Chapter 137 Hundred and thirty seven
Sixty stories of iron does not care how determined you are. It simply exists, patient and indifferent, waiting to find out whether your arms will give out before your will does.
Mia climbed.
Her shoulders burned somewhere around the fortieth rung. By the sixtieth, her hands had moved past pain into a strange, distant numbness that she recognised from long nights in the garage back in Coldwater, when she had worked through exhaustion into some quieter country beyond it. Her father had called it the second wind of the body. She called it stubbornness wearing comfortable shoes.
Dax climbed directly below her. She was aware of him the way she was aware of gravity, which is to say constantly and without having chosen to be.
"Tell me something," she said quietly, not because she needed conversation but because the hum was getting worse. It pressed against her skull in slow, rhythmic pulses, and having a voice to focus on was better than having nothing.
"What do you want to know?"
"What does the clubhouse look like? Back home. The real one."
A pause. Three rungs.
"Why?"
"Because thinking about something real helps."
Another pause. She could hear him considering it.
"The main room smells like engine grease and someone's grandmother's cooking," he said. "There's a bar along the left wall. Stools with cracked leather seats. Someone's been meaning to reupholster them for six years and nobody ever does." His voice dropped slightly. "Photos on every wall. Not just the club. Birthdays. Weddings. My brother's graduation photograph."
Mia did not say anything. She climbed.
"The garage out back," Dax continued, and his voice changed in the way that voices change when they stop performing and start remembering, "is where I actually live. Not the building with the beds. The garage. I have a 1962 Panhead in there that I've been restoring for four years. She's not finished yet."
"What's her name?"
"I don't name machines."
Mia almost laughed. "That is the most emotionally repressed sentence I have ever heard spoken by a grown adult."
"Ghost."
"What?"
"She's called Ghost," he said. "And if you tell anyone, I'll deny it."
She did laugh then, quietly, into the iron column, and it was the most human sound either of them had made since crossing the red wall.
The hum intensified.
It was not sound exactly. It was pressure. A low, analogue frequency that resonated in the bones of the skull and turned thought at the edges slightly soft, the way old photographs go blurry at the corners. Mia had warned them about neurological interference. She had not mentioned that it felt quite so much like being gently erased.
"Sixty meters to the top," she called down.
Reyes, fifteen rungs below, said nothing. She was saving her breath. Reyes had been saving her breath her entire life, hoarding it the way people hoard things they know are finite.
Forty meters from the roof access, the column shuddered.
Not the background tremor of the factory. A targeted, structural shudder that sent rust showering down from above like iron snow.
Mia looked up.
Moving along a dedicated rail track built into the underside of the roof was something that had not appeared in any of the schematics. It was low and wide and moved on eight articulated legs with the slow, deliberate patience of something that did not expect to be outrun. Its chassis was solid black iron, heavier than the Null-Troopers below, and its sensor clusters rotated in all directions simultaneously, reading the air the way a spider reads its web.
A guardian unit.
"That is new," Reyes said.
"There is only one," Tank offered, from twenty rungs below Reyes, his voice carrying the optimism of a man who had never yet met a problem he could not solve by running directly at it.
The unit's sensor array locked onto the column.
It opened its broadcast antenna and released a signal that Mia felt in her back teeth.
"It is calling for company," she said. "Ninety seconds before the roof access is surrounded."
Dax looked up past her. She felt his assessment travel the distance between them, quick and clean.
"The antenna," she said. "Forward mount, between the sensor clusters. Physical interrupt will kill the call."
"Range?"
"Thirty-five meters. I have one good shot before the angle closes."
"Then take it."
She did not argue. She pressed her spine flat against the column, forming a brace with her own body, and drew the kinetic pistol. The guardian unit was repositioning along its rail. She had three seconds.
She did not think about how many rounds she had left. She did not think about what would happen if she missed.
She pulled the trigger.
The antenna detonated in a shower of sparks.
The broadcast signal died.
The guardian unit lurched sideways on its rail, sensor clusters sweeping wildly, suddenly reading a world that no longer made sense to it.
"Go," Dax said.
Eighteen rungs. Burning arms. Screaming lungs. Dax hit the roof access hatch with his shoulder and it burst open. He hauled himself through and reached back down without being asked, his hand finding Mia's wrist in the dark.
He pulled her up into the grey light of the roof.
One by one the others came through. Reyes. Jax, who had to turn sideways and did not enjoy it. Tank, who left a dark smear on the rim of the hatch from the shrapnel wound in his thigh that he had not complained about once.
Dax slammed the hatch shut.
They stood on the roof of the Iron Citadel.
And there, rising forty meters above them from the centre of the vast iron platform, casting everything in pulsing red light, was the broadcasting array.