The garage smelled of ozone and hot iron. The smell of a storm trapped in a bottle.

  Kam sat on the edge of the reinforced bench press. His hoodie was soaked through, dark grey turning black along the spine. His chest heaved, pulling in air that tasted of diesel and dust.

  For the first time in weeks, the air around him wasn’t shimmering. No heat haze. No distortion bending the tools on the wall. The Limiter in his arm hummed—a dull, constant vibration—capping the output, forcing the energy back into the meat of his muscles instead of letting it radiate out.

  It hurt. But it was a different hurt. Not the burning of overload. The ache of being used.

  Leo stood by the monitor, adjusting his glasses, squinting at the scrolling data streams. The blue light washed out his tired face.

  “Micro?fractures in the lining,” Leo said. He tapped the screen. “Structural stress on the ceramic plates. But the core temp holds.”

  He paused, leaning closer.

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  “Also… your pulse spiked after the hit. Not before.”

  Taylor leaned against a stack of tires, spinning a lug nut between his fingers.

  “So he didn’t rage first,” Taylor said.

  “He chose the load,” Leo corrected. “Then the body reacted to the demand. It wasn’t an automated defense. It was a manual input.”

  Marcus grinned from the shadows near the door. The science went over his head, but the violence made sense.

  “Man said ‘please’ to gravity and it listened,” Marcus said.

  Kam stared at his hands.

  He flexed his fingers. They shook. Not the high?frequency vibration of heat trying to escape—the kind that melted controllers and cracked glass. This was a low?frequency tremor. Mechanical exhaustion.

  The wires in his arm felt heavy. The connection point ached.

  “I felt it,” Kam said. His voice was rough, scraped clean of performance.

  “Good,” Silas said.

  The mechanic sat on his workbench, cleaning a wrench with a rag that had been black since 1999. He didn’t look up. He didn’t offer praise. Silas didn’t believe in praise; he believed in function.

  “It hurt,” Kam said.

  “Better.”

  Kam looked up. Sweat dripped from his nose onto the concrete floor.

  “Harry won’t like this,” Kam said.

  Silas snorted. He wiped a smudge of grease from the chrome vanadium steel.

  “Harry is a futurist,” Silas said. “He wants friction?less systems. He can’t optimise pain. That’s why he avoids it.”

  He pointed the wrench at Kam.

  “Pain is data, son. If you can’t feel the weight, you don’t respect the break.”

  Kam leaned back against the rack. The cold steel felt good against his neck.

  The hum of the power wasn’t back. The molten river in his veins was dammed up, held by Leo’s code and Silas’s hardware. He felt heavy. Slow. Mortal.

  But something else was there.

  Resistance. A solid floor under his feet. He wasn’t floating in the coolant anymore. He was here, in the garage, feeling every bruise.

  He didn’t smile. He wiped the sweat from his eyes, took a breath that rattled in his chest, and looked at the weights.

  “Queue again,” Kam said.