Description

Excerpt

They packed the war room before the sun had finished dragging itself over the ruins.

It wasn't really a room—more a cavity in the compound's concrete gut, lit by a chain of scavenged bulbs humming at different frequencies. Rebar jutted from the ceiling like broken ribs. Shelves sagged under the weight of half-gutted radios and cracked biotubes. The air carried a permanent bite of metal and antiseptic, as if someone had once tried to clean the place and given up halfway.

In the center squatted an old T-series power-armor maintenance frame, toppled on its side and stripped to the bone. The radial support arms were gone; the hydraulic hubs had been carved out with torch scars; the yellow paint scorched to soot. Its angled chassis had been hammered flat enough to serve as a table, the exposed wiring and rivets framing the surface like a crude border. Mutant glyphs and old maps had been nailed to it in overlapping layers. The whole thing looked like a battlefield autopsy.

Above it, along the main beam, hung a parade of skulls: brahmin, human, and a jawbone too big for any brute she'd ever seen.

Nora stood against the far wall, hands behind her back. No chair. No place at the frame-table. The red armband on her sleeve itched; the silver sigil caught the weak light and flicked it back like a complaint. Claimed, but not belonging.

The room smelled of sweat and mold and guns kept too long in damp places. Mutants filled the space shoulder to shoulder—twenty, maybe more. Some wore riot armor patched with scrap. Others had only layered canvas and old leather. All had jaws set in that expression she'd learned to read: hunger disguised as discipline.

Gorz waited behind the ruined frame, coat buttoned to the throat. He stood perfectly still, weight rooted as if the concrete had grown around him. His presence quieted the room without needing to say a word.

When the last body muscled in and the door slammed shut, he spoke.

“South railyard’s gone,” he said, voice flat. “The crew we sent came back chewed and empty-handed. Zara’s pack owns the tracks now. Food, ammo, the west road—cut to bone.”

Zara. The name hit a nerve she didn’t know she’d left exposed. She’d heard it whispered among the laborers over scraps of stale water: someone fast, someone efficient, someone organized enough to unsettle even the mutants. A ghost with a map and a kill-list.

A grunt from the right. Karna. “You bled strength for experiments.” His gaze slid over Nora and away, like she wasn’t worth direct attention. “Weakness calls scavengers. Nothing more.”

The tension sharpened; a few of the younger mutants looked eager for blood. The lights buzzed.

Gorz didn’t spare Karna a glance. “Weakness quits,” he said. “We don’t.” His eyes swept the room. They didn’t land on Nora, but she still felt the weight of them behind her sternum.

“We lose stock to infection. We lose creation to clumsy hands. Every week our numbers shrink. That ends now. We need machines built for living flesh. We take them from the hospital at Grit Bridge.”

A rumble of unease, interest, fear—hard to tell which was which.

“Zara’s crews run there,” someone muttered.

“All the more reason,” Gorz said.

Then his head turned, slow as a turret aligning.

“The Asset leads.”

What?

Noise broke like a wave—shouts, snarls, boots scraping concrete. Nora felt the air shift before the eyes hit her, a pressure drop in her gut. Her heart sank with the certainty of something heavy thrown down a well.

Mutants surged in place, some arguing, some laughing like they’d just been handed a free death. A few barked objections that dissolved under the swell of voices. Someone slammed a fist against the fallen power-armor frame; metal rang like a struck bell.

Gorz didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t have to.

“She sees the things you can’t—knows the shapes, the codes, the work of old-world flesh,” he went on, cutting through the uproar like a blade laid flat. “Without that, you bring back trash. Or poison. She knows what keeps bodies alive.”

The room quieted in uneven drops, pockets of muttering giving way to stunned silence. The eyes didn’t leave her. The weight of them felt like hands.

“Knife belongs to the hand that can hold it,” he said. “She holds this task. She succeeds, or she feeds the radroaches. That is the law.”

The phrase hit her harder than the threat. Law. Their law. And now—somehow—it included her.

He swept the crowd with a cataloging gaze. “Asset leads. Nightkin for shadow. Brutes for force. Three from my line. Three from Karna’s. Disobey, and the pit takes what’s left.”

That closed the matter.

Eyes cut toward Nora—some calculating, some appraising, some salivating over the promise of meat.

The red armband burned against her skin.

The assembly broke into movement. Boots scraped. Threats traded. A few bodies jostled her on purpose, testing what she’d do. Nothing. She kept her spine straight and her hands tucked behind her back, parade-rest holding her together like glue.

Karna lingered, thumb tapping the handle of the ball-peen hammer at his belt as if keeping count of something only he could see. He didn’t spare her another glance. The dismissal stung more than the threat would have.

When he finally left, the room breathed again. Only after the last mutant had passed did Nora risk shifting toward the door.

“Asset.”

She froze, then turned to face him. Hesitation was danger. Parade rest, a neutral posture.

Gorz hadn’t moved from behind the gutted power-armor frame. His crook of a finger was small, but it carried like a command etched into the concrete.

Her throat tightened. She knew this pattern. Danger dressed as routine. She approached.

The smell of leather, smoke, iron, and something darker met her halfway. Her posture stiffened—reflex, muscle memory, the body remembering its place even when the mind rebelled.

“Some expect you to die,” he said quietly. “Some hope for it.”

His tone wasn’t cruel. That made it worse.

“If you fail, I cannot keep you.” He paused. “Even if I see use.”

Keep. Use. She felt these more than any threat.

“If you bring back what we need—machines, stock—then this”—his eyes flicked to the red band—“becomes permanent.”

“Then what?” she asked before she could stop herself.

His mouth twitched—the ghost of a smile with all the warmth of a razor. “There are worse cages than loyalty.”

He dismissed her with a tilt of his head. Final.

Nora stepped out into the corridor. The war room door thudded shut behind her, leaving only the hum of pipes and the distant clatter of metal on metal. Empty halls were worse; noise meant bodies, bodies meant rules. Silence had no rules.

She kept her pace measured. No hurry. No drift. Just enough presence to look like she belonged, not enough to draw notice.

The prep bay lay two turns down. Voices leaked from it—arguing, checking gear, the scrape of blades against whetstones. The smell hit her before the doorway: sweat, oil, the sourness of mutant breath. Once it would’ve staggered her. Now it barely registered. She tried not to think of what that meant.

Slog waited just inside, leaning against a rack of rebar stakes. Brick-faced. Watching her.

As she passed, he dragged a thumb across his throat, slow and deliberate, smiling with everything but his eyes.

She didn’t break stride. Didn’t look at him. Even gait. Even breath.

Inside her chest, something small and frightened counted exits, distances, the angle of the nearest shadow. Measured the odds.

The margin favored death.

She paused under a strip of flickering light. The red armband flashed back at her, silver threads catching like a flare.

Asset, she thought. Not a name. A sentence.