She looked at the poor man, those eyes soaked with fear. “Bandage that, quickly. If Mikhail’s in the Glade, we need to hurry.”

Clank.

Clank.

Clank.

Isaac had been dreaming that sound for quite a while, now. Constant, incessant, annoying-as-hell CLANKs that found all kinds of ways to audibly haunt his nightmares. First it was a bird, a black, furry-looking thing, perched atop the wooden fence that surrounded Old Man Frypan’s acre on the northern side of the island. The creature’s sharp beak hinged open and closed, open and closed, letting out that CLANK of a noise each time, like the bark of a mechanical dog.

Then it segued into a giant machine, a thing Isaac had been told about in the campfire stories of the old world, a thing he imagined now, as inaccurate as it may be. It was called a bulldozer, and for some inexplicable reason it was fruitlessly trying to plow over a mountain of metal trees, glistening silver and immovable. Clank, clank, clank it went, as the bulldozer rammed its way forward relentlessly, its giant scoop dinged and dented.

Then there was a man, standing in front of him, nothing but a dark sky as the backdrop, full of stars. The man had no hair and no eyes. He had half a nose. He had one ear. And although it was hard to tell for sure in the bare light, the man’s skin glistened in rivulets that had to be blood, seeping from a dozen wounds. That is one ugly son of a bitch, Isaac thought.

The man tried to speak, but the only thing escaping his lips was that sound again.

Clank.

Clank.

Clank.

The apparition’s throat bulged with each metallic utterance, as if he’d swallowed a plum and just wanted to cough it out. Isaac remembered more nightmares than he could count on every last finger and toe on the island, but this one chilled him to the core. He awoke with a startled yelp that wasn’t far off from the CLANKs that had seeped into his dreams.

Worse, the sound still clanged around him.

Awareness coming back in leaps, he sheepishly got out of bed and zombied his way over to the window, peaking past the curtains sewn by his dad at least a decade ago. It was a gloomy day, the clouds a solid, soupy mass in the sky, the light gray and sad. No rain had fallen, but mist crept along the grass of the yard, gathered in big clumps along the fence, wafted through the air in random groups of thinly stretched cotton. And out beyond the houses on the east side of the island, down near the beach, someone was beating the hell out of hot iron with a very large hammer.

The Forge.