The march toward the industrial sector was long, slow, and surprisingly peaceful.

  Inside the cockpit of the Centurion, the world felt small and contained. The new crystal-infused engine didn't roar; it hummed with a low, rhythmic vibration that felt less like a machine and more like a giant, purring cat.

  I checked the navigation display. We were still ten miles out. I shifted my weight in the pilot's seat, wincing slightly. My left shoulder was numb. It had been numb for an hour, but I hadn't moved a muscle.

  Amelia was asleep. Exhausted by the adrenaline crash of the fight with the Enforcer, she had drifted off. Her head had lolled to the side, resting squarely on my shoulder. Her breathing was soft and even, a stark contrast to the harsh, metallic landscape passing outside the viewport.

  The cockpit smelled of three things: the sharp tang of ozone from the crystals, the lingering aroma of Rax’s coffee, and the faint, clean scent of rain that clung to Amelia’s hair. It was a strange, domestic mix. It smelled like home.

  "You're going to get a cramp, kid," a gravelly voice whispered from the back.

  I glanced in the rearview mirror. Rax was sitting in the gunner's seat, sharpening his combat knife with a whetstone. Scritch. Scritch. He was looking at us with a smirk that didn't quite reach his mechanical eye.

  "She needs the sleep," I whispered back, keeping my hands steady on the controls. "She over-drafted her core to save us from the gravity spell."

  "Uh-huh," Rax grunted, blowing metal dust off his blade. "Back in my day, we just slept in the mud. You kids and your heated seats and your holding hands..."

  "We aren't holding hands," I corrected him.

  "Give it time," Rax chuckled, sheathing the knife. "Just drive smooth. If you wake her up, I'll have to listen to her complain about the coffee again."

  I smiled, a small, private thing. I adjusted the heater vent so it blew warm air toward her side of the cabin. Outside, the world was ending. Inside, it was just us.

  Five miles out, the sky changed.

  The grey clouds of the Rust Yard gave way to a suffocating, unnatural darkness. It wasn't night; it was smoke. Thick, oily plumes rose from the horizon, blotting out the sun.

  "Snow?" Amelia stirred, lifting her head from my shoulder. She rubbed her eyes, leaving a smudge on her cheek. "Is it snowing?"

  I looked at the windshield. Black flakes were drifting down, sticking to the glass like tar. "Ash," I said, my voice hardening. "Industrial fallout. We're crossing the perimeter."

  Amelia sat up straight, the sleep vanishing instantly from her eyes. She looked out at the desolate landscape. The reeds were gone. The trees were black skeletons, stripped of bark and leaves. The ground was a scorched patchwork of slag and chemical runoff.

  The smell penetrated the cabin filters—a heavy, rotten stench of sulfur and burning copper. The smell of the Grand Foundry.

  "Target in sight," I announced, bringing the Centurion to a halt behind a ridge of piled mining slag. "Engaging silent running."

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  I dialed the reactor down to 10%. The blue hum of the crystals faded to a whisper. The lights inside the cockpit dimmed to a tactical red.

  We crept up the ridge, peeking over the top.

  Below us lay the heart of the Empire's war machine. The Grand Foundry was a city of iron spires and blast furnaces. It stretched for miles, a labyrinth of pipes, conveyor belts, and massive smokestacks that vented green, magical fire into the sky.

  But it wasn't the buildings that made my blood run cold. It was the movement.

  "Look at the gates," Rax whispered, leaning forward.

  I magnified the image on the main screen. Thousands of figures were moving through the massive iron gates. They were chained together. Orcs, half-elves, humans—the "lesser" races of the slums. They were being herded into the processing centers.

  And coming out of the other side... were carts. Carts stacked high with the silver canisters we had seen in the train lab. Preservation tanks.

  "They aren't mining ore," Amelia whispered, her hand flying to her mouth. "They're mining... people."

  "Soul refining," Rax spat, his face twisted in disgust. "They strip the spirit to power the core, and use the body for parts. I thought it was a myth. A story to scare children."

  I panned the camera to the perimeter wall. Patrolling the fence line wasn't a squad of guards. It was a sea of silver. Hundreds of Fenrir-Class Hunter-Killers. The same elite wolf-machines that had nearly killed us in the swamp. Here, they were mass-produced. They prowled in packs of ten, their red sensors scanning the darkness.

  "We can't fight that," I said, stating the cold math. "Even with the upgrade. If we trigger an alarm, we'll be buried under a mountain of chrome."

  "So we leave?" Amelia asked. She looked at the line of slaves shuffling into the gates. Her hands were clenched into fists, shaking with rage. "We just let them... process them?"

  "No," I said. "We don't leave."

  I scanned the facility, my engineer's brain looking for a weakness in the architecture. Pipes. Vents. Heat exchanges. Every machine needs to breathe.

  "There," I pointed to a cluster of massive cooling towers on the eastern flank. "Watch the steam."

  We watched. Every few minutes, a siren blared, and the towers vented a massive cloud of superheated white steam that blanketed the entire eastern sector in a dense fog. "Thermal masking," I realized. "The steam is hot. It will blind their thermal sensors. And the noise will cover our engine."

  "What's the interval?" Rax asked, pulling out a stopwatch.

  I counted. "Fifteen minutes. We have a three-minute window of blindness."

  "That's a tight window to move fifty tons of metal," Rax noted.

  "We have the speed," I said, looking at the transmission lever. "We go in through the drainage outflow under the cooling towers. We get to the main boiler room. We don't try to save everyone—we can't. But if we crack the main geothermal regulator..."

  "The pressure builds up," Rax finished, a wicked grin spreading across his face. "Chain reaction. The whole foundry goes boom."

  "We shut it down," I said. "Permanently."

  We waited. The siren blared. WHOOSH. White steam erupted from the towers, rolling over the factory floor like a tsunami. The red eyes of the Fenrir wolves vanished in the fog.

  "Ten minutes to the next cycle," I said.

  I killed the interior lights completely. We sat in the dark, illuminated only by the faint blue pulse of the crystals behind us. The silence was heavy.

  "It's going to be rough," I said quietly. "Once we're inside, there's no room to dodge. If we get pinned..."

  I felt a hand take mine in the dark. It was warm. Small. Strong. Amelia didn't look at me. She was staring out at the hellscape below. "I'm not afraid, Julian," she whispered. "Not anymore. I look at that place, and I don't feel fear. I feel..."

  "Hate?" Rax suggested from the back.

  "Responsibility," she corrected. "We have the power to stop it. So we have to."

  She squeezed my hand. It wasn't a romantic gesture. It was an anchor. A promise. I am here. You are here. We do this together.

  "Three minutes," I watched the clock.

  The steam cloud below was beginning to dissipate. We had to time this perfectly. We had to hit the next wave just as it started.

  "Rax, load high-explosive spikes," I ordered. "Amelia, prep a thermal shield. It's going to get hot in that steam."

  "Ready," they said in unison.

  The siren wailed again. The ground shook as the vents opened. A wall of white death rolled out from the towers.

  I gripped Amelia's hand one last time, then moved my hand to the throttle. "Hunt's on," I said.

  I slammed the levers forward. The Centurion leaped from the ridge, plunging into the black snow and the white fog, charging straight into the belly of the beast.