“You’ll die, too!” I yelled.
“I will reform.”
“Not without the heart! Not without a body to possess.”
He considered this. Just before we hit, he flared his wings. I crashed into a tree, the ancient high tree I had hidden behind when first I ran into the woods. He peeled away, cartwheeling as he fell. I fell through the springy, fibrous branches of the tree. Things snapped inside me, but my fall was broken. The Angel fared less well.
When I came to the ground I lay there and spat blood. My left knee was ruined. Blood obscured my vision. The thing inside me was roaring, straining with the massive damage of my fall. I struggled to my hands and knees, and then, wavering, to my feet.
The Angel lay ten feet away, perfectly still. His limbs were indistinct pools of boiling cogwork. His wings were flat and immobile. He stared up at the rain.
I stumbled to the cliff’s edge and, carefully, retrieved the Cog. Using a stick to steady myself, I limped back up the hill.
Getting up the hill was difficult. Once I was out of the woods the wind battered me, the rain blinded me. My limp was horrible, the bones grinding. I was in shock. The stone was slick under my feet. But I was free, I was clear. I held the Cog in my hands, looking down at it with a faint murmur of stunned disbelief going through my head. Something cracked behind me. Another. I turned. He was rising, coming out of the woods, cracking trees in half as he came.
I dropped my stick, almost fell over in shock. He was emerging from the treeline, half apart, his chest unfolding, his wings expanding. He was abandoning any semblance of humanity. His two wings became four, his head was little more than a howling mouth. I saw the human body he had possessed poking through, the half-rotted corpse of a young Pilot, his face horribly deformed, his arms flapping out of the shifting geography of the Angel’s torso.
I held the Cog up like a talisman. He was yards away still. I felt my knee realign, the impossible health of my heart knitting bones. It used the last of my reserves. I could barely stand. I looked down at the Cog. It glittered in my hand.
What had Camilla said? Take the heart. Become the destruction of the city. Ruin the things you hate, save the things you love. I looked back up the hill. The Torch’ was a blurry shadow behind me. I couldn’t tell if Emily and Wilson were clear of the machine. I looked back to the Cog. How would I do it, how would it happen?
My body answered for me. My chest burst open bloodlessly, my ribs folding back. A flower of steel came out of my heart, spinning. It folded open, pulsing, yearning for the Cog in my hand. I stood there in the rain, shaking, staring down at the tortured mockery of my body. My hand quivered, the Angel’s heart shivering between my fingers. Take the heart. Become the destruction of the city. Of all you love.
The Angel was rushing me, roaring. Become that, I thought, become him to destroy him.
I wouldn’t. I would stand on my own and die on my own, but I would not become the dark angel Camilla dreamed of being. That was what the city was looking for, Sloane and his people trying to throw off the Church, the Church trying to keep the city in line with its secret, hidden girl. I wouldn’t.
I willed my chest to close, and it did. The Angel was nearly on me. I turned and ran, my head down, my body screaming.
The Torch formed up in front of me. Wilson, damn him, was still there, tugging Emily off the contraption. She was naked, the needles and half-grown cogwork weighing her down. He saw me coming and straightened up, a question in his eyes. A second later he saw the Angel behind me and started pulling roughly at Emily’s bonds. There was no time. No fucking time.
I fell as I reached the circle of brass around the Torch. I went down on my hands and skidded across the stone, my hands tearing. I could tell, even in that split second, that my heart was spent, forever spent. It hung in me dead. Whatever it had been, it would no longer repair me as it once had. I was happy with that, even as my skin came off my hands in sheets.
I ended up against Sloane’s shredded body. Wilson was yelling, firing hopelessly at the monster at the Torch’s ring. I fumbled to my knees. In searching for the key to the contraption, Wilson had emptied Sloane’s pockets. His things were spread out before me: some photographs, his leather gloves, a thin knife, and a dueling pistol. I picked up the pistol.
The Angel reared back and leapt over the Torch. His body was deformed, held together by nothing but rage and the rotting corpse of that poor cadet. I held the pistol in both hands, took careful aim, and fired. The bullet sailed true, smacking in to the middle of the flying horror. I cycled the chamber. It wasn’t necessary.
The Angel made a cracking sound, like thin ice breaking. He howled, howled with the wind and the rain. He fell against the wide arms of the torsion pendulum, squatting above Emily’s limp body. His face was breaking apart. His scream reached the sky, his rage fleeing his body. The cracking sound became a crescendo of a thousand tiny bells, shattering in their first and last note. He burst like a pillar of salt, struck with a hammer’s blow. Cogs rained down across the Torch, slithering over the stone and our bodies by the hundreds, the thousands. When he was gone, there was nothing but the rain and pools of snowflake cogs, clumping together on the stone.
I looked down at the pistol. Bane. Sloane had been packing Bane.
We got Emily off the contraption and, carrying her between us, started down towards the hangar. The machines that grew out of Emily’s skin were greasy and ashen. They flaked off when we touched them, no more substantial than wet paper. I worried about what was beneath the skin. Something we’d have to figure out when we got back down to the city.
“What happened?” Wilson asked.
“I think I died. Or something. We’ll figure it out later.”
“You’re bleeding a lot,” he said. “Is that thing in your heart doing okay?”
“I don’t think so. Seriously, we’ll talk about it later.”
“And your face. Man, that’s some serious scarring.”
“Are you telling me I’ll never be beautiful again?”
He chuckled. “You were never beautiful in the first place. You were always ugly and violent and cruel. Now you simply look the part.”
“I’m having the best time with you, Wilson,” I grunted as we made our way down the hill. “We should do all this again.”
“Anytime,” he said.
We got closer to the hangars and stopped. There were lots of guards, clustered around the entrance to the Academy. They didn’t seem too anxious to get close to us.
“We have a reputation,” Wilson said. “How are we going to get out of here?”
“Over here,” I said.
I led him to the nearest hangar and inside. The Thunderous Dawn was still half unmoored. I pried open the crew door and dragged Emily inside. We took her to the mess hall and lay her on a table.
“They’re going to look in here eventually,” Wilson said. “We can’t hide here forever.”
“We’re not hiding. We’re escaping.”
“What do you mean?”
“This is an airship. We’re going to fly out.”
“But you can’t pilot, remember? You’re broken.”
“And you’re twisted. But I can fly a little. If memory serves, I was able to get my first ship nice and high in the air before we fell out of the sky.”
“Jacob! This is a Flight of the City Line. It’s a battleship. You can’t just… fly it out of here.”
“That’s okay. I wasn’t really intending to fly, exactly. Come on. Get her secured here then find someplace to buckle down. I’ll be up top.”
The Dawn was a newer design. It took me a little while to find the control room, and longer to get buckled in. There are usually OverMates and Ensigns to help with this stuff. I could have used Wilson’s help, but I didn’t want him getting nervous. Spoil my concentration. I lay down in the coffin, clipped in the few connections I could see, then lay back and let the automated integration process do its bit. Still a moment of sickness when the visuals irised into my eyes. My chest unfolded again, but the hungry flower was dormant. Everything fit, much to my surprise.
My heart hammered loud in my chest, then my body disappeared and my soul sucked off into the manifold. I
