The junkyard in Sector 19 breathed like a living thing—rusted metal groaning under the weight of the smog-heavy sky, the air thick with the scent of scorched plastic and leaking coolant.
Lucent kicked aside a shattered drone shell, the brittle casing crumbling under his boot.
Beside him, Kai wiped sweat from his brow, leaving a streak of grime across his forehead.
"You sure this place hasn't been picked clean?" Kai eyed the mountains of debris, his voice edged with doubt.
The salvaged Conduit in his hands flickered weakly, its cracked screen glitching under the strain of even basic glyphs.
Lucent didn't answer.
He crouched beside a gutted mag-lev engine, prying open a panel with the blade of his knife.
Inside, the Aether regulator was fried, but the secondary capacitor coils still gleamed—untouched, their delicate filaments intact.
"Here." He tossed one to Kai. "If you can wire this into your Conduit without frying yourself, it'll stabilize the output."
Kai caught it, turning the fragile component over in his hands. "And if I can't?"
"Then you'll learn what your insides smell like when they're cooked." Lucent stood, scanning the wreckage.
The good stuff was always buried—corporate prototypes dumped after failed field tests, black-market glyph-chips smuggled in before a deal went sour.
The kind of things people died over.
A flicker of movement in the periphery.
Lucent's hand went to his Conduit, but it was just a pack of glow-rats, their emaciated bodies pulsing faintly as they gnawed on frayed wiring.
Kai exhaled sharply, shoulders slumping. "We're not going to find anything better than scrap, are we?"
Lucent wiped grease off his fingers onto his pants. "You wanted a Spire-grade Conduit? Should've stayed home."
"I didn't want any of this," Kai snapped, then flinched at his own outburst.
His fingers tightened around the capacitor. "I just—I need something that won't try to kill me every time I cast a damn glyph."
Lucent studied him—the raw skin on his palms from backlashes, the way his breath hitched when his spells sputtered. The kid was a spark away from burning out.
"Then stop looking for a handout," Lucent said, turning back to the wreckage. "Real power isn't in the parts. It's in knowing how to make use of them."
A beat of silence.
Then Kai's voice, quieter: "Show me."
Lucent paused.
The junkyard stretched around them, a graveyard of forgotten things.
Somewhere in the distance, a Reclamation drone whined, its searchlight cutting through the haze.
He reached into his pocket and pulled out his own Conduit—the screen spiderwebbed with cracks, the casing welded shut one too many times.
"See this?" He tapped a jagged scar along the edge. "Burned out a rank-5 glyph with a half-dead battery. Should've melted my face off. But I pushed it."
Kai's gaze flickered between the device and Lucent's hands—the old glyph-burns, the knuckles that had healed wrong.
"You're saying I should—what? Fry myself on purpose?"
"I'm saying you'll never learn shit if you're scared of the fire." Lucent pocketed the Conduit and jerked his chin toward a half-buried storage crate. "Now help me dig. Unless you'd rather go back to begging corps for scraps."
Kai's jaw clenched.
For a second, Lucent thought he'd walk.
Then the kid crouched beside him, fingers digging into the dirt.
Kai's fingers hovered over the exposed wiring of his salvaged Conduit, the capacitor coil Lucent gave him dangling between his grease-stained fingers.
The junkyard's metallic stench clung to the back of his throat as he watched Lucent pry open another rusted crate with methodical brutality.
"There's got to be another way," Kai blurted out, the words tasting like battery acid. "Something besides better hardware or cleaner code. Some... trick."
Lucent didn't pause his work.
The crate groaned as he wrenched it open, revealing a nest of fried circuit boards. "Tricks get you killed."
"You survived."
That made Lucent stop. He turned, his silhouette blocking the sickly yellow glow of the sector's floodlights.
The shadows under his eyes looked like bruises.
"Yeah." He wiped his hands on his thighs, leaving dark streaks. "And you see what it cost."
Kai's gaze dropped to Lucent's arms - the latticework of scars crawling up from his wrists, the way his left pinky stuck at a wrong angle.
Not just from fights.
From casting.
The wind shifted, carrying the reek of burning plastic from the smelter pits. Somewhere in the wreckage, metal settled with a sound like grinding teeth.
"The Spires teach you casting is math," Lucent said suddenly.
He picked up a shattered Conduit screen, the glass crunching under his boot. "Clean inputs, clean outputs. But down here?" He tapped his temple. "You learn to ride the surge."
Kai's breath hitched. "You mean rawcasting."
"I mean listening." Lucent kicked aside a dented coolant tank. "Every glyph's got a heartbeat. Push too hard, it bucks. Too soft, it stalls." His eyes locked onto Kai's. "Your problem? You're trying to strangle it into submission."
A spark jumped from Kai's Conduit, making him flinch.
The capacitor coil glowed faintly in his palm, reacting to his pulse.
"So what? I just... ask nicely?" Kai's laugh came out jagged.
Lucent's smile didn't reach his eyes. "You ever seen a rat-bait fight? Those junkies take hits that'd drop a fully augmented soldier. Know why?" He leaned in, close enough for Kai to smell the ozone on his clothes. "They don't fight the poison. They move with it."
The ground vibrated - not from machinery, but from something deeper.
The buried Aether lines, maybe.
Or something else.
Kai looked down at his Conduit.
The cracks in the screen mirrored the ones creeping up his arms, faint as spiderwebs.
"Show me," he whispered.
Lucent exhaled through his nose. For a heartbeat, Kai thought he'd refuse. Then -
"Cast something. Anything."
Kai's fingers trembled as he pulled up a basic luminescence glyph.
The spell stuttered, its light fracturing into unstable prisms.
Lucent's hand clamped over his wrist. Not stopping him. Guiding.
"Feel that? The hitch right before it destabilizes?" His grip tightened as the glyph pulsed erratically. "Now stop trying to control it. Let it breathe."
The glyph flared. Kai gasped as the feedback lanced up his arm - but Lucent didn't let go.
"There's your trick," he muttered. "Stop fighting yourself."
Somewhere in the wreckage, something shattered. The Conduit in Kai's hands hummed, its light steady for the first time.
Neither of them mentioned how the shadows seemed to lean closer to watch.
Kai wiped the sweat from his brow, his fingers leaving streaks of grime across his forehead.
The salvaged Conduit in his hands still flickered erratically, its cracked screen glitching under the strain of even basic glyphs.
He hesitated, then turned to Lucent.
"Let me ask just one last thing," Kai said, voice tight. "Can you give me better SpellApps? Ones that won't backfire every damn time?"
Lucent paused, his back still turned as he sifted through a gutted mag-lev console.
The silence stretched just long enough for Kai to think he'd been ignored. Then—
"Fine."
Lucent straightened, fishing his Conduit from his pocket.
With a few quick swipes, he pulled up a data transfer glyph, its edges frayed but functional. "These won't turn you into a Spire mage, but they won't melt your brain either."
A pulse of blue light passed between their devices.
Kai's Conduit chimed as the new SpellApps installed—basic Rank 1 and 2 utilities: Kinetic Push, Static Shield, Sensory Dampener, Leap. Standard fare, but stable.
Then something else loaded.
"Wait—" Kai frowned at the unfamiliar glyphs. "These are Rank 3."
Lucent didn't look at him. "Mind Accel. Lets you process faster for about ten seconds. Useful if you're about to get your skull cracked." He flicked his wrist, and a knife appeared in his grip. "And Accelerate. Short burst. Works on anything you're touching."
To demonstrate, he tapped the blade. A jagged glyph flared along its edge—and then the knife was gone, buried to the hilt in a rusted server tower twenty meters away with a sound like a gunshot.
Kai's breath caught.
"That's…"
"A last resort," Lucent cut in, retrieving the blade with a sharp yank. "Burn out your Conduit casting that too much, and you'll be shitting sparks for a week."
Kai's fingers tightened around his device. The new glyphs hummed in his library, dangerous and alluring. "Why give me these now?"
Lucent finally met his gaze. "Because you're gonna need them."
Somewhere in the distance, metal groaned—not the settling of junk, but the deliberate shift of something moving.
The junkyard held its breath.
Kai's Conduit screen flickered, casting his face in jagged blue light.
The Rank 3 glyphs pulsed like live wires.
Lucent was already walking away.
"Come on, kid. We're not done yet."
***
The air in the Steel Talons' hideout was thick with the smell of stale stims and cigarettes.
Karen leaned against the rusted metal table, her new prosthetic hand flexing unconsciously—a habit she hadn't shaken since Rena installed it.
The temporary arm whirred softly with each movement, its servos still unfamiliar in their precision.
Across from her, the remnants of Nex's inner circle sat in uneasy silence.
Rook's massive frame dominated the corner, his hydraulic augments hissing as he shifted his weight.
Echo tapped her blade against her thigh—three quick raps, then two slow.
A soldier's rhythm.
Vey nursed a bottle of synth-liquor, the melted side of his face twisting his smirk into something grotesque.
And Mags—
Mags hadn't spoken since Karen walked in.
She just kept polishing Nex's shotgun, her fingers tracing the scratches he'd put in the stock during the raid on the Scorchers' outpost.
Karen cleared her throat. "We need to talk about the east tunnels."
Echo's blade stopped mid-tap. "What's there to talk about? Red Dogs took them the second they heard Nex was gone."
"How'd they even managed to get that information so fast. I have a suspicion that there's a mole in our squads." The moment Vey's words left his melted lips, the temperature in the room dropped ten degrees.
As he intently stared at Rook "Or maybe one of you relay the information?"
Echo's blade froze mid-tap.
Rook's hydraulic joints hissed as his fists clenched.
Mags' polishing rag stilled on Nex's shotgun barrel.
Karen felt the tension like a live wire against her throat.
"Say that again," Echo whispered.
Her blade wasn't tapping anymore—it was poised to throw.
Vey leaned back, the synth-liquor bottle dangling from his scarred fingers. "You deaf? Someone sold us out. Red Dogs knew about the lab job before the bodies were cold." His good eye swept the room. "Only people who knew the details were in this fucking room."
Rook's ocular implant flickered red. "Careful, Vey." The warning rumbled through his augments like distant thunder. "You're sitting with the same people who pulled your melted ass out of the last Red Dog's fight."
But Vey wasn't backing down.
He leaned forward, synth-liquor sloshing in his bottle.
"Think about it. Red Dogs hit the east tunnels six hours after the lab blew. Knew exactly where our patrols would be thin." His ruined mouth twisted. "That's not luck. That's a rat."
Rook's massive frame blocked Vey before he could stand. "Enough." His augmented voice was a low growl. "We start turning on each other, we're already dead."
Echo's knife scraped against the table as she dragged it toward herself. "Rook's right. But so's Vey." Her gaze cut to Karen. "You really think we can move on the tunnels without cleaning house first?"
Karen exhaled through her nose.
The hum of her prosthetic filled the silence.
She'd seen this before—in the Spire garrison, right before a purge.
The way suspicion slithered through ranks, biting ankles until someone bled.
"We find the mole. Quietly." She tapped her Conduit awake, pulling up a map of their territory. "Set a trap. Leak false intel—different routes to each squad. Whichever one gets hit, we know where to look."
Vey barked a laugh. "Oh, that's rich. So we just wait for another ambush?"
"No." Karen's voice dropped. "We make sure the ambush is ours."
A flicker of understanding passed through the room.
Echo's blade resumed its rhythm.
Rook's ocular implant brightened as he accessed his tactical database.
Even Mags set down the shotgun, her fingers twitching toward her own weapon.
Vey took a long drink. "Fine. But when we find the bastard, I get first cut."
Karen didn't argue.
Karen leaned against the edge, her temporary prosthetic hand flexing in a restless rhythm.
Flickering neon strips cast shadows across the warped metal table where the remnants of the Steel Talons gathered, their faces drawn tight with exhaustion and simmering rage.
Echo's knife slammed into the table with a sharp crack, the blade vibrating from the force.
The sound cut through the murmurs like a gunshot.
"We're getting off topic," she snapped, her augmented eye narrowing, the red targeting lens flickering as it focused.
"Gristle's dead. That means no more glow, no combat stims, no black-market augments. How the hell do we keep breathing without our apothecary?"
Rook shifted in his seat.
His massive frame dominated the corner, the blue glow of his ocular implant painting the scars on his face in ghostly light.
"We can handle the augments," he rumbled. "Scavenge parts, trade with the Neon Bazaar. But the glow? The high-grade stims?" He shook his head, the cables in his neck straining. "Those formulas died with Gristle. No one else knows the ratios, the distillation process. Without them, we're peddling watered-down trash."
Vey let out a wet, mocking laugh, the melted side of his face twisting grotesquely as he raised a bottle of synth-liquor to his lips.
"Fantastic. So we're back to hawking scrap metal and praying to whatever gods still give a damn about this shithole." The liquor sloshed as he took a long pull, his fingers trembling slightly—whether from withdrawal or rage, Karen couldn't tell.
Karen tuned out the bickering, her fingers tracing the edge of her Conduit absently.
The numbers didn't lie—without Gristle's supplies, their profit margins would bleed dry within weeks.
But beneath the logistical nightmare, a darker thought coiled in her gut, cold and insistent:
The east tunnels were hit too fast. Too precise.
Someone had betrayed them.
The meeting had dragged on for hours, circling the same problems like vultures over a corpse, picking at the bones of their crumbling empire.
Her gaze drifted to the door at the back of the room—Nex's private quarters.
Untouched since his death.
The old bastard has probably an idea about the traitor—or traitors.
If there were answers, they'd be in there.
"We prioritize," Karen cut in, her voice slicing through the noise.
The room fell silent.
"Rook, you and Vey handle the augment trades. Stick to the basics—neural interfaces, limb replacements. Nothing that requires Gristle's expertise. Echo, you take point on securing the remaining glow stockpiles. Ration them. Cut deals with the Bazaar's lower-tier dealers until we find a new chemist."
Echo yanked her blade free from the table, the edge glinting under the flickering lights. "Roger that."
Then the thought of Gristle's room—also untouched since his death—sent a chill through her.
The old apothecary had been paranoid to a fault, his quarters likely booby-trapped with whatever chemical nightmares he'd cooked up in his final days.
"I'll search Gristle's room," Karen's prosthetic fingers curled into a fist. "See if he left anything behind about his brews. Formulas. Notes. Anything."
The silence that followed was thick enough to choke on.
"Yeah, better you than me," Rook rumbled. "That place was annoying to deal with when he was alive."
Vey snorted "Yeah, well. If you find his glow recipe, maybe we can all stop pretending his shit didn't make us see ghosts half the time."
Mags didn't speak.
Her fingers tightened around Nex's shotgun, the metal creaking under her grip.
The look in her eyes said everything—Gristle's room wasn't just a potential goldmine.
It was a tomb.
Karen exhaled through her nose, the weight of what came next settling in her bones.
The hunt for the traitor was underway.
And now this—one more walk through the graveyard of what they'd lost.
The neon lights buzzed overhead, their glow painting the room in sickly hues of blue and rust.
Somewhere in the walls, something scuttled—rats or worse, the Junkyard's ever-present watchers.
Tomorrow, she'd search both the rooms.