The sky didn't turn black. It turned the color of a bruised plum, swollen and angry.
Julian stumbled over a coil of rusted wire, his boots kicking up clouds of orange dust. His breath rattled in his chest. The escape from the Goliath had burned the last reserves of his adrenaline. Now, he was just a hollow shell powered by fear and the faint, residual hum of his crystal hand.
"Faster," Lyra urged, grabbing his elbow to steady him. She looked up at the clouds. They were swirling low, heavy with a greenish-yellow tint. "Can you smell it?"
Julian sniffed. The air smelled sharp. Metallic. Like a battery that had leaked.
"Sulfur?"
"Acid," Lyra corrected grimly. "The industrial runoff from the Upper City condenses in the clouds. When it falls, it doesn't wash the world. It dissolves it."
Hiss.
A single drop fell. It landed on the rusted hood of a truck next to Julian.
The metal sizzled instantly. A tiny plume of white smoke rose up, leaving a pitted, shiny crater in the rust.
Hiss. Hiss-tink.
Another drop hit Julian's shoulder. It felt like a bee sting. He yelped, slapping the spot. The canvas of his overall was smoking, a small hole burned through to the skin.
"Cover up!" Lyra shouted, throwing the hood of her cloak over her head. "Find shelter! Under something thick!"
They were in a valley of scrap, surrounded by jagged heaps of metal, but everything was porous. The skeletons of the airships were full of holes. The rusted fuselages were sieves.
The rain intensified. Sssssss.
It sounded like a million snakes waking up. The ground around them began to smoke as the acidic downpour hit the centuries of oxidation.
"There!" Julian pointed.
Rising from a mound of debris about two hundred yards away was a spire. It wasn't a wreck. It was a structure. It was built from welded exhaust pipes, engine cowlings, and sheets of black iron, twisting upward like a gothic needle. It had no windows. It looked solid.
"The Chapel," Lyra gasped. "I thought the Scavengers destroyed it."
"Run!"
They sprinted. The rain was falling in sheets now. Every drop that found exposed skin burned like a cigarette ember. Julian shielded his face with his crystal arm—the crystal seemed immune to the acid, the drops sliding off the blue glass harmlessly—but his legs and back were screaming.
The ground turned to slippery, smoking mud. They scrambled up a slope of shifting gears and tires.
They reached the entrance of the spire. It was a massive pair of doors made from the armored plating of a tank, welded shut against the storm.
"It's locked!" Julian shouted, pounding on the metal. The rain was drumming against his back, burning through his clothes.
"Look for a mechanism!" Lyra yelled, frantically searching the frame.
There was no handle. Only a large, circular indentation in the center of the doors. A socket. shaped like a gear with eight teeth.
"It's a Resonance Lock," Julian realized. He wiped the acidic slime from his eyes. "But it's mechanical. It needs a key."
"We don't have a key!"
"I am the key."
Julian jammed his crystal hand into the socket. It didn't fit perfectly. The metal was cold and dead.
Wake up, he screamed in his mind. Open up or we melt!
He didn't use finesse. He didn't try to find the frequency. He pushed raw, panicked energy into the mechanism. He forced the tumblers inside to vibrate so violently they shattered.
CRACK-CLANG.
The heavy locking bars inside the door groaned. The mechanism broke, but it unlocked.
Julian and Lyra threw their weight against the iron. The heavy doors shrieked—a sound of metal grinding on metal—and swung inward just enough for them to slip through.
They tumbled inside, collapsing onto a floor of cool, dry stone.
Behind them, the storm roared like a beast denied its meal. Julian kicked the door shut.
BOOM.
Silence.
The roar of the rain was instantly muffled to a distant drumming. The air inside was cool, smelling of incense, oil, and old paper.
Julian lay on his back, panting. His clothes were smoking slightly. He looked at Lyra. Her cloak was pitted with burn marks, but she seemed intact.
"You okay?" he wheezed.
"I'll live," she whispered. She sat up and looked around. "By the Gears..."
Julian sat up and followed her gaze.
They were in a sanctuary. The interior of the structure was vast, vaulted like a cathedral. The walls were lined with thousands of small gears, arranged in intricate mosaics that depicted scenes of industry: men building machines, machines building cities, and finally, machines becoming men.
Light came from hundreds of glass jars suspended from the ceiling on chains. Inside the jars, bioluminescent moss glowed with a soft, green light.
But the centerpiece was the altar.
At the far end of the nave stood a massive statue. It was twenty feet tall, welded from scrap metal, but crafted with exquisite tenderness. It depicted a figure in robes, but the face was a blank, polished copper mask. In its arms, it cradled not a child, but a Cog.
Underneath the statue, an inscription was etched into the floor in Low-Arcadian:
"FLESH FAILS. IRON ENDURES."
"What is this place?" Julian whispered, his voice echoing in the vast emptiness.
"An Iron Chapel," Lyra said, standing up and brushing the ash from her cloak. "The Cult of the Cog. They were purged from the Upper City fifty years ago. They believed that the Aether wasn't just fuel... they believed it was the blood of a god."
She walked down the aisle, her boots clicking softly on the mosaic floor.
"They thought that by replacing their bodies with machines, they were getting closer to divinity."
Julian looked at his own hand. The crystal blue fingers. The artificial light.
"Maybe they were right," he murmured. "Flesh does fail. My hand doesn't burn in the rain. My hand doesn't bleed."
"Don't start talking like a fanatic," Lyra warned, stopping at the altar.
Lying on the altar, in front of the statue, was a book. It was huge, bound in heavy lead covers.
Lyra hesitated, then opened it. The pages were made of thin sheets of tin, stamped with letters.
"It's a logbook," she said, running her finger over the metal pages. "Names. Dates. Modifications."
She flipped to the end.
"The last entry is from three days ago."
Julian froze. "Three days? I thought you said they were purged fifty years ago."
"They were," Lyra said, her voice dropping. "Which means someone is still maintaining this place. Someone is still..."
CLANK.
A sound came from the shadows behind the altar. The sound of a heavy metal footstep.
Julian scrambled to his feet, raising his crystal hand. The light flared, casting long, jumping shadows.
"Who's there?" he called out.
From the darkness of the apse, a figure emerged.
It wasn't a man. It wasn't a simple robot like the ones in the factories.
It was an Automaton. An ancient, bipedal machine made of polished brass and mahogany wood, wearing the tattered robes of a monk. Its head was a smooth dome with a single, vertical slit for an eye, glowing with a gentle, amber light.
It held a broom in its hands.
It looked at Julian. Then at Lyra. It didn't attack. It didn't raise an alarm.
The vertical eye-slit widened, the aperture adjusting.
"Pilgrims," the machine said. Its voice was soft, melodic, like a music box playing a lullaby. "You are wet. You are damaging the floor."
The machine gestured to the pews with its broom.
"Please. Sit. The Veneration has not yet begun. But the heater is warm."
Julian lowered his hand, bewildered. "You... you're not going to kill us?"
The Automaton paused. It tilted its head, a gesture so human it was unnerving.
"Kill?" it repeated, sounding genuinely confused. "Violence disrupts the Harmony. We are here to wait for the Signal."
It looked directly at Julian's glowing blue hand. The amber eye pulsed.
"And it appears," the machine bowed low, "that the Signal has finally walked through the door."