Dawn came the way it always did in the Meat Pit: a slow bruise spreading across the sky, the color of old blood under thin skin.
I was still curled beneath the carving when the boot found my ribs.
Moloch.
He hooked one iron-plated hand into my hair and hauled me upright like a sack of bones. My broken body unfolded with a wet pop of joints. The world tilted, then steadied into the usual gray misery.
"On your feet, cripple."
His voice was gravel dragged across iron. He didn't wait for obedience; he simply dragged me by the hair until my one good knee scraped the mud and I was forced to stand or lose half my scalp. Pain flared everywhere at once, ribs, shoulder, wrist, the dull fire between my legs, but it was distant thunder now. Familiar.
He studied me the way a butcher studies a cut of meat that has started to turn.
"South front is bleeding," he said.
"Dominion's pushing the river line. We're out of soldiers. Even dogs like you get pressed into service when the kennel's empty."
He released my hair.
My head snapped forward; I caught myself on my one hand, palm sinking into the filth.
"You'll train. You'll learn to swing what's left of you. You die in training, you die. You live, maybe you die slower on the front. Either way, the Empire gets its use."
He turned and walked. I followed because there was nothing else to do.
We stopped at a wider section of trench where a dozen fresh convicts waited, shivering in the cold. Some still wore the remnants of uniforms; others were naked except for mud and fear. All of them looked at me and saw the same thing: a one-armed, one-eyed thing with a branded face and piss still drying on its legs.
A man stepped forward from the group. Huge. Shoulders like ox-yokes, neck thick as my thigh. A scar ran from his left ear to the corner of his mouth, pulling it into a permanent half-snarl.
"Rulf," Moloch said by way of introduction.
"He keeps order here. You listen to Rulf. You listen to Grinder. You don't listen, you stop breathing."
Rulf looked down at me and smiled with too many broken teeth.
"Lord Killer," he said softly.
"Heard you cried like a little girl last night. Hope you saved some tears. You'll need them."
Moloch left without another word. The trench swallowed him.
That was when Grinder arrived.
He was older than the trench itself, or looked it. One eye milky white, the other a cold, flat gray. His left arm ended in a hooked iron stump. He carried a bundle of crude wooden clubs wrapped in wet leather, each the length of a man's forearm.
He didn't speak at first. He simply walked the line, looked every man in the eye, and when he came to me he stopped.
"Strip," he said.
I hesitated half a heartbeat. Rulf's fist took me in the kidney. I dropped, gasping. The rags were torn off me in pieces until I stood naked, shivering, every scar and brand and missing part on display.
Grinder studied the ruin of my body the way a carpenter studies warped wood.
"One arm. One eye. Half a man," he said, almost to himself.
"Good. Less to fix."
Grinder was already there.
One-eyed, iron-hooked, older than sin. He carried a bundle of crude clubs and, slung across his back in a battered leather sheath, something that made every man fall silent.
A cane.
Ebony-black, silver-capped, the length of a walking stick. But the way Grinder moved with it, the way the silver ferrule caught the weak light, told a different story. It was too straight. Too balanced. Too beautiful for this place.
Grinder saw us looking. He smiled with cracked lips.
"Dominion officer," he said.
"Took it off a corpse last week. Pretty, isn't it? Blade inside. Rapier. Noble's toy."
He tapped the cane against his palm. "One day I'll let the best of you earn the right to carry it. Until then, it stays with me."
He unsheathed it an inch.
The blade flashed: mirror-bright steel, slender as a lie, basket hilt of ornate silver wire and sweeping quillons, pommel a perfect sphere engraved with a crest none of us recognized. It looked like moonlight made solid. It looked like something that had never belonged in the mud.
Every convict stared. Hunger in their eyes. Hunger for the weapon, for what it represented: grace, nobility, a world that no longer existed.
Rulf licked his lips.
"I'll have that," he muttered.
Grinder slid the blade home with a soft, perfect hiss.
"Earn it," he repeated.
Then he looked at me, hanging half-dead from Moloch's fist, and laughed once, short and ugly.
"Start with the cripple."
"Three hundred swings," he said. "Then we run."
I looked at the cane-sword one last time.
It was the first beautiful thing I had seen since the world ended.
I thought: One day I will hold that blade. And when I do, none of you will still be breathing.
Then I started swinging.
He tossed me the shortest, heaviest club in the bundle.
"You swing with what you've got. Forward. Back. Forward. That's it. No blocks. No pretty footwork. You've got one job: hit what's in front of you, then step away before it hits back. Everything else is dead weight."
He turned to the others.
"Pair up. Cripple swings alone until someone feels like dancing with him."
No one did.
The first drill was simple and endless.
Grinder drove a row of splintered posts into the mud. We were to strike them, one blow each, then step back and let the next man through. The posts were wrapped in old uniforms soaked in blood and shit so the clubs stuck when they hit. You had to rip them free. Every impact jarred the shoulder, the wrist, the spine.
The others went first. Rulf's blows cracked the wood. Others followed, grunting, sweating, eager to prove they were worth feeding.
When my turn came, Grinder didn't let me join the line.
"You get three posts. All yours. One hundred swings each. Start now."
Three hundred swings. With a club heavier than any training sword I'd ever held. With one arm that ended in a swollen, maggoty stump.
I started.
The first twenty were agony. The next fifty were white fire. By the hundredth, my shoulder was a furnace and my vision tunneled to a gray ring. I kept swinging because the alternative was collapsing, and collapsing meant boots.
The group watched. Some laughed. Some spat. One of the younger convicts, a boy with a broken nose, tried to sneak behind me and trip me. Rulf caught him by the throat and slammed him face-first into a post.
"Later," Rulf growled. "Let the cripple tire first."
They ran us after that. Down the trench and back, boots slipping in mud, lungs burning with the stink of corpses. I fell on the first lap. Rulf hauled me up by the back of the neck and threw me forward.
"Again."
I ran until my legs gave out a second time. This time no one helped. They simply ran around me, kicking mud into my face as they passed.
Grinder never raised his voice. He just watched with that single gray eye and added more swings, more laps, more everything, until the sun was high and the trench steamed like a cook-pot.
By the time he finally called a halt, I was on my knees in the mud, vomiting bile and blood. My right arm hung useless, the shoulder swollen to twice its size. My ribs grated with every breath.
Grinder crouched in front of me.
"Tomorrow we do it again," he said.
"And the day after. Until you swing that club like it's part of you, or until you stop breathing. Doesn't matter to me which comes first."
He stood.
"Rulf. Get them fed. Cripple eats last. If there's anything left."
There wasn't .
i was vey hungry .
at my limit.
The dugout they shoved us into at night was nothing more than a wider stretch of trench roofed with broken planks and rotting canvas. Fourteen bodies, one stinking hole. The air was thick with the smell of sweat, shit, and fear. A single tallow candle guttered in a tin cup, throwing just enough light to see the hate on every face.
I was given the spot nearest the entrance, closest to the cold and the rats. The others arranged themselves like wolves around a dying fire: Rulf at the far end, legs stretched out, back against the wall, watching.
No one spoke for a long time. They chewed their meager rations hard bread and a strip of salt pork that tasted of corpse, and every bite sounded loud in the silence. My share had been three crumbs and a piece of gristle someone spat out.
I swallowed it dry.
Eventually the candle burned lower. Snores began. Someone farted. Someone else coughed blood into his sleeve.
I lay on my side, knees drawn up, the club Grinder had let me keep clutched against my chest like a child's toy. My shoulder was a swollen knot of fire. My ribs grated with every breath. The day's mud had dried and cracked on my skin, pulling like a second hide.
I did not sleep.
I waited.
They waited longer.
When the candle finally drowned in its own grease, the darkness became absolute.
The first kick took me in the stomach. I curled around it, breath whooshing out. The second caught my kidney. The third split my lip against my teeth.
Then the storm.
Boots. Fists. Elbows. The dull thud of wood on flesh. They did not shout. They did not need to. This was quiet work, practiced. A boot heel ground into my shattered wrist. Someone knelt on my throat just hard enough that the world tunneled. I tasted blood and mud and the sour stink of their feet.
I did not cry out. I had learned that lesson already.
They flipped me onto my stomach. Someone sat on my back, pinning my remaining arm. Another pair of hands seized my left leg (the one the boy's knife had opened weeks ago, still swollen, still weak and wrenched it straight.
Rulf's voice, low and conversational, from somewhere above.
"Hold him."
A rock the size of a man's fist rose in the dark. I saw its silhouette against the faint glow leaking through the canvas.
The first blow landed just below the knee.
There was no sound at first. Only pressure, then a wet pop like green wood splitting. Pain came a heartbeat later, white and total, a scream that lived only behind my teeth. My body bucked once, uselessly.
The second blow made sure.
Bone parted company with bone. The lower half of my leg folded the wrong way with a soft, sickening click. I felt the jagged ends grind together, felt hot blood flood the limb.
Someone laughed, soft and wet.
Rulf leaned close. I smelled the pork on his breath.
"Tomorrow you run on that, cripple. Every lap. Every drill. You fall, we do the other one."
They left me there.
Fourteen bodies rearranged themselves around me, already snoring again, as if nothing had happened. The darkness pressed down like a coffin lid.
I lay on my belly in a spreading pool of my own blood, leg twisted beneath me at an angle no leg should ever take. The pain was so enormous it no longer felt like pain; it was simply the world now. Breathing was a chore. Thinking was impossible.
Yet something inside the ruin moved. Not hope. Not rage. Something colder. Smaller. Sharper.
A single thought, repeated like a heartbeat.
One day I will kill every single one of them. Slowly.
I dragged myself, inch by inch, using my one good arm and the club as a crutch, until my back pressed against the cold earth wall. I curled around the broken leg the way a mother curls around a dying child.
The night stretched on, endless.
Somewhere far above, the first pale smear of another dawn began to stain the sky.
Tomorrow would come.
I would crawl to meet it.