“We can’t fight them here!” I coughed, waving the smoke away. “There’s no room!”
“Exactly,” Torvin grinned, though his eyes were hard. “We’re taking them out.”
He grabbed the second guard—a massive Umbrakynn—and tackled him through the door and back into the corridor of the fifty-eighth floor.
“Karys!” Torvin shouted.
She looked at the open door, then at her brother fighting two men in the hallway before she turned to me.
“Climb,” she ordered. “We hold them here. If they get into the shaft, they’ll shoot youoff the ladder.”
“I can’t leave you?—“
“You have a job,” Karys snapped. She drew a second knife. “Do it.”
She vaulted through the smoking doorway, joining her brother in the corridor. The sounds of violence—shouts, the crack of bone, the hiss of magic—erupted instantly.
I stood alone on the platform for a heartbeat, torn.
I looked up. The ladder stretched into the gloom, terminating at an iron hatch twenty feet above.
I gripped the rungs and hauled myself upward. I moved at a breakneck pace, the burn in my muscles forgotten as the echoes of the struggle below faded into the distance.
I reached the summit. The hatch was massive, secured by a rusted manual wheel.
I gripped the cold iron. I shoved. It groaned, rusted and stubborn, but it turned.
I pushed the hatch open.
Fresh air hit my face, smelling of ozone and the coming storm.
I dragged myself up and scrambled out of the shaft, rolling onto the gravel surface of the roof.
I stood up, the wind whipping my hair across my face.
I was on the highest point in Ravenholt. The city sprawled below, a galaxy of lights obscured by drifting clouds.
The Extractor dominated the centre of the roof.
Korenth’s design was a monolith of reinforced chrome and glass, shuddering with a primal vibration that rattled the gravel beneath my boots. It was a fortress built to contain impossible pressures, designed to survive a supernova.
And standing between me and the construct were two guards.
Quinn Tower’ssummit was a chaos of violent wind and screaming metal.
The hatch clanged shut behind me. The air was thin, tasting of copper and impending disaster. Above, the clouds tore apart, revealing a bruised violet sky.
The Eclipse had begun.
A twenty-foot spire stretched into the air, surrounded by a ring of oscillating pylons. Inside the central column churned the payload.
The silver fluid. It swirled violently, burning with a blinding light. My father’s life. My father’s magic. For a heartbeat, the grief gutted me, stealing the air from my lungs.
But watching him used as fuel—drawn from a tank at the base, churned through a dark metal core, and fired in a concentrated beam straight into the tear in the sky—the sorrow flash-froze into pure rage. I took a step forward. The two guards stationed beneath it moved to intercept me.
They were huge, their tactical armour matte black, their faces obscured by visors. But I could feel the discord of them—the discordant, sickly vibration of stolen magic forced into bodies that couldn’t hold it.
I drew the black iron dagger from my belt. The metal froze my palm, a bite of winter in the humid storm.
