(title hidden — not yet read)

(summary hidden — not yet read)

Zellion hooks a Charred's machete arm with his spear and trips him, then Elegy is on the man with the Shardspear, driving the Auxiliary-soul through his head until his cinderheart burns out. She keeps stabbing into the deck after he is dead, eyes wide and far too excited. Aux mutters in Zellion's ear that perhaps the weapon ought to be a little less sharp when she goes too far. Zellion reins her in. *Be careful.* She nods. The hovercycle the Charred had ridden up to the ship is already lost behind them.

The Dawnchaser — the most maneuverable of the Beacon ships — peels out of the formation that bunches the four gunships around the four overloaded transports. Sensibly, the Cinder King's pilots go for the gunships first; the people on the transport decks are obvious soft targets, but the enemy follows the textbook and aims at the defences. Rebeke swings the Dawnchaser in close to Zeal's gunship, which has Charred swarming the deck. Zellion jumps; Elegy lands beside him. He plays decoy with his flashing spear, she carves through them with the Shardspear, and in seconds four of the five are dead. The last leaps to a passing enemy vessel, and the two of them follow.

On the next gunship the Charred do something wrong: they break and scatter rather than fight. Zellion knows from his experience with Elegy that they will only flee under direct order. Then he sees them — small wired cinderhearts magnetised to the deck, glowing at the core. Bombs. He grabs Elegy, hurls her toward the returning Dawnchaser, and jumps a heartbeat before the gunship — pilots inside — flowers into red fire and detonates again on impact below. *Cheating*, Elegy hisses, her cinderheart pulsing white-red with rage. There are no rules, Zellion tells her. They brought cannons.

He hates that he did not see it coming. The Beaconites used the same trick on the rescue raid; he should have prepared. The bombs are a tactic that works without the Charred needing to win the fight at all — they just need to deliver and leap. He sends Elegy back to Zeal's ship to clear it and toss any bombs overboard, then leaps to the third gunship himself.

There a Charred is priming a bomb against her cinderheart. He kills the others, stabs her through the neck — uninvested steel, so she survives — and kicks the bomb off the side. The blast rocks the ship. He notices that even with a perforated neck the wounded Charred can barely keep her feet, and shifts his strikes to legs and feet; then he signals the pilot to roll, sending several wounded enemies tumbling screaming into the mud.

Across the formation Elegy is holding Zeal's deck, dumping two unprimed bombs over the rail. Aux is brutally effective against an enemy used to rushing in unconcerned about taking hits. But the fourth gunship — Jeffrey Jeffrey at the controls — has a smouldering hole torn in its side and three Charred arming more bombs on its deck. The ship is dead; the people on it are not.

Without prompting this time, Zellion runs and jumps. He misses the spear in the landing, sinks Auxiliary as a grappling hook into the deck to keep from being thrown clear, ignores the Charred, reshapes Aux into a man-tall Shardblade and uses it to slice the top off the cab like a tin lid. He cuts Jeffrey Jeffrey's restraints and hauls him out. Then, with no other ship in reach, he reshapes Aux again as a shield, slaps it over one of the primed bombs, and rides the detonation into the air — swinging claw-hooks into the Dawnchaser's hull as it sweeps past. He dangles by one arm with Jeffrey Jeffrey in the other above a thirty-foot drop. Cracked ribs, whiplash, a probable concussion, Aux notes; but alive.

He throws Jeffrey Jeffrey up onto the deck and follows, then sees Elegy alone against several Charred on another ship and lobs Aux across as a metal ball that lands in her hand as a machete. Jeffrey Jeffrey, dazed, stares at him. *Why is the light breaking around you?* Zellion glances at himself: an arch of fragments above his head, three more on his arms — perhaps ten in all, two distinct kinds, the remnants of both his orders trying to push back into reality. Almost like old times. He gestures the man into the cab.

Then the enemy pulls back. Ahead, the Cinder King's entourage has landed and circled a patch of ground, rifles up. Rebeke swoops the Dawnchaser down low for a quick prospector sweep through a hail of rifle fire that dings the rail but cannot punch the armoured hull. Then she meets Zellion's eyes through the glass and nods once: a large power source, exactly beneath that patch of mud. As he had hoped, the tyrant has led them straight to the Refuge's door. It is time to see what is inside.