BURN HER ALIVE, A NASTY VOICE inside Iris’s mind snarled.
No. No more of that. She was going to resolve this another way. She had to prove it to herself that she could.
“Iris…,” Uma whispered, her trusty long pipe slipping out of her fingers and onto the floor. “Are you really—?”
“Guards, subdue her!” Bosch commanded, and suddenly guns were cocking, firing at her.
“Wait!” Iris heard Uma cry before bullets began piercing Iris’s body. Iris lifted her arms to shield her face, but it wouldn’t stop the inevitable.
She collapsed to the floor, blacking out. But her death recovery was faster now. She felt their grubby hands picking her up, heard Bellerose’s nasty voice crying, “Rip out her heart!” Her hand stopped the small blade against her chest, which had been ready to pierce her flesh, before the guard could thrust it inside.
With her bloodied hand around the blade, her eyes snapped open, terrifying the men. Using the distraction, she elbowed one in the face and kicked one in the knees. Then a huge lurch of the ship launched them back, knocking Iris and the guards off their feet.
“Wait!” Uma cried again, just as Iris climbed to her knees and lifted her hands threateningly. “She’s Hiva, you fools! Do you want to be burned alive?”
“A very good question,” Iris said, staring at all of them with a smile. “I’m a lot faster these days. Want to see how quickly I can turn an average-sized man to dust?”
The guards stiffened and backed away. Bosch and Bellerose glowered. But Uma stared at Iris curiously. Her sharp words and cocky little smile weren’t too Hiva-like. She’d hoped Uma would understand just from that. The woman was a genius, after all.
Apparently she did. Uma hid a little smile of her own behind her fingers before clearing her throat. “What is it you want, Iris?”
Madame Bellerose bared her teeth. “We’re not asking this little beast anything—”
“I said,” Uma repeated loudly, drowning Madame out, “what is it you want, Iris? Why are you here?”
Giving the guards menacing looks that made them skitter away from her, Iris found her footing. “I came to get you off this ship.”
Not exactly the truth, but it was the easiest explanation with what little time they had. The ship was steadily moving. She could see it on each screen, the diagram of the Ark plodding slowly along giant rails toward the hatch that had opened at the side of the mountain. Inside its cylinder tube in front of her, the Moon Skeleton spun like a compass needle in the center of the rotunda.
“Max, Rin, and the rest activated the Titans against me, but they couldn’t deactivate it. They’re still on, blowing cities to shreds in the north.”
While Uma frowned, Bosch grunted as if he’d sniffed game. “The Titans?” he said. “Those contraptions are active? My men are still looking for the device that will control them!”
“Looks like someone beat you to it.” Bellerose folded her arms and slid Bosch an arrogant, knowing grin. Uma stiffened as the two Enlighteners on either side of her sized her up.
“Rin and the others. Where are they now?” Uma asked, staying calm despite the accusations on the tips of her employers’ lips.
Iris’s heart skipped before she could let herself say it. “Dead. They’re all dead.”
A shuddering gasp came from Uma’s lips. It wasn’t like the woman to show her emotional hand, but this time she couldn’t help it. Her knees buckled and she lurched over, clasping her chest through her shimmering blue sari.
“I’m sorry,” Iris said as the familiar pain began to swell inside of her.
“No, I’m sorry,” Uma said, quickly collecting herself. “I should have never allowed this to happen.” Wiping her face and straightening her sari, she let out an exhale of breath. “What can I do?”
“You can stop what you started,” Iris said. “Get off this ship with me. We need to do something about this disaster together.”
This disaster, and the ones to come. Iris thought of Adam and shuddered.
“Uma will not leave this ship unless I command her to,” said Bosch in his hunter’s uniform, his helmet covering the wrinkles on his forehead. “She is my employee. She goes where I tell her.”
“She goes where we tell her,” Madame Bellerose corrected with a haughty hmph. “As members of the Enlightenment Committee, our goal from the very beginning has been the launch of the Ark. Now we’re on the eve of its maiden voyage, and you want us to throw out our top engineer? You must be as mad as you are dumb, you wicked beast.”
As Iris squeezed her fists, Madame Bellerose turned to her monitor. “Find them,” she ordered Uma. “These contraptions she calls Titans.”
The bitterness of being ordered around like a dog was clear in Uma’s expression, but she obeyed, tapping the screen. A line diagram of the planet appeared. All across North Africa, quickly descending south, were glowing splotches of orange outlined in red.
“These are abnormal energy signatures,” Uma said before Iris could even ask the question. “This machine is powered by abnormal energy sources. Using Naacalian technology, we made sure it could track other signs of abnormal energy all across the world—those that don’t fit into normal categories discovered and used in our civilization. Abnormal. Extraordinary.”
Iris nodded. It was very similar to what the Naacal had been able to do in the past. “So the energy pulsating north and south from the Atakora Mountains—”
“Are the Titans,” Uma finished. “One has already reached Spain. The other is heading down Algeria. Oh God.” Her gear-shaped nose ring shook along with her head. “How did I let this happen?”
“But Uma, this is wondrous news!” Bosch laughed, clapping his hands. “Another weapon has fallen into my hands. When we’ve finished our maiden voyage into the New World, we will return and take the Titans back into our control.”
“And how many people will be dead by then?” Iris waved her hands at the monitor. “Be serious! Have a conscience, goddamn you!”
“The only thing I need more of is what I already have,” Bosch said. “Money.”
“Hmph.” Madame Bellerose dusted off the collar of her shirt. “So crude.”
“I can’t believe you!” Iris screamed.
“And who are you to judge us?” said Bellerose, looking her up and down. “You, the cataclysm known as Hiva. Think of all who’ve already died at your hands. Think of how many years we in the Enlightenment Committee prepared for you to do the same to us as well. If it were not for your existence and our knowledge of it, the Ark would never have been commissioned.”
And if it were not for her existence, the Titans would not have been created either. Max’s friends never would have operated it against her. Millions would still be alive. She knew that. She knew that. She and Uma shared something profound. And they were both capable of understanding just how profound their connection to each other—and to others—was. That was why Iris no longer bothered with the oafish Enlighteners. Her indignation toward them had transformed into annoyance and indifference. They were fools, and they would one day die fools.
Uma was different. Iris had so much to say and not enough time to say it all. But it was to Uma that she wanted to say it.
It took every bit of willpower Iris had to stay her trembling hands as the quiet anger she still carried toward herself seared her very skin. “So then what do you want, Uma?” she asked the conflicted scientist, who was staring woefully at the screen, watching the destruction in real time. “Do you want to listen to your powerful ‘employers,’ or listen to me? Do you want to be like the old me and drown in the blood of countless victims you have on your hands? Or do you want to be like the new me and refuse to let there be any more?”
Iris could see Uma’s lips mouthing the words, New me? as her eyes widened and glistened just a little. But whatever Uma might have been thinking, Bosch would not let her speak it. He pulled a gun off his waist belt and shot one of the guards in the head.
“Bosch!” Uma screamed. “What the hell are you doing?”
“Miss Hiva may have grown a conscience, but you doing so will affect my pocketbooks, Malakar,” he said, his dark eyes boring holes through her. “The Ark is ready. Operate the Helios and launch the ship. Every second you waste, I will kill another man.”
The guards didn’t look too happy about that, but when one opened his mouth to protest, he was shot in the head.
As Bosch scrunched his nose, his white mustache twitched. “Those who obey me will not die.”
He sure knew how to control his men. Because now guns were pointed at everyone—those desperate to show Bosch they were loyal, and those who saw through his empty threats. It was a stalemate. One wrong move and bullets would be flying. They each knew that.
“How ridiculous,” Madame Bellerose muttered. “If there’s anyone you should shoot, it’s that disgusting beast.”
“Uma!” Bosch and Iris screamed at the same time.
The room fell silent, but Uma could hear them. The whimpering of some of the guards not knowing when and how their lives would end. Iris knew from Uma’s defeated sigh that Bosch had won. Uma pushed the controls. The ceiling began to shudder. A hatch below the Moon Skeleton opened, and down came the Helios, carried by wires. More perfect, more complete than what Iris had seen that day in the Basement of the Crystal Palace.
It still reminded her of a snow globe, though one as tall as her legs. Blue glass with bronze and iron outer frames. Its dome crown pointed toward the floor. And when Uma pressed the screen again, the keyhole inside the Helios began to spark with white energy. An electric current zapped from the dome of the Helios to the Moon Skeleton, whirring around in its glass cylinder below. The current zipped up and down until a continuous energy was looping between the two devices.
Uma had explained it once before. The Moon Skeleton, made of white crystal from Iris’s body, moderated and controlled the energy in the Helios’s chamber. Once, ten years ago at the South Kensington fair, they had attempted to operate the Helios without the Moon Skeleton, and it had created a terrible reaction that had produced the Fanciful Freaks. Now, through the stabilizing process, the Helios would open a door to other worlds.
It was exactly as the Naacal had imagined it, what they had attempted to do themselves to escape Hiva’s wrath. This was the fulfillment of their dreams.
A massive force of energy erupted from the Helios and the Moon Skeleton, knocking everyone down to the ground once again. The Ark propelled itself forward in one large push, causing everyone to roll helplessly across the rotunda. After a minute, everything stilled.
Iris felt suddenly cold. A familiar haze of dread weighed her body down. Getting to her knees, Uma turned and found Iris.
“It’s happening,” Uma cried. “To the top of the deck!”
While Bosch and Bellerose were still floundering on the floor, the scientist ran to Iris, grabbed her hand, and made for the elevator. The doors opened on their own as she drew near. Pulling Iris inside the cubicle, Uma pressed a button, and the elevator began rising through the hull of the ship.
“This thing is taking us to the top of the ship?” Iris said, turning around inside the metal box.
“To the very top.”
The sound of Uma’s voice drew out a swell of anger. “Uma.” Iris rounded on her, but seeing the dark circles underneath the woman’s teary eyes dispelled her fury immediately.
“I’m sorry, Iris,” she said, and she sounded as if she truly meant it, the agony clear in her voice. “But I didn’t want to see those men die in front of me. Maybe it’s easier for me to handle the consequences of my actions when they’re far away.”
Iris stared at the floor of the elevator, her jaw tight. “It’s more than that, though, isn’t it? You want to see it,” she whispered. “You want to see what’s on the other side of the door.”
Knowledge for knowledge’s sake. Uma had told her once before. She’d wanted to see the impossible. To create the impossible.
“You’re not a god,” Iris said. “Neither are the Enlighteners. Neither am I?” She looked at her own palms. Her fingers that had ripped Max’s heart from his chest. “None of us have the right.”
Uma nodded. “I know, Iris. That I know.”
The elevator doors opened to a little room with a short ladder. They climbed up, and once they were outside, a rush of wind greeted them. Iris and Uma stepped out onto the deck of the Ark, the Atakora Mountains behind them.
The Ark had taken flight.
The deck of the ship was like that of any luxury cruise liner, but the smell of the fresh air, the view of the mountains and valleys below—this was unimaginable. Humankind had created a flying ship. The wind jostled Iris’s braids. Uma’s sari fluttered in the wind. They had been the first two to witness this wonder, before any of the patrons inside the ship. Before the Enlighteners themselves. Uma and Iris stood alone and soaked in the air as the Ark sliced through it, as cleanly as it would have the waves of the ocean. Tears finally fell from Uma’s eyes. It was only then that Iris realized how much this had meant to her.
“Look, Iris.” Uma pointed at the darkening mass far beyond them. The swirl within them reminded Iris of Hawkins’s blue portal, a vortex of sorts. But it was a cloud, dark and sparking with the same white light that Iris had seen pass between the Helios and the Moon Skeleton.
“Look!” Another voice from behind them. Bosch and Bellerose. They’d caught up. Bellerose gathered up her skirt and traipsed down the deck. “The door is opening!”
Not door.
Doors.
For swirls were taking shape within the clouds everywhere, as far as Iris’s eyes could see. Dark and terrifying, as if a thunderstorm was coming. They crackled with energy that traveled around the clouds as they formed black rings in the sky.
“I have done it!” Bellerose said. “The Ark. The Helios. I made it happen. I, Violet Bellerose. I am the ultimate Enlightener!”
And on the other side of the deck, Bosch was clasping his hands. “The amount of money I’ll make from this venture alone… Uma! We must pass through the door quickly!”
But Uma didn’t answer him. She’d seen something no one else had. And it was because of this that she suddenly grabbed Iris’s hand and began running back to the elevator. Confused, Iris looked behind her shoulder.
And saw them.
Ships coming through the dark cloud rings, passing through each door into their skies. Frightening creatures of nightmare, made of pure gold, formed their mastheads. Each vessel was at least three times the size of the Ark. Maybe more.
Warships. Warships from the other side.
An invasion.
Bosch’s and Bellerose’s laughter was cut short. Uma and Iris jumped into the hatch just as an energy blast from one of the ships tore up the deck, swallowing the two Enlighteners whole.