Chapter 2: The Hounds
The thud-scrape came again, closer. It was the sound of heavy boots on stone, punctuated by the metallic ring of a grapple-hook being set.
Lyra's blood went cold. She'd been diving for eight years and had never encountered another soul in a dead-zone wreck. Scavengers worked alone; it was safer. This was no scavenger. This was a hunter.
She killed the artifact's glow by jamming it deep into her pack, stuffing her spare cloak around it. The faint purple pulse was now muffled, but she could still feel a cold, rhythmic throb against her back.
They're here for this. They knew.
Her escape route through the main door was compromised. That left the "floor"—the original, crumbling outer wall of the study. She scrambled off the desk and crawled to the far side of the room, where a collapsed bookcase revealed a gaping, jagged hole. It led to the outside, straight into the screaming wind.
A beam of blinding white light, far more powerful than any scavenger's glow-rod, sliced through the study doorway. Lyra froze, pressing herself into the shadows of the debris.
"The heretic is in here," a voice boomed. It wasn't human. It was filtered, metallic, like a man shouting through a copper pipe. "The Key's signal is strong. Secure it. Cleanse the vessel."
Lyra didn't wait to find out what "cleanse the vessel" meant.
She bolted for the hole. As she dove through it, a searing-hot bolt of energy hissed past her ear, vaporizing the stone where she'd been hiding.
She was back on the exterior of the Gilded Wreck, clinging to the upside-down wall. The wind shrieked, tearing at her. Far below, the green Miasma churned.
"There! On the hull!" the metal voice shouted.
Lyra didn't look back. She ran. Her climbing boots, soled with tacky, grip-fast resin, found purchase on the ancient bronze. She was moving horizontally across the inverted spire, heading for her main anchor line seventy yards away. It was a lifetime.
Another energy bolt slammed into the wall above her, showering her with molten bronze. She yelped, shielding her face as she rappelled-ran, letting the angled wall take her weight. Two figures in dark, articulated armor appeared from the hole, their faces hidden behind polished, insect-like masks. Purifiers. "Hounds," the dock-hands called them. Soris's enforcers. They moved with unnatural speed, their grapple-hooks firing and retracting, pulling them across the hull in terrifying, spider-like lunges.
They were gaining.
"By the Architect's shadow," Lyra cursed, her lungs burning. She was still thirty yards from her line. She wouldn't make it.
She scanned her surroundings in a panic. An old, bronze-encased pipe ran down the wall, probably an ancient water conduit. It was thick as her waist and slick with algae. It ran parallel to her position, about fifteen feet "below" her (which was, confusingly, fifteen feet closer to the sky).
She had one chance.
Without slowing, Lyra unclipped her safety line, coiled it in one hand, and jumped.
For one heart-stopping second, she was airborne, a tiny speck against the backdrop of the endless sky. The Miasma seemed to rise up to meet her. She hit the pipe hard, her arms and legs wrapping around it in a bone-jarring impact. Her boots held.
The Hounds, not expecting the maneuver, paused. It was all she needed. Using the pipe as a slide, she shot downward, hurtling toward the open air.
The pipe ended. She was out of options. She looked "down" (past her feet, toward the Rim) and saw her main rope, dangling twenty feet away.
She pushed off the end of the pipe, a desperate, sprawling leap into the void. She grabbed her rope, her gloves smoking from the friction as she zipped down the line.
A high-pitched whine sounded above her. One of the Hounds had her in his sights.
Cut the line.
The thought was instinct. She pulled her knife and sliced the rope above her head.
She fell.
The scream was ripped from her throat. But she'd planned for this. She had ten feet of rope still in her hand, the end attached to the harness at her waist. As she fell past her anchor spike, she whipped the loose end of the rope around the spike's loop. The carabiner caught, the rope snapped taut, and she was brought to a shoulder-dislocating halt, swinging wildly in a huge arc.
The energy bolt from the Hound's rifle zipped through the empty air where she'd been a second before.
Lyra didn't wait for a second shot. She found the wall, slammed her boots into it, and half-climbed, half-fell the rest of the way down her network of safety ropes. She hit the surface of her home island, The Rim, in an undignified heap, collapsing behind a rusted-out water condenser.
She lay there for a full minute, shaking, gasping in the metallic-tasting air. Her pack was safe. The artifact was safe. She was not.
She finally staggered to her feet, pulling her hood low to cover her face. She took the shadow-ways back, a maze of back-alleys and maintenance tunnels. The Rim was quiet, the mid-day work whistles echoing from the factories. Everything looked normal.
But when she got to the tenement block where she lived, her blood ran cold for the second time that day.
The door to her small, one-room apartment was splintered, hanging open. And standing in the alley across from it, as if waiting just for her, was another Hound, his polished mask seeming to stare right through her.
He didn't move. He just tilted his head, a silent, terrifying acknowledgment.
They're not just hunting the Key. They're hunting me.
Lyra backed away slowly, her hand gripping the knife in her pocket. She couldn't go home. She couldn't stay on The Rim. There was only one place to go. One person who, despite their bad history, had a ship fast enough to get her out.
She turned and ran for the docks. She had to find Kaelen.