“It certainly will,” Kit said, grinning. “But that means I don’t need you anymore.”

She raised the tablet, flipping up the grille and pressing her thumb against the crystal switch. Gyre flattened himself against the metal spur, waiting for the blast. A heartbeat, then two. Nothing.

Kit looked up in time to see Naumoriel’s huge claw impale her.

It took her in the stomach, lifting her entirely off the ground, so she hung bleeding from the arm of his war-construct. Her hands scrabbled along the smooth surface of it, and she coughed, blood spraying from her lips. Her dangling legs kicked frantically.

“I imagine you’re looking for this.” One of Naumoriel’s smaller limbs snaked over, holding a familiar clay cylinder, scored on one side where the ghoul had cut into it. “I found it at once, of course. Poor fool. Did you really think this would work?”

He dropped the bomb to the deck. Kit could only cough again in answer, blood drooling down her chin.

“I should have killed you on the spot, of course. But I reasoned you might still be useful to help reach this place, and so it has proved.” The war-construct moved forward, and Naumoriel tossed the code-key aside and ground it under a steel foot. “Not that I would ever trust you with all my secrets, of course. There is no master key to Leviathan. My father was far beyond such crude methods.”

One of the spurs, just beside the pit, started to open, the sides folding outward. Inside the cavity thus revealed was a metal chair, set in a complex web of silver wire and gleaming crystal. Naumoriel came to a halt beside it.

“For all its power, the Core Analytica cannot control Leviathan alone,” Naumoriel said. “Only a living mind can do that. That is what I have lived for, since I learned the truth of what my father had created. I will shed this flimsy body and become a god, a titan of steel and its attendant swarm. And I have you to thank, Kitsraea. I would never have found all the pieces without you.”

Naumoriel’s claw twitched, casting Kit aside as a man might flick a bit of grit from his collar. She hit a nearby spur with bone-cracking force and slid down it in a long streak of blood, lying limp and motionless at the bottom. The war-construct knelt, and the canopy swung open, limbs turning inward to lift the old ghoul out of his seat.