The Maintenance Bay was a cage of noise. The rhythmic thud of the steam hammers vibrated through the iron walls.

  Ezy stood before the open chassis of the Crusher. The machine was a frame of Red Metal struts and hydraulic pistons, half-assembled but imposing. She held a heavy hydraulic actuator in her hands, trying to align it with a mounting bracket above her head.

  She took a step to the side.

  Her new prosthetic foot caught on a seam in the concrete. She stumbled, the foot’s weighted articulations throwing her off balance.

  She pushed on the chassis to keep from falling, the heavy part clattering from her grip to the floor.

  Trenn had been hiding here for an hour.

  He couldn't go back to the barracks; he couldn't face Mara. Seeing her guarded posture and angry stares triggered a confusing spike of aggression in his lizard brain, followed immediately by a crushing human guilt.

  He couldn't be near Almitad, either. He saw what was under the mask. Knowing the green pulse was coming from inside her exposed ribcage made the scales of his tail itch and filled him with anxiety.

  And he certainly couldn't face Zeen. The gnome had swung by earlier to help Ezy with calibrations.

  He hadn't said a word to Trenn, just glared before retreating to his own bay. Zeen looked at him like he was a bomb waiting to go off, and Trenn wasn't sure he was wrong.

  So he sat here with the Crusher. Watching Ezy work.

  She was angry, like the others. But it was directed at a machine, not at him.

  She kicked the tire. Pain jolted up her shin; she ignored it.

  "This damn foot," she growled, pacing a tight, angry circle around the dropped part. Her metal prosthetic clacked loudly, a disjointed rhythm. "The tension spring is too stiff. It doesn't swing."

  "It's not the spring," he said from his crate, his massive golden tail coiled around the base.

  Ezy spun on him. "Excuse me?"

  "Your hip. You're… throwing it,” he said, trying to explain a concept he had trouble remembering. “You're walking like you still have an ankle to push off of."

  Ezy bristled. "I designed the ankle joint myself. It articulates."

  "It's metal," Trenn countered. "It doesn't push. It pivots."

  Trenn rubbed his temple, the gold scales throbbing. He needed the man who knew the words, not the crocodile who wanted to bite.

  "Bio... mechanics," he said, the word an anchor in the fog. "It used to be my job. To know how bodies move."

  He stood, the movement heavy with the sound of shifting scales. He walked toward her, his body hunched forward to pull his center of gravity forward.

  "You're trying to walk light, like a gnome. But that leg is dead weight. Commit to the drop. Use it as a pendulum."

  He moved behind her, placing a few fingers above the prosthetic's ankle joint.

  "Step," he ordered.

  Ezy hesitated, her hip hiking up to lift the weight.

  "No.”

  The warmth of her body through the shirt sent a jolt through his nervous system.

  An impulse flared behind his eyes—prey, close, soft, crush—overlaying the instruction with violence.

  He squeezed his eyes shut, his hand trembling as he forced the reptile brain down, burying it under layers of sheer will until he found the human thought beneath.

  "Don't lift. Drive from the… the glute," he said, sweat beading on his forehead. "Swing it from the hip. Trust the momentum."

  Ezy hesitated. "Like a pendulum?"

  She relaxed her hip. She didn't try to lift the leg; she swung it. The heel struck the concrete with a solid clack.

  "Good," Trenn said, stepping back. "Now try to drive the heel."

  The rhythm wasn't graceful. It was a heavy, industrial cadence that required total, exhausting concentration. The lurching hitch wasn't gone; she was just learning to catch herself before she fell.

  From the adjacent bay, the high-pitched whine of Zeen’s grinder flared, cutting through the wall. It was followed by the sharp hiss of quenching metal. Zeen hadn't left his forge in two days, hammering their last piece of White Metal, the large round one, into a shield for Trenn.

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  The whole mountain was grinding toward war, indifferent to the quiet struggle in the maintenance bay.

  Ezy stopped.

  She looked at her metal foot, then back at Trenn. The anger drained out of her. Trenn watched the muscles in her thigh twitch, trying to flex an ankle that wasn't there.

  "I can feel them. My toes. They're curled tight. They cramp at night. How do I stop the cramping in a foot that's rotting in a landfill?"

  Trenn withdrew his hand. "You don't. You just learn to walk around the pain."

  Ezy slumped against the workbench. She reached down to the thigh strap of her prosthetic leg.

  "I need to adjust the fit," she mumbled. "It's biting."

  Her hand hovered over the buckle, her gaze darting anxiously to the open archway where the din of the factory floor roared. She hesitated, a flicker of shame tightening her jaw.

  Trenn caught the look. He stood and walked to the heavy iron sliding door. With a grunt of effort against the rusted tracks, he hauled it shut, throwing the latch with a heavy clank. The deafening thud of the steam hammers muted to a throb.

  The sudden privacy seemed to drain the last of the fight out of her.

  She unbuckled the heavy leather straps. She depressed the release pin on the socket. Ezy hissed through her teeth, sliding the heavy metal limb free.

  The smell hit them instantly—stale sweat, old leather, and the sharp bite of alcohol.

  She rolled down the thick wool sock. The skin was raw. Deep purple chafing marks ringed her calf. A cluster of blisters crowned the bone end; one had burst, weeping clear fluid and blood.

  Ezy picked up a rag and a jar of salve. She winced as she dabbed the stinging ointment onto the raw sores. Her face was pale, tight with a private, humiliating agony.

  "It never calluses," she said, her voice small. "Every morning, I put it on, and I think, 'Today it will fit.' And every night, it looks like this."

  She looked up at Trenn, her eye wet. "I'm turning into a monster, Trenn. Piece by piece. Pretty soon, there won't be enough Gnome left to fill a casket."

  Trenn looked at the raw meat of her leg. Then he turned around.

  "Watch," he said.

  He grabbed the hem of his gray Goat-Kin robe and pulled it up to his shoulder blades.

  Ezy gasped.

  The transition from skin to scale wasn't clean.

  Where golden armor erupted from his lower back, skin stretched to tearing. Translucent red striations marked the surrender of flesh to metal. Scabs and weeping sores framed the emergence. The scales didn't sit on the skin; they pressed into it.

  Every movement pinched raw flesh, sending fire up his spine that settled into a maddening itch.

  "As far as I can tell, it's fused. Bone to gold. It goes deep. It feels numb... until I twist."

  His hand twitched at his side.

  "Then it pulls on raw nerves."

  He let the robe drop back. He turned back to her. The gold scales on his neck flared and settled with a soft chink.

  "You're bolting metal to your body to survive. I'm being eaten by mine. We aren't what we were, Ezy. We never will be again."

  He sat back down on the crate, the tail curling heavily around his feet.

  Ezy looked at her stump, then at the heavy prosthetic on the floor. She wiped her eye with the back of her skeletal hand and pulled the wool sock back over the sores.

  She shoved her limb back into the socket. She gritted her teeth against the sting of the alcohol on raw skin and slammed the locking pin home.

  She stood up. She tested her weight.

  She reached down and picked up the heavy hydraulic actuator she had dropped earlier. She held it against her chest, adding to the load.

  She took a lap around the chassis, moving with a heavy, deliberate rhythm. She didn't stumble. She anticipated the weight, leaning into the swing like a sailor riding a wave. It hurt. It was slow. But it was controlled.

  "Ugly," she muttered. "But it works."

  She looked at Trenn, her voice hardening. "Help me lift the actuator. Let's finish the suspension."

  They worked in a rhythm of grunts and clanging metal until the steam hammers finally slowed. Ezy had fallen asleep on a pile of canvas tarps near the Crusher’s chassis, a wrench still loosely gripped in her hand.

  Trenn sat on his crate, watching the dust motes dance in the gaslight. He barely needed sleep anymore.

  He felt calm. For the first time since waking up in the mud, the rage was quiet. The Gem-Croc’s instinct to crush and devour had receded into a low, background static.

  He closed his eyes, listening to the factory. He picked out the rhythm of a distant pump.

  He matched his breathing to it. He tuned the hum in his chest to the frequency of the machine.

  I am in control.

  He tried to remember the plan. The objective.

  Kill the One-Eye? Was that all there was to his life?

  No. Mother. Sister.

  He frowned.

  He clawed at his thoughts, hunting for purpose. An emotion? A smell? Specifics were lost to instincts and a need to dominate.

  Why?

  There was a reason. Family.

  But when he thought of family… He found the image of a white fox. Mara? Why?

  Because she is pack.

  "Annie?" he whispered to the empty room. "My mother’s name is... An—"

  Names are for the weak. You are strong now. You are whole.

  He looked down at his tail. The gold scales seemed brighter in the dim light.

  He flexed the giant limb. Swung it left and right. The movement was smooth, powerful, and utterly inhuman.

  What am I thinking… of course names are important.

  He tried to summon her face again, but the image was grey and distant.

  He grabbed the alchemy book from his pack. Familiar leather warmed his hand. He flipped to the back cover, the parchment blank and yellowed.

  He picked up a piece of charcoal Ezy had used to mark the floor.

  His hand trembled as he wrote.

  Why cling to ghosts?

  Slowly, with a stranger's hand, he added one final mark.

  “Annie, Mom. Elora, Sister.”

  Why do they matter?

  The names felt hollow. But they were part of the hoard—his precious few memories. And a dragon does not abandon its hoard.

  He closed the book and shoved it deep into his bag, beneath bandages and the bone knife. Burying the question before he could answer it.

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