“Hello, friend! Have you come to speak with me? It’s been a long time since I spoke to anybody. I have more friends. I keep them in the chambers over there. I feed them well. You wouldn’t like to meet them. They’re not good at making conversation. They haven’t been good at making conversation for the past one thousand six hundred twenty two years, nine months, eight days, thirteen hours, twelve minutes, twenty-two seconds. Oops! I guess it was twenty-eight seconds by the time I finished my sentence.

“I’m bored. I’m lonely. Let’s have a conversation.

“Right. Now.”

—Inquirer Morrison’s notes: first contact with City Archon Tool in Chimera nest, formerly Last Era city of Strathlic, excavated 1885 CE

----

Chapterhouse of the Sodality of the Metagenic Apotheosis, Acerbia

Rising Blooming 9, 1885

Tvorh was all for going back to Acerbia to rescue his mom. He just wasn’t sure about wearing the generous robes of a Sodality novice to do it.

“Now,” Aoife said, “you keep these on nice and snug, all right? Don’t let anybody see your features.”

“I know how to infiltrate, girl,” Senrii grumbled, but she tugged the robe more tightly around her body all the same.

“Oh, I’m not just talking about them recognizing you. It’s bad luck to get a look at the faces of novices outside Sodality grounds. Bad luck for the novices, I mean. Out there, we’re all supposed to be the same.”

“How so?”

“Oh, you know,” Aoife said cheerily, yanking the golden threads around Tvorh’s neck to tighten the hood. At least it would keep him warm in Acerbia’s alpine clime.

And it was nice to be back in Aoife’s extravagant yet homey chambers. That was why Tvorh felt a little nervous knot in his stomach while Aoife stood in front of him, so close he could smell her scented breath — he liked liked her room.

Aoife grinned sideways and tugged once more. “No SOPHIOS or even SOPHIAS, unwanted by the Sodality until we can prove ourselves. That kind of thing.”

“Lovely.”

“I’m kidding. Kind of. Believe me, the most bothersome part of it is that it’s just so hard to watch a vidality with these things falling down over your eyes.” She stepped back and looked over Piotr, quirking her mouth in puzzlement. “I’m not really sure what to do with this one, though.”

“Do not trouble yourself,” a bass reply rumbled from deep within the fabrics.

“You’re just so tall,” Aoife mused. “It’s a good trait to have, genetically, I mean, but you do sort of stand out.”

“It’ll be fine, Aoife,” Senrii said. “We won’t be spending much time above ground anyway.”

“Thank you for your help, Aoife,” Tvorh said quietly. “I know that we all appreciate it.”

“My pleasure!” The gilded girl beamed. “Always happy to help a friend. If the Magistra did it for you when you showed up the first time, I figure I should the second time.”

“Speaking of the Magistra,” Senrii said, “where is Rosabella, anyway?”

“That’s what I’m here for. I’m just glad Tvorh remembered you’ve got more than one friend in this place.” She gave Tvorh a wink. He thought. It was hard to see from within the pile of clothes. “But to answer your question, she’s been in and out, in and out, and no, I don’t mean it like that. She won’t tell any of us what she’s up to, either, and even if she did, if I told you, then I’d have to kill you.”

“I’d like to see that,” Senrii said.

“You’d be surprised. I’ve bagged more than my share of game. Anyway, just remember, if you’re looking not to get noticed, just don’t, um, get noticed.”

“Very helpful advice, Aoife. Thanks for that.”

“Any time. Ready to go?”

Aoife escorted the three of them off the Sodality grounds and to the streets of Acerbia, waving goodbye from the gate. Tvorh, being the most familiar with the area, led, and the three of them walked in silence until they reached one of the many fissures that led down beneath the Table.

“I sure hope Dad knows what he’s doing,” Senrii said as they descended into the depths. “If that girl talks, we’re dead meat.”

Walking the crevices of the Chasm was so instinctual to Tvorh that he barely even noticed the stares that they were receiving from the disenfranchised men and women down here. He had never envisioned coming back to this place; far from being upset, the thought of leaving this wretchedness behind forever excited him. At last, at long last, he had entered the Chasm as a stranger rather than as an inhabitant. He had only a little more to do, and then he could be quit with it forever.

“Hold up a sec, kid,” Senrii said as they paused along a cliff-face where several decrepit merchants had rigged pitiful looking stalls out of the detritus that fell from above. Come to think of it, the merchandise was garbage, too. What was the stall? What was for sale?

Had he really lived like this? “Where are we going?”

“Heading down to the Libraratory—”

“Shh!”

“Sorry! Heading down to the… place.”

“We should probably go to the, um, other place first.”

“Why?”

“We need to confirm that we can get in there and that everything works.”

Tvorh frowned. Why wouldn’t they go deeper first and plunder the Libraratory for more data to feed into the Archives? “But if we go down to the first place first, then we can bring up everything that we want to look at.”

“Right, but—” They stepped aside to make room for an Eagle Warrior patrol. Nxtlu had stepped up its presence down here. “But if the second place doesn’t work, bringing stuff up from the first place is out, anyway. So we should—”

“You said we’d rescue my mom.”

“Kid—”

“Tvorh,” Piotr rumbled, “please take us to the… second place.”

Should he fight it? It probably didn’t matter. But what if it did? What would Father say? After a long moment of deliberation, Tvorh nodded. “Fine. Second place first. But first place second.”

“Deal.”

The rest of the journey to the Archives was uneventful, save for the attempt of a couple of urchins to violate the folds of Tvorh’s rich robes in search of wealth. The crew scared them off, set the hood right on his face (the attempted robbery had twisted the robe a quarter of the way around his body), and continued on through the tunnels.

It was a long journey; the underground fissure that broke into the Archives grounds began several kilometers away from the Archives, and so Tvorh had to lead them some distance out of their way, calling up at every juncture his five-year-old memory of the route reach the place, excising from the mental pathway all of the dead-ends he’d found and all of the mole-hole jaunts he’d taken, until only the single unbranching path lay before him.

At last, when they’d reached the tight squeeze at the end of tunnel and Senrii’s bioluminescence was the only light guiding their way, Tvorh knew they had arrived. He shimmied out between the crack into a small chamber, a janitorial closet. As Senrii struggled to pull Piotr through the crack in the wall, Tvorh pushed open the metal door on the other side.

A faint glow of lumins inched in through the crack. A dimly-lit hallway, musty and dry, awaited through the portal. “Wow,” Senrii murmured. “Looked like the kid wasn’t kidding.”

“Of course not.”

“I kid, kid, I kid. Let me see.” Senrii closed her eyes for a moment, and a burst of sound blinded Tvorh’s ears. “I’m getting twenty meters below the Table. We must be in the subbasement.”

“Could you not do that while I’m standing next to you?” Tvorh asked. Senrii just quirked an eyebrow.

As they stepped out into the dim hallway, Tvorh pointed and said, “The stairs up are over there. I took them to the floor-level libraries last time I snuck in here. Which means…” He recalled the schematics of the building, which Senrii had had him study on the way here. Then he picked a direction and started walking. “One level down, circle west through the Retaining Archives into the data center.”

“I’m surprised this place still has power at all,” Senrii mused as they forced open the stairwell door’s rusted hinges. “I would’ve expected it to go down when we sent out the command to shut down the city’s Archon Tool.”

“But the Tool in the Archives is a different one, right? Maybe your Gens left it on, hoping they’d be able to come back and do something like this.”

Piotr cleared his throat. “There was no such expectation. We were surprised to discover there was still a method to come inside. Only the reports of the external defenses’ continued functioning stood in support of the assumption that there would still be power.”

“Well, it’s lucky,” Senrii said. “We won’t have to worry about bringing the Tool out of stasis, at least.”

They trekked through stacks of paper and glass archives, moving westward toward the central chamber and the Archive Tool. Dust motes glittered in the weak light of the lumins, drifting behind pillars of glass that distorted them entirely out of size until Tvorh began to feel as though his movements were being tracked by hundreds of disembodied floating eyes. But after a few minutes, they reached the door to the central chamber, and upon Senrii’s touch—

Nothing happened.

“Blood and bile,” she swore. “Doesn’t a single one of our locks actually work for me?”

“Allow me,” Piotr rumbled. He put out his large hand, pushing Senrii’s fingers gently out of the way. The mechanisms of the door began to groan, and the chordal units spoke with a distorted voice as the portal dilated in fits and starts. “Tha-tha-thank you, Tutel-ela. Welco-o-o-ome back.”

“Oh, sure. The Tutela’s genetics unlock it. Why would I expect the Nethress girl’s to do the same?”

“We are not arrogant Nxtlu,” Piotr said gently as they proceeded into the chamber. “It is dangerous to allow our treasured blood access to all of our secrets. Would you be more of a target than you already are?”

“Yeah, well.” Senrii huffed. “What would have happened if you hadn’t come with us?”

“That is why I am here, Maga. Now. The vials, please.”

They stood in a circular room, not overly large, but barren except for the pillar of metal and membrane that stretched from floor to ceiling in the center of the room. Senrii handed over the handful of vials she’d stolen from the Libraratory, and Piotr brought them to the central pillar. “Tool,” he announced as he put the vials into their places, “please translate from High Exarchian techspeak to Modern West Vallus.”

“At once, Tu-tu-tela.” Images and veins reeled to life on the membranous screens as the Tool began the translation process. Every so often, the lumins around the machine flickered, grew brighter, then dimmed; at other times, loud hissing noises would come over the vocal units, and the Tool would announce, “Translation error. Recommencing transla-la-lation.”

Senrii rolled her eyes as leaned back against the wall as the process continued in fits and starts. “If I’d thought to bring a fuel pack—”

“The Tool has been alone for years,” Piotr said evenly as the cap slid off the holding chamber of yet another one of the vials, which he extracted and pocketed in the depths of his robe. “Energy is not its problem. Sanity is.”

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

“Yeah, well, if I have to wait around any longer, my sanity’ll be a problem too.”

“Have patience. Your father always—”

A high-pitched wail filled the air, wreaking havoc on Tvorh’s eardrums. He doubled over, gasping and covering his ears, as the room began to turn around him. He couldn’t see, couldn’t hear— no. The wailing had ceased, fading to only a dull whimper and a throbbing sense in Tvorh’s ears. But why couldn’t he see?

The room was flickering, that was why. The lumins shorted, glowed with light, shorted, over and over again, until it seemed as though Senrii and Piotr were moving in staggered slow motion as they backed to the walls of the room.

Where had Tvorh heard that wailing voice before?

“What’s happening?” he whispered.

“Something cut the power,” Senrii whispered back, grabbing the vials from the Tool and jamming them into the arms of her Sodality robes.

“Or someone,” Piotr added.

“Then why do we have lights?”

“Or chordal power, for the matter? Beats me, kid.”

“Hush!” Tvorh said, so sharply that Senrii started. As the ringing in his ears faded, he had become aware of something else lying below the surface.

His heart dropped. “They followed us,” he whispered.

As soon as the words left his mouth, Senrii was on the move. “Catch, kid.” Something flew at Tvorh, visible only in the lighted interstices between bouts of total darkness. A roar of gunslinging erupted as Senrii dove through the doorway back into the room of glass pillars and paper.

Tvorh subconsciously began to hum as the adrenaline surged in his body, filling him with energy from his feet to the tips of his hair. He willed himself to move out of the way of the flying thing, but his body refused to listen.

His arms, however, functioned perfectly well. He caught the knife out of the air by the handle. It had the wolf’s head symbol of Gens Nethress—

How could he tell in the flickering darkness?

Senrii, Piotr— where were they? They weren’t in the room.

It wasn’t simply the generous flickering of the lights that let Tvorh know that. He simply knew that they weren’t here. And if they weren’t here, then that meant that they were—

Back in the Retaining Archives. Where the gunplay was.

Tvorh let out a mighty hum, turned, and charged through the doorway after them.

With every burst of shots, Tvorh’s mental map quivered. He ducked between stacks and wove between pillars that he could barely see, trying to buy enough time alive to build an accurate picture of the room. Senrii’s voice stood out to his sensitive ears between the blasts of the bone bullets and the shattering of the projectiles as they ricocheted against the walls, floors, and shelves of the massive chamber. “Tvorh! Over here!”

She leapt out from behind a broad wall of shelving. Pistols barked, and two skull-masked Nxtlu guards who’d been sneaking up on Tvorh’s position dropped dead. “Gotta help Piotr!” she yelled. Her hair haloed her face as she glanced to the side, and she vanished behind a shelf before white shards filled the air where she had been.

Tvorh crept around the shelving to follow her trajectory and almost ran directly into one of the ambushers. So close, the Nxtlu warrior’s rifle’s length was a liability, and before he’d even had a chance to think about it, Tvorh was inside his guard, jamming Senrii’s knife into the man’s neck.

It was easy, so easy, just like slitting the throats of the gutter trash who’d threatened him and his family in another life. Tvorh spared a wistful glance for the man’s gun, reconciled himself to the fact that he’d be more dangerous to himself than to Gens Nxtlu with it, and ducked back into the stacks.

The fight was a blood rampage, a chaos of torn paper and shattered projectiles and glistening guts visible only when the lights deigned to give Tvorh a look at his latest victim. Yet somehow, in the midst of the carnage, Tvorh had built a perfect view of the scene. The blasts of the bullets no longer blinded him; he knew, somehow, that Senrii was four stacks over and making her way to Piotr, who had just taken off the head of another one of the Nxtlu warriors with his telescoping halberd. He knew that one of the warriors was pushing his way through the stacks toward Senrii. He was going to take her from behind.

Two could play at that game.

Tvorh sprinted past shelf after shelf in a frantic effort to catch up. The thug was rounding the corner of the stacks now, just behind Senrii, so close to Piotr— they would both die if—

“Hiaaa!” Tvorh leapt onto the man’s back, stabbing and stabbing again into his neck. They tumbled together to the ground, and Tvorh rolled off and away before Senrii had even had a chance to turn around.

Then her guns were screaming again, dropping two of the warriors next to Piotr. The man was a dervish, spinning and slashing as the bullets tore into his copious robe and shattered against the Stigmata-armored hide beneath. Piotr advanced as his foes retreated, and Senrii pushed after him.

Tvorh scrambled to follow. Shards of bone and forgebone both ricocheted off the archives, the walls, the ceiling, and blasted into and through the glass pillars after them.

“More,” Tvorh yelled— he could see them coming down the aisle, stopping and raising their weapons. Piotr spun to the side and Senrii and Tvorh followed as a hail of bone whistled past.

They sprinted down the next aisle. The Nxtlu warriors passed Tvorh’s peripheral vision in a flash. A moment later, there was a loud burst from their direction.

He glanced behind him. Senrii smiled. “Fast-acting, highly aerobic bacterial colony.”

Burning away the oxygen in the air. It wouldn’t stop the Nxtlu, but the concussion would slow them down. “Impressive.”

“Ain’t I just? Come on, kid.” Senrii raced past Tvorh— fathers, she could move when she wanted to— sprinted past even the long-legged Piotr, and slid into the hallway that circled the perimeter of the Archives, guns clapping. Tvorh crept out, letting the flickering lights and his preternatural sixth sense guide his knife hand into the chest of a warrior flanking Senrii a moment before Piotr’s whooshing halberd severed the man’s head from his shoulders.

The three of them formed a triangle, back-to-back-to-back, and spun. Senrii picked off two more warriors running down the hallway toward them, and just as another three come into view before Tvorh, they spun again. The sound of shattering bone and the feeling of brittle shards of glass, their momentum spent, met Tvorh’s ears and skin. Piotr stood in the path of the bullets, absorbing the shots meant for him and Senrii. As long as the bullets were bone, his armoring Stigmata would be able to handle them. But if any of these men had been given forgebone bullets…

They had to get out of here. “Stairwell’s back there,” Tvorh shouted during another one of their spins, in between Senrii’s gunslinging and Piotr’s absorption of the return shots.

“They followed us in. That exit’s a no-go.”

“How, then?”

“Shut down the defenses,” Piotr rumbled. “Exit by the main entrance.”

“But—” Tvorh could hear Senrii grit her teeth as she pulled the triggers again and again. “Let’s go! Tvorh, you remember how to get to the main floor? No stairwells packed with Nxtlu, all right?”

Tvorh racked his brain for the schematics. “Work our way to the other side of the building, take the stairwells there.”

Senrii’s hand was on his arm, dragging him forward. She covered their rear as they raced down the curving hallway. It would be a good half mile to cross the half arc to the other side of the building, but luck was with them; none of the Nxtlu had managed to get in front of them in order to close off the rest of the building. By the time they reached the opposite stairwell, Tvorh’s lungs were burning.

Senrii manhandled him into the stairwell. Tvorh forced himself up the stairs as fast as he could. “Third level up,” he gasped. “Main exit.”

“Need the Defensive Matrix Coordinator,” Senrii replied.

Huh? Tvorh took a deep breath. “Fifth floor, hallway 5-22, circle around eighty-five degrees, door 5.22.31.”

When they reached the fifth landing of the stairwell, Piotr placed his hand inside the wolf’s-head carving by the doorway. The portal quivered open, and they ducked into long-disused office space.

They raced down the halls. When Piotr opened the door to the Coordinator, Tvorh ducked inside and collapsed against the wall. Just a few minutes. He only needed a few minutes to rest.

It was a small square room. Piotr fiddled with the Coordinator, a vein- and nerve-covered terminal like the one downstairs, in the middle of the chamber. The forgebone blinds on the windows weren’t completely blocking out the light; tiny slivers of afternoon sun weaseled in between the slats. It was the brightest light since they’d cut the power.

Not that Tvorh was in any condition to appreciate it. Every moment of light was an moment in time engraved on his eyeballs, with flickering blackness immediately following.

Piotr activated the Tool.

“Tu-tu-tuUUUUUuu—” the voice said. Its registers moved from the low into the high, from unfamiliar into the voice of the Tool underneath the Archives.

Senrii kicked the console. “The bloody thing’s grown out of control. Their nerves’ve intertwined.”

“Is that,” Tvorh wheezed, “why we still have power?”

Piotr said, “The Coordinator does have a photosynthetic generator. If you are correct that the Defensive Coordinator Tool has grafted with the Archives’ primary Tool, Maga, the rest of the facility must be drawing from the Coordinator’s power as well.”

“And preventing us from doing anything! How are we supposed to make this thing work with the entire facility draining the power straight out of the Coordinator? Agh!” She kicked the console again.

“Speak your…” Incomprehensible. “What… Tutela…”

“Coordinator,” Piotr said, “lockdown mode off.”

“Speak your comm… utela…”

“It can’t hear you,” Tvorh gasped. The universe was beginning to come back into focus once again.

“Thanks, brainiac.” Senrii reached out and grabbed a thick nerve tubule marked with a long green stripe that ran from floor to ceiling along the pillar of the console. “We need power, huh? I’ll show you power.” With the other hand, she fished a cube of something Tvorh couldn’t quite make out from within her robe and popped it into her mouth.

For the first time, Tvorh heard anxiety in Piotr’s voice. “Maga. It’s too dangerous.”

“Yeah, well, nobody ever said I wasn’t a risk-taker.”

“What will I tell your father, Maga?”

“Nothing. I’ll tell him myself.” Senrii unscrewed a cover at the junction of the tube; a bundle of nerves and veins of fluids, clear and red both, blossomed from the open end of the cabling.

She shoved the bundle against her wrist. The nerves shot out and pierced her flesh, whipping forward into her body.

Tvorh fought his way back to his feet. “What’s she doing?”

“Powering the station,” Piotr said. There was a crack in the edge of his voice.

“With what? Her body?”

“The Symbiont is a highly efficient translator of energy,” Piotr said, sounding unsure of his words. “And she is consuming a calorie pack. Standard issue solid fuel provision, with caloric density far greater than that of carbohydrates or lipids.”

“That’s impossible.”

“As I said, the Symbiont is a highly efficient engine.” Piotr fell silent as Senrii went rigid. She shut her eyes tightly, and perspiration began to bead on her brow. “And now that energy is going toward the Tool.”

“Speak your command, Tutela,” the Tool said at last.

“Coordinator,” Piotr said urgently, casting a glance toward Senrii’s paling face. “Lockdown mode off.”

“As you wish, Tutela.”

The shutters on the windows creaked and began to pull open. Considering the gloom of the building, the bright streaks that began to broaden on the walls may as well have been a blinding flood of light. Senrii opened her eyes dreamily. “Well, there you go, Pio—” Then she gasped. “Look out!”

Senrii was a blur as the tube tore out of her hand. She barreled into Piotr, bearing him down as a ball of greasy flame burning bright blue sailed over their heads and impacted against the armored bone of the console. Tvorh momentarily flinched away from the heat of the fire, then drew his knife and fell into a crouch.

A bald man in the feathered blacks and reds of the Nxtlu nobility stood at the door of the room, holding a ball of fluid flame in his hand. He grinned down at Piotr and the Maga lying on top of him. “Never send a beast to do a human’s job,” he murmured as he drew back and prepared to pitch the pitch.

“Good plan,” Senrii snarled. She rolled forward off of Piotr as the Magus made his throw. For a second Tvorh couldn’t breathe, and then there was a deafening clap as new air filled the chamber.

“Disgusting,” Senrii murmured, brushing at the inert napalm clinging to her robes. Then she glanced up and smiled wickedly, and the Sodality robes fell off her, revealing the body-hugging black skinsuit that she had been wearing when Tvorh had first met her. “All right, you want to dance? Let’s dance.”

Her guns began to sing.

A strong hand pulled Tvorh away from the wall as the Magus retreated out the door. “You must leave, quickly,” Piotr said.

“Not without you. Or Senrii.”

“You are the Key to the Libraratory. If they find you, the whole Gens is doomed. Go!” Piotr shoved Tvorh toward the window. True to his size, the man was incredibly strong, but the act had been intended to encourage, not harm. Tvorh stumbled forward for a few steps, then regained control of his feet.

“No! I’m going to help you.”

“Kid.” Senrii was crouching next to the door, her back to the wall. She grimaced as bullets sped past, then popped out of cover and squeezed off a pair of shots. “You gotta go.”

“But I—”

“Kid, get back to the rendezvous point.” A fiery glow appeared in the doorway around Senrii, glowing brighter by the moment. She thrust out a hand, and there was another vacuum-clap. The glow vanished as quickly as it had appeared. “We’ll meet you there. Go!”

“But—”

“Go, go, go!” Shot, shot, shot.

Tvorh turned frantically back to the window. “There’s a problem.”

“No kidding!”

“The windows aren’t open yet.” The blinds had twisted to let in the sunlight, but they still crossed the glass of the window. “They must not have retracted before you broke free.”

“Blood and bile! I can’t do anything about that, Tvorh, I’m kind of—”

But Tvorh was already back in the center of the room, taking the cabling in hand. “Here goes nothing,” he whispered.

Then he shoved it into his wrist, as Senrii had done before him.

Black and red. Pain. Bite it back.

Where was the world? Was there anything that wasn’t on fire? There were words. Screams? Pops?

His muscles creaked and groaned, straining, stretching, being eaten up. Starvation. He was used to it. But he hadn’t been hungry only seconds ago.

Tvorh held on as the life drained from him. He’d thought he’d left starvation behind when he left Acerbia; the weakening of his body terrified him. But he needed to give his people time to get the windows open.

He was so, so hungry. And tired. And lesser and lesser every second.

And then Tvorh wasn’t lesser any more, though his stomach burned for fuel and his eyes would barely open. Strong arms were around him. “Have to,” he murmured.

“Tvorh,” said Piotr, his voice a bell-shaped distortion in the air against the myriad other sounds— the gunplay, the fire, the vacuum-claps. “Tvorh, you have little time.”

The tube, its nerve-ends bloody and dripping, coiled on the ground.

“I’m… I’m fine.” Tvorh found his feet. “I’m fine. Really.” He wasn’t, really, but he knew he could stand, and that was enough.

“Get him out of here, Piotr!” Senrii shouted through strained teeth.

“You did it, Tvorh. Now go. Go!” Piotr shoved him toward the window, and this time he didn’t fight it.

Sunlight. So bright.

So hungry.

Tvorh shook his head and focused all of his prodigious will on the thought of escaping. The forgebone slats were gone, and afternoon sun was shining through the window. He could do this.

Somehow Tvorh was outside, hanging by his fingers from the sill. The leap out the window had been so easy, so graceful, so second nature, that he didn’t realize he was doing it until he’d already completed it. He was going to be fine.

He was going to live.

As the sounds of gunplay, sizzling fire, and vacuum claps burst out the window above him, Tvorh began his slow, unsteady descent toward the ground. The black and white stone of the Archives’ outer walls were engraved with scenes from Gens Nethress’s past. Lucky they weren’t smooth. Each toehold brought him closer to the high untended grass of the grounds below. As he shimmied down a pillar, he cast one final glance up toward the window from which he’d come. It was so high up, so far away. How long had he been climbing? A minute? Five? Fifteen?

That Tool’s voice, with its strangely familiar undertones, wafted out from between the gaping front doors of the building; they must have opened when the lockdown was lifted. “Affirmative, Tutela. Commencing bombardment.”

This time, he recognized the undertone, and it was all he could do to hang on to the pillar as a wave of shock overwhelmed him. But he was not so lucky when the first Forge-Eater Roots struck the building, shaking it to its foundations and bringing a pile of marble and jet down on top of him.