"Ten minutes until your doom, Koscheva! Pick up your skirts and sprint!" Nikolai vaulted over a fallen lead conduit, his sapphire-trimmed rapier whistling through the gloom of the clock tower’s maintenance stairwell. "My skirts are tailored wool, Rostova, and if you trip me I will weld your boots to your shins," I gasped, taking two iron risers at a time. My ribs burned. The ancient hex in my marrow was no longer just a cold knot; it had grown teeth, chewing through my sternum with rhythmic, greasy pulses. We burst onto the apex platform of the central belfry. The wind howled through gothic arches, smelling of ozone, hot oil, and rain. Lissette was already standing beneath the enormous dial. She wore a pristine ivory frock without a drop of grease on the hem, which was frankly disgusting. Above her, suspended within the interlocking brass teeth of the city’s heart, hung a spherical cage of spun heavy-gauge wires. Inside it was Sergei. He was down on one knee, his left forearm clamped in an iron vise bolted to the floor. The skin around his wrist had peeled back in angry crimson flakes where my stray heart-pin had burrowed, and the metal beneath was spitting angry violet sparks straight into the cage’s lattice. Braided red cables siphoned that filthy, corrupt light straight down into a black obsidian stone hovering between Lissette's manicured palms. "Step-sister!" Lissette trilled over the roar of the gale. "Right on the hour. You always were punctilious about your own tragedies." "Lissette, you utter badger," I yelled back, stepping forward while Nikolai drew a pair of pneumatic thrust-blades from his coat. "Let him out of the birdcage. His hair looks ridiculous squashed against the wires, and I am the only one permitted to ruin his dignity." "Tatiyana! Stay back!" Sergei shouted, his voice rough. He tried to pull his arm free, but the metal harness whined, teeth sinking deeper into the scar tissue. "The collector isn't just drawing the residue—it’s cycling back into the main escapement! She’s tethered the family corruption to the city grid!" "Of course I have!" Lissette smiled, her porcelain cheeks dimpling. "Why settle for a petty inheritance when I can absorb the entire legacy of your cursed house? All that magnificent, ruinous power, purified by Orlov’s brilliant bloodline, turned entirely to my command. When the hour strikes, the rot takes your legacy, Tatiyana—and gives the marrow of it to me." She snapped her fingers. From the shadows behind the four-meter brass pendulum emerged three grotesque figures. They were the Lyceum’s prize gatekeeper sentries, but hollowed out, their ivory porcelain faces cracked and stuffed with whirring dynamo coils that leaked black soot. They moved with hideous, jerking grace, brandishing heavy crescent axes forged from furnace iron. "Leave the tin soldiers to me!" Nikolai bellowed, a lunatic grin splitting his face. He flourished his foil, springing into the path of the nearest automaton. "I've been looking for an excuse to dismantle the Headmaster’s favorite toys all semester!" Metal slammed into metal with an ear-splitting shriek. Nikolai ducked beneath a sweeping axe, the razor edge shearing off his feathered collar, and shoved his blade straight into the sentry's exposed cervical pinion. Gears erupted in a shower of grease, but the second machine backhanded him across the platform, sending him skidding over the rainy stone, spitting blood. Praising his stupidity would have to wait. The third automaton lunged for me, its pneumatic pistons hissing like a nest of vipers. I reached into my tool-roll, ripped out a pair of cobalt tuning forks, and struck them against my thigh. The resonance struck the damp stone, vibrating at the exact harmonic frequency of cheap pig-iron. The sentry's right knee buckled as its axle crystallized and shattered into powdered rust. It toppled with a deafening crash, clawing at my skirt as I scrambled past. "Sergei!" I threw myself against the metallic cage. The current bit into my palms, smelling of fried meat, but my pride wouldn't allow me to pull away. "How do I open this wretched contraption?" "You don't," Sergei grunted. His face was pale, beads of sweat plastering dark curls to his forehead. He looked at me through the wire, his hazel eyes completely clear despite the agony twisting his jaw. "The lock is slaved to the master anchor behind the clock face. The only way to kill the circuit from out there is to drop a heavy charge down the main spindle. You'd have to shatter the great wheel." I froze. My breath locked behind my teeth. The great wheel. It was the masterwork installed by my great-grandfather Kirill a century ago. The literal monument that held our house’s reputation above water, the sole historic achievement the city council hadn't stripped from our crest. To obliterate it was to admit to the entire empire that the Koschevs built nothing that lasted. It was public, permanent shame. "Tatiyana, listen to me," Sergei said, his hand reaching through the lethal mesh to hover near mine. "If you break the wheel now, the backlash will erase the Koschev name from the civic registry. Everyone will call you a butcher. They’ll say you destroyed the soul of Olenstadt out of spite." "I already have a terrible reputation, Orlov!" I retorted, my voice shaking with fury. "I am the Iron Witch! I turn conservatory flora into vulgar tavern singers! Why would I care about a rusty circle of brass?" "Because you built your whole life around surviving it," he whispered softly. "Because it matters to you. More than anything." "You absolute idiot," I snarled, tears stinging the corners of my eyes, hot and infuriating. "You matter more than a pile of scrap metal!" Above us, the massive iron hammer of the bell began its creaking ascent. Three minutes to twelve. Across the roof, Lissette raised the black crystal high, singing a high, warbling note of command. Nikolai was pinned beneath the second automaton, his rapier bent in half as he wrestled with its crushing brass fingers. "Koscheva!" he roared, veins bulging along his neck. "Do something disgraceful, quickly!" I looked at the master clockwork behind the dial. The escapement wheel spun with deafening, rhythmic clatter, five feet of solid bronze teeth bathed in foul violet radiance. If I hit it with pure destructive force, the sudden drop in tension would detonate the energized cage, crushing Sergei instantly. I couldn't destroy it. But I could overload it. I gripped the two halves of my tuning forks. I looked into Sergei's eyes. "Orlov. What was the exact ratio of the dampening clutch on your third-year gyro-skiff? The one I supposedly sabotaged?" He blinked, then a sudden, fierce dawn broke across his exhausted features. "Three to seven. Clockwise deflection." "You have forty seconds to build a shunt out of your arm brace," I said, teeth bared in a snarl. "If you miss the frequency, we both become strawberry jam." "I never miss calculations, Tatiyana. You're the one with sloppy handiwork." "Shut up and brace yourself!" I turned my back on him, raised my arms toward the massive escapement gear, and stopped fighting the filth in my blood. For twenty-four years and three hundred and sixty-four days, I had squeezed down on the family poison, choking it back, hiding the rot behind posture and silk and arrogant sniffs. Now, I opened the gate. The curse erupted through my hands like boiling tar, black and screaming with generations of Koschev misery. I aimed away from Lissette, shoving the surge headlong into the master wheel’s main drive-shaft. Lissette shrieked. "What are you doing? You'll crack the housing! Stop, you stupid cow!" The immense master gear ground to a screeching halt. The sound was like a train jumping its rails. Sparks rained across the stones in blinding showers. A surge of violent voltage roared up the braided cables, racing toward Sergei's tungsten enclosure. Inside the cage, Sergei held fast. With his free hand, he unbuckled the brass casing of his arm-brace, jammed the pointed tip of an alignment stylus squarely into the exposed tooth in his wrist, and wrenched it counter to the current. *Three to seven. Clockwise.* He didn't absorb the shock. He bent it. The energy hit his brace and whipped sideways, looping through the cage wires in a blinding circle of white light that snapped the reinforced filaments like dried noodles. The blast caught Lissette square in the chest, hurling her over the parapet into the darkness below, her dark prism shattering on the flagstones into worthless sand. The iron band on Sergei's arm sheared clean in two. The sliver of gear flew out of his flesh, vaporizing in the air with a single, ringing ping. He was free. Then came the backlash. A deafening, structural groan shook the entire tower. The great wheel, swollen with corrupted force, tore itself from its iron mountings. The pressure wave hit me like an anvil dropping from the clouds. The wind was ripped from my lungs, the cold stone platform dropped away beneath my boots, and the sky turned into a roaring smear of smoke and thunder. Through the blinding haze of falling brass, I saw Sergei lunging forward, his hands outstretched, screaming my name over the howling wind. Then the deep, bronze bell began its final, shuddering descent, striking twelve.

The Stroke of Midnight