Painfully, Gyre got to his feet. Leaving Maya where she lay, he walked back to the arched doorway. He felt like he was moving in a dream. At the top of the ramp, among the destroyed constructs, he cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted.

“Beq!” His voice echoed off the stone. “Can you hear me?”

Silence for a moment. Then a voice called back, “Who’s there?”

“Maya’s up here,” Gyre said. “And her friend. They’re alive, but they need help.”

“What?” Beq said. “Who are you—”

There wasn’t time for more. Gyre turned and jogged back along the dock. He scooped up the silver sword, still sticky with his sister’s blood, and returned it to its sheath. The fatigue and cramps were burning away in the stream of fresh power, and he felt light again, though a lingering weariness in his bones warned him there would be a price to pay. And there’s no spare bottle, this time.

The tower with the lifter in it was just ahead, and Kit had left the door open. Gyre stepped into the tiny chamber, and it started upward at once, accelerating smoothly until it reached the bridge over the top of Leviathan. This was a long, curving walkway, and Gyre pounded down it at a run. Beneath his feet, he knew, were the vast plates of the construct’s back.

The bridge ended in a short ramp downward to a broad steel plain. It was impossible not to think of the plating as a deck, as though Leviathan were a ship or a skyfortress instead of a muscular creature animated by dhaka. Spurs protruded from it, huge flanges like the spiked ends of vertebrae, armored in steel, running in two parallel rows. Between them, some distance away, he could see the hulking shape of Naumoriel’s war-construct, with the tiny figure of Kit kneeling in front of it.

Gyre crept down the ramp, taking cover behind one of the lines of spurs. He moved forward, watching through the gaps, until he was close enough to hear. There was a hole in the deck between the ghoul and the human, a deep, square pit, and around the edges something moved. Constructs, Gyre realized, a swarm of the little spiderlike things they’d seen inert in the complex, now animate and in furious motion. They crawled in and out of the pit, carrying bits and pieces both metal and organic—plates, cylinders, bones, and strips of meat. Spare parts?

“And the Order?” Naumoriel was saying, his voice distorted by the construct.

“Dealt with,” Kit said. “Though Gyre was injured. I left him below.”

“Good.” Naumoriel waved a clawed limb. “As you can see, the Core Analytica is in place. Leviathan’s swarm has awoken. We stand above the primary motivators, and once the swarm has repaired them, Leviathan will be ready.” He waved his smaller limb, still carrying the code-key. “And then the world will tremble.”