Chapter 19 - The Toll of Iron
Isabel spun around, raising the Colt with a shaking hand.
Emerging from behind the blackened rocks of the canyon pass was an armored steam-crawler, its heavy iron tracks churning through the silver-veined sand. Standing upon its open deck were four men clad in the pressurized leather and iron helmets of Halden’s Black Watch mercenaries.
And standing at the front, leaning heavily against the steel railing, was a figure that should have been dead.
Halden had not died in the furnace.
His grey suit was gone, burned away to reveal that his entire chest cavity had been opened long ago, replaced by a gleaming brass-and-steel chassis holding an artificial bellows-heart that wheezed with every breath. The right side of his skull was exposed metal, hydraulic wires twitching where his ear and jaw should have been.
"You cannot sever what was woven into the rock before the first man picked up a stone, Isabel," Halden said, his voice amplified through a brass loudspeaker fitted into his throat. "The child is the antenna. Ghost Mesa is the dish. And the sky is listening."
The mercenaries leveled their heavy repeater rifles.
Isabel looked behind her. Ten feet away was the sheer drop of Dead Man’s Drop—a five-hundred-foot plunge into the jagged boulder field of the dry riverbed. There was nowhere left to run.
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"She’s just a little girl," Isabel yelled into the howling, metallic wind, stepping between the crawler and the sleeping child. "She has nothing to do with your goddamn machine!"
"She was born from it," Halden hissed, raising a mechanical arm. "Take the girl. Flay the mother."
