"Hold the induction coil steady," Lenna Ashvane ordered, her voice rasping against the heavy canvas of her protective mask. "If it slips by a millimeter, we'll vaporize the entire block."
The underground laboratory in Halvern was stifling. Above them, the muffled thumps of the Crucible riots rang in the stone ceiling. The zealots were trying to break into the manufactory's upper levels, chanting hymns of purification, demanding the destruction of the secular machines. Down here, deep in the bedrock, Lenna and her team of exiled Mechanists were about to render their entire theology obsolete.
Toris, his hands wrapped in thick, insulated leather, grunted as he adjusted the brass calibrator. The air in the room was thick with ozone and the sharp, metallic tang of aether-radiation. Lenna could feel it in her bones—an ache that had been growing steadily for the past decade, the cost of standing too close to the raw output of replicated divinity.
