Chapter 31 · The Heart Wakes

"Rowan, it's looking at you."

The First Heart opened its eye.

Not an eye. A ring of white fire buried inside bronze, crystal, and stone older than the archives. The ring contracted, and every machine in the chamber bowed toward him.

Metal screamed. Chains snapped taut. Dead gauges shuddered awake, their needles slamming past red into numbers no engineer had built them to measure.

Then the alarms started.

They didn't sound like bells. They sounded like the city screaming through a copper throat.

Rowan staggered. The floor tilted beneath his boots. Blood ran from the cut across his palm and dripped onto the black platform. Each drop vanished into the engraved channels, racing outward in thin crimson lines.

Old symbols rose from the metal.

Not royal script. Not anything preserved in the archives. The letters were jagged and elegant, shaped like roots reaching through soil.

THE FIRST HEART REMEMBERS.

The words hung in the air above him, written in light.

"Tell me that thing has an off switch," Lyra said.

She stood at his left, one hand locked around the hilt of her lightning weapon. Smoke curled from the barrel.