Chapter 15 · The Frontline in His Head

The city was hunting them.

Eli heard it in the walls.

Not the sirens. Not the distant thunder of armored patrols grinding across the upper streets. The sound beneath those sounds was older—a low mechanical pulse traveling through the abandoned waterway, shaking dust from the brickwork and stirring black water around their boots.

Hunt. Hunt. Hunt.

The emergency lights along the tunnel flickered red, painting Sera’s face in pieces. One second she looked like the disgraced heir the entire city had just been ordered to kill. The next, she looked like a stranger wearing a crown of blood around her wrist.

Marlow stumbled behind her, one hand clamped over his side. His coat had been torn open by a drone’s rotary blade, and dark blood seeped between his fingers.

“Tell me,” he rasped, “that those things can’t follow us down here.”

A metal shriek answered him from the tunnel ahead.

Sera stopped.

Eli caught her arm before she could step into the dark. Her skin was cold. The Ash Crown beneath it was not.