They left before the city had fully woken, a low line of supply rigs threading the narrow bridge that linked two market districts. The bridge was old—iron ribs softened by tide‑light and years of patched seams—but it was the artery that fed half the fringe. Captain Rhea rode in the command rig, her face a map of concentration. Arjun rode near the front, the Astraeon Veil warm at his throat, the Golem‑bond strapped to the rig's flank and the Phoenix‑root medic crouched where he could move fast.
The convoy's manifest was routine: food, medical kits, a crate of water filters bound for a settlement that had been flagged in the academy's outreach logs. Contractors had been contracted for heavy haulage; their anchors hummed at the bridge's approaches like sleeping beasts. The academy had insisted on oversight: telemetry on, contractor liaisons present, cadet teams on standby. It was the sort of redundancy that made the frontier work—too many hands, too many checks.
Halfway across the bridge the first anchor failed.
It was not a graceful failure. A contractor's anchor—one of the heavy rigs that had latched to the bridge's midspan—spiked, then went dead. Sparks lanced the air where metal met tide‑light. The bridge shuddered. A crate slid and struck a support. The convoy's engines coughed. For a breath the world narrowed to the sound of metal and the smell of hot ozone.
"Hold positions!" Captain Rhea barked. The Golem‑bond slammed its palms to the bridge's ribs and began to press, keystone by keystone, while the Phoenix‑root medic moved to the nearest crate to check for injuries. Arjun named the seam between two warped plates and unrolled a narrow ribbon of starlight along the bridge's center, a sheltered lane for medics and a buffer for the rig crews. The corridor hummed and swallowed the bridge's groan.
Then the second anchor detonated.
It was a deliberate, surgical strike—an overdraw that had been forced into the contractor network and then cut, a pulse that had been timed to hit the bridge's weakest joints. The bridge bucked like an animal in pain. A support snapped. A rig tipped. Men shouted. Tide‑light sprayed like glass.
Arjun felt the halo at his throat flare into a white heat. The mind‑screen flashed warnings: fatigue critical; corruption trace deepening. He widened the corridor by a fraction, a motion practiced and precise, and the ribbon steadied enough for the Phoenix‑root medic to reach a fallen cadet. Harun lay half‑under a crate, one leg bent at an angle that did not belong. Blood darkened the tide‑light at his sleeve.
"Get him out!" the medic shouted. The Golem‑bond heaved the crate with a groan that sounded like old stone moving. Arjun threaded the corridor under the rig's lip and felt the stitch pull like a living thing. The contractor liaison cursed and tried to reroute power to a dead anchor; someone in the gallery—an observer from a contractor house—moved with a speed that was all calculation.
They pulled Harun free. The medic's hands were steady, but the injury was bad: a compound fracture and a deep resonance burn where the splice had licked the metal. The Phoenix‑root medic worked with the calm of someone who had seen the same bruise before—stabilize, bind, name the pain so it could be treated. Arjun felt the cost of the activation in his bones; the halo on his mind‑screen showed a red thread that would not fade quickly.
Captain Rhea's voice cut through the chaos. "Contain the site. No anchors. No contractor draws. We do this with sigils and constructs." Her order was a scalpel. The contractor liaison protested—anchors were faster, he said; the convoy would be delayed, he said—but Rhea's jaw did not move. She had seen the way private hands could turn a public seam into a private route. She would not let it happen here.
They worked in a choreography that had been rehearsed and refined: Golem‑bond keystones to shore the broken ribs, cadet teams to move crates into the sheltered lane, medics to triage the injured. Arjun kept the corridor steady with a series of small, surgical widenings, each one costing him a visible thread on the mind‑screen. Sparks lanced at the bridge's edge where a jury‑rigged draw device had been wedged into a maintenance panel; the device fizzed and died when the Phoenix‑root medic poured a stabilizing tincture into the seam.
By the time the last crate was secured and the injured were loaded into a med‑rig, the bridge had been stabilized enough to limp the convoy across at a crawl. The contractor liaison's face was pale and tight; his anchors had been compromised and his crew shaken. The academy's telemetry had recorded the attempted overrides and the scorched plates that matched the pattern from the tram hub and the reclamation channel. Someone had escalated from tests to sabotage.
The immediate aftermath was a tangle of practicalities and politics. Harun was flown to the outpost clinic with a guarded prognosis; the Phoenix‑root medic stayed with him until the med‑rig left. Director Sethi's office sent a terse message demanding a full report. The contractor houses issued statements that blamed rogue operators and promised cooperation. Public forums lit up with outrage and speculation: was this a strike, a test, or a message?
For Arjun the cost was immediate and personal. Harun's injury was a bruise on the mentorship circle—literal and symbolic. The academy's privileges were curtailed: contractor access to certain bridges was suspended pending investigation; cadet field deployments were tightened. The public, hungry for a narrative, demanded answers and quick action. The academy moved to show it could protect the frontier without ceding seams to private hands; the contractors moved to protect their routes and reputations.
That night the mentorship circle gathered in the low room with maps and practice rigs. They did not speak much. Captain Rhea cataloged the facts with the same economy she used in the field: who had been on the bridge, which anchors had failed, what telemetry showed. Ishaan's liaison sat in the corner with a dossier that smelled faintly of frontier dust; he offered no solutions, only a look that was almost sympathy and almost calculation.
Arjun sat with his hands folded and felt the halo at his throat like a compass that had been nudged. The bridge had held because they had chosen to stitch with people in mind rather than speed. They had paid a cost: a friend injured, a convoy delayed, and a public that now watched for the next breach. The sabotage had been a message—louder than a smear, more dangerous than a test. Whoever had ordered it had resources and reach.
Before he slept he wrote the reflective entries the Phoenix‑root medic required: the sequence of the breach, the way the corridor had held, the bruise on Harun's leg, and the pattern that linked this attack to earlier splices. Each line eased the fatigue thread a little. Each line made the halo steadier.
Outside, the bridge's ribs glinted under the city's thin indigo. The convoy had passed, but the map had been altered. The academy would tighten oversight and pursue the ledger; contractors would sharpen their counters. Between those motions, the world had become clearer and meaner: someone was willing to break public seams to force private advantage, and the cost of holding would be measured in blood and broken bones if they did not find a way to stop it.