The cave didn’t smell like the forest. In the forest, even rot smells like life, even when it’s decaying beneath the snow. Here, the air reeked of old stone, mouse droppings, and something else—sweet and nauseating. The way meat smells when it’s left too long over a fire and then forgotten in the sun.

  I lay on a filthy blanket, and every breath felt as if a shattered brick were lodged in my chest. Fever rolled through me in waves. One moment I was drowning in an icy stream; the next I was back inside that damned boiler, steam flaying the skin from my bones.

  “Malek, drink,” Ephrem said, pressing the rim of a tin cup to my lips.

  The water was ice-cold. It burned down my throat, but I gulped it greedily until I started coughing. The cough sent a blade of pain through my right shoulder so sharp I nearly blacked out. The prosthetic strapped to the sled boards felt like it weighed a ton. The iron had gone cold and was now leeching the last of the warmth from my body.

  “Need… Zeno…” I tried to move, but my left arm felt as thin and useless as thread.

  “Lie still, for God’s sake,” Ephrem wiped my forehead with his sleeve. In the cave’s half-dark, his face looked carved from dry bark. “I heard you. He needs copper. And where am I supposed to get that? I’m an old man, Malek, not some mountain dwarf. We’ve got rocks and your iron. That’s it.”

  I closed my eyes. Schematics floated behind them. It wasn’t magic—just my brain running at its last feverish revolutions. I saw the drive assembly I had designed back in the Zero Sector. Coils. Tight, compact coils of pure copper hidden inside the “elbow” joint of the prosthetic.

  “In my arm…” I rasped. “Open the elbow, Ephrem. Under the third plate… yellow wire.”

  Ephrem froze. I could hear him breathing hard.

  “You’re delirious, boy. If I start digging into your arm, you’ll bleed out. It’s fused to you.”

  “Not to flesh… to the frame. Cut the straps. Take the copper. If Zeno doesn’t stand… we don’t leave this place.”

  I felt him hesitate. Outside, the wind howled, driving needle-fine snow through the crack in the rock. We were trapped. No firewood. No food. And the only thing that could protect us had become a four-hundred-kilogram statue.

  “Forgive me, Lord,” Ephrem whispered.

  Metal scraped against metal. The old man pulled a knife and pliers from Kyle’s bag.

  It took forever. Endless. I felt every jolt, every twist of the blade. Ephrem wasn’t a mechanic. His hands, made for plows and axes, were too rough for delicate work. He grunted, cursed under his breath, and I felt drops fall onto my chest—sweat. Or tears.

  “There’s a bolt… it’s jammed,” he rasped. “Won’t budge, Malek!”

  “Use… leverage…” My lips barely moved. “Brace against the joint.”

  A sharp crack split the air. The metal plate sealing the prosthetic’s internals flew off and clattered against the cave wall. I screamed—the vibration shot straight through the pins screwed into my clavicle.

  “I see it!” Ephrem’s voice shook. “I see the wire. Golden… thin as a hair.”

  “Pull… carefully. Don’t tear it.”

  He drew it out centimeter by centimeter. I heard the copper whisper as it slid free of its channels. They were the nerves of my prosthetic. I was giving them up to bring another back to life.

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  Half an hour—or an eternity—later, Ephrem finished. In his hands was a tangled coil of gleaming wire. My right arm was now an empty shell. An iron skeleton without strength. Lighter than before—but it was the lightness of death.

  “Now what?” the old man asked, trembling.

  “Take it… to Zeno. On his neck… under the left plate… there’s a port. Two contacts. Bridge them… feed the charge from the capacitor…”

  I tried to explain how to close the circuit using the residual charge in the prosthetic’s power unit. It was madness. Like trying to start a massive ship with a single spark.

  Ephrem approached the Golem. The cave was dim; only a dull strip of daylight from the entrance touched Zeno’s black armor. The old man worked for a long time. I heard his ragged breathing and the faint chime of wire.

  “Contacts… I see them…” he whispered. “Connecting.”

  I held my breath. My heart hammered in my throat.

  Click.

  Nothing. Silence. Only the wind outside.

  “It’s not working, Malek.” There was such despair in Ephrem’s voice that I wanted to close my eyes and never wake up. “It’s just iron. Dead iron.”

  “Again…” I clenched my teeth until they creaked. “Check the polarity. Ephrem, please…”

  And then it happened.

  There was no thunder. No flash. Just a faint, barely audible whine. As if somewhere deep in the mountain, a very old, very tired bumblebee had awakened.

  Zeno jerked. His massive frame lurched forward, and the sled beneath him cracked.

  “Sweet mercy—” Ephrem stumbled back over the rocks.

  The Golem’s ocular lens slowly, reluctantly filled with a dim, sickly orange glow. Not the bright emerald fire I remembered. This was the glow of dying embers.

  “S-sys-tem… re-restored…” Zeno’s voice grated like millstones grinding stone. “Re-reserve… z-zero… nine… percent…”

  “Zeno…” I tried to smile, but my face had become a mask of pain. “You’re back.”

  “Iron…” His head turned toward me with a grinding creak. The lens flickered. “Y-your limb… deformed. Wear… critical.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” I whispered. “We’re alive.”

  Ephrem sat on the ground, back against the wall, staring at the “revived” monster. Only now did he seem to grasp that all this time he hadn’t been dragging scrap metal—but something that could speak.

  “Well I’ll be…” he breathed. “Well I’ll be, Malek.”

  He remembered the inquisitor’s bag only an hour later, once Zeno had somewhat “stabilized.” Rummaging for food, he found something more important.

  “Look at this,” he said, pulling out a leather tube. “The one in the cloak had it. Fine piece.”

  Ephrem unrolled the parchment. A map. Real, detailed, sealed with the marks of the Citadel. I squinted at the symbols in the dim light.

  “Zeno… scan it,” I ordered.

  The Golem’s lens emitted a thin beam of light. It passed over the parchment, pausing on red markings.

  “D-data… correlated…” Zeno rasped. “These are… the northern ranges. Red zones… marked ‘Cursed.’”

  “What’s there?” Ephrem asked.

  “There… the City of Bridges.” Zeno paused; something clicked inside him. “In my archives… designated ‘Object Four.’ An engineering hub of the Forerunners. There… are workshops. There… is titanium.”

  “Titanium,” I repeated. The word sounded like music.

  Titanium doesn’t rust. Titanium is light. Titanium is what I should be made of, if I intend to survive in this world.

  “How far?” I asked.

  “Three hundred forty kilometers… direct line,” Zeno replied. “In current condition… probability of arrival… less than two percent.”

  “You used to say zero point four,” I managed a faint smirk. “So the odds are improving.”

  Ephrem looked at both of us—the burned, skeletal boy with a gutted iron arm and the massive, crippled machine with an orange eye. He sighed, took a piece of stale bread from the bag, broke it in half, and handed me one piece.

  “Three hundred kilometers, you say…” he shook his head. “Well then. Three hundred it is. Best chew first. Won’t make it to your ‘titanium’ on an empty stomach. Not in a hundred years.”

  I chewed the bread, feeling it stick in my throat. My shoulder still burned. The fever hadn’t left. But the cave somehow felt a little warmer.

  I looked at Zeno. Motionless, conserving every microwatt of energy—but there. My teacher. My protector. My dead weight, alive again.

  “Ephrem,” I called.

  “What now, boy?”

  “Put… Zeno’s hand… on my shoulder.”

  “Why? It’s freezing.”

  “Just do it. It helps.”

  The old man muttered something about “mad engineers,” but he stood and with effort lifted the Golem’s heavy steel hand, lowering it gently over my blanket.

  The cold of the metal soothed the pain. I closed my eyes, listening to the steady, barely audible hum of the reactor.

  We survived. Today, physics proved stronger than death. And tomorrow… tomorrow we begin our journey to the City of Bridges.

  Two percent is more than zero.

  [Status: 5%. Stabilization…]