A crack of light appeared along the bottoms of the two globe-ships, then expanded as doors slowly, really slowly, began to spread open. At the same time, three of the escort Bergs on the outside of the group dropped toward the ground, stopping several dozen meters above the whipping grass. Cracks of light appeared in these, too, but of a different sort. Half of their bottom surfaces lowered away from the ship like a ramp, angling down until their edge thumped to a stop, hovering open in mid-air.

Things appeared in the light from within, shadows moving upon shadows, all of them human-shaped. And then . . . and then they were tumbling out of the ships, from all three of them. Bodies, chained together, clothing in tatters, flopping like discarded trash on top of each other when they hit the soft, grassy earth. It happened in three spots, together forming a rough semicircle on their side of the bridge, trapping Isaac and his friends. The bodies were moving, pushing and pulling on each other, struggling to stand up. They were human enough, for certain—except the eyes. The eyes had almost no life in them at all.

That voice, which had grown quiet in recent days, once again screamed inside Isaac’s head.

CRANKS!

Could it be? Could it really be possible?

“The bridge!” Old Man Frypan shouted. “Everyone head across the damn bridge!”

But then he noticed what Isaac was just now seeing. A fourth Berg had dropped a pack of bodies on the other side, and they were already stumbling onto the rickety skeleton of steel. Isaac looked back at the other groups. Somehow they’d stood up, stopped fighting each other, and seemed to be coordinating without words. They spread out, chains linking their hands and feet together, forming a fence that soon stretched in one continuous arc around Isaac’s friends, bank to bank in a half circle, the bridge entrance at its core.

Trapped. They were really trapped.

By Cranks. By the boogeymen of every scary story he’d ever been told.

He grabbed Minho by the shirt. “What can we do? What . . . what do we do?” He was shouting, throwing all the fear he’d ever felt in his life into the words.

Minho shook his head, his expression pained, but empty of fear. The guy wasn’t scared.

“Tell your friends!” he shouted. “Tell them not to fight or they’ll be killed!”

Isaac was ashamed to admit it, but he’d never once considered fighting. Not against an army of Cranks and a sky full of flying machines, shooting blue flame like the power of a thousand forges. After everything, he’d never felt so completely hopeless as he did in that single moment.

He looked up at the hovering globes of metal, their doors now completely open.