The sound of shattering crystal was like a gunshot.

  Dry. Sharp. A short crack that was instantly drowned out by the low hum of the overloaded Core.

  I jerked backward on pure instinct, my whole body reacting at once. It wasn’t a conscious attempt to pull free—it was the reflex of a cornered animal.

  But my right arm stayed there. Inside.

  At first, I felt nothing.

  My brain simply refused to process what had happened, replacing pain with a blinding white flash across my vision. The world flipped upside down: the white ceiling with rows of lamps, blinking red emergency lights, Efrem’s distorted face.

  I fell onto my back, my head cracking against the hard floor. My ears rang as if I were standing inside a bell. I tried to inhale, but my diaphragm seized in a spasm.

  “…boy! IRON!”

  Efrem’s voice cut through the ringing. The old man rushed to me, his hands shaking. He grabbed my jacket and dragged me across the floor, away from the rotating Core column.

  I turned my head. Looked to the right.

  Where my shoulder should have been, the sleeve of my jacket was shredded to rags. The fabric darkened instantly, soaking through with something hot and sticky.

  The arm itself—what was left of my crystalline prosthetic—was still lodged between the Core’s gears, like a broken bone stuck in a machine’s throat. Gray shards and twisted fiber-lines were jammed in the metal.

  “Tourniquet…” Efrem rasped. He tore off his belt, his fingers slipping in blood. “Hold on—hold on, damn it!”

  The pain didn’t come right away.

  When it did, it crashed over me in a heavy, pulsing wave that arched my body off the floor. It wasn’t like a burn. It felt like someone had pressed a block of ice against my shoulder while drilling straight into the bone with a rusted bit.

  “A—agh—”

  The air whistled out of my lungs.

  Efrem cinched the belt tight beneath my armpit. The world collapsed into a single black point. Nausea rolled through me.

  BOOM.

  Footsteps shook the floor.

  I forced my eyes open, fighting the urge to pass out.

  Ten meters away, framed by dust from a breached airlock, stood Kyle.

  In the red emergency lighting, he didn’t look human—didn’t even look like a soldier. He was a mass of mangled metal held together by pure hatred. His armor smoked. Black, oily fluid dripped from torn joints. The helmet was crushed on the left side, exposing part of a skull tangled with wires.

  The one remaining eye—a red lens—spun in its socket, scanning.

  “Target…”

  The speaker grated with radio-like interference.

  “Confirmed.”

  He saw us.

  Saw me lying in a pool of my own blood. Saw the old man struggling to secure the knot in the belt.

  Kyle advanced.

  He didn’t run. He didn’t need to. He was a tank, and we were infantry without weapons. He dragged the broken remains of his massive sword behind him, carving sparks from the floor.

  “Get away…” I tried to push Efrem with my left hand. My fingers were weak, childlike. “Efrem… server room…”

  “Shut up,” the old man growled.

  There was no fear in his eyes—only the weary resolve of someone who knows he has a minute left to live.

  He stood. In his hands was the same length of pipe we’d used to pry open the hatch. Against an armored killing machine, it was a toothpick against a bear.

  “Hey! You rusted bucket!” Efrem shouted, stepping sideways to draw Kyle away from me. “Over here!”

  Kyle turned his head. His processors lagged—probably damage from the electrical hit at the airlock. Slowly, he shifted his gaze to the old man.

  “Obstacle…”

  “Eliminate.”

  The Hound swung.

  Fast. Far too fast for something that massive.

  Efrem tried to dodge, to slip under the strike the way he’d taught me once, back in the prison yard.

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  But he was old. His leg was injured. He was exhausted.

  The broken sword howled through the air. Efrem managed to raise the pipe.

  The impact was monstrous.

  The pipe was ripped from his hands—along with the skin on his palms. Efrem was hurled aside like a rag doll. He slammed back-first into a server rack, slid down, and went still.

  “Efrem!”

  I tried to scream, but only a wet, bloody cough came out.

  Kyle didn’t even look at him.

  He turned back to me.

  Clack.

  Clack.

  Clack.

  Three steps. Four.

  I lay in my own blood. My right side was numb; my left trembled uncontrollably.

  I was an engineer. I’d spent my life fixing things.

  But I couldn’t fix myself now.

  My gaze darted around the hall. Red light. Shadows. Racks. The Core humming behind me. Pipes running along the ceiling.

  Pipes.

  I squinted. On one of the main lines directly above the center of the hall was a marking:

  A yellow triangle with a blue border.

  [Halon 1301. Fire Suppression]

  A gas-based fire suppression system.

  The Precursors used inert gas to extinguish electrical fires without flooding systems with water. The gas displaces oxygen and rapidly lowers temperature.

  Kyle was a cyborg.

  But Valerius had left him organic lungs and a heart to sustain the brain.

  He needed air.

  And cold was poison to overheated hydraulics.

  The Hound was five meters away now, lifting his sword for the final strike.

  I rolled onto my stomach. Pain exploded in my shoulder like a supernova, but I bit through my lip, choking down the scream.

  I crawled. Not away from him—sideways, toward the wall where a manual safety control panel blinked.

  “Stop…” I rasped, leaving a wide red smear on the white floor.

  Kyle took a step after me.

  Was he playing with me, or were his systems still lagging?

  Didn’t matter.

  I reached the wall.

  The panel was smashed—probably from the vibration when I jammed the Core. The lever was gone. Only exposed wires and a fragment of circuitry remained.

  Kyle loomed over me. Heat radiated from his armor. It smelled of burned flesh and machine oil.

  He raised the sword.

  “End… of cycle…”

  With my left hand—the only one I had left—I grabbed two exposed contacts.

  “Reboot, asshole,” I whispered.

  I shorted the wires.

  A deafening pop echoed through the hall, like a pneumatic tire exploding.

  From the ceiling nozzles, jets of white gas erupted with a feral hiss.

  The hall vanished into fog.

  The temperature plummeted. I felt the sweat on my face crystallize into ice.

  Kyle froze.

  The halon hit him directly. His overheated armor hissed violently. Metal, stressed by combat and impacts, couldn’t handle the thermal shock.

  Crack.

  The sound was as loud as a gunshot.

  The Hound’s chest plate split open, exposing its internals—woven synthetic muscles and pulsing tubes beneath.

  But more importantly—air.

  The gas displaced oxygen.

  Kyle began to choke. Horribly. Wet, gurgling sounds tore from him as the organic components suffocated. He dropped the sword, clawing at his throat. His knees buckled.

  “Error… ventilation… error…”

  He staggered blindly, sensors useless in the thick white fog.

  I lay pressed to the wall, breathing shallowly. The gas was heavier than air; it sank, but there was still oxygen near the floor.

  Kyle didn’t fall.

  The thing was too durable.

  Swaying, he followed the sound of my breathing. His red eye burned through the fog like a beacon.

  I needed more.

  I needed to shut him down.

  I looked at the floor.

  Near the puddle Kyle stood in—a mixture of oil, condensation, and my blood—lay a thick power cable.

  The same one ripped free from the Core’s casing when I destroyed my arm.

  It twitched like a living snake. Blue sparks danced at its severed end.

  Three hundred volts. Maybe more.

  A direct feed from the generator.

  I had to grab it.

  “Don’t…” Zeno’s voice cut in, weak and distant. “Your heart will stop.”

  “It already has,” I thought.

  I crawled toward the cable. Every movement sent agony through the stump of my shoulder, pain so intense I wanted to lie down and die.

  But I crawled.

  Kyle was two steps away now. He wasn’t striking anymore—just trying to step on me, crush me with his weight.

  I grabbed the cable with my left hand. The insulation was torn.

  The shock hit instantly.

  My teeth snapped together. My muscles locked.

  But I didn’t let go.

  “Hey!” I shouted, staring up into the red lens.

  Kyle looked down.

  I drove the exposed cable end into the crack in his chest armor—straight into the wet, living mass beneath the metal.

  Impact.

  The flash was so bright I saw the skeleton inside my own hand.

  The sound wasn’t thunder.

  It was the tearing of matter itself.

  Ozone and burnt meat filled the air.

  Kyle arched backward. His steel-clad arms flung wide as blue lightning danced across his body, leaping to the floor, to me.

  I convulsed violently, convinced my spine was about to disintegrate. My heart slammed in my throat, skipping beats.

  One.

  Two.

  Three.

  I held on.

  I poured raw power from the Zero Sector straight into him, burning out everything Valerius had built into that shell.

  The lens in Kyle’s eye shattered. Thick black smoke poured from the helmet. The speaker emitted one last, drawn-out wail—then went silent.

  The giant froze.

  I released the cable. It fell to the floor, still sparking.

  The Hound’s massive body—hundreds of kilograms of dead weight—slowly tipped forward, as if in slow motion.

  I tried to crawl away. There was nothing left in me.

  Kyle collapsed beside me, his helmet smashing into the floor ten centimeters from my face. The ground shook.

  Silence followed.

  Only the hiss of lingering gas and my ragged breathing.

  I stared at the ceiling. Black spots swam across my vision. My left hand was blistered raw; I couldn’t feel my right shoulder at all.

  “Alive…”

  A cough echoed from the corner.

  Efrem.

  Alive.

  I tried to smile. My lips cracked.

  We’d done it.

  We’d killed the Order’s finest executioner.

  We’d broken the Core.

  But I knew it wasn’t over.

  In the darkness behind my eyes, a cold green light ignited once more.

  “Impressive,” Zeno said. His voice was clear now. Calm. Unafraid.

  “You dismantled the problem piece by piece, Iron. Crude. Dirty. Effective.”

  I closed my eyes.

  “Let me… sleep…”

  “No,” the teacher’s voice hardened like steel.

  “You’ll sleep when we’re out. Now open your eyes. Look at the body in front of you.”

  I forced my lids open. Kyle’s corpse lay beside me, smoke fading from the helmet.

  “His brain is dead,” Zeno continued. “His soul—if he ever had one—is gone. But the hardware is intact. Hydraulics. Frame. Sensors.

  A masterpiece of engineering, Iron. And it’s empty.”

  A chill ran through me, unrelated to the gas.

  “What do you want?” I asked aloud.

  “I’m cramped in your head, student. And you need a protector who can carry you out of here.

  Connect me. That data cable by the wall—plug it into the port at the back of the helmet.”

  I looked at my only remaining hand, burned raw. Then at the dead monster.

  “You want to become… that?”

  “I want to be tangible. Move, Iron. We don’t have much time. Valerius will notice the Hound’s signal is gone.”

  I clenched my teeth, gathered what little will I had left—

  And began crawling toward the head of the dead giant.

  This wasn’t magic.

  It was reassembly.

  And it was only just beginning.