The world was ending, and Isolde was walking through the fire with a baby in her arms.
The courtyard outside the Women's Barracks was a slaughterhouse. The eruption of the volcano had turned the sky into a swirling vortex of ash and embers, painting everything in shades of grey and blood-red. The ground shuddered rhythmically, a heartbeat of geological violence that cracked the cobblestones and toppled the guard towers.
"Form up!" Isolde screamed, her voice cutting through the roar of the collapsing refinery. "Phalanx formation! Shields up!"
Two hundred women moved as one. They didn't have real shields; they had torn the plating off the ventilation units and the doors off the lockers. They locked them together, creating a wall of rusted steel.
Isolde stood in the center of the pocket, Lucius strapped to her chest in a sling made of heavy canvas. The baby was awake. His eyes, the color of old gold, tracked the falling debris with an unnerving calm. He didn't cry. He didn't flinch.
"To the docks," Isolde commanded. "Do not stop. Do not break step."
They began to march.
The path to the South Gate was a gauntlet. The explosion in the Design Tower had sent the garrison into a panic, but the automated defenses were still active.
As the phalanx rounded the corner toward the main thoroughfare, a line of Auto-Turrets mounted on the perimeter wall swiveled toward them. These were brass-cased Gatling guns, fed by steam-pressure and guided by simple motion-tracking clockwork.
"Turrets!" screamed Jessa, who was leading the shield wall.
The barrels spun. Whirrrrr.
The women flinched, bracing for the hail of lead that would tear them apart.
Isolde stepped forward, breaking the line of the phalanx. She placed a hand on Lucius's head.
"Hush now," she whispered to the child. "Quiet the noise."
Lucius blinked. A ripple of distortion—like a heat haze—expanded outward from his small body. It wasn't magic, not in the way the world used to know it. It was a void. A null-field.
The Auto-Turrets fired.
Click. Hiss. Clunk.
The steam-pressure in the feed lines simply vanished. The clockwork gears inside the tracking mechanisms seized, the lubricant turning to grit. The barrels spun lazily to a halt.
The turrets drooped, lifeless metal statues.
"Forward!" Isolde yelled.
The women cheered—a raw, feral sound—and charged past the disabled guns. They had seen the miracle. They didn't understand it, but they believed in it. The Lantern was lit.
They hit the South Gate like a battering ram. The guards stationed there, human regulars in light steam-armor, were already demoralized by the volcano. When they saw a wall of screaming women charging through the smoke, led by a woman carrying a child who silenced machines, they broke.
Isolde didn't waste time killing them. "Ignore the stragglers! The target is the ship!"
They burst onto the docks.
The scene was chaotic. The elite of Cinder—the surviving engineers, the overseers, the merchants—were scrambling to board the few vessels docked there. But one ship dominated the harbor.
The Iron Lung.
It was a monstrosity of naval engineering. A dreadnought clad in three inches of iron plating, powered by four massive paddle wheels and a rear propeller. Its smokestacks were belching black clouds, and its deck was bristling with cannons.
The gangplank was down. A stream of panicked nobles was rushing up it, carrying chests of gold and documents.
"That's our ride," Isolde said, pointing with her shiv. "Cut the lines. Take the bridge."
The women surged forward.
They hit the crowd of fleeing nobles like a wolf pack hitting a flock of sheep. There was no mercy. Years of abuse, of starvation, of watching their children sold or killed, poured out in a frenzy of violence. Aristocrats were shoved into the oily water of the harbor. Guards were swarmed and stabbed with sharpened screwdrivers and shivs.
Isolde moved through the melee with cold precision. She wasn't a brawler like Adam; she was a surgeon. She sidestepped a guard's clumsy swing and drove her blade into the gap of his neck armor. She didn't pause to watch him fall.
She reached the gangplank.
"Hold the ramp!" she ordered Jessa. "Let no one off!"
She sprinted up the incline, Lucius bouncing gently against her chest. Two crewmen tried to block her at the top.
Lucius gurgled.
The steam-pistol in the first crewman's hand exploded as the pressure regulator failed. He screamed, dropping the weapon. The second crewman's electro-baton shorted out, sparking wildly before dying.
Isolde kicked the first man in the knee, shattering the joint, and slashed the second across the face. She stepped over them onto the deck.
"Secure the deck!" she shouted. "Mara, take a squad to the engine room! If they try to scuttle the ship, kill them!"
Mara and ten others peeled off, heading for the lower hatches.
Isolde turned her eyes to the bridge—a fortified tower overlooking the deck. The Captain was there. She could see him through the glass, shouting orders, pointing a frantic finger at her.
The ship's main cannons began to turn inward, aiming at the deck itself. The Captain was willing to shell his own ship to stop the mutiny.
"Get down!" Isolde screamed, diving behind a capstan.
The cannons whirred... and then groaned.
The gears ground together. The hydraulics whined in protest. The Sanctuary Field was reaching them, but the distance was great. The cannons slowed, but they didn't stop.
Isolde looked down at Lucius. "I need more, little one. Reach out."
She unclipped the strap of the sling. She held the baby up, just for a second, toward the bridge.
Lucius looked at the massive iron guns. He reached out a tiny hand, as if grasping a toy.
Silence.
The deep thrum of the ship's idle engines cut out. The lights on the deck flickered and died. The turning cannons froze instantly, their momentum arrested so suddenly that the metal groaned.
The dreadnought was dead in the water.
Isolde re-wrapped the child and ran. She stormed the stairs to the bridge, kicking open the hatch.
Captain Vane was there, frantically pulling levers on a dead console. He was a large man with a thick beard and a chest full of medals. He pulled a saber from his belt—low-tech, reliable steel.
"Witch!" Vane roared, lunging at her.
Isolde didn't have a sword. She had a six-inch shiv.
She parried the heavy saber swing with a discarded metal tray she grabbed from the map table, the impact jarring her arm to the shoulder. Vane was strong, desperate. He swung again, a killing blow aimed at her head.
Isolde dropped to her knees, sliding under the arc of the blade. She slashed at his hamstrings.
Vane howled but didn't fall. He turned, raising the sword to impale her.
Bang.
Vane's head snapped back. A red hole appeared in his forehead. He crumpled to the deck.
Isolde spun around.
Standing in the doorway of the bridge was a young woman—a girl, really—holding a smoking flintlock pistol. It was Elara, a mute girl from the laundry detail who had never held a weapon in her life.
Elara's hands were shaking, but her aim had been true.
Isolde stood up, brushing the dust from her rags. She nodded to Elara.
"Good shot."
Isolde walked to the dead Captain and retrieved his keys. She went to the main console. The ship was silent, the engine dead because of Lucius.
"Mara!" she shouted down the voice-tube. "Report!"
"Engine room secured!" Mara's voice came back, tinny and breathless. "The engineers are dead or subdued. But the fires are out! The boilers are cold! We can't move!"
"Start them up," Isolde commanded. "Manual ignition. Use the coal. Get the pressure back."
"It... it won't catch, Isolde! The sparks won't light! It's the baby!"
Isolde looked down at Lucius. He was asleep now, exhausted by the effort of silencing a dreadnought.
"He sleeps," Isolde said. "The field is receding. Try again in thirty seconds."
She walked to the front of the bridge and looked out the viewport.
The view was apocalyptic. The volcano was fully erupting now, spewing magma onto the prison below. The Design Tower was a twisted ruin, leaning precariously over the crater.
But on the shore, a massive sea of people was pushing toward the water. And at the front, she saw the flash of a golden hammer.
Adam.
And high up on the scaffolding of the burning tower, a lone figure was climbing down.
Kael.
Isolde grabbed the cord for the ship's steam whistle. As the boilers below began to rumble back to life, catching the spark now that Lucius was dormant, pressure built in the system.
Isolde pulled the cord.
HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONK.
The sound was a mournful, defiant blast that shook the glass of the bridge. It echoed across the burning island, cutting through the screams and the explosions.
It was a beacon.
"We have the ship," Isolde whispered, her hand trembling slightly as the adrenaline faded. She touched Lucius's sleeping face. "Now we just need the crew."
She turned to Elara, who was staring at the dead Captain.
"Don't look at him," Isolde said softly. "Look at the sea. That's where we're going."
The Iron Lung shuddered as the paddle wheels began to turn, churning the dark water. The hijack was complete. Now, they had to hold the extraction point until the Titan and the Engineer arrived.