The air in the safehold was always the same. It tasted of recycled oxygen, stale synth-noodles, and the faint, metallic tang of rust that no amount of scrubbing could ever erase. It was a taste that had seeped into the very walls, a permanent reminder of where they were. Of what they were.
Nezra woke to the sound of dripping water. A steady, maddening *plink… plink… plink* from a leak in the corridor outside his room. He'd offered to fix it once, but Scarlet had told him it was part of the safehold's "climate control system" with a completely straight face. He'd believed her for a whole day.
He lay on his thin cot, staring at the ceiling. The exposed pipes and conduits were like a metallic nervous system, and sometimes, late at night, he could hear the faint thrum of the place's heartbeat. His arm throbbed. The burn from the tunnel fight was healing, thanks to Kara's salves, but it still pulled tight and angry every time he moved.
His ORM flickered to life in his vision without him willing it, a ghost in his skull.
`CORE RESERVE: 17%`
`RESONANCE RATE: 5.1%`
`VITALITY: 14`
`NEURAL INTEGRITY: 82%`
`STATUS: MINOR TISSUE DAMAGE. RECOMMEND HYDRATION.`
Seventeen percent. A number that would have been pathetic for any real Resonant. For him, after weeks of agony, it felt like a mountain climbed. He'd bled for that number. He'd screamed for it into a damp towel so no one would hear. He'd fed a bottomless hunger inside him for every single percentage point.
The door to his room hissed open without a knock. It was always like that. Privacy was a currency none of them had.
Scarlet stood there, a datapad in one hand, a half-eaten protein bar in the other. Her purple ponytail was a messy cascade over one shoulder, and she had a smudge of grease on her cheek.
"You're not dead. Good," she said, chewing. "Your bio-readouts were spiking like crazy last night. I thought you were finally gonna combust. Would've been a mess to clean up."
"Good morning to you too, Scarlet," he mumbled, sitting up. The movement sent a fresh spike of pain through his arm.
She drifted into the room, her eyes scanning the sparse space as if she'd never seen it before. She picked up the discarded stalk-weave suit from the floor, wrinkled her nose, and tossed it into a corner. "We need to get you a new one. This one's got loser cooties all over it now."
"We lost. Of course it has loser cooties."
"We didn't lose. We… tactically acquired a new mortal enemy. That's a net gain in my book." She flopped down on the end of his cot, making the whole thing shudder. She smelled of ozone, soldering iron, and something sweet, like synthetic berries. "Besides, you were kinda scary down there. In a messy, 'might-die-any-second' way. Jax looked pissed. It was great."
She said it lightly, but he saw the flicker of something else in her cyan eyes. Not fear. Awe, maybe. A little bit of worry they both pretended wasn't there.
"I didn't know what I was doing," he admitted, the words feeling too heavy for the small room. The truth was somewhere deep within him he felt deep dread...and guilt
"Nobody does their first time," she said with a shrug that was meant to be casual but missed by a mile. "You point the glowy end at the bad guy and hope. You did fine." She shoved the rest of the protein bar into her mouth and held out the datapad. "Here. Morgan wants you to run diagnostics on the skiff's aft thrusters. Says the port alignment is 'off by a hair.'"
Nezra took the pad. "She wants me to do it?"
"Yep. Says you've got a 'feel for unstable energy systems' or something." Scarlet grinned. "I think she just doesn't wanna do it. It's a boring job."
It was more than that. It was a test. A quiet one. After the chaos of the tunnel, it was a return to the mundane. A way to see if he could still function, if he could still be useful when he wasn't throwing spears of raw power.
The hangar bay was cool and vast, the skiff squatting in the center like a sleeping beast. The aft thrusters were a complex mess of wiring and micro-conduits. He could feel the latent energy humming within them, a faint, metallic song.
He worked in silence for an hour, the datapad guiding him through the diagnostics. His world shrank to the size of the thruster housing. To the feel of tools in his hands, the smell of engine oil, the intricate dance of aligning energy flows. It was peaceful. There was no Umeh here, no hunger, just a problem with a solution.
He heard footsteps behind him. Not Scarlet's light, skipping tread. Not Rielle's heavy stomp. This was a quieter, more measured step.
Rin stopped a few feet away, her arms crossed. She didn't say anything. Just watched him work. Her silence was a physical pressure.
After a few minutes, he couldn't take it anymore. "Did Morgan send you to check on me?"
"No."
"Then what?"
She didn't answer right away. Her eyes, the color of old steel, tracked his movements. "You left your flank exposed when you lunged for Kara," she said finally, her voice flat. "You led with your right shoulder. A trained opponent would have dislocated it and put a blade in your ribs before you hit the ground."
Nezra's hands stilled. He looked up at her. "I was… I was just trying to help."
"Trying to get killed," she corrected, no malice in her tone. It was a simple statement of fact. "The intention was adequate. The execution was garbage."
She turned to leave, then paused. "The thrusters. The tertiary coupling is misaligned. It's causing a feedback loop in the energy converter. It's why the alignment feels 'off.' Fix that first."
And then she was gone, leaving him alone with the skiff and the echo of her criticism. It wasn't encouragement. It was better. It was a piece of data. A way to improve. It was, he realized, the closest thing to approval he was ever going to get from her.
He found the coupling. She was right. He fixed it.
Later, he sat with Kara as she changed the dressing on his burn. Her hands were gentle, clinical.
"It's healing well," she said, applying a cool, green gel that immediately soothed the fire in his skin. "The tissue is regenerating. You'll have a scar, though."
"Another one to add to the collection," he said, trying for a joke. It fell flat.
Kara looked at him, her kind eyes serious. "What you did… it was brave, Nezra."
"It was stupid. Rin said so."
"Rin sees the world in angles and trajectories. She's not wrong. But she doesn't see the whole picture." Kara finished taping the new bandage in place. "You saw someone about to get hurt, and you moved. You didn't calculate the odds. You just acted. That's not nothing. In this world, that's… rare."
She packed her medkit and stood. "Don't let the rust get into your soul, Nezra. It's the one thing this place tries to take from everyone."
He sat there for a long time after she left, listening to the drip of water, the hum of the skiff, the distant, muffled sound of Rielle and Morgan arguing about something. The Rust Belt was trying to grind them all down, day by day. The drip of water. The taste of stale air. The constant, low-grade fear.
But it wasn't. Not today. Today, he'd fixed a thruster. He'd been insulted by Rin. He'd been patched up by Kara. He'd been bothered by Scarlet.
It was just a day. A slow, mundane, painfully ordinary day in the belly of a broken world.
And for the first time, it didn't feel like he was just waiting for the next disaster. It felt, almost, like a life.