The Ironworks didn't announce itself.

  There was no threshold, no sign, no moment where the Rat's Path ended and something else began. The tunnel just slowly stopped being a tunnel and started being something older. The fractured concrete gave way to stone — actual cut stone, pre-bomb, the kind of masonry that took real labour and real time and a civilization that believed it was building something permanent. The ceiling rose. The mana-lines in the walls thickened and shifted colour, from the cold blue of Guild infrastructure to something deeper. Almost violet. The way a bruise looks in the hour before it fully surfaces.

  My Architect's Eye mapped it without being asked.

  The radial lines I'd spotted at the end of the Rat's Path were stronger here — concentric, emanating from somewhere below and ahead. Not Guild construction. Not post-bomb improvisation. Something that had been here before anyone thought to put a city on top of it, and had simply kept running, patient and indifferent, through everything that happened after.

  File it, I told myself. Later.

  Leo's fingertips were blue. Later was still later, but it was getting closer to now.

  The sound reached me before the light did.

  Not music — the Ironworks wasn't the kind of place that played music to welcome you. It was the sound of a place that was alive and didn't particularly care if you knew it. The low frequency rumble of a generator somewhere below. The metallic percussion of someone working a press or a hammer in a space with good acoustic carry. Voices — not words, just the texture of human voices, dozens of them, bouncing off cut stone in ways that turned conversation into a kind of ambient hiss.

  Then the smell. Synthetic noodles and ozone and unwashed bodies and something chemical underneath it all — mana runoff from the ambient density of the Old Sector, pooling in the low places the way water does.

  Then the light.

  The cistern opened up ahead of me like a held breath finally released.

  It was massive. Pre-war, the Guild records called it a water management facility. A drained concrete bowl maybe forty metres across and twenty deep, its walls terraced with makeshift structures that climbed from the floor to the rim in stacked layers of corrugated metal and salvaged boarding and the occasional repurposed Guild container. Neon signs buzzed at irregular intervals, casting sickly pools of pink and green and amber light that overlapped and cancelled each other out into a general atmosphere of something between a fever dream and a functioning economy.

  The Spigot.

  I'd been here twice before. It had been smaller then, or maybe I'd been a different size. My Torque/Precision at 5.5 meant I was reading the space differently than I ever had — not emotionally, not impressionistically, but structurally. The cistern's geometry arrived in my head as data before it arrived as experience.

  The acoustics first.

  The bowl shape meant sound didn't dissipate — it collected. Conversations from across the floor arrived as whispers directly in the ear, intimate and sourceless, while the person standing two metres away sounded oddly muffled, their voice swallowed by the ambient hiss. This was why everyone in The Spigot spoke in a particular low, controlled murmur. Not because they were being discreet. Because they'd all learned, at some point, that the room was always listening. That a raised voice here travelled further than you wanted it to.

  I adjusted my own breathing accordingly. Shallow. Quiet. The tarp around my shoulders settled.

  The structure next. Three primary load-bearing columns running floor to ceiling — pre-bomb concrete, original to the cistern, solid enough that the entire improvised market had oriented itself around them without anyone consciously deciding to. The stalls clustered near them the way organisms cluster near heat vents. The open spaces between them were transit corridors, kept clear by unspoken agreement. The Ironworks had its own architecture, its own logic. It had just never been written down.

  Then the people.

  My Eye didn't stop at structures. Torque/Precision at 5.5 meant I read bodies the way I read beams — weight distribution, load, stress points, the micro-adjustments that told you where something was about to give.

  First sweep: two snipers. Not visible. But the third crossbeam of the scaffolding on the left wall was missing two bolts that should have been there — the metal had been recently modified, the rust pattern interrupted. Someone had adjusted that platform after the original construction, carefully, within the last week. The angle of the remaining bolts suggested the platform had been levelled. A sniper's platform doesn't need to be pretty. It needs to be level.

  New addition. Something had changed recently. Something that made someone decide The Spigot needed elevated coverage.

  I kept that information and kept moving.

  Second sweep: a man near the eastern column with a pneumatic augment on his left arm, the kind that replaced the forearm with a pressurised cylinder capable of driving a spike through plate steel. He was standing too still near the clinic entrance. Not browsing. Not transacting. Watching the clinic entrance in that particular way where the eyes don't move — not because the person is being subtle, but because they're waiting for something specific and they've stopped pretending to do anything else.

  Not a threat to me. Not yet. But a reminder that this market had its own tensions running underneath the commerce, its own debts and disputes being quietly managed.

  I noted him and moved into the flow of the crowd.

  The market floor was dense without being chaotic — The Spigot had the particular order of a place that had evolved its own rules through trial and error, most of the error having been fatal to someone. Weapon stalls ran along the south wall. Chem and medicine stalls clustered near the central column where the ventilation was better. Food — synthetic, mostly, with the occasional genuine protein that cost more than it should — occupied the terraced second level where the smells had somewhere to go.

  I kept my head down and moved north toward the clinic.

  I was halfway there when she spotted the bag.

  Small woman. Wiry in the way that the Ironworks made people wiry — not fitness, but the specific compression of someone who had been carrying weight for a long time and had adapted to it. Her stall smelled like chemicals and organic decay in a ratio that suggested she dealt in biological components. She was seated on a crate behind a folding table with a surface that was sticky in ways I chose not to examine.

  She didn't call out. She didn't need to. She caught my eye with a precision that told me she'd already clocked the mesh bag through the tarp from three stalls away.

  "Fresh adrenal?" Her voice was pitched low — Spigot-murmur, reaching my ear clearly despite the distance. She said it like an offer and a test simultaneously.

  I didn't stop walking.

  "Top rate," she said, still quiet. "Upfront. No intake fee."

  I kept moving.

  "Doc charges a finder's fee," she said, as I passed the edge of her stall. "For new faces. Might want to know that before you walk in cold."

  I walked three more steps before I processed the information. Then I filed it. Not because she was trying to help me — she wasn't, she was trying to redirect a transaction toward herself — but because it was accurate. Useful. Free intelligence from someone who had accidentally paid for it.

  I adjusted my approach accordingly.

  The clinic occupied a repurposed cold storage unit on the cistern's north wall — pre-bomb construction, three-inch insulated steel walls that had originally kept meat at four degrees Celsius and now kept Guild scanners from reading the inside. A red chemical light above the door. The kind of light that was simultaneously a sign and a warning. The man with the pneumatic arm was twelve metres to my left and not looking at me.

  I pushed through the door.

  The smell hit first — antiseptic over blood, the specific combination that lived in every unlicensed medical space I'd ever been in. The antiseptic was losing. The cold storage unit was about eight metres square, repurposed with a stainless-steel table in the center and shelving units along the walls stacked with labelled containers that I didn't let my Eye analyse because I was here for one thing and the Architect had a tendency to get distracted by inventory.

  Doc Aris was finishing with a patient.

  I used the word finishing generously. The mercenary on the table — big, augmented at the shoulder with a crude hydraulic assembly that looked like it had been attached by someone who understood the mechanics but had never considered the aesthetics — was making sounds that suggested the local anaesthetic was either expired or absent. Aris worked with the unhurried precision of a man who had heard worse and expected to hear worse again. Half his face was original equipment. The other half was brass optics — a cluster of three lenses where the left eye had been, each a different diameter, adjustable by a small dial at the temple. He had a cigar clamped in the corner of his mouth that had gone cold.

  He didn't look up when I entered.

  "Corner," he said. The single word arrived with the weight of a sentence that had already anticipated every possible response to it and decided they were all acceptable.

  I went to the corner. I stood in it. I waited.

  The mercenary limped out eleven minutes later. I counted. Old Porter habit — you learned to count elapsed time in the dark when you couldn't see a clock.

  Aris peeled off one glove. Picked up a lighter. Relit the cigar. Finally looked at me with the brass optics — I felt the lenses adjust, the faint whir of the dial at his temple, the three apertures cycling through what I assumed were different spectra.

  [ ARCHITECT'S EYE: READING OPTIC ASSEMBLY ]

  [ BRASS CLUSTER — THERMAL / MANA / STANDARD VISUAL ]

  [ ASSESSMENT: DIAGNOSTIC GRADE. NOT COMBAT GRADE. ]

  He was reading me the same way I was reading him.

  "New face," he said. Not a question. He'd already been told by whoever ran the door — or the woman with the sticky table, or the man with the pneumatic arm, or any number of the Spigot's ambient information network that had been tracking me since I walked in. "What do you need?"

  I moved to the stainless-steel table. I set the canvas bag down. It landed with the specific soft weight of biological material that was still viable — still warm, still dense, still worth something to the right person.

  I didn't open it yet.

  "Tier 1 Mana-Purge Stabilizer," I said. My voice came out steadier than I expected, given the night I'd had. "Four gallons of purified water. Thermal blankets — minimum three. High-calorie synth-meat, enough for four people for a week."

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  Aris looked at the bag. Then at me. The brass optics whirred once, cycling through something.

  "That's a specific list," he said.

  "It's a specific situation."

  "Most situations down here are." He picked up a metal probe from the tray beside the table, turned it between his fingers slowly. Not a threat — just thinking. "How does a Rat plan to pay for top-shelf medicine and a week's worth of calories?"

  I opened the bag.

  The six Ghoul adrenal glands lay in the mesh, slick with black ichor, intact and dense. In the chemical light they looked like something between an organ and a weapon, which was more or less what they were.

  Aris looked at them. The brass optics ran a slow sweep. Then: "Bruised. Left side. Marrow looks compromised." He gestured with the probe. "I can do the Stabilizer and the water. The food—"

  "They're not bruised," I said.

  "My optics say—"

  "Your optics are reading the ichor contamination on the casing." I reached into the bag with two fingers — carefully, precisely, my new Torque/Precision making the contact lighter than it looked. I pressed a fingertip to the largest gland and let a micro-pulse of [Anatomical Dismantlement] run through the contact. Not enough to damage. Just enough to read.

  The nerve clusters lit up under Aris's thermal optic — bright blue, clean, perfectly intact. No bruising. No marrow compromise. Six glands at peak quality, every filament undamaged, the adrenal sacs full and unruptured.

  Aris was quiet for a moment.

  "Who taught you to do that?" he asked.

  "Nobody."

  He looked at me differently after that. Not warmly — warmth was not in Aris's professional vocabulary. But the brass optics settled into their standard configuration and stopped cycling, which I was beginning to understand was his version of giving someone his full attention.

  "Who's the Stabilizer for?" he asked.

  Not what's it for. Who.

  "Twelve-year-old," I said. "Tier 1 kinetic mana in a Tier 0 nervous system. Indigo flush. Peripheral cyanosis setting in."

  The probe stopped moving in his fingers.

  He did the math I'd watched him do — I could see it happening behind the brass optics, the slight shift in his expression that was less emotion and more calculation. A twelve-year-old surviving Tier 1 kinetic mana poisoning for this long without a Stabilizer meant one of two things: extraordinary biological luck, or someone keeping them alive through the kind of sustained, grinding effort that didn't make headlines and didn't stop for sleep.

  He looked at me. At the Grey Hand, half-visible at the tarp's edge. At my eyes — which I knew, from the one time Lily had described them, carried a faint violet undertone that hadn't been there before the Awakening.

  He put the probe down.

  "I'll need something for the food and blankets," he said. "The glands cover the Stabilizer and the water. It's a fair trade and you know it."

  I reached into the Spatial Warehouse — the ripple of displaced air making Aris go very still for one second — and set the Depleted Mana Core on the table.

  Cracked down one side. Violet light long faded to grey. Intact.

  Aris picked it up. Held it to his thermal optic. The lenses cycled through their full range — three passes, slow, thorough. His cigar had gone cold again.

  "Where," he said carefully, "did a Rat get a Tier 0 High core."

  "It tripped," I said.

  He looked at me for one long second. The brass optics were still. Not cycling. Just looking, with whatever passed for naked attention behind three lenses and a dial.

  Then he set the core down and started packing the duffel bag.

  He worked without speaking, pulling the Mana-Purge Stabilizer from the locked cabinet under the shelving — sealed vial, medical grade, the kind that cost four hundred credits on the Guild market and twice that down here. Four water containers. Three thermal blankets folded tight. Synth-meat packs stacked efficiently.

  He was nearly finished when he paused. Reached to a separate shelf. Picked up a small glass vial — dark, unmarked, sealed with a wax stopper. Set it on top of the stack without looking at me.

  "For the fever," he said. Flat. Dismissive. The tone of a man doing something he didn't want to be questioned about. "Don't ask where I got it."

  I didn't ask.

  He pushed the duffel across the table. I shouldered it — the weight landing differently than the pod tow-strap, different than the cargo rig. Good weight. Useful weight.

  "Word of advice," Aris said, relighting the cigar without ceremony. He pointed it at me — not aggressively, just directionally. "Grog's boys saw you walk in here with fresh Ghoul meat. Watch your shadow."

  I picked up the duffel.

  "Appreciated," I said.

  He had already turned back to his shelving.

  I pushed through the clinic door into the neon-lit alley of The Spigot.

  The ambient noise of the market had changed while I was inside. Not gone — the market was still technically operating, the stalls still lit, the generators still running their low frequency rumble. But the texture of it had shifted. The murmur of a hundred conversations had dropped to something quieter and more deliberate — the specific adjustment a crowd makes when it has collectively decided to watch something without appearing to watch it.

  I stopped.

  Three figures at the alley exit. Heavily augmented — crude cybernetics, the functional kind rather than the aesthetic kind, pneumatic sledgehammers holstered at the hip. Big. Positioned to fill the width of the corridor without leaving obvious gaps. They weren't looking at me with hostility. The one in the centre had his hands open, deliberately, at his sides.

  "Grog wants to talk." That was what the hands said. The open-palm posture of a man delivering a message rather than starting a fight.

  My Torque/Precision read them in under two seconds. Left figure: weight slightly forward, right side favoured — the sledge was on his right hip and he'd already made the decision to draw it. Centre figure: genuinely relaxed, or performing it well enough that the difference didn't matter yet. Right figure: watching the duffel, not my face.

  Three points of data. Three calculations.

  Then the fourth.

  Small figure. Standing at the cistern entrance behind me, not the exit ahead. No visible augments. No weapon drawn. Standing at an angle that covered both the clinic door and the alley in a single sightline.

  Eating a stick of synthetic meat. Unhurried. The way you eat when you've already seen how something ends and you're just waiting for the other parties to catch up.

  That one's been in fights before. Not nervous. Not performing calm. Actually calm, the way only a person who knows the outcome in advance can be calm. The three at the exit were the offer. The one at the entrance was the answer to whatever I said next.

  I set the duffel bag down. Gently. The vial from Aris shifted inside the pack — a small, delicate sound.

  I flexed my Grey Hand.

  The new tendons pulled tight across my knuckles, dense and precise, and I felt the Entropy Output sitting cold and full in my chest — 13 points, all of it present, none of it spent.

  Four of them, said the Architect part of my brain, already running the geometry. One exit forward. One exit blocked. A market full of people who have already decided to look the other way.

  Alright.

  Let's see what Grog wants.

  The one in the centre hadn't moved.

  His hands were still open. Still deliberate. The universal language of this doesn't have to go badly — a language I'd learned to read in the dungeon, in the slums, in every place where the people who wanted something from you had enough experience to know that broken merchandise was worth less than cooperative merchandise.

  I didn't move either.

  The Spigot's ambient murmur had settled into something barely above silence now — that collective held breath of a crowd that had seen this specific configuration before and knew better than to be standing in certain directions when it resolved.

  Four seconds passed.

  "Grog wants to talk," the centre figure said. His voice was pitched for the Spigot's acoustics — low, controlled, travelling clearly to my ear without reaching the stalls behind me. Professional. He'd done this before. "Just a conversation. You walk out of here with your bag. No complications."

  I looked at his hands. Then at the one on the left — weight forward, right side favoured, already decided. Then at the one eating by the entrance, who had finished the synthetic meat and was now simply standing with his hands loose at his sides, patient the way the copper coil was patient.

  Just a conversation meant Grog didn't know what I was yet. If he knew, the four of them wouldn't be enough and he'd have sent more. Which meant the intelligence he had was partial — fresh Ghoul meat, possible Awakened, unknown class, unknown level. Interesting enough to want a conversation. Not yet interesting enough to want a war.

  That gap was the only leverage I had.

  "Who's Grog?" I asked.

  The centre figure's expression didn't change, but something behind his eyes recalibrated. He hadn't expected the question. In the Ironworks, asking who Grog was carried one of two meanings — you were either new enough to genuinely not know, or you were experienced enough to know that making someone explain their own authority was a way of measuring it.

  "Runs the Ironworks," he said. After a pause that was one beat too long.

  "Runs it how?"

  "The way things get run down here." He shifted his weight — not threatening, just repositioning for a longer conversation than he'd planned. "Keeps the lights on. Keeps the Guild out. Makes sure the market runs clean."

  "Clean," I said.

  "Clean enough."

  I looked at the duffel bag at my feet. At the weight of the Mana-Purge Stabilizer inside it. At the distance between me and the exit — approximately eight metres, three augmented bodies wide, the left one already decided, the right one watching the bag.

  Then I looked at the fourth figure by the entrance.

  He was watching me look at him. Not adjusting his posture. Not reaching for anything. Just watching, with the specific quality of attention that belonged to someone who had already run the numbers and was comfortable with the answer.

  He's not a fighter, the Architect's Eye said quietly. He's a reader. Grog sent him to read you, not fight you.

  Which meant whatever I did next — or didn't do — was going to be reported with more accuracy than I wanted.

  I picked up the duffel bag.

  The left figure's weight shifted forward another centimetre. I clocked it and ignored it.

  "Tell Grog I'm busy," I said. "I've got a twelve-year-old with mana-fever and a four-hour window on a Stabilizer. When the fever breaks, I'll come find him."

  The centre figure opened his mouth.

  "I'll come find him," I said again. Flat. Final. The tone I'd learned from a decade of telling Guild Hunters that no, the load wasn't shifting, and no, I wasn't going faster, and yes, I understood the schedule, and the schedule would have to wait. The tone of someone who was not asking for permission and was not going to argue about it.

  The centre figure closed his mouth.

  Three seconds. The kind of three seconds that had weight.

  Then he looked over my shoulder — at the fourth figure, at the entrance. A glance so brief it almost wasn't there.

  I didn't turn around. I didn't need to. I felt the fourth figure's assessment landing, being processed, a conclusion being reached.

  "Three days," the centre figure said. "After that, Grog comes to you."

  "That's fine," I said. "He'll know where I am."

  I walked toward them.

  The left figure didn't move for a moment — that one-beat delay of someone whose body had made a decision their brain was still reviewing. Then he stepped aside. The gap that opened was precisely wide enough — not generous, not welcoming, but navigable. A door held open by someone who resented holding it.

  I moved through without touching either wall.

  Behind me, I heard the fourth figure finish whatever he was doing at the entrance and follow at a distance that was professional enough to be insulting. He wasn't trying to be subtle. He wanted me to know I was being watched. That was the message.

  Good, I thought. Let him watch.

  The Spigot's ambient sound returned to normal in my wake — gradual, like pressure equalising after a door opens. By the time I reached the cistern's north tunnel, the market was fully operational again, the murmur restored, the collective performance of nothing happened here underway.

  The broker woman with the sticky table caught my eye as I passed. I didn't look at her. But I heard her exhale — quiet, controlled, the sound of someone recalibrating their assessment.

  The walk back was different from the walk in.

  I had weight now — real weight, useful weight, the duffel pulling at my shoulder with the specific gravity of things that mattered. The Stabilizer. The water. The thermal blankets. The unmarked vial from Aris that I hadn't asked about and wasn't going to until Leo was stable and I had the space to think properly.

  My new tendons carried it without complaint. The recalibration period the System had noted was still running — my hands were still slightly too precise, the world still slightly too legible — but it was settling. Becoming familiar. Becoming mine.

  The radial mana-lines in the walls of the deeper tunnel were stronger on the return journey. I didn't know if that was because I was paying more attention or because something had shifted in the ambient energy since I'd passed through an hour ago. The Architect's Eye mapped them automatically — those deep, pre-bomb patterns emanating from below, concentric and patient, indifferent to the century of debris and improvised construction layered on top of them.

  Later, I told them. I mean it this time.

  I moved fast through the Rat's Path. Counted elapsed time. Tried not to calculate the rate of progression of peripheral cyanosis in mana-fever cases because I didn't actually know the number and the not-knowing was worse than the knowing would have been.

  The substation door appeared ahead in the wireframe — a solid rectangle of blast-proof steel, the copper coil wound around its external wheel, the Chimera Optic Lens dark and waiting at the center.

  I put two fingers to the lens. My frequency. Pressed once.

  The trap acknowledged it — a faint warmth in the quartz, barely perceptible. Recognised. Standing down.

  Three heavy knocks. Pause. Two light.

  Silence on the other side. Then — the sound of the inner wheel turning. The sequential thud of locks disengaging. The door swung inward two inches and stopped, and through the gap I saw Lily's face — not her whole face, just her eyes and the bridge of her nose, scanning the tunnel behind me before she looked at me directly.

  She pulled the door open.

  I stepped through. She pushed it shut behind me and had the inner wheel relocked before I'd finished turning around. Twelve seconds from knock to sealed. She'd been timing it.

  The Substation hit me differently than when I'd left — the dead acoustic silence, the lead-wall cold, the blue shard-light turning everything the colour of held breath. Sam was awake, sitting beside Leo with his knees up and his back against the wall. He looked at the duffel bag with an expression that wasn't relief yet, because he'd learned not to be relieved until there was a reason.

  Leo was where I'd left him. The wet rattle was still there. The indigo veins had climbed another few millimetres. The blue at his fingertips had deepened from pale to definite.

  The clock hadn't stopped while I was gone.

  I set the duffel on the floor and opened it. Moved with the new precision — deliberate, controlled, no wasted motion. The Stabilizer first — I held the sealed vial to the shard-light, checked the integrity of the seal, verified the contents matched the label in the way that Aris's optics had already verified but that I needed to verify myself because it was Leo and I didn't outsource certainty when it came to Leo.

  Sealed. Intact. Medical grade.

  "How do you give it?" Lily asked. She was crouched beside me, watching my hands.

  "Sublingual. Under the tongue. Slow absorption — don't rush it."

  "How long until it works?"

  "Twenty minutes for the acute response. Full purge takes longer. Days, maybe."

  She took the vial from me carefully — both hands, the way you hold something irreplaceable — and moved to Leo's side. She knew how to do the rest. Lily had spent two years managing Sarah's pod medications on a schedule that left no margin for error. She knew how to be precise when precision was the only option.

  I watched her work. The way she tilted Leo's head. The way she checked his airway first, automatically, before anything else. The way her hands didn't shake.

  She was always better at this than me, I thought. She was always the one who stayed.

  Sam watched without speaking. He had Leo's hand in both of his, not doing anything with it, just holding it. The rebar was on the floor beside him. He hadn't put it down since the tunnel.

  I unpacked the rest of the duffel — water containers lined up against the wall, thermal blankets distributed, synth-meat stacked where we could reach it. I saved the unmarked vial for last, holding it to the light.

  Dark glass. Wax stopper. No label. The contents were a pale amber colour — not pharmaceutical standard, not any compound I recognised from the Guild med-kit. Something Aris had made himself, or sourced from somewhere he didn't want documented.

  For the fever, he'd said. Don't ask.

  I turned it over in my fingers. The Architect's Eye tried to analyse it and came back with insufficient data — it couldn't read chemistry, only structure. The vial was well-made. The seal was intact. Whatever was inside it had been prepared carefully.

  I set it down next to the Stabilizer and decided to give Leo twenty minutes on the standard medicine before I made any decisions about the other one. Evidence first. Options second.

  "Alex."

  Lily's voice. Different from her usual register — not the controlled directive tone, not the efficient-terror tone. Something quieter.

  I looked up.

  Leo's eyes were open.

  Not fully — heavy-lidded, unfocused, the eyes of someone surfacing from a very long distance underwater. The indigo flush was still in his cheeks. The veins were still there. But his eyes were open, and they were tracking, and after a moment they found my face.

  His mouth moved. No sound came out.

  "Don't talk," I said. My voice came out rougher than I intended. "The medicine is working. Don't talk."

  His mouth moved again. This time sound came with it — barely, a thread of it.

  "You look terrible," he said.

  Sam made a sound that wasn't a laugh but was trying to be. Lily put her hand over her mouth. Not to hide crying — to hide the specific expression of someone who has been holding something for days and has just been given permission to put it down.

  I looked at Leo. At the blue receding from his fingertips — slowly, barely perceptibly, but receding. At his eyes, still unfocused but present. At the indigo veins sitting still in his cheeks instead of climbing.

  "Yeah," I said. "Go back to sleep."

  He did. Not immediately — he looked at Sam first, and Sam squeezed his hand once, and something passed between them that twins share and no one else gets access to. Then his eyes closed.

  The wet rattle in his breathing had softened. Not gone. But softer.

  I sat back against the lead-lined wall. The duffel was empty. The door was locked. The trap was armed. Sam had Leo's hand and was looking at the ceiling with the expression of someone giving himself permission to breathe. Lily was checking Leo's pulse with two fingers, lips moving silently as she counted.

  Sarah's pod hummed its single patient note.

  I thought about Grog. About three days. About the fourth figure who had watched me walk away and was somewhere right now telling someone what he'd seen — a Rat with a Grey Hand and fresh Ghoul meat and a Tier 0 High core and no visible fear of augmented men blocking his exit.

  I thought about the pre-bomb mana-lines running beneath the Ironworks. About what was at their centre. About the dead terminals along the Substation wall, covered in their dust sheets, waiting.

  I thought about three Class Points sitting unspent and a building that wasn't a home yet but was going to be.

  Three days, Grog had said.

  Three days to build something worth defending before the Ironworks decided what to do with us.

  I closed my eyes.

  Not to sleep. To plan.

  The Architect didn't sleep.