Read Chapter 33: The Battle of Bloomsbury

The first walker’s foot came through the foundry roof like a fist through wet paper. Shards of slate and iron rained down, and Elias threw himself sideways, dragging Lila with him as a support beam crashed into the space where they’d been standing.

“They’re here!” Nell shouted from the stairwell. “Three of them—no, four—coming up Ironmonger Lane!”

Forty mechanics scattered across the foundry floor moved with a precision born of desperation. Elias had drilled them for three days straight, sleeping in shifts, teaching them the traps he’d designed, the automatons he’d repaired. Now the moment had come, and the air was already thick with steam and the copper tang of fear.

“Light the relay traps!” Corbin Pryce yelled from the upper gallery. “They’ll try to cut our power first!”

Elias ran. His bad leg screamed but he ignored it, vaulting over a barricade of scrap iron and landing beside the larger of the two salvaged automatons. Its brass chassis was pitted and scarred from whatever battle it had lost decades ago, but he and Lila had rewired its boiler core, giving it a purpose its original makers never intended.

“You remember the sequence?” he shouted to the mechanic manning its control levers.

“Three pulls left, one right, then release the pressure valve,” the young woman—Bess, she’d said—answered, knuckles white on the levers. “I’ve got it, Mr. Thorne.”

The second walker crashed through the east wall. Its spotlight swept across the foundry, illuminating the crouched figures of Elias’s people, and for a moment he saw them as Marwood’s soldiers must: a ragged collection of grimy mechanics armed with rivet guns and pipe wrenches, holding a crumbling building against the might of the Empire’s war machines.

“Now,” Elias said quietly.

Bess slammed the first lever. The automaton lurched forward, steam shrieking from its joints, and drove its massive iron fist through the walker’s support strut. The machine stumbled, and before it could recover, a second mechanic hit the hidden memory trap—a projector cylinder wired to the walker’s exterior speakers, flooding the crew compartment with the amplified screams of every man Marwood had ever silenced.

The walker’s crew panicked. The machine careened sideways, crushing a lamppost, and toppled into the street with a thunderous crash.

“That’s one,” Lila said, appearing at Elias’s side with a smoking rivet gun in her hands. Her face was smeared with grease, and there was a cut above her eye she hadn’t bothered to notice. “Two more coming through the front.”

Harriet Thorne stood at the base of the stairs leading to the sub-basement, her silver hair catching the emergency lamplight. Her gray eyes were fixed on Elias with an intensity that made him stop.

“Go,” she said. “Do what you need to do. I’ll hold them here.”

“Mother, no. You don’t know how to fight—”

She smiled. It was the same smile she’d given him when he was seven years old and had fallen from the roof of the foundry, breaking his arm. The same smile that said *I will fix this*.

“I’ve spent three months learning exactly what that man’s machines can and cannot forgive,” she said. “And I know where he’s kept his main device. Let me earn my way back to this family, Elias. Not as a traitor. As a founder.”

He wanted to argue. But over her shoulder, he saw Marwood’s third walker—larger than the others, its carapace painted black with gold filigree—descend from the sky on storm-bellows, landing directly in the middle of Foundry Square.

“He’s here,” Elias said. “Marwood. He came himself.”

“Then go. Now.” Harriet pressed something cold into his hand—a phosphor capsule, the kind Ashworth had used on Sinjin Voss. “You won’t get close enough to stab him with a wrench. But he’ll open his own doors to gloat.”

Elias pocketed the capsule. He wanted to embrace her, to tell her everything he hadn’t had words for in the years she’d been a ghost in his life. But Bess’s automaton collapsed behind him, its boiler blown out by a point-blank shell, and there was no more time.

“Stay alive,” he said.

“You too,” she said, turning away.

He ran.

The foundry was a warren of broken stairwells and maintenance shafts that Elias had known since childhood. He climbed as Marwood’s walkers methodically shot apart the building behind him, the screams of his mechanics ringing in his ears. He emerged through a skylight onto the roof of the casting house, overlooking the square where Marwood’s black walker had opened its chest hatch.

Marwood stepped out onto the machine’s extended platform, dressed in impeccable white, a cane in one hand and a small glass sphere in the other. The sphere pulsed with a sickly green light.

“Elias Thorne!” Marwood called, his voice magnified by the walker’s speakers. “Your little rebellion has been educational. But it ends now. You see this? It’s the original prototype your father built—the one he refused to surrender. I had my men recover it from the river where you threw it.” He held it up, a perfect cylinder of glass and copper thread. “Imagine what I can do with the true source instead of cheap copies.”

Elias’s hands tightened on the roof gutter. His father’s work. Marwood had his father’s work.

And he had the copper sliver in his jaw.

Before he could move, the foundry doors on the north side burst open. Harriet staggered out, blood on her temple, carrying a massive canister of volatile solvent in her arms. She stumbled toward Marwood’s walker, and Elias saw what she intended.

“Mother, no!”

Harriet didn’t look at him. She looked only at Marwood.

“Your device destroyed my husband,” she said, her voice carrying across the square. “You won’t use it on my son.”

She threw the canister at the walker’s base and lit the phosphor capsule in her other hand.

The blast was white and hot. It consumed the walker’s legs, sent Marwood flying from the platform, the glass sphere spinning from his grip and shattering on the cobblestones. And when the flames cleared, Harriet Thorne was gone.

Marwood lay stunned in the rubble, his white suit blackened, his face a mask of rage. Elias dropped from the roof and landed on the cobblestones fifteen feet away, rising with a rivet gun in his fist.

He raised it. Marwood sneered.

“Kill me if you wish, boy. There are ten more like me in Whitehall. A hundred more. You’ll never—”

Elias pulled the trigger. The rivet punched through Marwood’s shoulder, spinning him sideways with a scream.

“I’m not going to kill you,” Elias said, stepping closer, the sliver in his jaw burning against his tongue. “I’m going to make you tell the truth. And then I’m going to make everyone hear it.”