Ayla, Crier thought, you pulled me in.

“My lady,” said Faye. “Will you do something for me in return?”

Crier shook off her thoughts like snow. She raised her eyebrows at the scullery maid, taken off guard by such a bold request. “What . . . kind of something?”

“Stop the Scyre.”

“What— Keep your voice down!” Crier hissed. “You can’t just say things like that, anyone could be listening in, are you—?” She cut herself off before she said mad.

“Apologies, lady.” Faye leaned in, lowering her voice. “You need to stop him. I know what he’s planning. He likes to brag, you see. To those in his control. He underestimates us. He doesn’t think we have anyone to tell.” She was almost smiling. “That’s how I know.”

“Know what?”

“He’s going to destroy the Iron Heart.”

Faye’s eyes were clear and bright like Crier had never seen them before. Her shoulders were straight, her hands curled into fists at her sides. It was like glimpsing a ghost, the girl Faye used to be, before her sister was murdered for Faye’s crimes. Before grief left her stranded somewhere far away inside her head.

“Destroy it?” said Crier, an emotion like cold water rising inside her. The Iron Heart. “I know he’s searching for an alternative to heartstone, but—destroy the Heart? That doesn’t make any sense, he relies on it like the rest of us, he . . .” He wants to hurt humans, not Automae.

But even as she protested, the pieces fell into place.

Kinok was the leader of the Anti-Reliance Movement. On the surface, the movement aimed to further separate the two Kinds by building a new capital city just for Automae. The truth was much darker, bloodier. Kinok wanted three things: First, he wanted to raze all the old human cities to the ground and build new Automa cities in the ashes. Humans be damned. Second, he wanted to Make a new breed of Automa, with no human pillars at all. And third, he wanted to find an alternative to heartstone, thus ending his Kind’s reliance on the Iron Heart. He’d been conducting experiments, trying to synthesize a new gemstone on his own, but so far his attempts had been disastrous: he’d only succeeded in creating Nightshade, a black mineral dust that seemed to work at first, but in fact slowly poisoned whoever consumed it. And not only was it poisonous, it was highly addictive. Kinok had been using it to control his followers—including Crier’s friend Rosi.

But that wasn’t practical in the long run. So Kinok had been searching for a blue gemstone called Tourmaline, the same stone Ayla’s grandmother Siena had used to power her Automa prototype, Yora. He seemed to think Tourmaline was infinitely powerful—so much so that it could power an Automa body forever. Right now, Automa bodies aged—slower than humans, but they did age; their physical vessels did eventually weaken, wither, give out. They could die and be killed. Judging by the notes Crier had seen in his room, Kinok dreamed of a world in which neither of those things were true.