When I tried to breathe, my lungs filled with a fine suspension of stone dust. Lumon was silent. Without the familiar data grid, the world felt flat, dull, and small.
"Iron... get up. Come on," Albert's voice drifted in as if from a deep well.
I rolled onto my stomach. My left arm wouldn't obey; my shoulder had turned into a solid mass of dull, throbbing pain.
Upstairs, in the Town Hall lobby, something heavy thudded. It wasn't the sound of a collapse. It felt like an impact.
"He's inside," Wayland whispered.
The Count stood by the doorway, pressing his shoulder against the frame. His gaze was locked onto the stairs leading to the first floor. A heavy revolver was in his hands, but the barrel was visibly trembling.
"Get to the basement," Wayland turned to me. "To the Heart. If that man reaches the generators, it's over for Dornheim, and for all of us. We'll hold him off."
"With what?" I spat out blood and tried to push myself up, leaning on my prosthesis. Metal scraped against the stone floor with a harsh screech.
"Go. That's an order."
He gestured to his guardsmen, and they began forming a phalanx in the narrow corridor leading to the stairs. Clinging to the walls, I crawled toward the cargo elevator, which had been dead for ages.
Descending the utility stairs took an eternity. Every step resonated in my head like the tolling of a bell.
The basement smelled of coolant and damp earth. The main generator hall was bathed in emergency red light.
"Darwin! Elyria!" I called out, but my voice broke into a cough.
I found them by the switchboard. Darwin was on his knees, his arms coated up to his elbows in dark, pungent oil. He was trying to patch a puncture in the cooling pipe with a scrap of canvas, but a jet of freezing freon struck him right in the face, coating his skin with frost.
"Master! She won't wake up! The lens is overheating, the automation has locked the shutters! There's nothing we can do!"
Elyria lay nearby on a pile of sacks. Her skin was gray, and beneath her closed eyelids, her pupils were darting rapidly.
"Step back, Darwin," I sank heavily beside the panel. "Canvas won't help. We need a direct grounding here."
"But the automation..." the apprentice sobbed. "The access codes aren't being accepted!"
"To hell with the codes. We'll bypass them physically."
I looked at the distribution node. The massive copper busbar that was supposed to channel the energy for the final volley was cut off by a heavy safety switch. To throw it, we needed thirty atmospheres of steam pressure, which we lacked due to the damaged boilers. Or... or the contacts had to be connected manually.
The distance between the terminals was about thirty centimeters.
Upstairs, the first shot rang out. Then another. And then, silence.
Somewhere outside, in the harbor, Noah should have already reached the skiff. I hoped he realized that we stood no chance against Elias as long as he was powered by the etheric beam from the vessel.
"Iron, what are you doing?" Darwin's voice snapped me out of my daze.
I was stripping the protective casing off my prosthesis. The steel plates hit the concrete with a heavy clang. It exposed the intricate structure of drives, copper veins, and the small, flickering core of the Heart embedded in my forearm.
"I'm going to be the jumper," I said, staring at the busbar.
"You'll incinerate! Even if the prosthesis holds, your shoulder... the magic of the Heart will just tear you apart from the inside!"
"We don't have eight hours, Darwin. We don't even have eight minutes."
I heard the heavy oak door leading to the basement hall collapse upstairs.
Elias entered the generator room.
He had a calm face. He looked at Darwin, at the unconscious Elyria, and finally, at me.
"Technological heresy," he said softly. His voice vibrated at a frequency that made the glass faces of the pressure gauges in the basement tremble. "You built an altar out of rusted iron and thought it would replace the true light for you. It is tragic."
I pressed the prosthesis against the first terminal. The metal sparked; phantom pain in my missing fingers flared into a blinding flash.
"Your city is a mistake," Elias raised his luminous staff. "A mistake that creates an imbalance. I am not here to punish you. I am here to correct the equation."
At that moment, something whistled briefly in the sky above the Town Hall. The Inquisitor's skiff shuddered. I felt it by the way the pressure of the ether in the room instantly slackened.
"Noah. You actually did it," I muttered.
The light on Elias's staff flickered, losing its density. The High Punisher frowned.
"Now!" I screamed to Darwin. "Turn on the feed to the spire!"
I jammed the prosthesis forward, bridging the gap between the two massive copper busbars.
I felt the insulation melting inside my arm, the blood boiling in my shoulder, the capillaries bursting in my eyes.
A colossal pillar of white-blue fire erupted from the Town Hall tower and shot vertically upward, tearing right through the Inquisitorial skiff and taking a couple of the other ships down with it. For an instant, the sky over Dornheim blazed brighter than the midday sun.
Inside the generator room, the discharge ripped through me and struck the floor. Elias was hurled backward. Stripped of its power supply from the ship, his shield couldn't withstand the resonance. The Punisher crashed into the concrete wall, and I heard the distinct crack of bones.
I collapsed. The prosthesis was still welded to the busbars, thick, acrid smoke billowing from it. The entire left side of my body was completely paralyzed.
Elias got up. His white caftan was torn, and a deep, bleeding gash lined his forehead. He looked at his hands, then at me.
"You grounded celestial fire through your own flesh," he said quietly. "It is barbarism."
The Punisher turned and walked toward the exit.
I lay on the floor, staring at the red emergency light slowly rocking on the ceiling.
Darwin rushed over to me, shouting something, but I couldn't hear him.
Lumon suddenly flickered to life.
[SYSTEM ERROR. STRUCTURAL BODY DAMAGE: 42%. CRITICAL PROSTHESIS OVERHEATING. EXECUTING EMERGENCY SHUTDOWN]
"No way..." I whispered. "It's not over yet..."
I turned my head. Elyria stirred on her sacks. She opened her eyes—they were glazed over. Almost immediately, she closed them again.
"Did we... win?" Darwin asked, trying to pry my hand away from the melted copper.
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