With her left arm now in a sling and mending quickly thanks to a healing extract, Klara picked her way along the narrow, dark catwalk in Vera’s Revenge’s mainframe. Ahead, the hatch to the control car lay open and daylight shone straight up through it, casting strange shadows around the giant hydrogen cells that kept the airship in the sky. Until someone shot a grappling pistol into one of them and released the hydrogen…

  The usual throb of the engines was absent this morning. Yuri’s pilot, Pavel Adamov, had set them down just south of the Veter River last night so they could patch the cell before they lost too much hydrogen.

  She reached the hatch and, keeping her injured arm tucked to her stomach, grabbed the railing with her right hand and fumbled her way down the ladder. From what she understood, the airship was still able to fly with one cell drained of hydrogen, but hydrogen wasn’t cheap, nor was there anywhere nearby they could restock.

  “Crew only!” a gruff female voice snapped as Klara landed on the deck of the control car.

  “It’s all right, Alyona, she can stay,” Yuri said, waving his first mate away. The snub-nosed woman gave Klara another glare before turning back to her work with Pavel, the slender pilot, by the control panels at the fore of the control car.

  Klara’s uncle, a short, broad-shouldered man with a face constructed from scar tissue, lounged against the sweeping windows opposite the ladder. He, like the two crewmen, wore dusty tan Air Trader coats.

  “Don’t mind her,” Yuri said. “She’s just annoyed because you made her job harder by putting a hole in one of our hydrogen cells.”

  Klara flushed. “Sorry,” she mumbled.

  Yuri waved a dismissive hand and pushed off the wall, coming to stand by Klara and gazing out at the sunrise. Windows wrapped the entire car. Ahead to the left, the sun rose, shrouded in cloud as its rays hit the frost that coated the tundra each night. Tendrils of the mist curled around the stationary airship, leaving the main gondola, fifty feet behind them, nothing but a shadow.

  After a moment of watching the mist-shrouded land, Yuri took her arm and gently propelled her to a table at the rear of the control car. Charts of Vlanovia lay scattered over it. One chart had a mark made next to Lake Orzak in the eastern corner of of Serovnya. Krepost Lozvinsky sat at the mouth of the river connecting Orzak to the ocean.

  Lozvinsky was the last place Elana Koskova had been sighted, protecting a recently opened gate with the Warrior Guild until a permanent installation could be established. At the thought of the white haired and rotund woman, Klara’s hearts sank. The hatred on Mikhail’s face last night had been ugly and terrifying. Was that what people had seen in her for so many years as she channelled her anger at the Nishkuks, the giant dragons who’d killed her sister? She pushed the thought aside. She hadn’t come here to ponder the destruction hatred wrought on a soul. No, she had something far more devastating to discuss.

  The Alchemist betrayal.

  Klara slid onto a bench running alongside the table while Yuri sat on the bench opposite her.

  “What exactly happened last night,” Yuri asked.

  Klara leaned back, resting her head against the window behind her. She’d been asking herself that same question all night. The rest of the squad were still sleeping off their injuries with the help of healing extracts. But she’d been unable to sleep—or even close her eyes. Right now they burned, stinging every time she blinked.

  “Voronina played us,” Klara said. “She knew the bait of Pozharsky would be too much for us to ignore.”

  Yuri absently rubbed his smashed right ear. “But you can’t honestly believe she did all that just to tell you to run, right?”

  Klara pursed her lips. That irritated her too. Why would Voronina go to so much effort to get them in the same room so she could tell Klara to get out of Serovnya? She only had two answers to that question. Either Voronina was trying to misdirect Klara, or she actually cared about their friendship and wanted to spare Klara’s life.

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  She wasn’t sure which sickened her more.

  “It doesn’t matter why she told me what she did,” Klara said. “It’s clear they’re betraying the Sentinels. We need to take this fight to them, stop them before they endanger the entire country.”

  “You want us to fight the entire Alchemist Guild?” a deep voice rumbled from the ladder.

  Klara and Yuri spun to see Yeger skip the last two rungs of the ladder and drop to the control car’s floor with a thump. He wore no coat, only a thick, stained, white roll-neck shirt, a tan vest loaded with pockets and phial pouches, and heavy black trousers. Brown boots encased his legs up to his knees, though he’d left the laces that ran up the shin only loosely tied.

  Yeger’s short black hair tufted at all angles and stubble shadowed his face. He’d clearly just woken up.

  Behind him, Alyona’s lip turned up in a snarl as she glowered at his back. Was there anyone that woman approved of?

  “Blinov,” Yuri said, “have a seat.”

  Yeger squeezed his hulking form onto the bench beside Klara. She shot a glare at him and shuffled along to make space. That or be suffocated by an odour of stale sweat that took up even more room than he did.

  “Sentinels have nothing to fear from Alchemists,” Yuri said, draping an arm across the back of his bench and lounging. “They don’t need us to fight the Alchemists for them.”

  Yeger nodded. “If dragons can’t beat Sentinels, what hope do Alchemists have? We only made it through a few days of Sentinel training and they couldn’t even kill one of us—for the five of them we killed.”

  “If they have hidden one extract,” Klara said, “what else have they hidden from the Sentinels?”

  “About that,” Yuri said. “The extract probably has limitations, just like Trinity. Did any of you get a clue what its limitations are?”

  Yeger seesawed his head. “Maria said they couldn’t use speed or reflex extract with it. That makes it pretty useless against a fighter with Trinity and even a small amount of skill.”

  Klara looked at her arm. “You sure? Voronina was using steel skin, but also strength and speed. She couldn’t have broken my arm without both. I don’t know about reflex though.”

  “They moved like snails,” Yeger said. “There is no way they could have been on speed extract. Though maybe strength.”

  Klara ground her teeth. “So you’re saying I’m so slow I can’t even avoid a kick from an unboosted fighter?”

  “Sure. We all know Voronina was a better fighter than you.”

  “Enough,” Yuri said, before Klara could retort. “We can be sure they weren’t using reflex, though it sounds like they could use strength and maybe speed mixed with steel skin without causing illness. But we don’t know what its recovery time is, if it’ll give ‘em the sickness from back-to-back doses, or if it causes rage snaps like strength. For all we know, it could be an extremely limited extract that only gives an edge because of surprise. That surprise is gone now.”

  Klara narrowed her eyes as she looked from Yuri to Yeger. “They have skin like steel and only their eyes are vulnerable. How is that not an insane advantage? But I’ll admit, we do need to gather more information on the extract. We should get Elana. If anyone would know about it, it’d be her.” And she could prove to Mikhail that his mother was alive.

  “Then what will you do?” Yuri asked, his fingers drumming a slow rhythm on the back of the bench he lounged on. “If there’s a brewing conflict between Alchemists and Sentinels, I’m listening to that Voronina girl and flying to Machtvoll.”

  “What?” Klara asked, jerking forward in her seat. “You’d abandon Serovnya?”

  Yuri’s scarred brow furrowed, and he leaned forward, crossing his arms on the table. “Look, kid, I admire your loyalty and all that, really, I do. It’s all… patriotic and stuff. But I have my crew to think about. I’m not putting them in danger for a civil war that I have no skin in.”

  Klara gave him a flat stare. “You have no trouble putting them in danger being a pirate.”

  “Watch it, kid,” Yuri said, levelling a finger at her. “I could leave you and your squad right here.”

  “You wouldn’t dare. You know father would never stop hunting you if you did.”

  Yeger choked back a laugh.

  Yuri’s face turned deep red and his brow furrowed. “Once we’ve fixed the damage you did to Vera, I’ll take you to Ledavsk. You can stick around and fight with them, but me and my crew? We’re leaving this Sculptor forsaken wasteland.”

  Klara glared at her uncle a moment before grunting. She’d get nothing more out of him for now. She jabbed an elbow into Yeger’s ribs and he took the hint and shuffled off the bench, clearing a path for her. She glanced at him as she passed. At least she had her squad to help her. There’s no way they’d turn their backs on the Sentinels.