Ash held the conduit in his hands as if it were made of glass.
It wasn't his first time touching one—he'd handled plenty during deals, passed them off to marks, even stolen a few low-grade corporate models for quick resale.
But this was different.
This one was his.
Earned, not stolen.
A reward for a string of successful runs gathering intel, mapping rival territories, and identifying weak points in security grids for Blaze's… theatrical demonstrations.
It was a modest piece of tech, about the length of his hand, its casing a dull brushed steel etched with faint, utilitarian glyphs along its length.
It hummed softly when activated, a steady, low-frequency vibration he could feel in his palms.
To anyone else in the Junkyard, it would have been a treasure—a genuine, functioning piece of corporate engineering.
A tool that could, with the right knowledge, reshape reality in small, practical ways.
To Ash, after what he'd seen, it felt like a toy.
His mind flashed back, unbidden, to a different conduit.
Not this dull, functional thing, but the one Blaze wielded.
The memory was crisp, sensory—the smell of dust and charred metal, the way the air itself seemed to bend around the device in Blaze's grip.
A skirmish with a rival crew that had escalated when Cinder had shown up, a third party looking to collect bounties on all of them.
Ash had been hidden in the rafters of a derelict warehouse, watching through a rusted vent.
Blaze hadn't fought.
He had performed.
His conduit—a sleek, predatory piece of technology that seemed less like a tool and more like an extension of his will—had glowed with a deep, internal crimson.
With a flick of his wrist, ribbons of fire had unfolded from thin air, not as wild eruptions, but as controlled, intelligent things.
They coiled around support beams to cut off angles, herded enemies into kill zones with gentle, terrifying persistence, and snuffed out Cinder's precisely placed sonic glyphs with contemptuous ease.
The fire hadn't just burned.
It had listened.
And Blaze had moved through the chaos with a smirk, his eyes alight with a kind of cruel delight, the conduit in his hand humming a song of pure, unadulterated power.
That was a conduit.
What Ash held now was a glorified calculator.
He focused, channeling his intent through the device.
The basic activation glyph on its surface glowed a steady, unremarkable blue.
Rank 1—Vacuum Clean.
A faint pulse of force, enough to disturb a pile of dust on the workbench, sending it puffing into the air.
Rank 1—Thermal Regulate.
A slight warming of the air directly around the conduit's tip, like a weak hand-warmer.
Rank 1—Sense Condition.
A vague, staticky impression of the local aetheric field, less detailed than what he could get by squinting and concentrating.
It could clean dust.
It could warm a small area.
It could sense magic poorly.
It was, for all intents and purposes, a glorified multi-tool.
The kind issued to low-level corporate maintenance staff for cleaning vents and thawing frozen pipes.
His shoulders slumped.
The eager, almost childlike excitement that had filled him when he'd first been handed the case drained away, leaving a hollow, bitter feeling in his gut.
He'd imagined weaving complex glyphs, crafting illusions, maybe even managing a basic barrier.
He'd dreamed of the control, the agency it would represent.
Instead, he held a janitor's key.
A soft, muffled sound came from across the room.
Ash's head snapped up.
Cinder was sitting on the worn-out sofa they'd scavenged, methodically field-stripping her long, matte-black rifle.
Her movements were precise, economical, each component laid out on a clean cloth on the crate beside her.
She wasn't looking at him.
But her shoulders were trembling.
Another sound escaped her—a sharp, choked exhale through her nose.
She was trying not to laugh.
Ash's glare could have cut steel. "Something funny?"
Cinder didn't answer immediately.
She carefully slotted the rifle's bolt carrier group back into place, the click sounding abnormally loud in the tense silence.
Then she wiped her hands on the cloth, slowly, deliberately.
Finally, she looked at him.
Her pale grey eyes, usually as expressive as winter ice, were crinkled at the corners.
Her lips were pressed into a thin, tight line, but it was a losing battle.
A low, shaky breath hissed out between her teeth.
"It's just," she began, her voice straining against the pressure, "the look on your face."
Another tremor ran through her.
She raised a hand, covering her mouth, but a snort escaped anyway.
"You looked like a kid who just unwrapped socks for his birthday."
That did it.
The dam broke.
Cinder doubled over, a full-bodied, genuine laugh tearing free.
It wasn't her usual dry, humorless exhale—this was ragged, loud, and utterly human.
She clutched her stomach, tears beading at the corners of her eyes as she gasped for air between bursts of laughter.
"I—I told you!" she managed to wheeze, pointing a finger at the conduit in his hands.
"I warned you weeks ago! 'Don't get your hopes up, Ash. The stuff on the open market is scrap!'"
Ash stared, his face burning with a mixture of fury and humiliation.
He watched the legendary, stoic bounty hunter, the woman who'd stalked them for weeks with cold, murderous focus, now reduced to a giggling mess on a busted sofa because his magic wand could barely warm his lunch.
"It's not that funny," he growled, his knuckles white around the conduit.
"It is!" Cinder insisted, wiping her eyes with the back of her wrist, her laughter subsiding into breathless hiccups.
"Your face… it was priceless. Pure, unadulterated heartbreak."
She took a deep, shuddering breath, trying to compose herself.
"You thought you were getting a gun. But you got a spoon instead."
Ash slammed the conduit down on the workbench with a dull thud. "It's a start. It's functional."
"It's a lower-spec utility model," Cinder corrected, her mirth fading back into her usual clinical dryness, though a faint, amused smirk remained.
"Probably mass-produced for Nimbrix's facilities maintenance division. Meant for cleaning corrosion off bulkheads and debugging minor aetheric leaks in climate control systems."
She reassembled her rifle with swift, sure motions, her focus returning.
"The conduit Blaze uses is a prototype. A one-off, built for a specific, high-intensity combat application. The one you gave him from that trap job was likely stolen from a black-ops R&D lab. It was never meant to be sold, let alone used by someone outside a controlled testing environment."
She snapped the final component into place and looked at him, her expression flat.
"You're comparing a kitchen knife to a surgeon's scalpel. They're both sharp, but only one of them is built for the work you're imagining."
Ash was silent, staring at the useless piece of metal on the bench.
The memory of Blaze's effortless, beautiful control over fire taunted him.
That was the power he wanted.
That was the language he wanted to speak.
But all he had was a spoon.
Cinder watched him for a moment longer, then shouldered her rifle, the amusement gone entirely from her eyes, replaced by something colder—the look of a professional assessing an asset.
"Don't get so disappointed," she said, her voice quiet.
"It means you expected something better. In the Junkyard, that's a quick way to get dead. That conduit won't win you any duels. But it might keep a vent from freezing shut during a winter stakeout. Or clean the lens of a scope. Or send a faint, untraceable aetheric pulse as a makeshift signal."
She walked toward the door, pausing with her hand on the frame.
"Stop looking at what it can't do. Start figuring out what it can. Even a spoon can dig a hole. Or," she added, the ghost of her smirk returning, "serve soup to a very hungry person."
The door shut behind her, leaving Ash alone with his lower-spec dreams and the faint, mocking hum of the conduit on the table.
***
Ash lay on his back on the cracked, frost-coated concrete, staring up at the smoke-stained ceiling.
Every breath was a negotiation.
His ribs protested—one definitely cracked, maybe two.
The world swam gently at the edges of his vision, a nauseating, slow spin that had nothing to do with the lingering heat.
The wave of annihilation had passed.
The roaring, all-consuming firestorm was gone, leaving behind a deafening silence that rang in his ears louder than any explosion.
The air still shimmered with residual heat, tasting of ozone, melted plastics, and the sickly-sweet, unmistakable scent of charred meat.
He didn't look toward the source of that last smell.
He didn't need to.
The mental image of Bricks throwing himself over Gideon and Mara was already etched behind his eyelids.
Idiots, he thought, but the venom was weak, diluted by a strange, hollow exhaustion.
Loyal to the end.
What a waste.
With a groan that scraped raw in his throat, he tried to push himself up onto his elbows.
The movement sent a lightning bolt of pain through his side.
He collapsed back, his head knocking against the floor with a dull thunk.
Forget it.
For a minute, just… forget it.
He let his body go slack, the cold of the concrete seeping through his jacket, a grounding counterpoint to the burns on his back and the deep, aching protests of his muscles.
His gaze drifted from the ceiling to his right hand, which lay splayed open beside him.
In it, clutched in fingers that felt numb and distant, was his conduit.
Or what was left of it.
The sleek, custom-built prototype—his pride, his tool, his key to a higher tier of power—was ruined.
The central glass viewport, which usually glowed with a soft, internal blue light showing aetheric flow, was a spiderweb of fractures.
It was dark now, dead.
The casing, a reinforced polymer composite meant to withstand high-stress casting, had a deep, permanent bend near the middle, warping the delicate internal glyph-etched channels.
Tiny components—micro-glyphic resistors and aetheric capacitors—were visible through a split seam, spilled out like metallic guts.
It wasn't just broken.
It was destroyed.
A write-off.
The kind of damage you didn't repair, you salvaged for scrap and billed the operator for negligence.
A cold, sinking feeling settled in Ash's gut, far colder than the floor beneath him.
Another debt.
Conduits like this weren't bought.
They were issued.
By the corporate handlers who funded them, equipped them, and owned them in every way that mattered.
This one had been a field-test model, given to him after his "promotion".
It was a statement, a badge, and the worst, a leash.
Losing it wasn't an inconvenience.
It was a transgression.
A failure of stewardship over expensive corporate property.
They wouldn't just give him a new one.
They'd deduct the cost from his standing.
Add it to the ledger already filled with other operational losses, including, he was sure, Cinder's prized Anopheles drone, which he'd last seen dropping like a stone after draining itself.
The cost would be astronomical.
And in the Scorchers, debts weren't paid in credits.
They were paid in blood.
In missions.
In favors owed to people you didn't want to owe.
In the slow, incremental erosion of what little autonomy you had left.
He let his hand fall back to the floor, the dead weight of the broken conduit hitting the concrete with a final, pathetic clack.
From somewhere down the ruined hallway to his left, beyond the crater and the settling dust, he heard it.
Footsteps.
Not the frantic, scrambling run of Red Dogs. Not the heavy, dragging tread of the injured.
These were measured.
Calm.
Purposeful.
The crisp, efficient sound of boots on debris, avoiding loose rubble without breaking stride.
He didn't need to turn his head.
He knew that rhythm.
A mild, deep-seated annoyance bloomed in his chest, cutting through the fatigue.
It wasn't anger—he was too tired for that.
It was the weary irritation of a man who already knows the script of the coming conversation, knows his lines are all apologies and excuses, and just wants to skip to the end.
He closed his eyes for a second, then slowly, painfully, tilted his head to the side.
She stood at the edge of the devastation, where the hallway was merely ruined instead of vaporized.
Cinder.
Her dark tactical gear was dusted with fine grey ash, but otherwise she looked untouched.
Unruffled.
Her ponytail was still tight, her expression the same impassible mask of winter-grey eyes and sharp, unreadable features.
The long barrel of her rifle was slung across her back.
She scanned the scene with a single, sweeping glance—the glassy crater, the scorched walls, the still forms of Gideon, Mara, and Bricks, the cracked ceiling—her gaze analytical, absorbing data.
Then it landed on him.
She didn't say anything.
Not at first.
She just looked at him, lying broken on the floor, his conduit shattered beside him.
Ash held her gaze, his own face a mask of bruised exhaustion.
He didn't try to sit up.
Didn't offer a greeting.
Just waited.
Finally, Cinder took a few more steps forward, her boots crunching on the fine debris.
She stopped a few feet away, looking down at him.
Her head tilted a fraction.
"Report," she said.
Her voice was flat.
Dry.
Completely devoid of the mocking laughter from his memory, or any concern.
It was the voice of a superior officer finding a subordinate in a crater.
Ash let out a breath that was half a laugh, half a wheeze.
It hurt.
"Report," he echoed, his voice rough.
"The puppet was stronger than anticipated. The gravity well was a high-tier distortion. Your drone's solution was… explosive. The primary targets, Arden and Tenn, are gone. The Red Dogs leadership is neutralized or dead. My conduit is scrap."
He lifted his broken hand slightly, indicating the ruined device. "And I think I cracked a rib. Possibly two. That's the report."
He stopped there, leaving the words to hang in the scorched air.
He didn't mention the woman in the pink dress.
He didn't describe the pink umbrella, the milky eyes, the way she had lifted Jessa like a doll without a single glyph.
He didn't say how the air had warped around her, how reality itself had felt thin and sweet like poisoned honey.
The omission was deliberate—a cold, calculated withholding.
If someone was powerful enough to control a rawcaster of that caliber, to walk through a firestorm untouched, to treat gravity as a polite suggestion… then she was beyond pay-grade.
Beyond their pay-grade.
Reporting her to their Scorcher handlers wouldn't lead to a tactical response.
It would lead to panic.
To lockdowns.
To corporate auditors sniffing around, asking questions Ash didn't want to answer.
Better to let her be a ghost.
A problem for another day.
A piece of dangerous intel to be kept close, examined in private, maybe even used later if the right opportunity arose.
But as he clenched his jaw, holding the secret behind his teeth, he didn't realize how hard he was gritting them.
A deep, quiet pressure built in the back of his skull—not just the aftermath of the blast, not just the pain in his ribs.
It was something colder.
Sharper.
A silent, seething hatred had taken root in the dark soil of his humiliation.
It wasn't for Jessa, the broken puppet.
Not even for the Red Dogs who had cornered him.
It was for the puppeteer.
For the woman who had watched his struggle from the shadows, who had plucked her toy from the wreckage with a smile, who had made him feel—for the first time since Blaze had held a flame to his throat—like kindling.
He had been a wildfire in his own right.
A Scorcher.
A bringer of controlled chaos.
And she had treated him like background noise.
The hatred didn't burn.
It settled.
It crystallized.
And he didn't even know it was there—not yet.
But it was planted.
Waiting.
Cinder's eyes didn't leave his face.
She processed the information without a flicker of reaction. "The anomaly? The child?"
"Gone. Vanished after the blast. Along with her conduit." Ash coughed, a wet, painful sound. "Poof. Like a ghost."
Silence stretched between them, thick with the smell of destruction.
Cinder's gaze finally drifted from him to the broken conduit, then back to his face.
"I lost an Anopheles Mark IX," she stated, the words crisp. "Fully loaded. Aether core catastrophically depleted. Command will list it as 'destroyed in action due to unplanned escalation.'"
She let that hang.
The unspoken your unplanned escalation was louder than any shout.
"The data," Ash countered weakly, gesturing vaguely at the ruined hall. "Field data on an unknown, high-threat anomaly wielding prototype corporate tech. That's worth something."
"It is," Cinder agreed, her tone not warming in the slightest. "It will be factored into the cost-benefit analysis. It may reduce the disciplinary weighing. But it will not zero the balance."
She took one last look around, her mission-assessment complete.
Then her eyes returned to him, cold and clear.
"Can you walk?"
Ash tested the idea.
Pain flared, but nothing was snapped.
Just… thoroughly beaten.
"Probably. Not well."
"Good enough." She turned, as if to leave, then paused, glancing back over her shoulder.
"The conduit. Bring the pieces. Every fragment. Salvage verification is required for the write-off."
She didn't wait for a reply or offer a hand up.
She simply started walking back the way she came, her footsteps once again measured and sure, expecting him to follow.
Ash looked at the broken conduit in his hand.
He looked at the retreating back of the woman who had just tallied another massive debt against his name.
With a groan that was pure agony and exasperation, he began the slow, painful process of gathering himself off the floor.
"Wha—" Ash began, but the word was cut short as another deep, rolling crump vibrated through the ruined foundation of the base.
He slumped back against the fractured wall, a fresh wave of pain radiating from his ribs.
Above them, dust and fine debris rained from the cracked ceiling in a gritty shower.
Cinder didn't flinch.
She simply tilted her head up, her pale eyes narrowing as she brushed a fine layer of grey powder from her hair and shoulders with a sharp, irritated flick of her hand.
It was a small, human gesture of annoyance in the midst of the unreal.
Her gaze grew distant, seeing through the eyes of one of her remaining drones stationed outside.
"I'm picking up energy signatures," she said, her voice low and analytical.
"Southwest. Multiple high-yield glyph discharges. The frequency is chaotic. Not a clean engagement."
Ash pushed himself upright again, one hand pressed to his side.
"That's the direction of the rally point," he muttered. "Where Blaze and Ember went."
"Yeah." Cinder's focus remained inward, processing the distant feed. "Thermal bloom suggests Rank 4 or higher. Repeatedly. Atmospheric disturbance readings are off the scale. It's like a war zone in there."
A faint, dry sound escaped her—not quite a laugh, not quite a sigh.
"Looks like they're having all the fun without us."
***
Back at the rally point, the air was thick with the smell of antiseptic, blood, and burnt metal.
The makeshift medical bay had been set up in what was once a storage locker—a large, cold room with cracked concrete floors and flickering overhead lights powered by a jury-rigged generator.
Cots lined the walls, most of them occupied by groaning, bandaged Steel Talons.
The quiet hum of a portable infuser mixed with the low, tense murmurs of those still able to talk.
Vey stood near the entrance, his good eye sweeping the room with the weary focus of a man tallying a cost he couldn't afford.
His gaze settled on three figures in the far corner, separated from the others—a grim triptych of the night's toll.
On the right, Pen.
She lay on a cot, sedated into a fitful, twitching sleep.
An IV drip fed painkillers and stabilizers into her arm.
The blanket was pulled up to her shoulders, but it did nothing to hide what was missing.
Both of her arms were gone.
Not just injured—severed at the wrists.
The ends were wrapped in thick, sterile gauze, but the shape beneath was all wrong.
Flat.
Empty.
The memory of how it happened was still fresh in Vey's mind—the way Blaze's fire sphere had detonated her conduit right in her hands, turning the device into a fragmentation grenade of glass and alloy.
She hadn't just been burned.
She'd been unmade from the hands up.
Her face, visible above the blanket, was a patchwork of healing gashes and synth-skin grafts.
One particularly deep laceration ran from her temple to her jawline—a permanent souvenir written in scar tissue.
But she was alive.
Stable.
Not in immediate danger.
Vey clicked his tongue softly, a sound of grim resignation.
Pen had just crossed into her early twenties.
A kid, really.
Tough as rusted nails and twice as stubborn.
He'd known her since she was a scrappy teenager following the Talons around, begging for odd jobs.
She'd earned her place through sheer, relentless grit.
Now she'd wake up to a new reality.
No hands.
No conduit.
No way to hold a weapon, or a tool, or even feed herself without help.
She'll get augments, Vey thought, the practicality cold but necessary.
Both arms.
Top-of-the-line, if we can scrape the credits together.
Military-grade prosthetics with full neural integration.
She'll treat it like an upgrade.
Knowing her, she'll ask for built-in tools.
Blades in the forearms.
Grappling hooks in the wrists.
The thought should have been comforting.
It wasn't.
It was just the next problem in a long line of problems.
On the far left, Ember.
They'd dragged her here because they didn't know what else to do with her.
She lay on another cot, unconscious, her breathing shallow and mechanical.
Her face—now visible without the shattered crimson helmet—was sharp-featured, tanned, and currently pale from blood loss and trauma.
A network of fresh bruises mottled her skin, and her nose had been badly broken, caked with dried blood.
She looked small.
Human.
Vulnerable.
It made the hatred in the room feel sharper.
The vote among the Talons had been near-unanimous: execute her.
She'd killed at least five of theirs during her assault.
She'd broken Nail.
She'd come here as an exterminator, a corporate hammer sent to crush rusted nails.
Vey himself had voted yes.
Still wanted to.
His finger had itched near the trigger of his sidearm every time he looked at her.
But they'd stayed their hand.
For now.
Information.
That was the only currency that mattered more than revenge.
Who sent her?
Which corporation was behind the Aegis-frame?
Who wanted the Steel Talons erased so badly they'd deploy a million-credit warsuit to do it?
So she lived.
For questions.
Not for mercy.
In the corner nearby, piled like the carcass of some gleaming, mechanical beast, were the remains of the crimson armor.
They'd pried her out of it—the chest plate cratered and buckled, the helmet in pieces, the limb assemblies cracked and sparking faintly.
Even in ruins, it looked expensive.
Alien.
A technology so far beyond Junkyard salvage it felt like an artifact from another world.
Probably worth more than all our lives combined, Vey thought bitterly.
He pushed down the urge to put a bullet in her skull.
Later.
After she talked.
Or after she died from her wounds—whichever came first.
And in the center, between them, Nail.
He lay on a cot, flat on his back, his body relaxed in a way that felt all wrong.
His chest rose and fell in shallow, steady breaths—too steady.
The rhythm was mechanical, like a pump on a timer.
But he wasn't sleeping.
His eyes were half-open, staring blankly at the ceiling.
The pupils were dilated, unresponsive to the flickering light above.
Dried blood crusted beneath his nostrils and in the delicate cracks at the corners of his eyes, giving his pale face a cracked-porcelain look.
More blood had dried in his ears and along his hairline.
They'd cleaned him up as best they could, but the damage wasn't just surface.
It was deep. Cellular.
Vey stepped closer, his boots scuffing softly on the concrete.
He waved a hand slowly in front of Nail's face.
No blink.
No twitch.
He snapped his fingers near his left ear.
Nothing.
Coma.
The word hung in the air, unspoken but understood by everyone in the room.
But it wasn't a coma from blunt force trauma, not from a concussion or a bleed in the brain—at least, not the kind their med scanner could pinpoint.
This was different.
Vey had seen Nail take beatings that would put hardened fighters in the med bay for weeks.
He'd seen him shrug off pain, push through broken bones, come back swinging with a grin full of blood.
This wasn't that.
This was… emptiness.
A hollow shell with the engine still idling.
Why?
Vey's mind circled the question like a scavenger bird.
And how?
He'd watched it happen.
One second, Nail was on the ground, broken, shouting at nothing.
The next—a blur.
A series of impacts that sounded like a building being dismantled from the inside out.
And then Nail was standing over Ember's broken body, frozen in the aftermath, before his legs gave out and he collapsed.
But he hadn't been hit in the head.
Not in any way they could see.
No skull fracture.
No spinal damage.
His vitals were stable, if slow.
It was like his mind had… burned out.
Overclocked itself until the circuits fried.
Vey remembered the way Nail had moved in those last moments.
Unnaturally fast.
Impossibly precise.
As if time itself had slowed down for him alone.
Vey had a cold suspicion settling in his gut.
He reached down and gently lifted one of Nail's hands.
The knuckles were raw, split open from the force of the punches that had shattered the Aegis-frame.
But the fingers were limp.
No tension.
No life.
Vey set the hand back down on the cot, his own fingers lingering for a moment on Nail's wrist, feeling the slow, shallow pulse beneath the skin.
What did you trade, kid? he wondered, the thought quiet and terrible.
What did you give for those few seconds of power?
There was no answer.
Only the hum of the infuser, the distant groan of the generator, and the quiet, shallow breathing of a man who had won a fight and lost himself in the process.
And beneath it all, vibrating through the concrete floor, trembling in the air—the distant, relentless sound of another fight.
It wasn't close.
Not here.
But it was loud enough to bleed through the ruins, to seep through the walls of the rally point like a bad rumor.
A deep, percussive crump—the sound of something heavy and final being unmade.
The shriek of shearing metal.
The low, subsonic groan of a building giving way.
And sometimes, between the collapses, a brighter, sharper sound—a crackling discharge of energy that didn't sound like any glyph Vey knew.
The fight was being broadcast across the sector in the only language the Junkyard understood: violence.
And it was getting louder.