Read Chapter 30: The Damage Done

The crackling hum of the energy field filled Elias’s ears as he dropped to one knee beside Sable. Blood seeped through her fingers where she clutched her shoulder, her face pale but set with grim determination.

“Don’t you dare,” she rasped. “Go disable that thing.”

MacReady fired a burst at the doorway, cursing as French shouts echoed back. “She’s right, Captain. We’ve got minutes before they swarm through.”

Elias’s gaze flicked between the wounded woman and the pulsing violet barrier encasing the meteor—a churning sphere of rock and machinery that hummed with terrible potential. His crew. His mission. The lives of hundreds of thousands in London.

He pressed his pistol into Sable’s good hand. “Make it count.”

Her grin was bloody and fierce. “Always do.”

Elias scrambled toward the control dais, ducking behind a steel support as a volley of musket fire whined past. The console glowed with arcane symbols and brass levers, French engineering designed to be proof against tampering. But he’d spent five years memorizing every weakness in French military hardware.

He yanked a maintenance panel free and stared into the tangle of copper wiring and pneumatic tubes.

“Amelia,” he muttered under his breath, recalling her idle chatter about fortress redundancies. She’d mentioned the failsafe—a manual vent that would bleed excess power from the field. A safety valve.

He grabbed a wrench and slammed it against the vent housing. The metal screamed, then gave. Violet energy surged through the gap, blinding and hot, and the field flickered.

“Now, MacReady!”

The bosun hurled a petard shell at the barrier’s base. The explosion shook the chamber, dust raining from the ceiling. When the smoke cleared, the field guttered like a dying candle.

The meteor sat exposed—a black, crystalline heart cradled in iron claws.

Elias moved. He vaulted the console and sprinted across the shifting floor as the fortress groaned around them. Plaster and stone cracked overhead. The fortress wasn’t just damaged—it was breaking apart.

“Sable!” he shouted.

MacReady had her over his shoulder, running hard. “Get the bloody rock, Captain!”

Elias grabbed the meteor’s housing. The metal was freezing cold, searing into his palms. He heaved, feeling the weight of its strange gravity pulling at his bones.

Then the floor tilted.

He slid, boots skidding across debris, and crashed through a doorway just as the chamber behind him collapsed into a yawning abyss of sky and wind. The meteor’s housing scraped against the frame, nearly wrenching from his grip.

“Elias!” Amelia’s voice cut through the chaos. She stood at the far end of a narrow corridor, her dark hair wild, a loaded pistol in her hand. Her eyes were wide, not with fear, but with something colder.

“Help me,” he grunted, hauling the meteor forward. “It’s heavy.”

She didn’t move.

“Amelia, the fortress is falling apart. We have to go—now.”

Something shifted behind her eyes. A veil dropping. She raised the pistol, not at him, but at the ceiling above his head.

“I’m sorry, Elias.”

She fired.

The shot wasn’t meant for him. It punched through a support beam groaning under the strain, and the ceiling above Elias buckled. He threw himself sideways, the meteor rolling from his grip, as tons of stone and metal crashed down between them.

When the dust settled, he was on his knees. Through the haze he saw Amelia lift the meteor housing with impossible strength—a mechanism gleamed on her forearm, whirring gears lending her power.

“You knew,” he said, voice raw. “You knew all along.”

Amelia’s face twisted—grief, regret, or triumph, he couldn’t tell. “I loved you once. I hope you understand this is bigger than either of us. The syndicate promised me a new world. And I intend to build it.”

She turned and ran as another section of wall exploded outward, showing a yawning gap of sky and the black sea far below.

Elias lunged, but MacReady grabbed his arm, Sable swaying at his side.

“Captain—she’s gone. The whole fortress is coming apart.”

He watched Amelia disappear into the smoke, carrying the meteor—his mission, his redemption, his hope—into the chaos.

Then he heard the click.

He dropped his gaze. His boots rested on a steel grating, and beneath it, a glowing phosphor trail snaked through the bowels of the fortress.

“That’s not debris damage,” he said slowly. “That’s a detonation cord.”

MacReady followed his gaze. “Someone’s scuttled her.”

Elias looked up. Through a torn gap in the fortress’s hull, he could see the other sections breaking apart on a synchronized pattern. Not random collapse—shaped charges, timed and placed.

Amelia hadn’t just betrayed him. She’d planned this. She’d lured them into a fortress that was never meant to survive the night.

“Where’s Hollis?” Elias asked, sudden ice in his veins.

“Last I saw, he was covering the east stair,” Sable said weakly. “Before they cut us off.”

Elias ran.

The east stair was a hell of flame and twisted metal. Three French soldiers lay crumpled at its base, and Hollis stood over them with a shattered cutlass and blood streaming from a gash above his eye. When he saw Elias, his grim face flickered with relief.

“Captain—I thought you were done for.”

“Not yet.” Elias grabbed his arm. “Amelia took the meteor. She’s hunting a launch deck. We need to cut her off before she escapes.”

Hollis’s eyes hardened. Years of misplaced hatred, now redirected with absolute focus. “She won’t get far.”

They fought their way through burning corridors, MacReady dragging Sable, Hollis and Elias cutting down any French soldier who stood in their path. The fortress tilted around them, sections shearing away into the darkness.

They burst onto a launch deck just as Amelia reached a sleek dirigible tethered to a collapsing pylon.

She saw them. And for one terrible moment, she hesitated.

“Elias,” she called across the whistling wind. “Come with me. Together we could rule the sky.”

He raised his pistol.

Her crew swarmed around her, blocking her from view as the dirigible’s engines flared. Elias fired, once, twice—but she was gone, swallowed into the cabin.

The tether snapped.

The dirigible rose, impossibly graceful, against the burning skeleton of the fortress. And as it climbed, a loudspeaker crackled to life. Not Amelia’s voice—deeper, mocking.

“Well fought, Captain Thorne. Your reputation precedes you. Tell your admiralty the Bastion sends its regards. And that the sky belongs to those who dare to take it.”

The dirigible’s hull bore no markings. No French colors. Nothing.

Then it vanished into the clouds.

Elias stood at the edge of the collapsing deck, wind screaming past, the ring on his finger cold against his flesh. His ship was tethered a hundred yards below. His meteor was gone. His ex-lover now served the Bastion—the very conspiracy Grey swore he was fighting.

MacReady limped up beside him. “Captain… that voice. I’ve heard it before.”

Elias turned.

“That was Ash,” MacReady said, his face pale. “Captain Ash. The one they say went rogue three years back, sold his commission to the highest bidder.”

The fortress lurched. They had seconds, not minutes, to reach the ship.

“He wasn’t following Amelia,” Elias said, the pieces clicking into place with terrible clarity. “He was waiting for her. This whole fortress was a trap—but not for us.”

“For who, then?”

Elias’s jaw tightened.

“For whoever tried to take the meteor first.” He looked down at the ring on his finger—Amelia’s ring, returned to him as a goodbye. “Ash knew she’d come to me. He used her to find the weapon. And he’s using her to deliver it to the Bastion.”

Below, the ocean churned like a furious black maw.

“We going after them?” Hollis shouted over the wind.

Elias turned from the wreckage, his eyes fixed on the dark clouds where the dirigible had vanished.

“Oh, we’re going after them,” he said, a new edge in his voice. “But not to take the meteor back. She’s made her choice. Now I’m going to make sure she lives to regret it.”

He jumped for the rope ladder of his hull descending through the smoke, and as the fortress broke apart behind him, he whispered a promise to the sky.

“You want a war, Ash? You just started one with the wrong man.”