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The Queen of Zern raises an immense, mechanical hand, casting a shadow over the Zephyr. Marya, holed up at the wheel of her beautiful ship, recognizes this for what it is: a calling, for that great and terrible bird. Between the clenching panic, Marya wants to reach into this automata's chest—she wants to rip Ludmila out of its brass heart. More than that, she wants to go back to the Straka's yawning beak on that fateful day, she wants to go back, further, further still, all the way back to their shared workshop in Scrapsylvania.
That quiet voice, the one that still takes Professor Comfrey's shape in the back of Marya's mind, hisses. Jesus, kid, this is why I let you think she was dead.
But Ludmila isn't. She is not dead, she is something worse: changed by the Corrodi Primarchs, stripped of her human heart and manufactured into this venemous, otherworldly empress. Another voice, Marya's own, always haunting: they waited one thousand years for her heart to break. She believed I would come through that door for one thousand years and I let her be dead and now she is this.
The screech rings out, louder than the raptors, louder than the festivities in Oda, louder, even, than the psychic screams of Tazgw'agwa splitting her head in two. The Straka. Marya loads three bullets, carved with that beast's name, into her gun, and prepares to call for piloting assistance as giant, metal wings span the sky, plunging the Zephyr, and its crew, into total darkness.