What is happening? she asked Autonomy. You, the distant—too distant—voice said, are failing me.

No. The bomb is being delivered! I’m … I’m …

For the first time, she took in the wreckage around her. A broken rooftop. Bent steel girders. A smashed remnant of her missile-launching construction.

“What … what happened?” she hissed.

“They took spikes from the bodies,” the woman said, pointing. “Ordinary ones, not made of your metal. But one granted … duralumin.”

No.

Telsin heaved herself to her feet and stumbled to the edge of the building to stare out over the bay. The force of Wax’s Push had bent and crushed the very underlying girders of the skyscraper here, leaving the rooftop cracked and sloped.