The blast struck low.
One hinge tore loose. The gate bowed inward, then jammed against the paving, leaving a gap narrow enough for a single body.
Pyra went through sideways.
A spearhead struck the stone beside her face. She caught the shaft under her arm and dragged its owner into the opening. The fighter fell; someone behind her seized the back of her armor and yanked her out of the path of a second thrust.
Ash drifted past her cheek.
The Ash Maiden stepped through the gap.
“Your opening,” the Maiden said, “is very small.”
“You’re welcome.”
The nearest Augmenter raised a blade. The movement faltered. Ash clung to the fighter’s face and lashes; the eyes lost their focus for just long enough.
The Maiden struck once.
Pyra was already moving.
She hit the gate with both hands. Nothing. A bent support had wedged beneath it.
An Augmenter on the gallery shouted. Three weapons swung toward her.
“Down,” said the Maiden.
Pyra dropped. Bolts hammered the gate where her chest had been. The bent support glowed, sagged, and snapped.
She laughed despite herself.
“Helpful.”
The Maiden did not laugh.
Together they shoved.
The gate scraped across the paving. Crimson shields filled the gap, then Crimson voices, and the yard vanished into close fighting.
Pyra forced her way toward the gallery stairs. Twice she turned back: once for a fighter trapped against a cart, once because a shout behind her sounded too much like Tavin.
The second time, it was someone else.
She reached the stairs too late to stop the bolt that killed them.
The shooter saw her coming.
There was time for one more shot. The weapon’s blue chamber flashed, dimmed, and failed to charge.
Pyra struck the barrel aside. The Augmenter stumbled against the railing, hands searching for a smaller weapon.
“Don’t.”
The hands stopped.
Below them, Kael’s voice cut through the yard. Crimson fighters tightened into ranks around it. The last defenders gave ground toward a rear passage, dragging their wounded between them.
“Hold here!” Pyra called. “No pursuit!”
A few of her people took another step before stopping. They had spent so long trying to get inside that some could not yet believe they were there.
The Augmenter before her looked toward the passage.
“Go,” she said.
The fighter went.
Pyra stayed at the railing until the blue coats disappeared.
Only then did she notice that the charge chamber of the abandoned weapon had been bound shut with wire.
Someone had repaired it three times.
The first storehouse was empty.
Pyra stood in its doorway, blinking in the dimness.
Shelves rose above her. A few broken crates lay along the walls. Rectangles in the dust showed where larger containers had stood.
She walked to the nearest crate and pushed it with her boot.
It contained packing straw.
“The next one,” she said.
The next held machine housings stripped of their working parts.
In the third, they found sacks.
A Crimson fighter gave a ragged cheer and cut one open. Gray dust spilled across the floor.
Grinding waste.
Nobody cheered when they opened the others.
Pyra searched each building herself. She went into corners, behind partitions, down a stairway that led only to an empty cellar. Her side hurt where the gate fight had driven something hard beneath her armor. She could not remember what had struck her.
There had to be another room.
The scouts had seen loaded carts. Guards. Smoke from the furnaces.
There had to be another room.
Outside, someone was raising the Crimson banner over the gate.
She found the Ash Maiden beside the wall. Freshly bolted plates reinforced its inner face. The Maiden scraped soot away from a square of metal, uncovering a stamped cargo mark.
“Storage bins,” the Maiden said.
Pyra looked along the wall.
More squares. More patches. Edges that did not quite meet.
“They cut them apart.”
“And the racks. Some of the machinery.”
“To hold the gate.”
The Maiden nodded.
Pyra remembered the gun’s slowing rhythm. The weapon wired together. The silence of the yard.
She had imagined the Augmenters sitting behind these walls with everything the Crimson Hosts lacked.
They had been taking the place to pieces around themselves.
“How much did we find?” she asked.
“Two unopened fuel cells. Several damaged ones. Food in the guardroom.”
“How much food?”
“Not enough for the people carrying it out.”
For a while Pyra watched the banner climb.
“Take it down,” she said.
The Maiden looked at her.
Pyra pressed the heel of her hand against her eyes. “No. Leave it.”
The flag mattered to the fighters in the yard. They had earned the right to look up and see it.
She just could not bear it yet.
Kael listened without interruption.
Behind the warlord, soldiers were laying their wounded beneath the gallery. They used the doors of the empty storehouses as stretchers.
“How many lost?” Kael asked.
“We’re still counting.”
“Count the ones who can be moved first.”
Pyra looked sharply up.
“We cannot sleep here,” Kael said. “No provisions. No reliable machinery. Half a wall built out of scrap. We take what we can carry.”
“And leave?”
“What would you have me hold?”
She had no answer that did not contain someone else’s body.
A limping figure emerged from behind a stretcher. Tavin, the strip of red still tied around his hand, was helping carry a fighter twice his weight.
“I told you to go downhill,” Pyra said.
“I did.”
“And?”
“They needed another pair of hands coming back.”
She opened her mouth, then shut it.
“Your foot?”
“Still there.”
“That wasn’t the question.”
“It’s the best answer I have.”
She took his end of the stretcher. He did not let go until she looked at him.
For a moment they stood holding the weight together.
Then a horn sounded below the ridge.
One note. A pause. Two more.
Kael turned before the last note ended.
Pyra knew the signal. Everyone in the yard knew it. Several of the wounded tried to sit up.
She lowered the stretcher and ran to the wall.
From there, the whole ravine lay open.
The road. The bridge. Their camp on the far slope.
Blue light flickered among the transport wagons.
Pyra searched for the reserve. For the ranks she had watched climb toward her. For anyone who could be between those lights and the low canvas shelters where the wounded had been left.
Behind her, boots scraped stone. The reserve crowded the wall to look down.
All of it.
Across the ravine, the red banner above the camp lurched sideways.
Someone caught the pole before it fell.
For one heartbeat, Pyra thought they might hold it.
Then the cloth dropped out of sight.
Blue began to rise in its place.