A quick glance told her that the chasm now inches behind her was at least fifty feet deep. No escape in that direction.
“You’ve backed yourself up against a pit,” he said, advancing. “Now what? Perhaps it’s time to… what was it? Do the smart thing and surrender?”
Instead she set the grenade to go off on a few seconds’ delay, then wedged it securely into a spot among the rocks. Then she gripped the barrel of her rifle under her arms and pressed it firmly against her chest.
He frowned. Then the grenade went off.
Force transference. Every Push creates an equal and opposite Push.The grenade shoved the rifle barrel, which hurled her backward with enormous force—straight across the chasm.
Shesmashedback-first into the wall. That was enough to stun her, but then the grenade’s charge gave out. She dropped to the ground. Safely across the chasm as she’dplanned, but winded and dazed.
Through teary eyes, she saw the Cycle run and leap across the chasm. So she scrambled, half-blinded by pain, searching the dusty stone, looking desperately for the pistol…
There!
He loomed overhead, a terrible shadow, his arm raised to smash her skull. In response, she delivered three shots straight into his face. He dropped.
Oh hell,she thought, sitting up despite the pain. Wax did things like this all the time. Leaping off cliffs, jumping around and slamming into things. How onScadrialwas his body not horribly ruined by it all?
She prodded at her ribs, hoping nothing was broken. Her left shoulder protested the most, and she winced. The pain was so distracting that she had to force herself to focus. A shot to the head should stop a Bloodmaker from healing, but some part of her insisted she should check anyway.
She lurched over to inspect the corpse. And found the bullet wounds pulling closed on the man’s head, the holes in the skull resealing.
Rustinghell.
She heaved the slumped-over body onto its back and scrambled to pull her knife from his belt. He was healing from bullets to the head? Something was very wrong here. She shot him again, but that would only be temporary.
Instead, she ripped aside his shirt—revealing four spikes pounded in deep between his ribs. As she had suspected. Knife in hand, she began the gruesome work of digging the spikes out. She dug faster as she realized at least one of them was made of a strange metal with dark red spots like rust. One they’dbeen searching forforever.
The Cycle’s eyes snapped open, despite his broken jaw and the holes in his skull. Marasi cursed and worked faster, bloodied fingers straining to pry out the first of the four spikes, which was so tightly embedded between his ribs it was difficult to yank free.
Those eyes. They were glowing a vivid red now.
“The ash comes again,” the man said through bloody lips, his voice strangely grating. “The world will fall to it. You will get what you deserve,and all will wither beneath a cloud of blackness and a blanket of burned bodies made ash.”
Marasi gritted her teeth, working on the rusty-looking spike, slick with blood.
“Your end,” the voice whispered. “Your end comes. Either in ash, or at the hands of the men of gold and red.Gold and—”
Marasi yanked the spike out. The red glow faded and the body slumped, the healing stopping. She felt at the throat anyway, and even when she found no pulse, she dug out the other three spikes.
Then she finally leaned against the wall, groaning softly. Wayne had better have found a way to deal with those other thieves—because Marasi doubted she had the strength to lift a gun at the moment. Instead she closed her eyes, and tried not to think about that terrible voice.
7
Max called for Wax to make each leap higher, faster. The boy’s shouts of glee carried over the rushing wind and flapping clothing. And rusts if that wasn’t infectious. Wax had been a solemn child, a trend that had continued into adulthood. But even he appreciated the rush that came from a well-executed Steelpush.
The sudden explosion of speed, the moment of stillness at the zenith. The lurch in the stomach as the plummet began. It wasn’t like any other experience a man could have—at least, not and survive.
In the distance a Malwish trade ship hovered into the city, flying using their strange ettmetal devices, as the two of them bounded across the city, afforded a view that was somehow reductive and expansive at once. From up so high, you could see the octant divisions along major roadways. You could understand and feel the different neighborhoods, the crunched-up forced familiarity of the slums, the expansive yet isolated grounds of the manors.
Once, Wax had assumed this kind of experience—not just the height, but the motion while traversing the city from above—would always be reserved for Coinshots. Then the Malwish airships had taken that assumption and tossed it out a window from three thousand feet.
Regardless, something about this perspective felt like it belonged to him. This washiscity. He’dreturned to it, and had—over the years—come to love it. It represented the best that people could achieve: amonument to ingenuity, a home to thousands of different ideas, types of people, and experiences.
At Max’s urging he took them higher, using skyscrapers as his anchors to Push upward, back and forth, until they landed near the top of one building in particular: Ahlstrom Tower. The penthouse was their home, and Wax had picked it specifically. It was tough getting to the peak of a too-tall building with Steelpushes as your anchors ran out below. Fortunately, this one had several tall skyscrapers unusually close, and that gave him anchors to Push himself inward.
Today Wax didn’t stop at their penthouse. He took them to the roof, where there was a little built-in platform for a worker to latch on and lower window-cleaning devices. Wax settled onto it and Max unhooked, though he was still tethered to the harness by a strong cord. Wax wasn’t worried about its reliability. Steris had designed it.