Chapter 7 · He Got Here First

The blade sat in the engine's heart like a splinter in frozen flesh.

Marcus didn't touch it. Not yet. The air around it hummed wrong, a pitch that made his teeth ache and his sinuses burn. He'd restored instruments for fifteen years. He knew the difference between broken and poisoned.

This thing was both.

"How long does the engine have?" He kept his voice low. The ice walls around them groaned, a deep bass note that traveled up through his boots.

Ayla crouched on the opposite side of the core mechanism, her gloved fingers tracing the fracture lines that spiderwebbed out from where the blade pierced. "Hours. Maybe less." She looked up, and her eyes were hard in the blue-white glow. "If the resonance collapses completely, the entire plateau goes. The settlements, the supply lines. Everything."

"Right." Marcus swallowed. His mouth tasted like copper and cold. "So we pull it out."

"And replace it with what?" Ayla's voice was flat. "You said you fix things. This isn't a cracked lute string."

She wasn't wrong.