“I fear I cannot do exactly what you wish, but… There is an option. It will entail not just a graft, but also further brain surgery, and it likely will not allow you to simply enter that state at will. If I were to guess, it will make it easier to enter and maintain it,” the grafter said.

  “There’s a catch. What is it?” Krahe asked.

  Firminus smiled.

  “We don’t have the parts,” he shrugged. “The truth is, I was not able to conceive of a manner to directly trigger your combat trance. I only compared it with past graft-saints who had similar abilities and looked at the grafts they had. What you want will likely have to be sourced from a particular soulbeast, and will likely be something like an adrenal gland. Finding and killing the right beast is the first step, and there is no guarantee that it will have the exact organ you need based on its known abilities. You will need an individual with strong soulbeast appraisal abilities, both of the system and non-system sort. Once you do have the organ, it will be up to me to somehow cut it down to size and fashion the necessary control unit. At least you have an easy and clear goal now, no?”

  He tossed her a memslate. Krahe loaded it up and looked through it. There was no single type of soulbeast. It, in fact, recorded numerous distinct soulbeasts, all sharing some similarities, especially the fact they had been slain and used for parts by a graft-saint some time in the last 400 or so years. It also contained the exact locations where those beasts had been found and a collection of intel on how exactly one would go about tracking down a soulbeast and the procedures of a hunt. Option A entailed paying a rancher to track down a beast within the rancher’s territory, which was expensive and would often involve forfeiting most of the materials to the rancher as part of the payment. However, it guaranteed that you would only have to fight the beast, and would thus be in peak condition when it came down to the fight. The alternative was to go directly to the Beyond Frontier. In the case of the Beyond Frontier, it was undeveloped wilderness, and tracking a soulbeast was a matter of one’s own skills, hiring a tracker, joining a hunting caravan, or any of many other options.

  On the twenty-fourth day of the second month, her Tsetse-pattern conduit lines arrived, and the operation proceeded without any further delay. They resembled an organic version of typical synthetic nerve fibre replacements, with central conduits and sub-conduits branching off. Only her left arm was left unmodified.

  Finally, finally, she could harness the Atomica’s full output without it tearing her apart from the inside. And the moment she did, the moment she unleashed that power, the moment Lasher’s gossamer-threads ripped into a target dummy, she felt it click. The Atomica’s immense output surged through her, spiraling through her conduits. A single cast left a five-pronged spiral embedded in the supernaturally resilient wood making up the dummy. For the first time in actual reality, she went through the full kata she had watched engram-Sauer perform so many times, that she had herself replicated in the dream. Until now, Afterburner had been out of her grasp — Anathema’s unique properties simply couldn’t facilitate it. But now that she had full reign of the Atomica, it came to her like second nature. Without Razormind it was demanding, that was true, but it didn’t matter in Krahe’s head.

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  Three days later, the green-eyed demon would descend upon Audunpoint once again.

  Blackhand.

  That name, once a newly-spreading myth, had grown into a true urban legend over the last two months.

  It was known that, following the Slaughterhouse 9 Incident, Semzar Hashem had made a great effort to hunt her down, placing a substantal bounty on her head and even hiring none other than Crescent Jezail, twice.

  And then, before the month was out, Semzar was dead. Slaughtered in the middle of a banquet, right in the middle of the Mirzaii Subdistrict. The survivors of that incident told the tale openly, throwing gasoline-soaked logs onto the fire with their exaggerated accounts.

  The church readily spread rumors about the direct involvement of an inquisitor, whose activity in the city following the raid spun the rumor mill even faster.

  And if that were not sufficient, Brizogia Rasug al-Imuzat, an administrator of the Silversword Agency and the owner of Mirzaii 2, lodged a formal complaint with the church for damage to the property, demanding restitution. The church, in return, demanded proof that whomever rented the mansion didn’t know it was being rented to Semzar Hashem, which smothered the case in the crib.

  One survivor in particular, a man with a pretentious mustache and yellow graft-eyes too small for their sockets, built upon the urban legend yet further. He insistently claimed that Blackhand just had to be some veteran upper-mid-ranker, if not higher, merely using lower-order equipment for some unknown reason — in his own words, “Nothing else can explain how she fought.”

  The fact this didn’t truly line up with reality didn’t matter. Audunpoint, like any other city, loved urban legends. Blackhand was just one more among the ranks of many. One more spectre that many knew of, but only few knew to be real.

  Krahe’s return to the city took place by way of a high-speed subterranean tramline, the tunnel possessing several enormous bulkheads and lined by statues that she was certain were disguised automata — even the tram car was built like a tank, and was operated by an automaton. From the journey, she surmised two things: First, the compound was at least thirty kilometers outside Audunpoint. Second, it wasn’t the only one connected to this tunnel. As much as she would have liked to simply continue where she had left off in her investigation, her absence meant that things had changed, and she had to catch up — despite her allies’ best efforts to keep her up to date on goings-on during her stay at the compound. Allies. That word still felt like it didn’t quite fit. Like the grip of someone else’s gun.

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