As Leander had said, even the two of us together could never take on the whole city. But I’d seen what a mess those Purifiers had made of their building work. The only reason that hateful barricade couldn’t be torn down right now by determined bare hands was because the only people ready to take that risk were kept away by its iron underpinnings.

Iron poles pierced every yard of this barricade, while more bits and bobs made of iron were tangled up in the various randomly piled materials. It was more iron than I’d ever handled in my life…and it sang out to me like a siren, pulling me under.

I was determined not to miss a single piece. But the barricade was huge, running all around Larimont’s borders, and I didn’t have endless time. So I threw out all of my usual precautions and swept my spirit out further and further from my body, even deeper into the metal of the barricade, until my whole spirit was swimming freely through it like Bessie stroking through lake water deep below us. We might both be oddities of nature, but each of us had our own perfect element.

The voices behind me turned into a featureless blur. Only Ruby kept me anchored to my own small human body, my arms around her strong and safe.

Metal sang in my veins. I was one with the barricade. I was in it and around it. It belonged to me alone, no matter what its creators had intended. Every piece of iron in it vibrated at my wordless command…

And then they blasted outwards, long poles and pans and spoons and iron horseshoes all flying into the air at once around the rambling bounds of the big city in an explosion that rocked the ground beneath my feet and sent that whole long, evil barricade of hate shattering into hundreds of thousands of broken pieces.

I let the rest of the barricade tumble freely where it had stood. Only its deadly iron components flew high and then even higher yet into the night sky over Larimont, arcing towards its center from every yard of the demolished barricade…until they finally all came together, like a massive spear above the city, and narrowed into a single, cohesive point.

That collective spear landed hard on the crossroads I’d passed earlier, where an iron cage had been left in the sun to send a message to the public. Its impact broke the cage apart and smashed a yawning pit into the earth where it had stood.

That was my message to the Purifiers of Larimont.