Kasim lunged, rings glinting beneath the gas lamps. His glove clamped onto Jivya's collarbone, blunt nails digging through fine silk to drag her into the open.
"You thieving little wretch!" he spat, spittle hitting the marble. "You crawled from my estate into another man's alcove? Guards! Chain her!"
He did not get to pull her an inch further.
Zarren moved without a sound. One second he was looming over Jivya; the next, his palm cracked against the nobleman's forearm with the impact of an iron piston. Kasim shrieked as Zarren twisted the man's wrist sideways, bone grinding against cartilage until the lord dropped to his knees, his face pressed against the hem of Jivya's sapphire skirts.
"Take your hands off her," Zarren said. The ballroom shrank into dead silence around the low, icy register of his voice.
"She is my property!" Kasim choked out, thrashing, his pomaded hair coming undone over his forehead. "We have a binding covenant! She belongs to House Darabi, pledged to me—"
"She belongs to the Sun-Forge," Zarren corrected. The Director applied another fraction of pressure, producing a distinct, sickening snap. Kasim whined, high-pitched like a kicked hound. "She is under my direct, sovereign oversight. Touch her again, Lord Kasim, and I will feed your liver to the sulfur vats."
"Treason!" Kasim howled to the gallery above, his face purple. "Vashni boys, slaughter them both!"
From behind the banquet tables and velvet partitions, eight men shed their servant livery, whipping brass cudgels and serrated daggers into the open air. High-society ladies shrieked, trampling their own petticoats as the gala dissolved into shrieking chaos.
Zarren shoved Kasim flat onto the floor and spun Jivya behind him. His tailcoat swept wide, revealing twin throwing-spikes strapped to his ribs. "Stay behind me, Jaya."
"I am not a coat rack, Director!" Jivya snapped back.
She kicked off her satin slippers, grabbed a silver wine bucket from a pedestal, and hurled the iced slosh directly into the eyes of the first charging thug. While the man sputtered, blinded by chilled vintage, she swung the heavy silver bucket in a savage upward arc. It connected with his chin in a dull clang. He crumpled.
Zarren caught a cudgel mid-swing with his bare left vambrace, the steel reinforcing his cuff sparking against the impact. With his right fist, he caved the attacker's solar plexus in. He glanced back, eyebrows raised. "Barbaric. Effective, but barbaric."
"You haven't seen my cousin with a tea tray," she shot back, stepping back-to-back with him as three more ruffians circled their island of ruin.
Their spines pressed together. Through the thin silk of her bodice, the heat radiating from his broad frame was dizzying. Every twist he made to shatter an incoming blade rippled cleanly through her own posture. They moved like gears in a grand clockwork engine, ducking and parrying in synchronized rhythm.
"Look up! Duck, you absolute clods!" a voice screeched from the ceiling rafters.
Minoo perched on the crossbeam fifty feet above, dangling by one knee. She held a massive, grease-blackened Sun-Forge utility spanner in both hands, furiously unscrewing the central ceiling pin.
"Minoo, no!" Jivya screamed.
"Minoo, yes! Timber!"
With a deafening groan of shearing metal, the four-ton crystal chandelier ripped free from the plaster.
Zarren seized Jivya by the waist, lifting her clean off the floor as he dove sideways behind a marble pillar. The chandelier hit the center of the parquet with the force of an artillery shell. Thousands of glass prisms exploded outward like shrapnel, crushing two syndicate thugs instantly and burying the rest under a mountainous hail of crystal and shattered brass.
Dust and powdered lime filled the hall in an opaque white fog.
Through the haze, Jivya spotted Kasim crawling on his belly toward the garden veranda, dragging his broken wrist. The breast pocket of his brocade coat flapped open, exposing a slim, calfskin notebook stamped with the black viper of the Vashni Syndicate.
The genuine shipment logs. Definite proof of forged military permits sold beneath the council's noses.
Jivya scrambled out from under the director's protective shadow. She sprinted across the glittering field of glass, leaped over a dazed thug, and slid across the polished stone right onto Kasim's back. Her knee pinned his spine to the floor.
"Get off me, you street-spawned harpy!" Kasim wheezed.
"Shut up, darling, we are having a moment," Jivya hissed, her fingers slipping into his pocket. She snatched the leather ledger, tucking it snugly inside the tight stays of her bodice.
"Jaya, get back!" Zarren's roar echoed through the hall.
Kasim twisted violently, his good arm whipping out from beneath his belly. Glinting in his grip was a thin, emerald-tinted stiletto, its needle-fine blade weeping drops of iridescent green sludge—Sun-Blight venom, an outlawed neurotoxin distilled from corrupted catalyst sludge.
Jivya froze. The tip leveled directly at her throat.
Zarren tackled her aside. His heavy flank slammed into hers, sending her skidding safely across the marble, but the upward thrust didn't miss completely. The venom-laced steel carved a shallow, jagged trench across the director's ribs, through waistcoat and shirt, scoring the flesh beneath.
Zarren grunted, snapping Kasim's other wrist with a brutal stomp before kicking the noble through the shattered glass doors into the courtyard.
Silence fell over the ruins of the ballroom, broken only by the crackle of burning velvet.
Jivya pushed herself up, coughing against the smoke. "Director? Did you—"
Zarren took one step toward her, then swayed. His knees hit the parquet hard.
"Zarren!" The false name died on her tongue as pure instinct took over. She rushed to his side, catching his broad chest against her arms. His skin was scorching, burning hotter than any fever she had ever treated in the apothecary shops.
He peeled back the shredded linen of his shirt. Around the shallow cut, thick, metallic veins were spreading rapidly outward across his chest like crawling moss. They weren't purple or black; they glowed with a sick, curdled brass luster, pulsing in time with his laboring breath.
"Sun-Blight," he rasped, his voice dropping to a harsh whisper. His fingers dug weakly into her forearms, his jaw slackening. "Corrosive catalyst... coagulates the blood within the hour."
"No, no, you idiot, why did you jump in front of me?" she demanded, her vision blurring with furious, panic-stricken tears. "I had a silver fork! I was going to stab his ear!"
"Couldn't... let him mark what is mine," Zarren muttered, his heavy eyelids fluttering shut as his head slumped against her collar.
"I am not your anything! Stay awake, damn you!"
From the rubble of the balcony, Minoo landed with an ungraceful thump, her skirt singed and soot smeared across her nose. "Jivya! The city watch is ringing the bells at the north gate! The syndicate men are regrouping in the lane! We need to run!"
"Help me lift him," Jivya ordered, hauling Zarren's uninjured arm over her neck.
Between the two of them, groaning under his dense weight, they dragged the Sun-Forge's most terrifying administrator down the servants' ramp and kicked open the rear carriage house. Standing in the central bay rested the lord's private steam-carriage, brass pipes already hissing on a low idle.
Jivya shoved Zarren into the velvet-lined passenger bench, slamming the door before leaping into the driver's cab. She reached for the primary pressure lever, her hands slick with Zarren's tainted blood.
"Do you even know how to drive this beast?" Minoo shrieked, tumbling onto the floorboards beside her.
"How hard can it be? It's just boiling water and poor life choices!" Jivya slammed the throttle forward.
The carriage erupted into life with a deafening screech of brass pistons, lunging through the stable gates and tearing into the midnight streets of Zafiras at a lethal speed, trailing black smoke toward the glowing chimneys of the Sun-Forge.
Behind the cab glass, Zarren let out a low groan, the glowing gold veins creeping up his neck toward his throat.