Rain came in thin, stinging sheets, glossing the depot's iron like a black mirror. It made the place smell sharper ... wet metal, oil, and the faint tang of old fires. The thunder that rolled over the city felt less like weather and more like a warning.
Kazuma woke the team before dawn. He moved with the same calm precision he used for everything: in calculations, in decisions, in the way he accepted responsibility. Today, the objective was straightforward and terrifyingly important.
"Power," he said. "We get a generator running. If we can get local systems online ... lights, pumps, communications ... we can change the geometry of danger. Mobility follows."
Mike rubbed sleep from his eyes and flexed the bandage on his arm. "You just like saying words like 'geometry' before breakfast."
Leina packed spare batteries into a canvas bag, the movement efficient and silent. "Then let's get to it."
Luna appeared at the workbench with a small toolkit and a stack of printed schematics. She moved like someone who had lived in the language of parts and circuits ... careful, almost reverent. There was a steadiness to her that hadn't been there when she'd stepped into the fog.
Kazuma set her next to the depot's rusting diesel generator. Its casing was pitted and crusted with the grime of years. A spiderweb of cables led from it to a dusty control box where fuses had been eaten by corrosion.
"You understand this?" he asked.
She didn't answer at first. Her fingers found the service panel, thumb tracing the faded labels. "It's old, but straightforward. If the starter engages, we'll need a field charge. The solenoid is fried. We can jury-rig a relay from the secondary bus, but the cooling fan's seized. We'll need to free it before sustained power, or it'll overheat."
Kazuma's brow tightened. "Parts?"
Luna shrugged. "A handful of bolts, some wire, a capacitor or three. I can scavenge most of that here." Her voice was calm. "If we can spin the flywheel manually and get the field winding energized, it'll turn over."
Mike grinned before the plan finished forming. "So basically, we get the oldest machine to pretend it's a new one. Simple."
Dan, checking the perimeter on the tablet's cached map, said, "We don't have long. If the Runners pick up noise, they'll close in. Quiet and fast. Two people on the gates."
Kazuma assigned them. "Mike and I will work the generator. Leina and Dan take the south gate. Luna stays on electronics and the relay setup."
Luna hesitated. "I ... I'd rather be with you."
Kazuma's face softened for a fraction of a second. "You need a clean, dry station to solder. We need you alive and steady."
She nodded, hiding the disappointment well.
~~ Line Break ~~
They moved like a small engine of their own: Mike and Kazuma hauling the heavy starter housing onto the concrete, Luna at the bench reverently measuring, Dan bolting barricades shut with Leina's steady hammer blows.
The generator was impossibly heavy and stubborn. Old men had once cursed these things into life; now four people cursed in sixteen different languages between them. Mike wiped rain from his face, muscles burning, and threw a grin at Kazuma. "Ever regret major life choices at eight in the morning?"
Kazuma did not smile. He read tolerances in the bolt threads and found rust where tolerance had bled away. "If you mean staying alive, yes. Frequently."
Luna soldered with a trembling hand at first, then steadier. She had a confidence that grew as the smell of flux filled the air and the spatter of metal and wire assembled into a plan. She fashioned a makeshift relay from a capacitor scavenged off an old locomotive control board and rewired the field circuit according to diagrams she'd printed from some long-dead forum.
Mike and Kazuma wrestled the starter into alignment. Metal banged. Fingers pinched. The rain tapped a counter-rhythm across the depot roof.
"Ready?" Mike asked, voice tight.
"Ready," Kazuma answered.
Mike turned the heavy crank at Luna's direction ... three rotations, then a pause to let the field charge take, then another spin. The generator coughed, complained, and shuddered something like remembering motion. The big flywheel trembled and then turned.
A sputter. A cough. The diesel coughed again, a grate of old lungs.
Luna's voice was small and full of more hope than she intended. "Field's holding. Now..."
The generator roared.
It was not elegant. It was noisy and oily and it spat a few bursts of black smoke that smelled like the old world. Then the control panel lights blinked, a small constellation of green that made their faces look like things under streetlamps.
A chorus of relief escaped them ... not prayers so much as the better, raw sound of a thing regained.
They had power.
The Taste of Light
Lights hummed on in the warehouse like constellations waking. The pumps in the yard gurgled as ancient lines cycled. A radio crackled on the bench, and for a moment the static seemed like applause.
The first practical victory was a small warmth: the water heater coughed and then gave a weak hiss, and hot water trickled into a battered kettle. Leina laughed, a quick, incredulous sound. Mike cupped steam in his hands like a child finding a coin.
Kazuma moved with purposeful steps, rerouting power to the security gate. "We can close and lock electronically. Cameras will be intermittent, but we'll get motion feeds."
Dan frowned. "Motion sensors will give us a noise problem."
"We'll schedule sweep windows," Kazuma said. "Short, coordinated. Quiet in between."
Luna stood very still, absorbing the hum around her. Power was not just light; it was leverage. A refrigerator could sound like a trumpet in war, but it could also keep medicine from spoiling. A radio could be a beacon or a lure; it all depended on how you used it.
She stepped close to Kazuma and said, quieter than before, "We can rig a low-voltage heartbeat on the fence. If something pushes through, we'll know before it's within sight."
He nodded. "Do it."
Her hands moved with something like ownership.
~~ Line Break ~~
They worked late into the day, wiring, reconfiguring, learning the temper of ancient machinery. The depot flared with small points of light now: a bank of LEDs along the office corridor, a weak desk lamp lighting a row of tools, a patched radio spitting static while someone tried to tune a voice.
And then, as the sun fell, they heard it ... a high keening in the distance that grew like a held breath being released across rooftops.
It was the call of a thousand small alarms: shouts, moans, the metallic ring of things banging together.
Mike looked toward the south gate, where Dan and Leina stood like sentries in the dark. "They heard us."
Kazuma's voice was calm but hard. "We have two choices. Close the yard and hole up, or leverage the power to make a path."
Luna's hands were steady around the relay switch. "We can make the lights draw attention away from the gate. Program a moving beacon along the east corridor ... lure them past the gate until they're grouped, then lock down."
Mike blinked. "Like a festival of death?"
"Like a controlled distraction," Kazuma corrected. "We draw them to a kill zone on the tracks. The Brutes are slow; the Runners will fall back when they find obstacles."
Leina's jaw tightened. "And people?"
"There may be no people left to save in that sweep," Kazuma said. "We minimize risk."
For a long second, it was almost too quiet. Then the gates trembled under a first ripple of impact ... a test, or a probing.
Dan yelled into a throat that had learned to be heard when it mattered, "Now!"
Luna triggered the moving beacons ... a string of LED markers on timer relays ... and the depot exploded into motion: lights chasing each other along the rails, a path of false safety. Distant shapes turned like moths.
The plan was a messy, human thing ... a mixture of improvisation, desperation, and engineering. It worked for a while. The dead turned toward the corridor of light and moved as if magnetized.
Then something thundered from the east: a wall of sound and weight ... multiple impacts at once. The Brutes were pushing through a collapsed overpass; their slow momentum became terrible force.
The fencing began to strain.
Kazuma shouted orders that threaded through the rain. Men and women ran to reinforce points, to jam bolts, to push scrap metal into webs of defense. The generator coughed; the load spiked. Gauges wavered.
Luna's face went white. "We're overloading the bus!"
Mike's hand shot to the breaker. "Pull it!"
Kazuma barked, "Divert! Shed nonessential loads. Lights only on the beacon. Cut office power!"
They ripped circuits out and isolated the beacon. The roar outside became a pressure against iron and bone.
For a breath, the depot shuddered and held.
~~ Line Break ~~
When the noise finally faded into ragged moans and the pounding eased to a distant scrape, the five of them slumped where they stood. Rain washed over the yard like a purifying thing that did not know what to cleanse.
They had kept the gates. The fence had buckled in places but not given. They had bought themselves a moment ... a bloody, expensive sliver of time.
Kazuma's shoulders were tight. He looked at each of them in turn, as if counting what they had left.
"You did… well," he said to Luna, voice not without warmth. "The relay held longer than expected."
She wiped grime from her hands, suddenly very tired. "It's just circuits," she said. "They do what they're told."
Mike let out a breath that might have been a laugh. "You keep referring to 'just' like we're in a DIY tutorial."
Dan, who had stood like granite at the gate, finally allowed himself a small nod of approval. "We pushed them off. For now."
Leina sank onto a crate and hugged her knees. "For now is what we have."
Kazuma turned his head toward the dark line of tracks stretching into the ruined city. "We keep building. Power. Perimeter. Mobility. If we can get a locomotive running under its own steam, we move on rails and the world becomes smaller."
Mike looked at Luna and, without his usual line, said quietly, "You did good today."
She looked surprised, then smiled very small. "We did it together."
Rain kept falling. The depot thrummed with the low hum of machinery and the distant, patient mutter of the dead. The storm had passed, but the threat had not. Power had given them leverage; it had also made noise, and noise had a cost.
They had bought themselves a beginning.
Somewhere deep in the dark beyond the yard, something larger than a horde listened and moved.