The iron bell in the high tower struck seven, and the main doors of the grand auditorium swung inward, drinking in the ocean-wet fog that always coiled around the district after sunset.
From the wings, Signy rubbed her heavy eyelids, chewing the corner of a crust of bread Tymon had pressed into her palm ten minutes prior. "Why does he need three tonnes of dry ice?" she muttered. "The floor feels like a wet cellar. My slippers are ruined."
Tymon tugged at her sleeve. His small fingers were cold. He pointed up, beyond the velvet borders, toward the steel web of the flies.
High above, things moved. Not stagehands. Eight-legged shapes spun out of razor-fine brass wire crept across the suspension grid. Their legs clicked like needle-points on slate as they sawed methodically at the hemp ropes holding the set upright. No light caught their bodies, only their shadows, spindly and scurrying.
"The rigging is loose, Signy," Tymon whispered.
"Vance told everyone this morning he wanted the set to look unsteady," she said with a slow blink, swallowing her bread. "Method staging. He's crazy, but the pay packet clears at midnight. Stay behind the fire curtain, Ty. If I get through the fourth act without sitting down, we can buy the coal stove from the cobbler's shop tomorrow."
Out beyond the footlights, three hundred patrons sat shoulder to shoulder in the velvet dark. Critics in fox-fur collars held brass opera glasses. A low, wet hum rose from the brass orchestra pit as the conductor raised his baton.
The curtain rose.
Signy shuffled toward center stage, her moth-eaten mourning gown trailing across damp painted floorboards. The draft hit her immediately, chilled by the archipelago's sea air, but she welcomed it; the cold was the only thing preventing her from slumping onto the fake gravestone and sleeping through the overture.
Above, a thick hemp line snapped with the crack of a pistol shot.
A seventy-pound hempen sandbag whistled down from forty feet in the air.
Signy never looked up. She merely stepped sideways to adjust the train of her dress, her posture slack with pure fatigue. The canvas sack smashed into the floor two inches from her left heel, exploding in a crater of gray sand and splintered timber.
The sound echoed like a mortar shell.
A gasp rippled through the front row.
"To fall," Signy drawled into the stunned hall, her voice rich with the dry, gravelly flatline of total indifference, "is simply to meet the dirt a second early."
In the darkness of the fourth row, a theater critic dropped his pen, scrambled to retrieve it, and scribbled furiously. Madame Orlov, watching from the wings, pressed both palms against her cheeks, her face bright with manic delight.
Up in the catwalks, the clockwork horrors quickened. Dozens of them swarmed over the iron girders, their tiny serrated mandibles chewing through the thick braided cables of the heavy Fresnel lanterns.
Another snap.
A blackened iron lamp crate plunged through the mist, trailing sparks. Signy dipped her torso in an unhurried, clumsy roll—an instinct honed by dodging flying beer bottles in dockside taverns when she had swept floors as a child—and came up resting on one knee against the wooden cenotaph. The iron fixture crushed the boards where her ribs had been half a second before, shedding hot glass that showered the footlights in silver hail.
The audience erupted into scattered, frantic applause. They thought the near-misses were rehearsed to the fraction of an inch.
"Brilliant!" Vance yelled from the prompt corner, chewing through his cigar. "Keep the pressure on her! Make the tragedy visceral!"
Behind the proscenium arch, Breda stood frozen. Her skin was the color of boiled lard. Every hair on her arms prickled as the terrible pulse hammered between her ears, loud enough to drown the strings.
[ANOMALY PERSISTS.]
[TARGET RESISTANCE: MAXIMUM.]
[SEVERING PRIMARY RIGGING. ELIMINATE THE VESSEL.]
Breda looked up. The entire central light bridge—a two-ton latticework of steel piping, heavy arc-lamps, and counterweights—was groaning. Hundreds of the brass spiders had clustered around the main winch, their clockwork bodies jamming the safety gears, snapping the teeth out of the cogs one by one.
Directly beneath that iron monster sat Signy, resting her chin on her palm, reciting her lines with the hollow, beautiful despair of a woman who just wanted her bed.
Signy failed to see the winch give way.
She never heard the shriek of shearing iron as the cables unspooled like loose violin strings.
"No," Breda said.
Her boots felt heavy, filled with lead, the System's icy grip freezing her marrow. It wanted this. It needed Signy dead so it could feed on the void left behind. But Breda saw Tymon in the shadows, his wide eyes fixed on his sister, his small hand clutching that pair of tiny tweezers as if he could mend the world with them.
Breda had traded her mother's breath for this misery. She had poisoned her own soul for a crown made of barbed wire. And now, the thing in her head was going to smash this exhausted girl into paste.
"No!" Breda screamed, her voice tearing through the orchestral swell.
She bolted from the wings.
Signy heard the shout and began to turn, her brow furrowing with mild annoyance. "Breda? Your cue isn't until the graveyard sexton arrives—"
Breda hit Signy like an iron wedge. The impact hurled the thin orphan across the floorboards, sending her skidding through the scattered sand into the safety of the painted backdrop.
A roar shook the hall.
The great steel bridge tore free from its moorings and slammed down upon the center stage.
The impact shattered the oak timbers, collapsing the trapdoors beneath it into the damp cellar below. Plaster rained from the ceiling. A cloud of black soot and pulverized wood billowed into the footlights, choking the front row. The shockwave blew out the gas sconces along the aisles, leaving the theater illuminated only by the dying crimson embers of shattered arc bulbs.
Signy pushed herself up on one bruised elbow, coughing in the haze. "What in the... Vance, what are you doing?"
Then she saw the wreckage.
The steel truss lay twisted across the splintered boards. Trapped beneath its central girder, her legs and waist pinned under five hundred pounds of structural iron, was Breda.
A dark, thick puddle was already spreading from beneath the metal, soaking into the dry stage canvas. Breda coughed, a wet, choking sound, blood bubbling over her lower lip and down her pale chin.
In the stalls, women screamed. Men surged toward the aisles. The house lights failed to rise; the stage power panel was smoking.
Signy crawled forward on her hands and knees, the indifference stripping away from her face like dried mud washed off by a flood. Her hand shook as she reached through the twisted iron to grasp the girl's sleeve. "Breda. Hey. Get up. You're... you're ruining the scene. Get up."
Breda looked at her. Her gaze was unfocused, but her lips curled into a crooked, bloody grin. "I... shoved you. Right? For once... I actually beat you to the mark."
"Shut up. Don't speak," Signy said, her fingers digging into Breda's torn dress as she hauled against the iron bar. It wouldn't budge. It was anchored by two tons of collapsed rig. "Help her!" Signy screamed into the dark, turning toward the wings. Her voice cracked, raw and jagged. "Get the crew! Get a pry-bar!"
Nobody moved. The stagehands were fleeing the falling debris, and the audience was shoving toward the exits in panic.
Then the air above the pinned girl's chest warped.
A light flared—not the amber of lamps, but an ugly, arterial crimson that cast no heat. Pixels of jagged light assembled in the smoke, snapping together into large, floating numerals that hovered three feet above Breda's shattered chest.
[KARMA LIQUIDATION ACCELERATED.]
[USER BREACH DETECTED: UNFORGIVABLE TREASON.]
[COLLECTION IN PROGRESS: 00:59]
[00:58]
[00:57]
Beneath the glowing numbers, a second window flared in sickly violet, projecting a live phantom image: Breda's mother in the infirmary cot, her face sunken, her chest heaving as translucent black worms began burrowing into her pale skin, devouring her from the marrow out.
Breda seized Signy's wrist with shocking, desperate strength. Her fingernails cut into the orphan's skin.
"Signy," Breda gasped, her lungs wheezing through the blood. "The clock... don't let it hit zero."