Dawn in the scrap mountains did not so much arrive as apologize. The sky tried on a lighter shade of smoke and declared that "day" was in effect. Nothing warmed. Nothing brightened. The heaps — those continent-sized, metal mausoleums — simply became visible enough to be rude again.
Kael lay under the spine of a dead shuttle, face mashed into iron dandruff, trying to breathe like a rumor no one believed. The shuttle's ribs arced above him in a cracked grin. Rust flaked into his hair. He kept the crowbar in his fist because it made his heart pretend it had a plan.
Above, scavenger hounds stalked the ridge.
There were three of them. Of course there were three. One was a problem; two were a negotiation; three were a committee.
They moved like a bad idea that wouldn't stop explaining itself — meat rerouted through wire, ceramic tiles studded where God might have meant skin. Their heads were welded cages full of teeth. Optics glowed a flavorless amber. Claws ticked on loose steel with the cheerful rhythm of a clock counting down to someone else's surprise.
The lead hound stopped. Its muzzle pistoned open and vacuumed the air. Servos purred as the skull tilted. Listening.
Kael's lungs clamped shut. Don't even whisper, he thought. If air can hear you, so can teeth.
A memory tried to kick its way in, the kind with a scream at the end — Jik sprinting, all elbows and hope, scooped up from the jagged pile like a tossed snack. Crunch. Silence. Kael told the memory to sit in the corner and think about its choices.
Salvation arrived as a noise : somewhere far off, a tower of plating gave up and crashed back into the valley below. The hounds pivoted with the single-minded grace of hunger and bounded toward the fresh catastrophe, claws clattering, voices ripping the haze.
Kael counted to fifty when he finally let his lungs cash a small breath.
He slid from beneath the shuttle's spine and studied the day's labyrinth. The heap below him was a maze drawn by a lunatic — cargo boxes warped into drunken trapezoids, beams crisscrossing like arguments, sheets of hull stacked at angles that suggested the mountain had been drunk since the last war and had no plans to sober up. Everything creaked. Everything hissed. The heap-song never shut up.
He tightened the rags around his palms. His hands were maps of crisscrossing scars punctuated by brighter, newer cuts. The crowbar's eaten end slid into a seam that promised to complain before it betrayed him. He leaned. Metal squealed the way truth does when it's not ready to be said. The panel jerked. He set his shoulder and slowly worked the joint into giving way.
He could only see darkness inside, stale and cold. Kael let his fingers go exploring, because eyes lied and his hands never did. He felt the snag and pull of copper hair — thin coils tangled like a bad haircut — he teased them loose and wound them neat. A length of conduit: brittle at one end, pliant at the other. A pinch of screws and two washers. A bracket. And then—
A casing. Smooth. Heavy. Cold.
He drew it out carefully. A power cell. The face wore a thin crack like a smirk. A thin breath of gel hissed along it. The indicator winked
"Hello trouble."
He wrapped the cell in cloth that already smelled like old resin, laid it under the copper, and reached for more miracles. The seam offered him rust and regret, which he pocketed out of habit. Above, the sky rubbed gray onto everything and called it a job well done.
His stomach tightened into knots. He had been living on the smell of other people's food for three days. The hunger was not dramatic anymore; it was a tax, collected every minute.
The bell down-valley rang once. It was trade hour.
Kael knotted the bundle, tucked it under his shirt beneath his ribs, and began the descent.
The path down was a conversation with gravity conducted in small, nervous words. He tested with knuckles and bolts. Ring? Maybe safe. Thud? No thanks. He moved sideways more than forward because forward here was performative and got you killed quickly. Twice the heap sighed into avalanches elsewhere; once something massive — indifferent as weather — rolled overhead, rattling screws and prayers.
He avoided ash that looked solid but behaved like a trapdoor to hot air. He tiptoed past a seam that whisper-growled when a breeze kissed it, the kind of seam that only respected people who called it names. He took the worst footing because the good footing was always busy betraying optimists.
At the bottom, the air thickened into a humid rancid stew. The market sprawled across a flattened patch of wounded earth — tarps stitched from doomed banners, table-frames bullied into shape, braziers sulking. Signs shouted in white paint with the voice of someone who had borrowed authority and was ready to return it:
KRAGG SECTOR — TRADE BY LICENSE
Someone had painted a crown on a buzzard with a steel jaw. Someone else had slashed through it and written RAT MEAT in block letters. The last stroke smeared, as if the writer had been invited to a different conversation.
Kael flowed into the body of people pretending not to be a line. Rats did not shove. Shoving was memorable. Being memorable was a luxury you could not afford.
The market smelled like a chemistry experiment that kept asking to be forgiven: fried fungus trying its best; boiled sludge that had been told it was soup; hot iron; cooled fear. The scent curled a finger into Kael's gut and stirred. He tightened his jaw and let his eyes wander without looking like they were doing it.
Collectors sat behind tables, their vests with multiple bulging pockets. They moved salvage into categories as if real hope could be neatly filed. Their smiles had the exact curvature of a blade that had stopped pretending to be anything else. Enforcers loitered the way storms do, cudgels against thighs, cut-down rifles balanced like props in a play where the ending never surprised anyone. Kael called them black-jaws under his breath for the lacquered face shields that made their faces look like insects had been asked to consult on the uniform.
A speaker somewhere coughed itself awake and started preaching like a frying pan.
"Trade fair, or trade not at all," it chirped. "Baron Kragg keeps you safe. Baron Kragg feeds—"
"—you to the machine," Kael whispered, and then stopped his mouth before it got him educated.
He glanced at the crane at the far edge. Two bodies swayed, not far enough down the rope to be respectful. A placard bobbed at an ankle: THIEVES. The lettering was neat. Professional. Someone had practiced their penmanship on somebody else's oxygen.
The line inched forward. A skinny old scrap-saint two stalls over held up a chronometer that still ticked like a guilty conscience. "It ticks," the man said. "Tick is worth something."
"Nothing," the Collector corrected, and proved it on a scale that knew how to lie politely. An Enforcer smashed the point home with his club. The crowd performed the ritual of seeing without seeing.
Kael's turn shuffled into existence.
"Show," the Collector said, already halfway bored.
Kael put down the copper wire, the conduit, the screws, and the cell like a dare. The stick — Collectors loved sticks; they were the costume of expertise — poked the crack. "Dead," the man said, in the tone of a judge who hates paperwork.
"It'll seal," Kael said, keeping his voice exactly halfway between pleading and humor. He tapped the indicator with his nail. The yellow power indicator turned flashed a credible blink. "Still holds charge."
The Collector's eyes refused to be charmed by electronics. They climbed Kael's face like they were checking for receipts. "Dead," he repeated. He sorted the copper with two fingers as if touching it too much would obligate him to empathy. "Low grade. Conduit's brittle. One strip."
Say nothing, Kael told himself, which was funny, because his mouth loved saying things.
"That's worth three," the part of him that had never liked living softly muttered anyway.
The cudgel arrived on the table like an unhelpful relative. The black-jaw behind it let a smile wander around his face that didn't touch his eyes. Kael's words packed a small bag and quickly left town.
The scale did its crooked dance. A half strip of ration — salt-paper — slid toward him, shiny with other people's fingers. "Next," the Collector told the air with the authority of a weather report.
Kael looked at the half strip the way men look at a joke that knows it's mean. He reached for it with a hand that understood theater and, in the same movement, let his fingers practice a different art.
As the Collector tossed the cracked cell, it arced toward the reject bin. Kael's palm brushed the wood, his sleeve gaping with a pocket sewn into that sleeve masquerading as a tear. The cell disappeared into the tear; a smooth scrap — a knob polished into a coin by a thousand anxious thumbs — took its place falling into the collected scraps bin. The universe, which loved sleight of hand as much as it loved gravity, yawned.
The black-jaw's gaze snapped to Kael's face and held. Kael let his blood remember how to be ice. He avoided blinking because blinking in front of a predator was a hobby for people who reveled in pain. He adopted the blank, restful expression of furniture.
The black-jaw's eyes drifted away, not because Kael had fooled him, but because boredom is the highest law here.
Kael opened his mouth and slid the half strip to his cheek, where salt could pretend to be generosity, nodded because rats nodded, and moved his body the exact speed that said I am a man who has never considered speed a hobby.
Only when the tarps behind him looked like tired flags and the crane shrank into a toy scaffold did he let his fingers pinch the cell through his shirt. Dangerous. Stupid. Necessary. He counted it as a win and promised not to count it that way if anyone asked.
The cut back up between two leaning spires of rebar had the polite privacy muggers like. Kael chose it anyway, because the public routes came with public problems, like black-jaws who collected tuition from people learning to object.
As if on cue, they stepped out from the shadows.
Older rats. Better boots. Worse smiles.
"What'd the pocket-leech pay you?" the first one asked. A star tattoo stained his cheek, the ink having migrated the way hope did — toward the eye, then out. He wore confidence like it had come with the boots.
Kael considered the implications of lying and settled on the lightest version. "Enough."
"Enough for you," said the second. His teeth were filed into points, because sometimes people warned you ahead of time. "Not enough for us. Hand it over."
Kael let his right hand drift toward the knife on his belt. His left hand stayed where they could see it, empty but busy. Over the star boy's shoulder, a black-jaw lounged on a rise, studying the afternoon like a cat watches a bowl. Too close, Kael thought. Too bored.
"I didn't keep anything," he said, flatly. "You know better."
Star Cheek enjoyed a long look, the sort you take when deciding whether violence would improve your afternoon. He smiled without showing teeth, which was somehow worse than his friend. "Next time, don't make us ask."
"I'll make an appointment next time," Kael said before discretion could kick his tongue.
"Cute," Star Cheek said, but the kind of cute that meant some day.
Kael walked. Not fast. Not slow. You gave men like that your back in one-second rentals. He trudged his way up the path, step by step, expecting a knife he did not receive. Their voices sank into the heap-song and became just more creak, more sigh, more gossip from metal.
Anger bloomed in the right place, a coal under ash, useful if you warmed your hands over it and fatal if you tried to swallow it. They don't steal because they're hungry, he thought. They steal because starving politely takes too long.
The climb resumed its old sermon. Plates tried to pretend they were floors. Ladders believed in him until his foot tested their faith. Ash waited for a grand entrance and took offense when denied. He insulted each hazard in a measured tone, and the hazards, being artists, accepted critique.
He recognized a leech-track — slick, with a zipper pattern where its mouth had sampled the ground — and skirted it. A fog of junk-wisps glittered quietly under a skewed beam; he reversed until they lost interest, because you didn't argue with glitter that hums. Far up-slope, a rustborn giant trundled like a regret, and Kael let it be prehistoric in peace.
By the time he reached the ridge, his hands were raw under the rags, his arms a chorus of shakes, and his mouth tasted like someone had tried to solder it shut with salt. The market below his shoulder looked like ants playing capitalism. The crane drew a clean, unkind line against the sky. The two bodies dangled at the end. The placard that said THIEVES swung on its string, teaching spelling to no one who needed it.
He paused where collapsed panels made a geometry nobody valued. To the casual eye, it was just another pile of dead junk. To Kael, it was the seam between the world and the part of the world that was generous to him personally.
He pressed his thumb to a bolt that had never been a bolt and his palm to rust that had never been rust. The panel sighed like a door that had taken up smoking and slid a mean inch. Cool air exhaled from the crack — air that smelled like it had minded its own business all day.
He didn't go in yet.
He took a last look at the heap-sprawl, at the black-jaws lounging, at the Collectors counting other people's effort into their pockets, at the tarps shivering like flags for a country that deserved better, at the crane's grammar lesson. Beyond it all, the city was a smear of suggestion, towers like teeth biting a sky that did not bleed.
Mandatory juvenile. District Theta. The half-broken wrist-comm had coughed those words like a secret yesterday. He let the syllables sit on his tongue a moment, the way you balance an expensive taste you didn't pay for. A seat. A wall that doesn't move. Someone making me listen and then making me talk. Imagine.
He did. In the smallest, meanest way. Then he folded the image tight and put it in the pocket where he kept things you don't show the weather.
"Not forever," he said, and this time he said it out loud, because sometimes you have to be rude to the universe in public.
The heap, which had opinions about everything, creaked like a man changing his mind.
Kael slid into the seam sideways, the way rats approach luck. The panel kissed shut behind him, and the outside world went back to pretending he did not exist.
For a long breath, he held still in the darkness. The tunnel breathed slowly around him, the way old things breathe when they aren't in charge anymore. He listened for the noises that meant company — the wrong kind of scraping, the foreign rhythm of a boot. He heard the quiet he had built with wire and glass and stubbornness. He moved.
He crept a few meters in — fingers grazing the familiar rivet that squeaked unless pinched, shoulder sliding past the plate that only yielded to the left — then stopped and pressed his head to cool metal.
He didn't smile, exactly. Smiles were for open rooms and permission. But something in his face softened the way the sky sometimes does, and if the tunnel had been a person, it might have felt complimented.
The burrow waited farther inside, past three turns, two tests and one idea that smelled like revenge. That was tomorrow's introduction. Tonight's chapter ended at the threshold, with the boy and the dark agreeing not to betray each other until breakfast.
He tapped the seam with one knuckle — a habit, a superstition, a thank-you that didn't put him in debt — and the sound went out into the heap and came back as silence.
Not forever, he told himself again, and this time the words felt less like a joke and more like a lever.
He went in.