Read Chapter 28: A Bargain in Blood

The rail yard stank of coal oil and wet iron. Elias crouched behind a stack of rusted coupling pins, the harmonic dampener's half-assembled guts pressing cold against his ribs inside his coat. Lila knelt beside him, her fingers white around a Bureau-issue revolver she'd lifted from a dead guard two hours ago.

"The maintenance tunnel runs under the Enclave's west wall," she whispered, eyes scanning the floodlit perimeter. "Ashworth's private carriage arrives at dawn for the inspection. We get one shot."

Elias nodded, but his throat was dry. The extraction had left him hollow, his thoughts arriving through layers of gauze. He flexed his jaw, feeling the copper sliver shift—his only weapon now, a scrap of himself that remembered what the machine had tried to take.

A boot scraped on gravel behind them.

Sinjin Voss stepped out of the shadows between two freight cars, his Bureau coat pristine despite the filth of the yard. Three men flanked him, rifles raised. Their muzzles were not pointed at the yard. They were pointed at Elias and Lila.

"Mr. Thorne," Sinjin said, almost kindly. "I did so hope you'd be reasonable."

Lila's revolver came up. Elias caught her wrist. "He's not here to help us, then."

"No," Sinjin agreed. "I'm here to correct a miscalculation. You see, I don't intend to simply *implicate* Ashworth. I intend to own what he's built. His emitter. His extraction algorithms. The failsafe in the Enclave's heart." He spread his hands. "All of it. And you, Mr. Thorne, are the only man alive who can tune those machines to sing in a new key."

"You want me to replace Ashworth," Elias said flatly.

"I want you to survive. Your mother's mind is in that Enclave, hanging on a thread of phosphor and copper. With Ashworth dead—by *my* bullet, not yours—I control the failsafe. I can restore her. I can give you back everything."

Lila's voice cut like a blade. "And if he refuses?"

Sinjin's smile didn't waver. "Then the extraction machine takes him apart properly. And I'll make sure the warden who found his weaknesses survives to finish the job."

Elias felt the copper sliver shift against his tongue. He could taste blood.

Then the first shot cracked through the yard.

It didn't come from Sinjin's men. It came from the roof of the carriage shed, a hundred yards east, and Sinjin's left-hand man folded as the round tore through his shoulder. Chaos erupted. Sinjin's remaining men dove for cover, rifles cracking back toward the shed.

Sinjin himself moved with unsettling speed, drawing a long-barreled pistol and firing twice into the shed's darkness. A shadow dropped from the rafters, and Elias saw Ashworth's pale, furious face catch the floodlight for half a second before he vanished behind a coal hopper.

"Now!" Lila grabbed Elias's arm and hauled him toward the maintenance tunnel's grate. They were halfway there when a second vehicle's engine roared—not the Enclave's gate, but the yard's eastern loading dock. A black Bureau tank truck smashed through the chain-link fence, scattering Sinjin's men like leaves.

Sinjin turned, recognized the vehicle's driver through the smoked glass, and his face changed. For the first time, Elias saw something like fear cross the man's features.

"Ashworth," Sinjin snarled. "You would—"

The tank truck opened fire. Not bullets—a compressed burst of phosphor gas flooded the yard, and Elias knew that gas. It was the same compound the extraction machine used to loosen memory threads. Sinjin's body armor couldn't stop what it did to his mind. He dropped to his knees, hands clutching his head, screaming in a voice that no longer sounded like his own.

Ashworth climbed down from the truck's cab, a compact emitter clutched to his chest like a child holding a toy. His leg was bleeding—Lila had hit him in the exchange—but he moved with a predator's grace toward Sinjin's crumpled form.

"I built the failsafe, Voss," Ashworth said, standing over him. "Did you truly believe I wouldn't build a countermeasure to the man who sold it to me?"

He pressed a stud on the emitter. Sinjin's scream cut off. His eyes went glassy, and he toppled sideways, breathing shallowly but utterly emptied.

Ashworth turned to face Elias, and the emitter came up.

"Your turn, Mr. Thorne. You've caused me no end of trouble. But you're still useful." He limped closer. "You'll tune my machines. You'll build my future. And you'll do it knowing that your mother's failsafe keeps her mind only if I keep breathing."

Elias's hand closed around the dampener's half-assembled casing. It wasn't functional. It wasn't anything. But it was metal, and he understood metal better than Ashworth ever would.

He lunged.

The emitter fired. White light screamed past Elias's shoulder, and he felt the ghost of his own memories peel away from the edges of his thoughts—his sister's face, the smell of his workshop's forge, Lila's laugh. But the copper sliver in his jaw sang, and the false memories the warden had fed the machine came flooding back instead, interposing themselves between the emitter's beam and what he truly was.

Ashworth's eyes widened. He had spent years perfecting this technology. He had never faced a man who could *lie* to it.

Elias's fist, wrapped around the dampener's casing, connected with Ashworth's jaw. The man staggered, the emitter skittering across the gravel. Elias was on him in an instant, the jagged edge of the casing pressed to Ashworth's throat.

"Do it," Ashworth rasped, blood on his lips. "Finish it. But know that the failsafe triggers on my heartbeat. You kill me, and your mother's mind goes dark forever."

Elias's hand shook. Lila appeared at his side, revolver trained on Ashworth's head. "He's lying."

"Is he?" Elias looked into Ashworth's eyes and saw no lie there. Only certainty.

A grinding roar drowned the moment. The maintenance tunnel's wall exploded inward in a cloud of brick dust and iron shards. Through the smoke, an armored vehicle—all riveted plates and black exhaust, something out of the Church's deepest forges—ground to a halt ten feet from them.

Its hatch squealed open.

Elias looked up, and the world stopped.

The woman climbing out wore Owl Guard leathers and carried a memory-washing lance in one hand. But her face—dust-streaked, exhausted, alive—was the face he had spent ten years mourning.

"Mother," Elias whispered.

She looked at him, then at Ashworth bleeding at his feet, and her eyes were cold as the Enclave's deepest clockwork.

"You were supposed to kill him," she said. "Not bargain with him."