The clerk slid a crate of battered firearms onto the trolley and set an amber vial on top. "Today's meds," he said. "This week's repairs and take-backs. And… one more thing."
Haven 73 lived on the edge of too many ellipses. The man's mouth opened, closed, then he pushed the vial toward Ash Vale. "Because of the Nightshade Unit's expansion, anti-rad stocks are thin. That's your third." He hesitated. "It's also the last. Good luck."
Ash rubbed both hands over his face and forced a smile that didn't reach his eyes. "I'll make it count." He signed the slate, hooked the trolley, and dragged the rattling load through the concrete throat of the administration hall toward the surface. The air changed from bleach to dust, from fluorescent hum to the high, thin wind that always found the seams of the refuge and whistled like a kettle you could never lift from the fire.
His shop crouched two corridors down from the freight lift, a tin-mouth hole with a hinged sign that never hung straight. Inside, benches waited under the harsh spill of a scavenged floodlight: vises, cracked hard cases of tools, a barrel stove ticking itself cool. Ash propped the door with his boot, kicked the trolley inside, then palmed the vial. The liquid inside glowed a tired shade between honey and iodine.
"Compared to everyone else who 'transmigrated,' I definitely pulled the short straw," he muttered. The word still felt ridiculous in his mouth, like he was accusing himself of a magic trick in a world that ran on rust and ration chits. Back on Blue Star he'd had a job, two decent hands, and a future that, while narrow, didn't actively try to saw through him. Ruinworld didn't deal in futures. It dealt in attrition.
He set the vial on the bench, wiped his palms on his apron, and rolled up his right sleeve. The necrosis mapped itself across his forearm like frost on river ice—dark violet webs between pallid islands of skin. The flesh felt heavy and faintly numb, as if someone else's arm had been grafted on a degree out of alignment. He'd burned two vials already and watched the rot creep anyway.
"Third time's the charm," he told the room, and twisted the cap.
The smell came first—metal, disinfectant, a bitter echo that pinched the back of his tongue. He tilted his head and took the anti-rad in one hard swallow. It went down like a fist and settled like a hot stone. He waited, breath held until his ribs ticked, for anything—coolness, a sting, a twitch. Nothing. Only the shop's sounds returned: the lift cables thudding somewhere in the walls; the wind dragging grit along the door seam; the faint metallic settling of the guns in their crate.
Work, then. Work never lied.
He broke down the first rifle on the bench with his left hand doing the thinking and the right doing its sluggish best to follow. Springs went into a dish. Pins stacked on a rag. The bolt came free, its face pitted with grit and a faint smear of radioactive dust that winked dullly where the floodlight hit it. Ash breathed out through his teeth and set the bolt aside for a full scrub in the sealed box. Haven 73's admin office called this "recycling and repair." Out in the waste, people who carried these things called it staying alive.
He cleaned the chamber with slow, precise strokes, rotated the guide, watched the pull patches go from black to gray to something that was at least honest about its contamination. He rewrapped a fraying sling, crimped a dented feed lip, tapped a stubborn pin back to obedience. When the rifle went back together, the action cycled smooth. He tagged it, logged the serial and the condition in his dog-eared book, and reached for the next.
Between jobs he logged serials and condition notes, kept himself moving, kept from sitting too long with the heavy, numb ache of the arm. Twice he reached for the amber bottle out of reflex and found it empty, cap off, the reek fading, the promise already bankrupt.
By midnight the barrel stove had given up its ghost and the floodlight had taken on a faint pulse that meant its salvaged capacitor was warming. Ash stacked the admin guns in one rack—repaired, tagged—and turned to the three crates that had been dropped off with a grunt and a nod by Hale, a broad-shouldered captain with storm-gray stubble and a laugh like a gravel slide. Payment, Hale had called them. Scav finds. "You'll make better use than we would."
The first crate was honest enough: stripped weapons for parts, a coil of copper wire, a bundle of cloth-wrapped magazines that smelled like old oil and cold fear. The second crate held a tangle of harness webbing, two cracked lenses, and a field manual printed in a font the world didn't use anymore. The third crate thought it was special. Gray foam cradled a palm-sized slate whose face was a sheet of dead glass. Someone had etched a salvage mark across one corner with a knife tip before thinking better.
Ash wiped grit off the slate and thumbed the side seam. A line of light crawled. The screen flickered, stuttered, then steadied on a deep starfield pricked with notations like moth bites. In the lower corner, blocky numerals crawled into place.
IMPERIAL YEAR: 30068.
He blew air through his cheeks. "You've got to be kidding me." The Grand Expedition era. People in that year had crossed the dark like it was a country road. They had put flags on asteroids and names on gods and called it logistics. Haven 73 was the table-scrap left after their feast dried out and flaked to dust.
A menu tab unfurled down the left edge. VEHICLE SYSTEM. A second. COLOSSUS LEGION. "Where did you pull this from, Hale?" Ash asked the slate as if it would develop a mouth and tattle. The map responded to touch with a lazy parallax that made his stomach float. He pinched, dragged, zoomed, watched routes spiderweb through a star-necklace he didn't recognize, and then the screen hiccuped and threw a kernel panic in an alphabet no one taught in Haven schools. The slate went black again, the room's single floodlight reclaiming its throne.
He set the relic gently into its foam like he was putting a child down to sleep, then leaned on the bench and let the ache in his arm inform the rest of him. He needed that vial to do something. Needed this day to be more than a long walk to the same cliff's edge.
He didn't get miracles. He got screws and solvent and old manuals and a refuge clerk's careful pity. Fine. He'd make do.
He worked until the clock on the wall clicked past whatever number meant the night had changed its mind. He checked the arm again between jobs, then stopped checking because it never improved while he stared at it. He cleaned two bolts that wept grit like tear ducts. He re-crowned a barrel that had kissed a rock too hard. He rewrapped a stock with cloth soaked in resin until it felt honest in the hand again.
When the floodlight finally hiccuped and steadied and the lift thumped somewhere deep like a mechanical heart turning over, the air outside the shop had thinned from black to a bruised, metallic gray. Morning didn't so much arrive on Ruinworld as admit it hadn't died yet.
Ash pushed back from the bench, flexed his right hand, and felt the thumb lag a fraction of a beat behind the rest. He stared at the arm without rolling the sleeve. Then he stood, walked to the back room, and found the full-length mirror he kept there because sometimes a man had to face things with both eyes.
The mirror had lost a fight with something heavier than truth and was cracked on the left from shoulder to floor. He dragged it to a sliver of light leaking through the doorway, planted his feet, and rolled the sleeve. The skin below his elbow told him everything he needed to know before his brain caught up. The dark violet webs had thickened. Islands of pallor had shrunk. The rot had crept toward his wrist a finger's breadth while he'd been drowning the night in work.
His stomach made a small, practical decision about hope and shelved it. He breathed once, twice, shallow. The arm was heavier again, the numbness more distinct, as if the boundary between him and not-him had moved inward another centimeter.
"At this rate," he said to the cracked glass, "two months and I'm down a hand. Three and I'm sawing at the elbow." His voice didn't wobble. Why would it? He'd done the math before. He did it every morning like brushing his teeth, in a world that had very few bathrooms left to brush them in.
He put a fist—his left—against the mirror beside his reflection's face. "I'm not a brawler," he told the man looking back. "I'm not a hunter. I fix things. That's my way through." And because saying it made it real, and because making it real was what he could control, he said it again, quieter. "I fix things. I keep the shop. I survive."
The light shifted, as if the sun outside had shrugged and shown one more shoulder. The mirror threw a pale smear across the floor. Ash lowered his arm. The weight of it dragged at his shoulder like a sack of wet sand.
He looked down—and froze.
Something new had slid into the world where nothing new happened without a price. It wasn't on the mirror. It wasn't on the bench or the floodlight or the slate cradled in its foam. It was in his vision, as if a drop of clean water had landed on the surface of his eye and had decided it could bloom there.
A rectangle, thin as breath, a cool blue panel that didn't belong to reflection or residue or any trick of fatigue. It hung where his attention hung, floating at the edge of his focus and following when his gaze shifted, as if tethered to his thinking.
Ash didn't move. He didn't blink. He tracked the panel up a fraction. It came with him, obedient as a cursor.
His mouth tasted suddenly of the anti-rad again, the bitterness returning like a memory that carried its own weather. He let out a slow breath he hadn't counted on holding.
"Okay," he said. "Either the meds finally did something weird…" He angled his head. The panel stayed. "Or—"
The panel brightened a shade, the blue deepening, the lines of its border resolving into something too precise for any hallucination he had rights to.
"…or I just got an interface."