Chapter 59: Internal Affairs Done
The Iron Serpent cut northward through charred valleys and silent towns. No fanfare followed it now, only the hum of its engine and the clatter of steel wheels over reinforced track. Every town they passed bore some scar—church bells silenced, noble estates repurposed, crops planted not by landowners but by brigades. Behind them, Aragon’s revolution crept outward like heat from a buried flame.
Ahead of them lay Barcelona.
The city had long stood apart—wealthy, cosmopolitan, devout, and proud. It had not welcomed royalist crusades, nor embraced republican uprisings. It endured. It watched. It traded. And now it waited, uncertain whether to resist or receive the oncoming force of progress.
Inside the Iron Serpent, Lancelot stood in the center of the mobile planning chamber, eyes on a translucent map projected by a rudimentary arc-lamp device. Juliette paced beside him, boots scuffed with soot, her coat marked with grease and chalk. Bellido sat nearby, surrounded by half-drunk coffee mugs and stacked communiqués.
"Two towns between here and Barcelona have declared neutrality," Bellido said. "Vilafranca and Igualada. Clerics control both councils. Their militias won’t attack, but they won’t allow track laying either."
Juliette tapped her chalk against the map. "We’ll bypass their centers. Lay silent relays overnight. Set up portable transformers outside the town perimeter. If we’re fast, we can light up the coast before they finish another sermon."
"And if they retaliate?" Lancelot asked.
"We don’t answer with rifles," she said. "We answer with bulbs."
That night, as the Serpent halted outside Vilafranca, teams deployed in silence. Engineers moved like shadows, digging trenches for cable, hoisting wooden pylons, and setting coil batteries behind dry-stone walls. The townspeople watched from rooftops—silent, uncertain, some praying, others curious. Not a single musket fired.
By dawn, the first streetlamp beyond the church plaza flickered on.
Children crowded beneath it. A boy held up his tin cup, as if it would catch the glow like rain.
They didn’t cheer. They stared.