. I went to get my tools… I don’t know what happened after.”
So, he had probably died before fetching his tools. What if Danras’s Power generator had something to do with the Star of Mersia? What if Lysandros had somehow used Fractica to bring about the destruction?
But Eldred had told her that Mersia never declared independence, and Noam had confirmed it. Could it actually be true that the Star of Mersia didn’t happen because of the Empire?
Regardless, there couldn’t be a single Power generator that could have wrought such devastation as Arienne had seen above. There had to be something more. The last time they met, Lysandros and Eldred had blamed each other for the fall of Mersia…
“And Lysandros was not present?” Arienne asked.
“He’d said there was something he needed to check on, so this was two days after he left. If he’d been here, then maybe it wouldn’t have happened…”
