Ember flamethrower's Arc

Chapter 7 of 7

They flew at dusk. The flying machine carried Ember and Lewis over the canal in shaky lifts, the crystal feeder ticking under the engine. Grit had waved them off from his workshop roof with a hand pressed to his side. The wand had clipped him during the fight with Sedrick, deeper than he let on. He told them to go before he changed his mind. Ember looked back once and saw him sit down hard on the tiles. She did not see him stand again. The estate came up fast under them. A bloom tree stood at the front gate, its branches strung with thin crystal chimes that turned slow in the wind. Ember understood at once. The chimes were not for music. Each one held a sliver of mirror angled at the wall. Anything that crossed the lawn would throw a shard of light up to the windows. Lewis saw it too. He cut the engine early and they dropped onto the slate roof of the crystal house with a crack that split one wing. The machine slid, caught on a spire, and hung there bleeding gears. They climbed in through a skylight. Ember went first, blade out, the scrap of black cloth in her fanny pack. Lewis followed with the skin reader pressed to his chest. The hall inside the house was bright with lamps and empty of guards. That was wrong. Ember knew it was wrong. She kept walking anyway. She had not come this far to turn at a quiet hallway. The wealthy man sat at the end of a long room, alone, in a chair that faced the door. He was older than she had pictured. Thin hands. A face she almost knew. He did not stand. He said her mother's name first, and then her father's, and then her own, and her name in his mouth made her stop breathing. He said he was her grandfather. He said her parents had come to this house the night she was born to ask him for help and he had turned them away at the door. Men he paid had followed them home. He said he had spent twelve years deciding whether to find her, and now he had, and he was sorry, and none of it could be undone. Lewis raised the reader and pressed the black cloth to the plate. The screen lit with the old man's name. The same man in the chair. He had sent the hooded killer. He had sent Sedrick. He had been hunting his own granddaughter to finish what he started, then changed his mind too late to call the dogs back. Ember heard a door open behind her. Two hooded men came in fast. Lewis turned with the reader still in his hands and the first blade went through him below the ribs. He sat down on the rug like he was tired. He looked up at her over his glasses and said, oh man. Then he said her name. Then he stopped. Ember killed both men with the knife she had forged when she was nine. It did not take long. She walked to the chair. Her grandfather did not lift his hands. He said he had already taken poison before she landed on the roof. He said he wanted her to have the house and everything in it and the name that came with it. He died while she was still deciding whether to answer. She sat on the rug next to Lewis for a long time. Outside, the chimes in the bloom tree turned in the wind and threw small lights across the walls. She walked out at dawn through the front gate nobody guarded anymore. She left the flying machine on the roof and the reader in Lewis's hands and the man in his