Time would defeat them.
We need a new plan,he thought. But what? He had no answer, and he couldn’t stop moving or stop fighting to think of one. It was all he could do to keep up with the endless stream of enemies. If they could trap the army somewhere . . . Or leadthem out of the city . . . Or force them back into the caves and collapse the caves . . . He wished Kreya were here to see the possibilities and make the call. In the middle of fighting, he couldn’t clear the space in his mind to plan anything larger than the next strike or parry. He tried not to worry about Kreya, facing Eklor. She had Zera by her side. The two of them could handle themselves.
He wished he’d taken the time to tell Kreya that he finally understood. After seeing Stran nearly lose his wife, he knew why Kreya had made the choices she had. He even understood why she hadn’t told him. In her place, he’d have done the same—it had taken him a while to admit that, but he’d gotten there at last.
He wanted to say he was sorry for being angry, sorry for dying and leaving her alone, sorry he hadn’t swept her away from all of this before Eklor came back into their lives.
He swore that if they survived this, he would devote every day he had left to making it up to her.
Across the street, Stran was cornered by three multiarmed constructs. His blades were blurred, moving quickly to parry and strike. Sweat poured off his face. Jentt darted toward him, jumped onto a cart, and launched himself in the air.
He landed on the back of one of the constructs and drew his blade across its neck, severing the wires that connected its head to its spine. He then yanked out the bone lodged in its chest. The construct collapsed beneath him.
Springing out of the way, he went back-to-back with Stran.
“I’m out,” Stran said.
“What?” Jentt heard him, but he didn’t want to believe it.
“Last talisman failed.”
“Then we stick together,” Jentt said. “Protect each other.”He scanned the street. “Need to find a defensible position. Can’t fight them all at once.”
Stran grunted as he beat back the closest construct. “Need to find Amurra. And the others. If we’re going to die, I’d rather”—he ducked beneath one of a construct’s many arms—“die together.”
It wasn’t a plan for victory. But it was better than what they were doing here. At least if they found their friends, they could protect one another.
But first they had to make it out of the second tier.
“Cart,” Jentt grunted as he swung his blade at a half man lurching toward him. He sprinted for the cart that he’d vaulted over. Stran jumped into the front. Whirling his blades, he carved a path through as Jentt used the last of his talismans to push them toward the gate to the third tier.
“You!” Jentt called to one of Kreya’s statues, a marble elk that was twice the size of a live elk. “Clear the way!”
The elk obeyed, bashing through the gate, and Jentt and Stran followed in its wake. As they passed through the gate, he felt as if he were abandoning the citizens, statues, and bone workers that still fought on the second tier. But then the feeling vanished as he saw the state of the third tier: the battle was here too.
And the people were losing.
Littering the street were the wounded and the dead. Constructs lay between them as well, broken or twitching, but the fighting raged in the streets around them. He spotted another one of Kreya’s statues—only for an instant, as a pack of constructs lifted it off the ground and tossed it into an aqueduct. Both the statue and the aqueduct shattered in a spray of stone that rained down onto fighters below. One boulder crashed through a roof.
“Shit,” Stran said.
All the work they’d done, all the fighting, to contain the enemy in the first and second tiers... It had been pointless. The constructs they hadn’t defeated had poured into the third tier, and Jentt didn’t doubt they’d reached the fourth tier as well, and would soon reach the fifth.
“The city is lost,” Jentt said.
“But we aren’t yet,” Stran said, and charged forward through the street, with only his own strength in his body.
With a roar, Jentt chased after him.
The hopelessness of it began to sink into his bones, and he fought harder with tears blurring his eyes. This was a fight they couldn’t win.
Kreya waited for a moment to feel something: Eklor was dead. Finally. And this time, she was going to make sure he stayed that way. Whispering to a strength talisman, she hoisted Eklor’s body over her shoulder and carried him over the two mechanized constructs that she and Zera had sliced through, with the help of the talismans.
“Bonfire time?” Zera guessed.
“Oh yes.” Like the fire that had burned her tower.
Together, they carried Eklor’s corpse through the corridor. They encountered no one—everyone was outside fighting the army, she guessed—but she remembered the way. There had been funerals while she was a student, each of them burned into her memory.
