For a second the world was only sound.
It started as a distant, mechanical groan — a long, bored exhalation through steel — and then the cellar answered with its own complaint: wood seams popped like knuckles, stone sighed, chains below their feet chimed like a dozen bells. Dust bloomed in the air, sudden and soft, turning the light into a gritted haze. For a heartbeat the basement was a cathedral of particles, glittering in magnesium smoke and the ghosts of torchlight.
Then the ceiling gave a cough and began to fall.
Emily heard the first slab break away before she felt it. Her mind ordered the elements — magnesium to light them, beryllium to brace, titanium for blunt force — but the room gave her no time for neat lists. The first chunk of ceiling slammed down where the auction table had been, wood splintering outward in slow motion. Noah pushed forward before thought: a shoulder into a drift of falling masonry, pipe arcing out to catch an edge and lever it enough for Emily to punch through the smaller rubble with a titanium-razor hand.
Vorren's men scattered with animal efficiency. The leader's visor flashed crimson, unreadable, and for a moment Emily thought he would stand there and watch them all die like a bored arbiter. Then a crack shivered down a support beam and he moved, gliding past the dead golem like a current around a rock. He did not shout orders; his voice was too clean for that. He tapped his ear with the cane and vanished into the chaos as if he had a dozen routes already counted.
They ran because the building was running out of itself. Dust made every breath a decision: live or not-live. Noah hauled a piece of shattered flagstone like a battering ram to clear their path; Emily dragged molten aluminum plates to wedge between falling bricks, turning one collapse into a shatter that sent a ribbon of sparks sailing harmlessly overhead. The mithril ingot rubbed against her palm, heavy and impossibly cold, as if the metal remembered where it came from.
Their systems triangulated survival in layers. Noah's metallic radar pinged frantic waypoints: structural supports, thin rebar, a hollow-sounding column where an air shaft might still be. Emily's system — the chatterbox — offered commentary between exclamation points.
[Collapse protocol good for cardio! Also, you might want to stop hugging the ingot. It will not draft your resignation letter for you.]
"Shut up," Emily snapped, not because she wanted it quiet and not because Vorren's men might hear — they already heard everything — but because she couldn't afford the loss of concentration. The sarcasm sliced into her brain like static.
Noah didn't look back. "This way!" he yelled, voice peeling off the stone. The path he cut with the pipe was not graceful but it was a path; it was the kind that ejected you from collapsing rooms and into breathing air that still behaved like air.
They hit a passage that smelled of copper and the faint, beaked stench of old oil. A soft wind moved along it, like a promise. For an instant, Noah thought he could hear orders in the far distance — masked voices, the muffled command of soldiers who had not been toppled by stone. Part of him wanted to turn and fight. Another, louder part wanted to sleep and skip the rest of growing up.
"Up!" Vorren's voice, close now, was a blade. Two guards slammed past them; a clink-shout of bodies. One shoved them aside and skittered into a side tunnel, the other slipping on powdered mortar and going down. The heap of soldiers behind him did not sound like they were evacuating. They sounded like they were securing a perimeter.
Emily's breath cut into a thin wire.
"We need to get to the surface," she said. "Find the wall—vent shafts, anything."
Noah blinked out of the tunnel's smoky half-light and pointed. The metallic radar flagged a shaft — a thin ladder traced against shadow like a backbone. "There."
They climbed on hands and knees, hauling the mithril between them like contraband and sin. The ladder smelled like iron and sweat and an old kind of fear. At the top the hatch was jammed with something heavy; Noah wrenched while Emily pulsed a faint field of heat through the metal to loosen the rust. Her fingertips glowed a wet blue when she finished, and she felt it in her bones: the elements inside her had burned something awake.
The hatch popped and slammed open, throwing them up into a rain of slate and chill night air. For a second Emily was a creature of pure reaction, face stung by wind, lungs desperate. She tasted metal, rain, the startled tang of town smoke — like burnt bread folded into ozone.
They spilled out behind the auction house into an alley, coughing and blinking. Above the town, the sky was a wide, innocent black. But the black had been punctured across the horizon: stars dimmed in the east, and there, low and uncomfortably close, a smear of burning metal arced like a wound and struck the far side of Lyrthorne with a chrome finality.
Another strike followed it fast — not falling like a stone but descending in technology: a glint of curved armor and heat. The town's eastern grain stores answered with an answering scream: a structure bathing the night in orange and collapsing inward. Somewhere a bell clanged and did not stop.
Vorren's men poured from the auction house behind them, forming a line to the street with tactical speed. The leader — Vorren — did not emerge. The shadow of his coat fell like a promise into the doorway. Someone shouted orders: "Contain the perimeter! Do not let them escape!" but who those words applied to — storage crates or the town itself — blurred.
Noah tightened his fingers around the hammer he'd picked up from the golem, now slung against his back. The new alloy felt like promise. Kinetic memory hummed in his palms. "We need to move. Toward the gate. Lyrthorne's walls."
Emily vaulted the low wall into the street. Her system was a jab of strawberries in her head.
[Field report: The sky is misbehaving. Meteoroids? Delivery trucks? Who's in charge of logistics? Either way, you might want to consider shelter that isn't on the receiving end of falling junk.]
She did not answer. Instead she watched the eastern sky as if it were trying to tell a secret in a language she half-remembered from a lab notebook. The arcs of fire were not random. They had vector, mass, an origin. She could feel it in the way the night-air pressure kissed her scalp. Her mind tabulated propulsion signatures; she smelled, absurdly, the leftover ozone of ionized entry. Someone — something — was seeding the fields with metal.
Sirens — human ones — began to rise. Not the guild's polite rooster-call but the kind of shriek that told people to wake and not go back to sleep.
"Town under attack," Noah said. It was not a question.
The guns from the Siege Breaker woke up the market. Men with powder-iron rifles took positions behind a baker's wagon and used it like a fort. Lanterns bobbed like slow fireflies. A horse screamed and bolted. People in the square stumbled out in robes and nightshirts, eyes wide enough to swallow the moon.
Emily's system offered a plan she resented more than she admitted: [Option 1: Seek shelter and rendezvous at the Inn. Option 2: Evacuate civilians. Option 3: Sabotage incoming craft with improvised charges. Option 4: Retrieve mithril and retreat for tactical analysis.] It slapped options up like a menu in a café she did not own.
They were both looking at the mithril in her hands.
Noah's lips tightened. "We don't have time for a full-blown lab assessment," he said. "But if those things are being delivered, the ingot is probably the reason someone wanted it. We can't just hand it to them."
Emily swallowed. She'd imagined many endings for the ingot — weapon, ransom, property for a black market row, gleam in the hand of a greedy man — but none had included a sky that rained steel. "We make a decision," she said. "Fast. But we help people on the way. We can't leave the town dotted with casualties."
He nodded. "Agreed. If we can lead people to the Golden Hearth, it's defensible."
They moved, but the town was rearranging itself into chaos around them. Soldiers fanned out, but not all of them were Vorren's men — Lyrthorne's constables, guildsmen, and a few independent fighters who did not want the sky to own their children. Noah co-opted a baker with a cart and pushed a pile of sacks into the wagon, turning it into an impromptu shield and stretcher. Emily — by impulse, not plan — found herself stopping at a doorway where a teenager was sobbing over a crate of loaves. She tossed a cooked magnesium flare into her palm like a toy and handed it over. "Follow us to the inn," she said. "Keep low."
The boy's eyes were equal parts terror and trust; he chose trust because there was nothing else to choose. He clutched the flare like a piece of dawn.
They moved in a zigzag, the city turning into an obstacle course of panic: a cart overturned, two dogs abandoned, a woman carrying a chest of what looked like family silver. Every time they threaded between debris, the sky offered them a new option of ruin: a metallic disk that struck the watchtower and skittered, clanging across shingles; a slab of unknown alloy that bounced from one wall and sheared a merchant's sign in half.
Vorren's black-armored soldiers did not stop them, but their glances were legal papers of disapproval. An officer reached them and said what Vorren must have intended all along: "Keep them alive," he ordered the subordinates, as if they could pick and choose who to keep from death. The phrasing felt obscene, administrative. The officer's visor reflected the meteors like a pair of angry clocks.
At the Golden Hearth, the innkeeper had opened the back gate and swung down his shutters half-madly, stacking tables and benches against the doors. He barked, "No room for heroes—there's room for the living." A line formed inside: elderly, pregnant, someone with a newborn sleeping under a cracked shawl. Noah shoved the cart through and then drew it backwards so it braced the door. "Get everyone in, get them down, and don't open until I say."
Emily's system sang like a canary: [Crowd control initiated. Emotional volatility at threshold 0.8. Consider calming pheromones. Also, I can conjure a quick heater if fingers are cold.]
"Focus the heater on the old man in the corner," Emily said, because small decisions were their currency now.
They huddled inside, knees pressed together with strangers, the inn's small hearth feeling like an over-generous sun. Someone added old quilts; someone lit candles. The heady smell of stew, a miracle they'd become accustomed to, made the room feel momentarily safe. The Golden Hearth had iron shutters that clanked and a cellar that would hold people in tighter spaces like an onion. Good defenses. Not impregnable ones. Not this night.
Noah's system pinged in his head: [Perimeter: unstable. Incoming metallic mass forming gust front east-northeast. Estimated time to impact clusters: three minutes. Recommendation: evacuate southern district.]
Three minutes. Noah imagined a countdown like numbers falling through his chest. He imagined the hammer at his back, heavy and capable.
Outside, the town trembled as if someone had scaled to the rooftops and punched it. A blast of air — not hot, but hard — moved through the windows. The inn's dog barked like a man and then quieted. Someone in the doorway whispered a prayer and someone else laughed, a brittle thing that sounded like rope snapping.
Emily's system chirped, then had a private meltdown: [If we have to improvise an anti-meteor defense, here's an idea: rig the bakery ovens to overpressurize and throw a cloud of superheated air into the trajectory path. It will disrupt the airflow. Also, cookies.]
"Cookies later," Emily said. She rose, the crowd parting like reeds, and met Noah at the door. "We need a plan to redirect the incoming shells."
He looked at the sky. The first object — thick and angular, trailing jagged vapor — slashed into the edge of town. A wall of flame and debris rippled outward like a hand closing. Someone in the crowd screamed. Noah's eyes were bright as hot wire. "We can create a pressure differential," he said. "If we get the bakery ovens to burst open in a pulse timed as the next incoming arrives, it might kick the air enough to nudge its path. It's stupid and it might not work, but it's a chance."
Emily's scientist brain cataloged: explosion variables, oven chamber volumes, heat flux, stoke timing. She thought of the Element Fusionist skill, of atmospheric manipulation, of sodium and chlorine and the way they twisted. Inventive, then dangerous.
"Stupid is what we have," she said. "No plan, we die with muffins."
They moved, working like a pair of hands that had rehearsed the same choreography a thousand quiet nights ago: Noah talking to three men at the bakery through the half-open shutters, Emily flipping a pan into her satchel (for reasons she could neither justify nor deny). The baker, a flabby man with a face like soft dough, swallowed hard and nodded. "If you think it might save the ovens, you do what you have to. Down the alley, pull the levers in the flue; the oven spits will open automatically if the dampers are ripped."
"Then we time it," Noah said. "You control the timing with an ignition flare; I'll hook up a release line to the oven valves. When the next one drops, we give it a shove."
Emily's system made a sound that meant excitement. [Pulsed oven technique: 6/10 on feasibility. Cookie probability reduced temporarily.]
Noah grinned. "Sorry, system. No cookies."
They ran, the town a maze of bodies and shouting. As they worked, a new star bloomed on the horizon — not a star at all, but a shape that made their stomachs empty. People near the gate looked up and pointed, then fell silent because whatever was coming cast a shadow on the future.
The second cluster hit closer. The timed seconds between them were thick as iron filings. Noah fixed ropes and levers; Emily calibrated a flare's burn time by throwing a tiny magnesium sphere into a test pan and watching the reflection on a curved shard of mirror. Sparks winked. Their hands moved with the authority of habit.
Three minutes. Two. One.
Emily struck the flare. A white tongue licked up into the night, pure and honest. Noah yanked the release. The bakery's ovens belched — not an explosion, but a correctly calibrated pulse of heat and steam that shot into the narrow alley like a gust from a storm door. The air folded against the incoming object's wake. The thing wobbled. It yawed like a drunken gull, and for one miraculous beat, its path curved away from the inn and toward the open fields beyond town.
A cheer rose in the street, sudden and fragile. People clapped like hands on tin. The second cluster fell into the far fields and the crops lit up in a clean line of orange. Noise stayed loud and angry, but there was a place to breathe.
Emily laughed once, a sound that might have been hysteria; Noah slapped her shoulder like he did when a circuit finally closed. They were a ridiculous pair: a scientist who could make pockets of atmosphere do her bidding and an engineer who could improvise a baby's-scale engine out of a bakery cart and a rope. Together, they kept the town from becoming a smeared mottled ash.
But the celebration lasted less than a breath.
A shadow crossed the eastern gate — broad, exact, and impossibly fast. The ground trembled in a new rhythm: not falling objects but the arrival of something larger, something that did not drift but landed with intention. Men from Vorren's ranks shouted and fell into formation; the town's bell rang a different alarm: not woken, but told to flee.
Noah's metallic radar pinged a different signature — not natural, and not random: [Large mass detected. Composition: composite alloy; propulsion dampeners active. Recommendation: distance.]
Emily's throat went dry. The way the object settled into the fields left a crater that smoked: three rings, concentric and deliberate. Dust billowed like a curtain. The townspeople went still and watched as something moved within those rings. It looked at the town. It did not decide if it liked what it saw. It simply decided.
From the far end of the crater a hatch opened slowly, like a maw parting. A ramp uncoiled. Figures moved down: not artillery, not beasts. Men in plates darker than night, visored helmets like sealed lids. In their hands they carried rods and boxes that pulsed with a quiet, effective light.
Vorren's officers whispered into their comms. The leader's voice — low, precise, and finally audible — came through the static to the nearest handset: "They requested pickups. We responded. We now secure the cargo. Leave the town intact."
Emily's chest hollowed. "They have a delivery mechanism," she said. "They can land what they want at targeted coordinates. We might have just postponed the storm."
Noah's jaw tightened like pliers. "Then we stop the next one before it can set down."
His system pulsed: [Resource: mithril ingot.] There was no question implied. The ingot sang faintly against Emily's palm. It had weight, dimension, the sense of things that change hands and laws.
Around them the town did not yet know whether to be angry or grateful or broken. People clutched children. A man swore like the world had insulted his family. The innkeeper shuffled out with bread and soup, because that was what people did when the universe asked a loud question.
Both of them understood the choice without speaking it: the ingot was not only a prize. It was a key. It probably opened more doors than either of them could imagine, but the men who brought the deliveries had already made one thing clear: they had the maps to the sky.
Emily looked at Noah and found, in his face, the same tired, stubborn light he'd had when he'd first led the goblins away. He would not become somebody's pawn. Not when he had fists and hammers and a sense of right that could be brawled into shape.
"We either try to take the control center — whatever made those drops — or we run with the ingot and find someone who will help us use it," she said. "Both options terrible. Both options necessary."
Noah grinned the wrong way — the grin of someone who liked impossible things. "Then we do both. We split: you and I take the control point; one of us runs for reinforcements. If we must get clever, we will shred the sky's address book."
Emily's brain skidded across variables: probability of success for a two-person incursion; chance of being captured; time until the next drop. Her system pinged an internal status, quickly: [Confidence: 0.37. Sarcasm: 0.8. Success if you are very, very lucky.]
"Or," she said, because she didn't like leaving home without a plan, "we use the mithril. The deliveries seem to react to metals used as signatures. If I can reverse-engineer the resonance and make a false target, we can misdirect their beacon."
Noah's eyes lit. "Fake signature. Trojan metaloid."
"Exactly." She smiled with a mouth too small for the scale of the thing it promised. "But it'll take time, and we'll need a secure lab."
"Which we don't have," he said.
"But we have the inn, and we have the Golden Hearth's cellar," she countered. "It will be cramped, but it's better than nothing."
Outside, beyond the ragged silhouette of the delivery craft and the dark, patient soldiers, a third shape traced the horizon. It was a line of smoke, thin and deliberate, like somebody had dipped the world in ink. The town had bought a little time. The sky had not forgiven that purchase.
Vorren's officer watched them, visor reflecting the inn's small fire. He lifted a hand, and his soldiers tightened their ranks. "You two," he said into the channel of a thousand small radio ghosts, "we hold the ingot for now. You will not leave. Unless you want to spend the rest of your life dreaming of what might have been."
Emily's pulse ticked hard, but she did not give him the satisfaction of fear. Her hand closed around the mithril as if to test its temper.
Noah's thumb brushed the hammer's haft and found a rhythm. "We don't plan to be stationary for long," he said. "But if you're asking, yes: we'd rather survive the night."
The officer laughed — a flat thing with no humor. "That's very flexible of you. Make a choice and make it fast."
From the smoke-curtained fields the delivery craft hummed, as if impatient. The sky measured Lyrthorne like a hand considering a coin. Time thinned into a sliver between heartbeats.
Emily breathed, then spoke a sentence that felt like drawing a line. "We're going to take that ship's house number off the registry," she said. "We will send it somewhere it can't call home."
Noah's grin touched the corners of his mouth in a way that made the inn's dog sigh with what might have been approval. "Then let's get to work."
They had one hour to make mischief out of a metal signature and to turn the feel of fear into something that looked like a plan. The town had one hour to decide whether to be brave or small.
Outside, beyond the empty cradle of the fields, a new star had begun to fall.
The Golden Hearth smelled like wet wool and boiled potatoes and the small miracle of too-many-people-huddled-together. It felt wrong and right at once — a cluster of warm bodies pressed into one another like emergency insulation. Children slept on laps. An old man hummed a tune that might have been a hymn or a memory. Someone passed around bowls of thin stew, and for a few breaths the town seemed less like a target and more like a family having a very bad day.
Emily kept her hand on the mithril as if that made it a person she could reassure.
Noah moved like a man with a list to complete. He'd catalogued the perimeter and the exits in the three minutes they'd owned; he ran them through again now. "We go south," he said in a whisper that could be heard by the nearest. "River path—less open fields, more cover. Two-wide batches. Women and children first. Gear second."
His system pinged dryly: [Moral calculus: 100% humane. Logistics: 73% feasible.]
Emily didn't answer. Her brain lived half in the chemistry of the night, half in the terrible arithmetic of bodies and ratio. She drew a line through the options: bakehouse diversion worked; the inn would hold for an hour; Vorren's men were busy securing perimeter and liaising with the arriving drops — not yet focused on routing civilians. They had the hour. That was all.
"Okay," she said. "We split into three columns. I'll take the eastern alley. Noah takes the bakery road. Everyone else keeps to the cellar—no lights. Move in silence. If they shout, scatter into the corpses of market stalls and run for the river. I will make the path visible only to us."
"How will you do that?" one of the constables asked, eyes hollow with caffeine and fear.
Emily's smile was a surgeon's. "Magnesium light and sodium smoke. Not for the eyes—just for me. I can dress the lane with brief flashes that'll show the safe spots to step. You trust me?"
"You carried a meteor in your hand," he answered, like it was proof enough.
Outside, the eastern quarter was a scatter of shutters and half-closed carts. The delivery craft still smoked in the far field like a wound that refused to heal. Soldiers in the black armor lurked under the lamp light but their attention was split; the larger invasion forces took priority over gently rounding up a town's residents.
Emily stepped out first. Her system immediately announced: [Mode: Tactical Nightlight — engaging. Also: you are wearing a cape of doom. You look cute.] She ignored the "cute" and willed magnesium to whisper into existence along the row of paving stones. It burned white and fierce for less than a second, enough to show where a foot could find purchase on the slick cobbles, and then it went out like an eyelid. She stitched a chain of those flashes, fingertip to fingertip, a low strobe that painted the alley and hid their footprints in the dark.
Noah's team moved at hers like a slow tide, a clutch of people pressing against his shoulders. He had rerigged the cart as bracing and a stretcher; he had pushed old men and small crates into puddles of shadow as they moved. When a soldier passed with his head low and boots clattering, Noah stepped in front and barked, "Lost! Lost in the lane! Help!" The man's eyes flicked, the cart took a second to be a problem worth stopping for — and the people moved past him like smoke.
It felt like cheating. It felt like miracles. It also felt like charity and theft at the same time.
Twice a child slipped. Twice Emily's hand flashed magnesium and caught the falling smallness. Once a woman screamed when a shard of rebar rained down and hit her shoulder; Noah was there with bandages before she could remember how to be frightened.
The third column, the slowest, carried the mithril. Emily and two burly townsmen formed a human tripod around the crate they'd made: a rough chest lined with blankets and nailed shut. They left the ingot exposed for a moment — heavy and cold with a light inside it — then slid it back into the padded husk and strapped it across a pack. The pack sagged, as if a small moon had been sewn to canvas.
"Don't drop it," Emily warned like someone who'd seen too many lab samples lose their heads. "And don't let anyone from Vorren get their hands on it. Especially not their radiomen."
"Nope," the elder whispered. "We'll smuggle it like a babe."
They moved like that, in phases. From the inn to the bakery lane, from the bakery to the backstreet, from the backstreet to the river run. The town thinned and then clumped again; the soldiers adjusted, sometimes missing entirely, sometimes swinging a lantern straight into a face. Each time, a snap of magnesium, a blink of sodium smoke, a shove into shadow, and they were past.
Not everything was clean. A boy with a fever lagged behind and no one noticed until a crossbow bolt thunked into the cart axle near him. The bolt's shaft tilting the wheel was the only reason someone shouted. Noah dropped the stretcher, ripped the bolt free with bare hands, and slammed the wheel back into place while Emily bled the boy's fever with a flash-freeze pocket of nitrogen on his temples. The kid slept and did not wake until two streets later.
They were half out when the alarm changed. Not the sharp, panicked bell of falling slag, but a different sound: a mechanical bleat, like a horn that had learned to whine. Vorren's soldiers snapped to attention; their radios spat out commands like red snow. "Perimeter breach — all units converge on river line."
Emily's magnesium chain hit a new tempo. She'd timed the gaps wrong. Too slow and the windows of safety closed; too fast and they'd run into a patrol.
Noah's grin was the kind that says you accept the risk because the alternative is worse. "Move," he said. "Keep the children in the middle. If we see crossbows, flatten and roll."
They reached the sewer mouth — a low-set iron grate behind a ruined tannery. It smelled like wet leather and old coin and something metallic that felt like money. The grate's lip had been fashioned into a ledge; a rusted hoist still hung nearby. Noah's shoulders found the metal, the pack squirmed, and they slipped into the dark.
Inside the tunnel, everything changed. The world narrowed to breath and echo and the steady drip of sewage. Their magnesium flashes ricocheted in the black, making insect shadows huge and threatening. But the sewer moved away from the open fields; it walked under the town's bones and toward the river. This was exactly why cities had sewers: unloved routes for people who could not afford the front door.
Emily's system sang in a style that was simultaneously proud and snarky: [Sewer navigation: 0.99. Confidence: 0.12. Also, yum? No. Disgust.]
"Shut up about the yum," Emily hissed.
The pack scraped the low arched stone; Noah made the team go single-file. Twice the water level rose like an answering pulse as something landed in the field overhead. Once, a distant boom pressed against the tunnel and pushed a spray of grit into their faces. The children whimpered. The old man hummed. A dog—someone had smuggled a dog—shivered but kept his head down.
After a long hour of crawling, wading, and moving like a rumor, they surfaced beyond the mills in a reed-choked backwater. Dawn was a bruise on the horizon. The river moved like a slow promise. Lyrthorne behind them was a bruise of smoke and scattered light, Vorren's silhouette a loose smudge in the east. The delivery craft still loomed, been given elsewhere the task of sorting the fields into fires. The sky had not stopped sending; it had re-prioritized.
They came up two at a time, pulling the last of the people through a drainage tunnel and into reeds that hid them like a half-remembered blanket. The pack was lighter now, or they had gotten used to the weight. People breathed and laughed in small, shaky bursts. A woman thanked Noah with tea-stained hands. The boy with the fever coughed and sat up. The dog sneezed.
There was a moment — a small, fragile hour — where it was almost possible to believe they had done enough.
Then a sound cracked from the far field: a call, literal and human. "FIRE! SOUND THE ALARM! They are escaping!"
Vorren's officers had discovered the hole in their sweep. Soldiers moved in a wedge through the tall grass. They were too few to storm the reeds properly and risk the river's bank giving way. They were, however, more than enough to pick off anyone foolish enough to walk the shore.
Noah's radar whispered in his head: pings of metal like a constellation. A patrol was closing from the north; another squad flanked from the east. Vorren's men were efficient and cruel; they were unrelenting. The river was a thin line between them and running.
"Plan B," Noah said. "We run the ferry."
"There's a ferry?" someone asked.
"No, but there's a skiff at Miller's dock. We take it."
Miller's dock was a half-mile downstream and required crossing a channel that was shallow and full of reeds and full of chance. They moved fast. Noah shoved, Emily conjured temporary foot-holds from thin sheets of aluminum along the muddy path so boots wouldn't sink, and the townsfolk ran like a ragged, breathing river.
A volley split behind them. The round struck the reeds where they'd been an instant earlier and peeled them apart like a hand through hair. Someone fell. Emily crouched and wrapped her arm around him and dragged him. Blood smeared into mud. No one left him. Noah vaulted the last stretch, catching the skiff's mooring with a thrown hammer and then—because it was his temperament—broke the rope in one savage tug. The boat came loose with a groan.
"On!" he shouted.
They shoved people aboard. Emily heaved the crate with the mithril into the hull herself, fingers white. The old man who'd insisted they smuggle the ingot made the sign of whatever prayer he had and then sat down like he'd done this his whole life.
Noah pushed with his shoulder, the skiff angled and then slid. Water rose and swallowed their sound. For a second the world narrowed to oars and the dark bell-mouth of the river and the smell of reeds and sweat.
They were halfway across when the first grapeshot struck the water near the bow like a slap. The boat shuddered and the old planks creaked with the sound of a thing considering law.
A shadow moved on the far bank — a soldier with a long pole harnessed to a grappling hook. He launched; the hook went wide but snagged the stern. A chain creaked. The boat slowed. Vorren's men were already climbing the reeds with knives in hand and faces painted with ambition.
Noah's face went very small. He put the hammer down like a man who had decided the thing had weight for the right reasons. "We go hard," he said. "Swing the oars. I'll make the gap."
Emily's system, in a voice that seemed gleeful only in private, muttered: [Adrenaline: 48%. Danger: look at you go. Also: I like water.]
They rowed like people who had been forged by late nights and cold toast. Oar after oar, the river threw its skin behind them. The soldiers hacked at the reeds, tried to climb into the water, then splashed in and cursed when the mud tried to eat their boots. The grappling hook held for a measuring breath, then slipped with a dull twang and spilled them into the bank like children.
Noah swung the hammer in a wide, brutal arc when a man leaned too close; the blow landed against the pole and splintered it, the man went down and the rest hesitated. That hesitation was enough.
They cleared Miller's dock and reached the open channel. The boat rode the current like a hairline on skin and carried them, dizzy and soaked, into a meander where the town's watch couldn't follow fast enough.
Someone cried, somewhere toward the stern, and it was both grief and hilarity — a sound that said they had survived something terrible and lived to tell about the cost. Emily let out a breath that sounded almost like a laugh. She reached out, fingers brushing the mithril's crust, and felt the metal hum under her skin — not dangerous now, not yet, but full of the notion that things had started.
They did not celebrate. They dried hands and shared bread and watched the distant horizon, where the fields still smoked and delivery craft lifted like obscene moons being called back. Vorren's forces would not stop. They would reorganize. They would have better toys and worse principles.
Noah looked at Emily, river water running off his sleeves in dark beads. "So what now? Hide the ingot? Find a buyer? Burn it?"
Emily thought of labs and blueprints and the billions of tiny things one could do with a new alloy. She thought of towns and how they were small, stubborn, and sometimes worth the sort of stupid plan that broke your elbows. "We find someone who won't sell the sky the address book," she said at last. "Someone with a map." She tucked the mithril into the crate and tied the straps tight.
They floated on into the morning — a ragged, breathing convoy: a skiff, a dog, a fevered boy, the old man, a baker with flour in his hair. Lyrthorne became a smear on the river's ribcage. Behind them, smoke snaked up like fingers.
They had escaped the town and the night that wanted it. They had the ingot. They had people. They had directions, and a list of enemies that had learned their names.
Ahead: water, reed, and beyond that the world.