“Col,” I say, but my comms are silent.
“Frey?” someone answers.
I look up. A rebel scout group is approaching on their boards.
“Are you hit?” comes a question.
The fog of confusion starts to lift, and at last I recognize the voice.
“Boss X?” My throat is dry.
He hands me a flask. I take it and drink deep.
The cool water feels like nothing.
Yandre is with him, and three others from X’s crew. People who know my real name.
That’s handy. I’ve got nothing left to lie with.
“You okay?” Yandre asks. “Anything burned besides your hair?”
I run a hand across my scalp. It’s patched and bristly, like dry grass.
“Lost my comms to the haze … and my feels.” I blink for heat vision. It’s still there, my implants too deep inside my eyes to be infected. “You shouldn’t touch me, though. I’m covered with nanos.”
Yandre lifts a handscreen, sweeps it across my body. “They’re already breaking down, chica. They’re designed to fade quick, or they’d eat the whole mountain.”
“Oh.” The dirt beneath my feet hasn’t disintegrated. The Paz AI was too smart to let loose some all-consuming goo.
I guess that’s good, the world not ending.
Down toward the forest, the smart-matter rocks are blackened from the explosion, but the wall of haze has formed again.
“Still trapped,” I murmur.
“Who says we want to leave?” Boss X says, his eyes sparkling.
Yandre lets out a sigh. “Here’s the situation, Frey. We’re breaking into the Iron Mountain, getting this done now.”
I stare at them. “The five of you?”
“Six, if you want to join,” X says. “And another dozen gathering above. More than enough.”
I should be astonished, and terrified for them. But my body isn’t ready for more emotions.
“That’s brain-missing,” I manage.
“But necessary.” X looks up at the mushroom cloud still half blotting out the sky, its edges shearing in the breeze. “That blast was big enough for satellites to see. The city governments will wonder what’s happening. They’ll send recon forces. Now may be our last chance.”
“My fault,” I say, tying to feel a shard of guilt, and failing. “We had to get Teo out.”
Boss X lets out a low growl. “The ’Foxes. Typical.”
“He took a bullet for me,” I say, trying to remember which feeling goes with that.
Thankful? Cherish? They’re all dulled inside me.
One of the others speaks up. “They’re ready for us, Boss.”
X reaches out, a heavy hand on my shoulder. “Coming, Frey?”
For a second, I don’t know.
But then I feel it, a hint of battle in my veins. That frenzy that was born in me the first time I saved my sister.
The feel that’s all mine.
“Sure. But I don’t have anything to fight with.” A flicker of shame goes through me. “Sorry, X, but the haze ate your gift.”
He waves my apology away. “Even at half pulse, nanos would burn before they got close. Have you tried calling it?”
I raise my hand, holding up two fingers.
A moment later, the knife flits into my grip, cool and steady.
Something like Calm goes through me then, mixed with Relief—pulse knives still give me feels.
“Not lost, just missing.” X takes a battery from his belt, tosses it to me. “Now all we need is a way inside.”
I feed the battery to my knife, looking up at the ancient switchback half-covered in stones.
“That part’s easy, Boss. We found an opening.”
“What kind of defenses?” Yandre asks.
My battle ecstasy starts to tremble, like water about to boil.
“All kinds.” I smile. “But we blew them up.”
We stand at the open blast door, nineteen rebels and me.
“A fraction of the force Em and Zach wanted,” Yandre says.
X’s eyes gleam in the darkness. “And twice what we need.”
His lance buzzes to life, and I put my hand on his shoulder.
“No pulse weapons till absolutely necessary, Boss. They make the drones in the mountain angry.” My own knife is in its sheath. “But they’re perfect if we need a distraction.”
“I’ll do more than distract them,” he grumbles.
We head deeper into the tunnel, climbing over the shredded remains of the robots. Metal spikes from Zura’s splinter mine jut from the walls, like we’re inside some medieval torture device.
As we leave the opening behind, darkness envelops us.
I blink for night vision, and the rebels shift into shimmering heat blobs, like dull red planets orbiting the hot sun of X’s animal metabolism.
I keep waiting for a twinge of fear to hit me, here in the dark. But nothing stirs my blood except a readiness for battle. Not my usual frenzy, but smoothed out by my explosion of feels into something cold and steely.
And only a glimmer so far.
The tunnel slopes downward, deeper into the cool stone. I can sense the crushing weight of the mountain above us, but claustrophobia doesn’t settle in. Maybe it’s been burned away along with my feels.
It will take Col and the Vics hours to reach Rafi’s base—a long time for a field dressing to hold.
I reach for Hope.
It’s gone.
“The seismics found a big chamber.” Yandre’s face is ghostly in the light of their handscreen. “About a klick from here. It’s the deepest part of the whole complex. All the tunnels lead there, like a traffic junction.”
“At least this isn’t a game of hide-and-seek,” Boss X rumbles in the dark.
No, but what kind of game is it?
We’ll find more Rusty defenses, of course—crude, brutal, still deadly after three hundred years. But also whatever tricks the city of Paz left behind.
The darkness seems alive around us.
I reach for Focus, but nothing’s there.
Before the feels, how did I force my brain to concentrate? These shadows are just a blur of darkness around me. My brain refuses to catch hold of anything.
We walk for five minutes. Nothing happens.
My feels itch like a phantom limb, and I’m not even sure which one I need.
“Why’s it so quiet?” I mutter in the dark. “Boss Zach said the whole mountain was waking up.”
“Licking its wounds,” Yandre says. “A lot of the mountain’s drones went into those nanos.”
Helpful, but it also means a lot of good rebels have lost their boards, their equipment, which is everything a rebel owns.
That should make me sad.
Beside me, Boss X is scenting the air.
“Anything?” I ask.
He doesn’t answer, just raises a fist. We halt.
He stands there, motionless for ten long seconds—then suddenly leaps into the air, his pulse lance buzzing to life, sweeping across the ceiling. Sparks and stone-dust swirl around us.
A drone the size of a house cat falls from above, sliced in two.
I kneel to look at it. “That thing was quiet.”
“In sleep mode,” X says. “But it had a definite scent.”
The machine is covered with tiny arms, each with a different tool.
“Just a repair drone,” Yandre says. “But that means there’s something around for it to fix.”
X kneels beside me, his sharp eyes staring at each of the tools. Finally he pries one free and sniffs it.
“Kerosene,” he says.
I nod. “Could’ve been fixing one of the flamethrower drones we—”
X grabs my arm, and I hear it too.
A scraping sound, like an ancient door opening. Then the clank of mechanical legs.
“Take cover!” X cries.
My frenzy stirs at last.
A tongue of flame leaps from the darknes
s, fills the corridor with sudden heat and light, bouncing off the walls, coiling around us.
We scatter, spilling cries of pain and shock. The flames flow like liquid into every space. The smell of burned hair and skin and clothing fills the air.
Flamethrowers are deadly in closed spaces.
Boss X’s pulse lance ignites again, roaring through the burning dark. Before I can even draw my knife, I hear the flamethrower being cut to pieces.
“Careful!” I shout. “Don’t hit …”
The lance cycles down, and X stands there among the scattered pieces of the drone. All six legs lie on the ground, nothing moving except shadows. A last dribble of fire trails from the drone’s body to the amputated maw of the thrower.
“… the fuel tanks,” I say.
X gives me a disdainful look in the flickering light. Behind him, the tanks are perfectly intact.
“Everyone okay?” Yandre asks.
The answer is a rueful laugh or two, and the hiss of medspray.
I become aware of something pulsing through me. A burned patch on skin on my shoulder. My fingers reach for Painless …
I’ve forgotten how annoying pain can be. But at least it keeps my heart going. My battle frenzy is real now.
Yandre hits my shoulder with medspray. It’s not as good as Painless.
“Where’d that thing come from?” I ask.
X points. Behind the fallen six-legged machine is an opening. Perfectly flush with the tunnel wall, the door is engineered to disappear when closed.
“Still half a klick to go,” I say. “How many more of these hidden doors, you think?”
“They won’t use fire near the center,” he says. “Not if that’s where the data’s stored.”
I squint in the flickering light—his fur is singed away along his left arm, right where feels would be. The bare skin is red and mottled.
“You should spray that.”
He smiles, all wolf. “Why? It focuses the mind.”
A thought flashes through me—what did he look like before the surge? Maybe his desire came from some part of him, something lupine in his eyes, his brow.
Or did he look normal and boring?
Maybe it came from who he was, not what he looked like.
I’ve been avoiding these questions since his strange words this morning. But somehow it’s easier to have these thoughts with my feels burned away. Nothing rushes up to push them down.
Before his wolf surge, he might have looked like my sister and me.
“Boss—” I start.
He holds up a hand for silence. His ears are twitching.
“Small things on legs. From all directions.”
“Your pulse lance,” I say. “They spotted it.”
“Boss!” Yandre shouts, eyes on their handscreen. “Motion sensors are giving me hundreds of pings … thousands!”
X and I stare at each other. The Iron Mountain is still awake.
“How much ammo do you all have left?” I ask.
X shakes his head.
Both of us turn to the flamethrower.
“Yandre,” I say, “do you have any bombs?”
We run, two sounding charges ticking behind us, nestled between the fuel tanks of the flamethrower drone.
We have two minutes to get away.
There’s no point in being stealthy. The tunnel dances with our flashlights as we run. I can see the traffic markings on the roadway clearly now—stop signs and speed limits, booths for security guards. A whole Rusty city once existed down here, a network of machines and people.
But there’s no time to stop and look.
We’re halfway to the central chamber, when we see them coming at us—small spindly-legged drones, like spiders.
They swarm the walls and ceiling of the tunnel, the mountain’s last line of defense, ready to overwhelm us with sheer numbers.
We can’t let them slow us down.
The rebels open fire with their autorifles, blasting spiders into parts. Those that get through, X sweeps away, and my darting knife protects him from any that skitter inside the reach of his lance.
The little drones aren’t quick or smart—definitely Rusty tech—but they keep coming.
“I’m out!” one of the rebels shouts. She swings her rifle by its shoulder stock, flailing at the little machines.
“Me too!” another yells.
A rebel beside me cries out in pain. One of the spiders has grabbed his arm, squeezing with all eight of its metal legs.
A moment later he drops, out cold from an injection of knockout juice—or worse.
But we can’t stop for the wounded. The bombs behind us are still ticking.
“Thirty seconds!” Yandre cries.
More of our guns fall silent, out of ammo, or rebels bitten by the spiders. We fight with flares, stun grenades, and shock wands stolen from wardens long ago.
Without Boss X, we’d be overwhelmed, but his pulse lance flails and buzzes.
The ranks of the little drones are thinning. For a moment, it seems like we’re in the clear …
Until I look over my shoulder.
Another horde of spiders is on its way, filling the tunnel behind us, drawn from every quarter of the mountain.
“Five, four …” Yandre’s voice rings out. “Down!”
We drop to the ground, piling into a heap, those with body armor on top. They empty their water bottles onto themselves, like rain leaking down to the rest of us.
Boss X is beside me, breathless and slicked with sweat.
“My brothers and sisters,” he pants. “You are all … very heavy.”
A grim laugh bubbles through us.
The conflagration comes then—a flash of light, then a roar and shock wave at the tardy speed of sound. All that burning fuel channeling down the tunnels, flowing along walls and ceilings.
It hits us in a swell of heat, burning the air in our lungs, scalding bare skin. The noise and fury, the reek of kerosene and burned hair all too familiar.
Then it travels past, leaving us behind.
The pile of rebels shifts atop me. With muttered curses, whimpers of pain, and coughing, we sort ourselves. More medspray, but no one is critically hurt.
There are still a handful of spiders coming toward us down the tunnel, but they wobble drunkenly, their small metal bodies covered with sticky burning goo.
One by one, they shudder to a halt.
“I’ll go back, Boss,” Yandre says, pulling out their medkit.
X nods. “Take two with you.”
All those fallen rebels—they were defenseless in the path of the flame. Only twelve of us still stand.
There’s nothing but battle frenzy in my veins. No grief, no anguish. Like the rest of me was burned away with my feels.
I can worry about the fallen later. About X.
“Let’s finish this,” I say.
The central chamber is bigger than a soccer stadium.
The entrance is wide enough to drive a construction drone through. An ancient Rusty ground truck sits stalled halfway in, its cargo never delivered.
It all just ended one day. A whole civilization.
As we cross the threshold, lights flicker on around us. The rebels draw what weapons they have, and X’s lance roars back to life.
But nothing comes at us.
I sheathe my knife. “Maybe the Rusties didn’t want any firefights in here with their precious data.”
“There are still Paz’s tricks to worry about,” X says, but his pulse lance falls silent.
Thousands of giant cabinets fill the room, four meters high. We spread across the chamber, searching.
X and I fall in together, walking down the corridors between the cabinets, staring at the strange markings on their doors. The logos of ancient corps are simple shapes and bold colors, like magic glyphs signifying power and permanence.
The floor is covered with unreadable markings, nav symbols for the drones that once scurried here, filing and retrieving. A few
sit rusting at intersections on fat rubber wheels, their batteries forever spent.
“How do we find Paz in all this?” I ask.
X grumbles, then pulls at one of the cabinet doors. When it resists, he cuts it open with his lance, to reveal …
Paper.
Stacks of it, binders and boxes. More than in my father’s collection of Rusty-era books. More paper than I’ve ever seen in one place.
Boss X pulls out a handful. It’s covered in tiny print, rows of numbers and names. List of transactions, deals, promises, all incomprehensible now.
The paper is ancient and dry, and crumbles in his hand when he makes a fist.
He looks more confused than I’ve ever seen him. “This was what had them trying to kill the planet? Pieces of paper?”
I can only stare. I thought we’d find data and code, machines that threatened to resurrect the corps, ancient demons brought back to life.
But this is just dead trees.
“Looks like the old saying about this mountain was wrong,” I say. “The corps aren’t coming back, are they?”
X slides a fresh battery into his pulse lance. “Maybe they only existed in the Rusties’ heads.”
He hands me a battery pack for my knife. Something about the gesture—the unthinking, easy sharing—makes me realize we’re alone.
“Can I ask a question, Boss?”
“You just did. Ask a more interesting one.”
I groan. “Earlier today, you said something weird. ‘Not all that’s missing is lost.’”
“I did. And your question?”
“What did you mean by that?”
His lupine eyes meet mine at last. “Anything that’s truly yours is still with you, even if you can’t see it.”
“I feel like you could be more specific.”
He shrugs. “Not just things—people. The connections are still there.”
“X. What connections?”
“Love, family,” he says. “But this isn’t the time, Frey.”
I open my mouth to keep pressing him, and nothing comes out. My hand takes my wrist, where Elucidation used to be—but the little face is burned away.
And yet my heart is beating hard and fast. My feelings aren’t gone. They’ve simply found a new place, deeper inside me. And they won’t let me speak.
If X is my brother, I have to tell him what I did.
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