There might’ve been plenty of delving work to go around, but Ellen and I had one glaring problem.

  “No,” Councilwoman Harriet Myers said.

  We sat in her office, high above downtown Phoenix, staring at the councilwoman as she cleared her throat and kept talking. “Right now, the people of Phoenix are starting to realize that this siege isn’t just another portal surge, or even something like the Wickenberg portal that we’ll get under control. Things are going to get ugly when they figure that out, and the longer we can delay that, the better.”

  “So we should be allowed to fight,” Ellen said.

  “Oh, I didn’t say anything about you. You’re a quarterfinalist, and that makes you a symbol of the city’s power. Go ahead and find a place on the Wall.” Myers turned toward me. Her hawk-like eyes locked on mine, and I broke first. Something about the unawakened woman was more intimidating than Eugene, the Crone, or Queen Mother Yalerox. “As for Kade, though, absolutely not.”

  I clenched my fists as I stared at Myers’s desk. “Why not?”

  “Because right now, you and Deborah Callahan are more important symbols of the city’s strength than Delver Traynor. You don’t get out much, do you?”

  “I’m too busy clearing portals.”

  “And finding more Paragons to kill?” Myers asked. I shrugged, and she kept going. “We’ve already postponed the tournament once, and morale crashed until we restored it. The city needs the distraction. They need to see a champion get crowned. And right now, the two of you—Deborah, not Miss Traynor—are symbols on par with the S-Rankers. The next wave of powerhouses.”

  “I haven’t seen any of that,” Ellen said. Her face reddened, though.

  “It’s been building, and after the semi-final round finished yesterday, it got truly out of control. They’re calling Deborah the Silent Armor. It’s a stupid title, especially if you’ve ever met her. She can’t help but talk. But she hasn’t said a single word on the screen. And Kade’s The Storm Unbroken.”

  I flinched at that. Did people know about my core? It said "reforged" in my status, but I’d consistently avoided registering with the GC, and my current record in the system… no, I’d shared it with a GC rep at some point. So, the GC knew, and the S-Rankers knew. All the guild leaders did, too.

  “Your build’s very interesting, by the way,” Councilwoman Myers said, confirming my worst fears. “We’d like to talk about it at some point in the future—you’re doing some things none of the GC has seen before.”

  “Maybe later,” I said. Then I pressed forward. “Look, you can’t actually stop us, can you? If we walk up to a portal and step inside, or take the elevator to the top of the wall, then we’re fighting.”

  “Are you going to do that?” Myers asked.

  Ellen shrugged. “I don’t see why not. You want to stop us. You can’t. The best move you could make is—“

  “Assigning you to a low-risk section. I know.” Myers sighed. “I was hoping you’d see reason, Kade Noelstra. But if you won’t, we’ll deploy the two of you to the northeastern front, north of Surprise, at the intersection of the 303 and Wickenberg Walls. You’ll be safe there—we haven’t seen anything but C-Rank monsters in that area.”

  “Thank you,” Ellen said before I could argue more. She stood up, and I joined her as she headed for the door.

  “One more thing, both of you,” Harriet Myers said. She stared at Ellen with the same hawklike, predatorial expression she often reserved for me. “You’ll be witnessing something new up there. Do your best to keep it quiet.”

  There were, in fact, monsters at the 303 Wall.

  Brass-and-silk monstrosities stood a few hundred yards from the massive portal metal and concrete barrier, their gears and cogs spinning slowly at the edge of the wall of steam. Ellen and I took a few shots at them, and they simply stepped back into the mist.

  “Been like that all week,” someone said. I glanced over at the D-Rank mage. He was short and muscular, and he sat on a massive wooden crate whose boards had warped in the humidity, smoking under an umbrella. “They don’t come close, we don’t go out there. Stalemate.”

  “You play?” I asked

  “What? Chess? Nah, not in a decade. We’re at a stalemate, though. They can’t get in—they tried the first day, and the Light of Dawn threw them back. We can’t go out. We tried on the second day, and it didn’t work. So now we’re stuck. Every so often, they throw a handful of the climbing machines at us, but other than that, it’s slow up here.”

  I groaned. Ellen put a hand on my shoulder. “We knew it was going to be boring here. Hey, do me a favor, uh…?”

  “Orion Herbert. D-Rank, dust mage.”

  “Sure. Do me a favor, Orion? The next wave that comes in, let Kade fight it alone. He’s trying to push to A-Rank, and he’s close. But—“

  “That’s Kade Noelstra? The Unbroken Storm?” Orion interrupted.

  “This has to be a set-up. Myers is trying to make me think I’m something I’m not,” I said.

  Ellen kept pressing. “Yes, this is Kade. He needs to hit A-Rank if he wants any chance of beating his finals opponent. It’s critically important.”

  Orion looked at me, brown eyes flickering. Then he nodded slowly. “Sure. Sure, you two get the next wave. Me and my boys—“

  “Ahem,” the group’s second archer and tank cleared their throats at the same time. They were a full team, a mix of C and D-Rankers, and most of them were on the C-Rank bottleneck path. But they had one advantage that made them perfect for Wall defense; two mages and two archers gave them more ranged damage than they should be able to do.

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  “—and girls,” Orion continued like it was a bit they did a lot, “will take the back seat. Be a nice break to watch B-Rankers do our work instead of struggling through it.” He pulled out a new cigarette, lit it with the butt of his old one, and kept on smoking.

  A half-hour later, the monsters hadn’t reappeared, and I was starting to get frustrated. If there were no monsters, I was wasting time. I needed A-Rank—and I wanted enough time to get used to the power increase before I fought Deborah. My strategy was to match her blow-for-blow after the initial five seconds. I couldn’t do that at B-Rank, and I couldn’t hit A-Rank if there wasn’t anything here to fight.

  It was boring up here. All was quiet on the northeastern front.

  Then the elevator creaked to a stop next to us, and a full dozen unawakened humans got out. They stared nervously at the fog bank in the distance, then started unloading another set of boxes—boxes that matched the one Orion had been sitting on. As he stood up, Ellen flinched, then grabbed my arm. “Look!”

  Every single box had a simple logo painted on it, along with a pair of words. ‘Traynor/Overholz.’

  “What’s he up to?” I muttered.

  One of the workers walked over to Orion, and they talked for a moment. Then the mage stood up and backed away from the box, face a mix of anger and fear. “You didn’t tell me that last time!”

  “We didn’t think we’d need to. Who smokes next to a weapons box?” The worker started opening the crate, and I craned my neck to see what was inside.

  It was a barrel. The entire thing was maybe five feet long, a foot wide at its widest, with a bore big enough for me to stick both hands in comfortably. The back side had a hinge built into it, with a steel ramp. But the rest of it was what struck me. It wasn’t all steel. In fact, no part of the barrel was. It was entirely the gunmetal gray of portal metal. The shape reminded me less of a pre-Portal Blitz artillery piece and more of something off a pirate ship.

  The workers struggled to move the massive barrel. How they’d gotten the crate up here was beyond me, and after watching for a few seconds, I cleared my throat. “Need a hand?”

  “Absolutely not,” the worker said. He squared up like he was going to stop me, and a small part of me wanted to laugh. He had no chance. But I raised my hands to show him I didn’t mean any harm, and he kept talking. “The foreman said not to let delvers touch ‘em. Something about your cores corrupting the forging or something. I don’t know the details, just what he told me.”

  “Good enough. What is it?” I asked.

  “Traynor-Olverholz Cannon. They’re new, and they’re going to break this siege. This’ll be their first field test in an uncontrolled environment.” The worker stared at us for a moment, then nodded seriously. “Delvers’ll still be useful for portals until the tech gets miniaturized to hand-held size, but you’re a dying breed.”

  I stared at the cannon as the dozen workers slowly started wrestling it out of the box, then nodded sceptically. The day a cannon like that outdid me—to say nothing of the Light of Dawn—would be a sad day for Phoenix, not a victory.

  The workers spent almost forty-five minutes assembling the Traynor-Olverholz Cannon. When they’d finished, it sat on a wide, circular swivel that rested on bearings. It was heavy enough to support the massive gun, but a single worker pulling on the handles could shift the entire thing from side to side by hand. The gun itself rested on a portal metal frame, and a dozen shells as long as my forearm sat in an open crate nearby.

  And the whole thing was being watched over by the same workers. They kept shooting looks at us. At first, I wasn’t sure if it was because they didn’t trust us not to mess with their machine, but after a few seconds, I realized it was because of me—and because of Ellen.

  “They recognize us,” I whispered to her.

  “They recognize you,” she shot back. “You’re the celebrity.”

  “No, they’re looking at both of us. They know who you are, and they’re nervous about it for some reason.” I paused. “If this is the first field test for this…thing…your father’s probably going to want to watch it. Think he’ll be here?”

  “Hopefully not. Probably not. He’ll watch from his office so he can see all the angles and celebrate when it works, and so he can hide from the embarrassment if it fails.” Ellen sounded bitter and frustrated, and I wrapped my arm over her shoulder as we watched the monsters in the distance. They’d started to push out of the steaming fog again, but not close enough to be in danger—at least not from Ellen, Orion, or me.

  The elevator made yet another trip up, and three people stepped off. Two of them were dressed in lab coats. The last one wore a suit. “Alright, let’s see what this thing can do,” he said, and I did a double-take as the familiar, deep voice hit me like a delver’s aura. It was the Phoenix Reborn. Councilman Nathan Anders, the retired S-Ranker, had come to see what this new weapon could do.

  I glanced at the ridiculous hybrid pirate cannon/howitzer again. My initial thought was that it wouldn’t be a game-changing tool even if it worked, but if the leader of the Governing Council was interested, then maybe Bob Traynor was on to something after all.

  “Fifteen minutes,” one of the scientist-looking women said. She looked vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t place her. She also looked incredibly frustrated; she kept glaring at the weapon, then catching herself.

  Ellen didn’t have that same block. She stood and offered her hand. “Rebecca Overholz, right? We met at one of the Traynor Corporation’s galas. You were running the Overholz company along with two others on a three-person board, right?”

  “Right.” Rebecca stiffened as Ellen’s hand hovered there. “Miss Traynor, I don’t mean to be rude, but—“

  “Oh, that’s fine. I’m not associated with Daddy anymore. We went our separate ways in terms of business a few weeks ago.” Ellen didn’t pull her hand back. If anything, she stuck it even closer to Rebecca Overholz’s, waiting expectantly. “I’m here as a delver, not as a Traynor.”

  “Be that as it may…” Rebecca trailed off, then reluctantly accepted the handshake. “Could you two back up a bit? The firing process needs to be as controlled as possible until we know how my weapon interacts in a real-life environment. You’ll need to back up, too, sir.”

  Nathan Anders nodded and stepped to the very edge of the wall, behind the elevator’s guard rails. I joined him, and after a moment, so did Ellen. He didn’t say anything to either of us. Instead, he just watched.

  “Alright. Load,” Rebecca said curtly. Two workers lifted one of the shells in a portal-metal clamp, then dropped it into the steel rack. It clanged into place, and another worker opened the door. A second, gonglike clang filled the air as the shell rolled into the barrel and the heavy door closed behind it.

  “Field test number one, Overholz Cannon,” Rebecca said. Ellen glanced at me; she’d noticed the omission, too. “Fire when ready.”

  The workers turned the cannon, then backed up. One held a wired trigger. He counted down with outstretched fingers, then pulled the trigger.

  For a moment, nothing happened. Then the cannon rocked on its swivel, kicking up dust all around it in a massive plume that met the rain and fell back to earth as muddy water. The cannon sounded less like a boom and more like a whip cracking. A gout of flame ten feet long belched from the barrel, and then it was silent.

  The silence lasted less than a second—just long enough for the firing’s echo to bounce off the nearby buildings behind us. Then the shell hit.

  The Light of Dawn, it was not. There was no mushroom cloud. It didn’t break the wall of steam or set the desert ablaze. The shrapnel itself only covered a few dozen yards, and even that wasn’t enough to do more than damage the B-Rank monsters out there. But it was enough to shred a few dozen C-Rank monsters—and it had hit well beyond the fog barrier. The echo from the explosion rippled across Phoenix, and for a moment, it was quiet again.

  “Test successful,” Rebecca Overholz said. “Overholz Cannon functioned as expected. Begin rapid-fire testing.”

  I stared out into the fog as the team of workers loaded another shell, then sent it rippling off into the desert, then another. The weapon worked. It was killing monsters, and it was doing it without a delver involved at all. Whatever Rebecca Overholz and her company had figured out, it would change how humans and portals interacted.

  But that would come later. We had to be ready for what was coming now. There was movement in the mist. A lot of movement. The Traynor-Olverholz Cannon hadn’t solved the Siege of Phoenix. All it had done was poke the hornet’s nest.

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