Chapter 12 #2
Terror kicked at her heart, spurring her into a frenzied scramble as she desperately tried to escape with her life.
“What is that?” she cried as she clambered to her feet.
“An automaton. A bad one. Run!”
The machine lunged at them, swiping its hand at Amaya as if to grab her instead of going straight for the kill.
Squeaking, she ducked under its arm and managed to slip past it, but not before a jagged edge on its fingertip sliced into her bicep, sending rivulets of blood down her arm.
Amaya gritted her teeth at the sharp pain, but compartmentalized the injury as something to be dealt with later as she and Mouse sprinted to the stairs.
She ran faster than she ever had before, her body catapulting into a new realm of athleticism because she was fully convinced this thing would grind her to pieces if she didn’t.
Reaching for Mouse’s hand, she dragged him up the stairs two at a time and bolted onto the deck, where they promptly collided with Ford on his way back down.
“Ford! Get that thing!” Mouse said.
Ford tapped the circular medallion hanging around his neck and a silver sheen flashed across his body. With nothing but a grunt, his hands tightened around the helve of his axe as he shoved them both aside, descending to meet the automaton.
Amaya winced at the screech of the machine being carved into submission by Ford’s axe. She and Mouse couldn’t just stand here, but the rest of the deck had become a battlefield.
Sebastian and Lockwood were fighting with the rest of the Maelstrom crew, a handful of pirates flying back and forth from either ship on skiffs.
Cannons fired, mainly from the Stormrunner.
Edmund had taken residence in the crow’s nest, firing the occasional shot and yelling warnings at his fellow crewmates.
Crowe lay unconscious a few feet away, his axe by his side. Amaya couldn’t tell if he was dead.
The scene was unlike anything she’d ever witnessed, raw and brutal. Her stomach churned and her pulse thrummed in her ears, her eyes unwilling to accept the violence as reality.
“Bas!” Mouse shouted to the first mate. “Killer machine, right behind us!”
“I fucking know, Mouse!” Sebastian roared.
He activated a terrifying segmented sword that flashed purple and dragged unwitting enemies to him, where they met a quick end that sent Amaya’s head spinning. Everywhere she turned, there was blood and death and danger.
Ford couldn’t keep that machine downstairs forever.
Driven by an intense desire to not die, Amaya went for the axe beside Crowe’s limp body and employed her full body weight to lift it. It was heavy—far too heavy for her. She could barely hold it above her waist, but it was the only thing she could think to do.
Sure enough, the monstrosity came stomping up the stairs again, cracking the floorboards. Ford had done a number on it—wiry ligaments held the automaton’s outer shell together and its yellow eyes sparked erratically. But it wasn’t dead.
Could these things die? Its movements were stiffer now, its parts clicking and grinding inside, but it was far from out of commission. It still moved fast and far more fluidly than it should.
Ford was at the machine’s back, dodging blades and taking every opportunity to further demolish it, but it didn’t go down.
The pirate wasn’t in great shape, either.
Though the force field enveloping his body appeared to keep him from being ground to smithereens, his hulking frame was battered and bruised.
Amaya deduced the silver medallion protected him from blades and gunfire, but not blunt force.
Whether consciously or not, the automaton appeared to decipher Ford’s relic at the same time. The machine raised its arm and let it fall in a heavy swing, swiping the giant aside like he was nothing. Ford’s head collided with the ship’s railing, and he fell unconscious.
Then the automaton turned on Amaya.
She backed up slowly, holding out the axe the best she could for protection as the automaton advanced, its yellow eyes lifeless and cold.
It was going to kill her.
The thought that had previously served as a motivator to escape now settled over her like a dark fog, blurring her vision and strangling her lungs.
She was going to die here—not at the hands of a Sky Lord, but upon the blades of this obscene creation.
Whatever painful end lay ahead, she hoped it would be quick.
She hoped Camden and her mother would meet her.
But the end didn’t come. Instead, a flash of black and a glint of crimson spun into her line of sight—an oddly shaped sword flying toward its target.
It cut into the automaton’s frame deeper than Ford’s axe had managed, causing the machine to stagger forward and turn away from Amaya to see the perpetrator.
Amaya looked past it to see William Lexington leap off a windskiff and promptly . . . disappear?
In a flashy swirl of black smoke, he materialized right in front of her, yanking his curved black sword out of the automaton’s back.
This ability wasn’t like Corsair’s, whose invisibility relic left him unseen but still corporeal. This was lightning-fast transportation that saw the captain dissolving into nothing and reassembling before her eyes.
It must be Lexington’s Class Four.
Amaya could hardly process it. Her feet were frozen in place, her arms shaking from the weight of the battle axe.
The automaton turned on the Sky Lord and slashed with its weaponized hand.
Lexington pulled the same stunt again, flinging his sword and vanishing into a cloud of black smoke. He reappeared on the other side of the blow, just in time to rip the blade through the automaton’s leg and cripple it.
Forcing her body to move, Amaya stepped back, vaguely aware of Mouse behind her. But her gaze stayed trained on the captain.
This wasn’t the man who’d offered her freedom the other night. This wasn’t even the man who’d callously thrown her in the brig. This was someone much, much worse.
He was soaked in blood from head to toe, the sanguine hue staining his white shirt, tan skin, and halo of gold hair.
He was like an angel of vengeance, ferocious and inexorable.
But there was an art to the fall of his sword that even Amaya could see, an uncanny intuition in the way he dodged the automaton’s attacks and occasional bullet flying past his head.
How was he doing that?
Mouse put his hands on Amaya’s shoulders and drew her back to a corner to hide as the captain danced around the machine. The rest of the crew focused on eliminating the few remaining pirates that had successfully made it over from the Stormrunner.
Amaya wasn’t sure if she was imagining it, but the Sky Lord seemed to be slowing down. Although his reflexes were still above and beyond any ordinary man’s, the automaton had no human limitations to contend with.
Mouse noticed it, too.
“He’s getting tired,” he murmured.
The automaton didn’t land any blows, though . . . until it did.
It sliced across Lexington’s back and unraveled his red coat, the lacerations oozing blood. His own, this time.
Amaya gasped, one hand flying to cover her mouth while the axe blade tilted to the floor. She barely kept her grip on the handle.
Lexington roared, the sound angry and desperate. He whipped around and vanished to the machine’s other side, brutally cleaving off its attack arm.
But when the captain disappeared again, his timing was off. The automaton flipped on its heel to sink a razor-sharp finger into his side.
“Captain!” Mouse cried.
Lexington threw his sword across the deck and arrived at its location on his knees, taking a moment to recover. When he lifted the sword again, the motion was arduous.
Mouse shouted something intelligible that Sebastian echoed as the cacophony of violence faded into the background.
Amaya didn’t know what came over her. She no longer saw a fearsome Sky Lord; she saw a man pushed to his limit, teetering on the knife’s edge of death and madness. She saw a man about to sacrifice his life because, for some reason she couldn’t understand, he’d rather do that than hand her over.
Amaya felt herself take a step forward, and then another, the heavy axe dragging on the ground.
The automaton was about to strike the captain and finish the job—it didn’t see her or hear her footsteps in the flurry of activity. It took every ounce of strength she possessed to lift the giant axe and bring it down in the middle of the automaton’s back, but it landed with a satisfying crunch.
Letting go would have been the next logical step, but Amaya didn’t think to.
She clung to the axe’s wooden handle as the automaton whirled around, tossing her from its back like she was an inconsequential pest. She slipped on the blood coating the deck, falling onto her back.
The automaton’s body blocked out the last rays of the setting sun, its shadow creeping over her.
Now she was going to die.
But her distraction gave Lexington enough time to collect himself and rise to his feet one more time.
With a horrible shout, he launched into the air and plunged his sword into the machine’s back, piercing all the way through its chest until the curved edge stopped only inches away from Amaya’s face.
Lexington rotated the blade like a key in a lock, twisting the automaton’s interior workings, then slashed it through the side.
As its top half slid off its base, the automaton crumbled with a clanking crash, and the light finally faded from its yellow eyes.
In its place stood Lexington, chest heaving and sword loose in his grasp. He glanced up and met Amaya’s gaze, green eyes charged with an electric intensity.
Neither spoke, but a quiet understanding passed between them.
They were square.
“Amaya!” Mouse ran forward and fell to his knees at Amaya’s side, putting his arm around her waist to help her up. She stumbled, feeling numb and disconnected from her body, save for the incision in her bicep finally beginning to throb.
The corners of her vision darkened. How much blood had she lost? Not nearly as much as the captain, and somehow he was still standing. Maybe it wasn’t her own loss of blood causing the lightheadedness, but the volume of carnage surrounding her.
Amaya accepted Mouse’s help and leaned on him for support as she painstakingly stood, but her eyes never left the Sky Lord’s. He didn’t look away, either.
BOOM.
An enormous explosion drew everyone’s attention back to the Stormrunner. Smoke billowed from the ship as it tilted backward, rapidly losing altitude. An engine must have blown up.
Amaya’s arm tightened around Mouse as Sebastian bolted to the railing.
“Serena!”
Lockwood expertly shot down stray enemy windskiffs as the Stormrunner crew tried to abandon ship, sending the vehicles nosediving into oblivion along with their riders.
Amaya anxiously scanned the returning Maelstrom crewmates, looking for Serena’s messy bun and overalls among them.
She was undoubtedly the one responsible for the engine failure.
Amaya finally found her in the chaos, dashing across the Stormrunner deck toward a breach in the railing. She didn’t have a skiff, and she wasn’t slowing down.
“Serena, no!” Sebastian shouted.
The engineer paid him no mind and leapt from the ship.
Amaya’s stomach dropped, a cry jumping from her throat. It was too far—Serena would never make the jump.
Luckily, Serena never intended to make the jump. Malcolm, who was strapped to her back, produced a rotor that unfolded with six blades, spinning furiously. Serena regained what little altitude she’d lost as Malcolm released two jets of steam, further propelling them up until she could land safely.
“What the hell was that!?” Sebastian threw his arms around his sister.
Serena just laughed, patting him on the back. “Made some recent upgrades to Malcolm. I figured it was as good a time as any to test them out.”
“That was a test?” Sebastian sounded appalled, but Amaya couldn’t help but crack a smile.
There were fine lines between bravery, recklessness, and sheer stupidity. They’d all danced between them today.
“Well done, Serena.” Lexington’s voice this time. He stumbled toward the siblings, unsteady.
Sebastian and Serena turned to look at him, their faces falling. Sebastian reached out first.
“Will, are you—”
“Will!” Serena extended her arms to catch the captain as he collapsed.