Mira Vale didn’t hesitate.
She didn’t look at the summons. She didn’t look at the iron door bending inward under the weight of the Cardinal’s siege engines. She looked only at her brother. It trembled in the dust, blood leaking from his ears as thirty thousand dead creditors screamed inside his marrow.
She stood upright, stepping over Ren’s shuddering body.
Her charcoal-wool shawl slipped from her shoulders, pooling on the blood-spotted flat stone slabs. For the first time in six months, she didn’t hide her right side.
From the delicate curve of her neck down through her right shoulder, her anterior ribs, and her entire right arm, her body was smoky, many-sided quartz. In the gloom of the ancient crypt, the crystal didn’t look like an illness. It looked like a weapon forged from midnight and starlight, semi-clear, sharp-angled, and perfectly tuned.
Artificer Ren scrambled to his feet, his jeweler’s loupes swinging wide in alarm. “Mira, no! If you uncage the full ringing output of that chest lattice without a sound buffer, the shaking shear will crack your own chest bone! Your heart is only eighty percent hardened. The around the heart tissues can’t sustain—”
“Quiet, Artificer,” Mira commanded. Her voice was not loud. But it carried a strange, dual-tonal deep ring that shook through the stones beneath their boots. “You tuned my chest to survive. Now watch me use it.”
