The interior of Car Seven was not dark. As the Centurion crashed through the roof and settled onto the reinforced deck plates, emergency chemical lights flickered to life along the walls. They cast a sickly, sterile green glow over the chaotic scene of twisted metal and rain.

  "Clear," I coughed, waving away the smoke from the plasma cutter. "Amelia, scan for hostiles."

  Amelia didn't answer. She was staring at the walls.

  I followed her gaze. The car wasn't a cargo hold. It was a mobile laboratory. Rows of floor-to-ceiling cylindrical tanks lined the steel walls. They were filled with a viscous, bubbling green preservation fluid. Inside the tanks were... things.

  I walked up to the nearest one, wiping the condensation from the glass with my gloved hand. It wasn't a monster. At least, not entirely. It was a human arm. But the skin had been peeled back, and the muscle tissue was interwoven with intricate gold filigree wires. The bone had been replaced with a matte-black titanium rod. Hydraulic pistons, no larger than a matchstick, were surgically grafted into the tendons.

  The fingers twitched. Tap. Tap. Tap. against the glass.

  "By the Architects..." Amelia whispered, her voice trembling. She backed away, her hand covering her mouth. "It's... it's alive."

  I moved to the next tank. A human heart floated in the center. But the aorta was connected to a small, humming mana-pump. Gears—tiny, watchmaker-precision gears—were embedded in the ventricles, forcing the organ to beat with a mechanical, unnatural rhythm.

  Thump-whir. Thump-whir.

  "Bio-thaumic augmentation," I said, my voice cold. "They aren't just building machines, Amelia. They're trying to build better people. They're trying to mechanize the soul."

  This was why the Empire needed high-purity crystals. You couldn't run a machine like this on coal. You needed the purest mana to keep the flesh from rejecting the steel.

  Amelia looked like she was going to be sick. This went against every tenet of natural magic she had ever learned. To a mage who drew power from the wind and the earth, this was a perversion of life itself.

  I walked over to her and firmly placed my hands on her shoulders, turning her away from the tanks. "Don't look at them," I said, my voice low and steady. "Focus on me. We can't save them. They're already gone. But we can take the power source that lets the Empire do this."

  She took a shaky breath, nodding against my chest. "Okay. Okay. The mission."

  " The mission," I repeated.

  I turned to the center of the car. There, bolted to the floor, was a heavy cage made of a dull, silver-grey metal. Inside the cage sat a plain wooden crate.

  "Mithril," I noted, rapping my knuckles against the bars. "Solid bars. Magic resistant. Physically indestructible."

  "I can't blast it," Amelia said, recovering her composure. "My wind blades will just bounce off."

  "And my plasma cutter won't melt it fast enough," I added. "Mithril disperses heat incredibly well."

  "So we're stuck?"

  "No," I grinned beneath my mask. "We just need some physics. Mithril is tough, but it's rigid. And rigid things hate thermal shock."

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  I unholstered the portable plasma torch from the mech's emergency kit. "I'm going to heat this one bar until it glows white-hot. When I yell 'Now,' I need you to hit it with the coldest, most concentrated blast of freezing wind you can summon. Don't think about cutting it. Think about shattering it."

  Amelia nodded, stepping back and raising her hands. The air in the car dropped ten degrees instantly as she began to pull the heat out of the atmosphere.

  I ignited the torch. The blue flame hissed against the mithril bar. For a minute, nothing happened. The metal absorbed the heat. Then, slowly, a dull cherry-red spot appeared. I pushed the torch closer, sweating from the proximity. The spot turned bright orange, then blinding white. The metal was expanding, straining against its molecular bonds.

  "NOW!" I screamed.

  Amelia thrust her hands forward. WHOOSH. A focused jet of sub-zero air, visible as a white fog, slammed into the superheated metal.

  The physics was violent and instantaneous. The outer layers of the metal contracted aggressively while the inner core was still expanded. The stress was too much for the crystalline structure to handle.

  CRACK! The sound was like a gunshot. The mithril bar didn't bend. It shattered into a thousand glittering shards that rained onto the floor.

  "Beautiful," I muttered, kicking the remnants of the gate open.

  I pulled the wooden crate out. It was heavy. I pried the lid open with a crowbar.

  Inside, resting on velvet, were twelve fist-sized crystals. They glowed with a deep, pulsating sapphire light. The mana density was so high the air around them hummed. Amelia gasped. Just being near them, the color returned to her cheeks. Her mana core, depleted from the shield spell, began to refill simply by proximity.

  "High-purity," she whispered. "One of these could power a city block for a month."

  "And these," I lifted a heavy, oil-wrapped package from the bottom of the crate, "will keep us moving." I tore the paper. Inside was a gleam of polished steel. Planetary gears. Synchromesh rings. A clutch assembly. It was a military-grade variable transmission. It was art.

  There was something else at the bottom. A thin leather folder stamped with the Imperial Seal and the words PROJECT CHIMERA: PHASE 4. I didn't have time to read it. I shoved it into my flight suit.

  "Rax to Julian!" The radio crackled, Rax's voice distorted by static. "We're running out of track! Dead Man's Drop in two minutes! You need to get off this train now!"

  "Two minutes," I checked my watch. "Grab the crystals, Amelia. I'll take the gears. We're loading up."

  We scrambled back into the Centurion's cockpit. It was a tight fit before; now, with a crate of crystals and a heavy transmission housing jammed behind the seats, it was claustrophobic.

  I rebooted the main reactor. The V8 roared, eager to leave this house of horrors. "The roof hole is too high," I said, looking up at the jagged tear we had fallen through. "We can't jump out the way we came in."

  "The side?" Amelia suggested, buckling her harness.

  "The side," I agreed.

  I maneuvered the Centurion in the cramped space. I placed the right shoulder—the one with The Riveter—against the outer wall of the train car. I didn't fire the spike. I used the mech as a battering ram.

  "Brace!"

  I slammed the fifty-ton machine sideways. CRUNCH. The armored wall bowed outward. I backed up a step and slammed it again. SCREEECH-BANG!

  The wall gave way. A ragged hole, three meters wide, tore open to the night. Wind and rain instantly flooded the car, blowing away the sterile smell of the lab.

  We looked out. The train was crossing a massive stone viaduct. Below us, far below, was the black, churning water of the Toxic River. It was a hundred-foot drop.

  "Rax, are you clear?" I yelled into the radio.

  "I'm on the roof!" Rax shouted back. "Jump! I'll magnetic-grapple to you on the way down!"

  The train was moving at ninety kilometers per hour. We were about to jump sideways into a void.

  "Do you trust me?" I asked Amelia, my hand on the throttle.

  She looked at the horrifying tanks one last time, then at the crystals glowing behind her seat. She looked at me. Her hand found mine on the control lever. "Fly," she said.

  I slammed the throttle forward. The Centurion charged the hole.

  We burst out of the side of the train car like a cannonball. For a moment, there was no sound. No engine. No tracks. Just weightlessness.

  We hung in the air, suspended in the dark rain, the lighted windows of the train flashing past us like a streak of lightning. Then gravity remembered us.

  We fell. The wind screamed past the cockpit. I saw Rax, a small dark shape, dive from the roof and fire a grapple line that caught the Centurion's leg.

  "Impact in three... two..."

  I fired the jump jets—tiny maneuvering thrusters—at the last second to orient our feet downward.

  SPLASH!

  We hit the water with the force of a bomb. Darkness swallowed us. Cold, crushing pressure slammed against the hull. The cockpit groaned. We sank deep, the heavy steel dragging us down toward the silt.

  But the hull held. The seals held. We were underwater. We were alive. And we were rich.