The air in the Clock-Tower was thick with the smell of ozone and burnt porcelain. Without the hum of the mana-grid, the silence was heavy, broken only by the rhythmic clank-clank of the Heavy-Watch's steam-boots echoing from the levels below.
I looked at my left hand. The violet glow was gone. The skin was a dull, dead grey, cold to the touch. The "Burnout" had finally burnt out. I wasn't a mage-breaker anymore; I was just a man with a heavy limb and a broken doll in his arms.
"Kaelen," Cora hissed, her voice a jagged whisper in the dark. She was kneeling by the hatch, her double-barreled crossbow leveled at the shadows. "The sensors are down, but they're using chemical flares. We have three minutes before this plaza is lit up like a festival."
"I'm moving," I rasped.
I adjusted my grip on Elara. She felt lighter, her right arm having been reduced to a pile of white powder on the terminal floor. Her sapphire eyes were dim, glowing with a faint, dying ember of light that pulsed in time with my own heartbeat.
"The... the lift-shaft," Elara whispered, her silver diaphragm clicking. "The counterweights... they aren't... powered. But the emergency... brakes... are mechanical."
"She's right," Cora said, glancing at the abyss where I'd thrown the Inquisitor. "If we can jam the gears, we can slide down the cables. It's a six-hundred-foot drop to the Mid-Basins."
"And if the cables snap?" the father asked, his voice trembling as he clutched his singed robes.
"Then we reach the bottom a lot faster," I muttered.
We scrambled to the edge of the shaft. Below us was a throat of absolute black. I could feel the cold air rising from the Sinks—the breath of the city I had spent my life trying to escape.
"Cora, you first. Take the father," I commanded.
Cora didn't argue. She looped a combat-strap around the father's waist, hooked her specialized bracers onto the grease-slicked cable, and vanished into the dark with a hiss of friction.
I looked down at Elara. Her face-plate was cracked, a jagged line running from her temple to her chin.
"I... I am sorry, Kaelen," she whispered. "The fare... was too high."
"Shut up," I said, my voice cracking. "The ride isn't over yet."
I stepped into the void.
I didn't have a harness. I wrapped my good right arm around the cable, my boots locked around the steel weave. I tucked Elara against my chest, her cold porcelain skin pressing against my heartbeat.
We slid.
The heat from the friction began to burn through my leather glove instantly. The wind screamed past my ears, smelling of old grease and wet stone. Above us, the first chemical flare ignited, turning the top of the shaft into a blinding, artificial noon.
BANG. BANG.
The Heavy-Watch were firing down the shaft. Blue tracer-rounds hissed past us, striking the brickwork and showering us in sparks.
"Kaelen!" Elara's eyes flared bright blue for a split second. "The... the cable... it's being... cut!"
She was right. I felt the vibration through my arm. The Sentry-Eye drones at the top were using high-frequency lasers to sever the supports.
The cable whipped. For a heartbeat, we were weightless.
"Hold on!" I roared.
I slammed my dead left arm into the guide-rail as we fell. I shouldn't have felt anything—the nerves were supposed to be gone—but a white-hot spike of agony shot through my shoulder as the blackened limb acted as a crude brake against the metal.
The friction didn't just burn; it tore. But it slowed us.
We slammed into a maintenance platform forty floors down with a bone-shattering impact. I rolled, shielding Elara's head with my body as we crashed through a stack of wooden crates.
Silence returned. Heavy and suffocating.
I lay on the cold stone, my lungs screaming for air. My left arm was a bloody, mangled mess, the grey skin torn away to reveal something that shouldn't have been there.
Beneath the "Burnout" scar, my bones weren't white. They were glowing with a faint, crystalline violet.
"Kaelen?" Elara's voice was small, mechanical. She was lying a few feet away, her dress torn, her single arm reaching out for me.
I looked at my arm, then at the dark city stretching out below the platform. The Spires were dead, but something was waking up in my marrow.
"I'm here," I rasped, pulling myself up. "We're in the Mid-Basins. No Watch. No Inquisitors."
"Just the dark," she whispered.
"No," I said, looking at the glowing violet sliver in my own arm. "Just us."
High above, the chemical flares finally died out, leaving Oakhaven in a darkness it hadn't known for centuries. The revolution hadn't started with a shout. It had started with a fall.