Iron didn’t wake to an alarm, but to the sound of someone breathing loudly and unevenly right above his ear.

  He snapped his eyes open.

  The first thing he felt was nausea. His skull throbbed as if a dozen construction staples had been hammered into it.

  Last night’s work with titanium — and that cursed mental “overclock” — had taken its toll. Gray blotches drifted across his vision, and his mouth tasted stubbornly of rust.

  “He opened his eyes!” someone whispered hoarsely, voice trembling. “The Master is watching!”

  Iron tried to sit up. The world lurched violently. Zeno was instantly at his side. The Golem hadn’t deployed his mounted guns, but his manipulators were coiled tight as drawn springs.

  “Iron, thirty-two biological entities detected within a five-meter radius. Aggression level: low. Insanity level: critical,” the robot intoned.

  Iron forced his sight to focus.

  Around them, in the half-dark of the warehouse, people knelt.

  These were not the polished mages of the Citadel. They looked like animated heaps of junk — rags, loops of wire worn like necklaces, faces smeared with used oil.

  One stepped forward — the oldest among them. A bent copper pipe formed a crude “crown” on his head.

  “O Voice of Steel…” the old man trembled, extending skeletal hands toward Iron. “You repaired yourself. You breathed life into dead flesh. Save us as well. Our flame… our god is dying.”

  Iron glanced at his new right arm. Matte titanium looked alien against his pale, sweat-damp skin. The fingers obeyed perfectly, but a twitching pain pulsed deep in the stump joint.

  “Ephrem. You alive?” Iron rasped, ignoring the old man.

  “Alive,” Ephrem muttered from the corner, gripping his staff tightly. “But if these lunatics decide to eat us in honor of their gears, I won’t last long. Malek, they’ve been watching you for an hour. Praying.”

  Iron pushed himself to his feet. His knees buckled, and he instinctively braced against a crate with the new arm.

  A soft crack.

  Wood splintered beneath his titanium fingers like eggshell.

  He hadn’t even tried.

  “Lead,” he said to the ragged leader. “Let’s see your god.”

  They walked for a long time.

  The inside of the City of Bridges resembled the intestines of some colossal steel beast. Narrow passages. Ladders held together by stubborn hope. Pipes everywhere — large, small, icy with condensation or scalding hot.

  At last they entered a vast chamber that had once been a pumping station.

  Stolen novel; please report.

  In the center, from a massive rupture in the floor, rose a column of blue flame.

  But it was sickly.

  It didn’t roar as it should — it whistled weakly, sometimes faltering into sooty yellow sputters.

  Around it, hundreds of people swayed in rhythm with that thin, wavering sound.

  “There,” said the old man — Corvus, they had called him — pointing to the ruptured pipe. “The Heart of the Bridge. If it dies, the Great Cold will come. We offered sacrifices… copper, oil…”

  “You’re idiots,” Iron muttered, stepping toward the rupture, ignoring the collective gasp. “Zeno. Light.”

  The Golem’s beam sliced through the gloom.

  Three meters down, the main valve was clogged with grime and scale. Gas pressure had dropped. Worse still, from a neighboring pipe cracked by age, superheated steam poured into the shaft.

  “If pressure drops two more units,” Iron wiped his nose; the sleeve came away red, “the flame dies. Then the accumulated gas explodes. Your ‘heart’ will take this entire sector with it.”

  “Save it!” Corvus fell prostrate. “Prophet, command the metal!”

  Iron stared into the narrow steam-filled shaft. An ordinary man would boil alive in under a minute. His left arm was useless.

  Only the right remained.

  Again.

  He wasn’t afraid of death.

  He was afraid of what happened inside his head when the skill activated.

  It felt like plunging into freezing water — first the burn, then nothing but the objective.

  [Activating: The Will to Live]

  The world froze.

  The chanting became a distant hum. Nausea vanished. Iron saw only vectors — pressure vectors, torque angles, thermal expansion coefficients.

  “Zeno, secure the grate. Ephrem, stay where you are,” Iron’s voice sounded flat. Borrowed.

  He jumped down.

  Steam engulfed him instantly. Skin on his face hissed; boiling droplets ran through his hair. But he felt none of it. His mind categorized pain as irrelevant noise.

  He seized the valve with his right hand.

  The titanium heated almost instantly, transferring fire into the shoulder mounts. Something burst inside his skull. Darkness bled across his vision, thick and heavy.

  He didn’t let go.

  “Thirty degrees. Four hundred newtons. More. More,” the emotionless inner voice whispered.

  The valve, unmoved for fifty years, shrieked. Rust fell in flakes. The hydraulics inside the prosthetic screamed under pressure. One more second and the titanium tendons would rupture.

  With a resonant удар, the valve turned.

  Gas roared upward.

  Above, the flame transformed from a sickly flicker into a towering five-meter pillar of blue fire.

  Iron climbed out, staggering. His face was blistered red; his clothes smoked.

  The instant his boots touched the floor, the skill disengaged.

  The backlash hit like a hammer.

  Sound vanished completely — deafness swallowed everything. Blood vessels burst in his eyes, tinting the world pink.

  “Malek!” Ephrem rushed forward, grabbing his shoulders. “Can you hear me?!”

  Iron stared blankly.

  He saw the old man’s lips moving, but felt nothing. No fear. No relief. Ephrem looked like nothing more than an inconvenient mass of organic matter blocking his balance.

  He shoved him away with the titanium arm.

  Ephrem flew back several meters, striking a pipe hard.

  “Don’t… touch…” Iron rasped. His voice barely obeyed him.

  The crowd erupted in ecstasy. Foreheads struck the floor. Songs rose.

  Corvus crawled toward Iron, offering a bundle wrapped in dirty suede.

  “Prophet… You restored the God… Take this. Memory of those who built the Bridges.”

  Iron accepted the bundle with trembling fingers.

  His hearing returned slowly, along with a crushing, inhuman fatigue. Every word struck his skull like a mallet.

  “Paths,” Corvus whispered. “Hidden trails beneath the Bridge. Follow them. But beware. The Black Man with glass eyes… he is already here. He hunts the one who steals the Precursor spark.”

  Iron tucked the bundle inside his coat.

  He looked at his hand — blackened with soot, yet still gleaming coldly. He was himself again. Pain from burns returned. So did shame for shoving Ephrem aside.

  But something colder remained.

  He understood now: the skill didn’t merely help him survive.

  It was erasing him.

  Layer by layer, turning him into the same indifferent metal as this City.

  “We leave,” he said, forcing himself upright. “We can’t stay.”

  Zeno stepped forward without a word, clearing a path through the kneeling fanatics.

  Iron walked behind him, clutching his burned arm to his chest, trying not to meet Ephrem’s gaze as the old man limped after him — casting wary glances at his malek.