"This is today's dose. These are the firearms you'll service or strip for parts this week. And…"
The admin clerk stacked a wobbling heap of battered rifles and pistols onto a handcart, then pinched a single vial of amber liquid between two fingers as if it might evaporate if she blinked. The office fluorescents were the color of a bruise; dust swam in the air like gnats in a jar. She held the vial just out of reach, torn between duty and the rulebook.
"Because Nightfall Squad keeps pushing its patrol lines, our anti-rad stock is short," she said, lowering her voice until the camera dome wouldn't pick it up. "This is your third vial—and the last. Good luck, Jace."
Jace Calder kept his face still and took the glass with his left hand. "I'll stretch it." He didn't look at the crate of rotten paperwork behind her or the red dot burning in the ceiling. He kicked the cart's brake, let the wheels bite, and backed out past the sign that said NO IDLE HANDS.
The corridor had the damp-metal smell of a ship's belly. A pipe ticked overhead. Down the hall, someone laughed too loudly and stopped fast. Two kids watched the cart go by with the close animal focus of hunger; their mother drew them aside with a thank-you-nod that meant you just did me a favor by not slowing down so they could stare at the guns. Jace rolled on. The handcart squealed on a flat spot like it had learned to complain to get what it wanted.
His workshop sat three corridors down, a narrow bay of steel tables and pegboard pocked with the ghosts of missing tools. He parked the cart by the bench and set the vial where he could see it—center of the faint ring the last one had left, glass on old glass. The gooseneck lamp fought its joint and lost, sagging to aim at nothing. A draft came under the door and made the hanging tape measure clack against the wall in a small, steady rhythm.
"Compared to how other out-of-towners land on their feet," he told the empty room, "my second life's a train wreck."
Strictly speaking, he wasn't from here. He came from a place he called Blue Star, and woke on this one smaller, younger, and breakable in all the wrong ways. Ruinworld had once been a border outpost under a far-flung Imperium, a pinprick of light for fleets chasing a grand expedition. That was forty thousand imperial years ago. The fleets were gone. The light went out. You're born, you work, you inhale rust and fallout, and sooner or later your cells stop bargaining.
His right arm had started the negotiation without him. Under the skin, the muscle was mottled dark-purple where radiation had chewed through. Fingers that were steady last winter now trembled when he lifted a wrench. If the rot crossed the wrist, he'd be a spectator at his own job.
He cleared a square foot of tabletop with a rag that was mostly memory, laid out needles, the strap, the tourniquet—ritual by muscle memory. He paused with the vial in his palm and listened to the vault breathing through the ductwork. Somewhere two doors down, a baby coughed like a loose bolt. The flavor of metal rode the air.
He popped the cap, drew the dose, tapped bubbles out with a knuckle. The serum was cold even through the glass.
"Don't waste it," he told himself. Don't waste anything.
He slid the needle into a vein high on his forearm, exhaled, and pushed the plunger.
It hit like dumping ice water on burning coal. Heat and cold collided; something in the dead tissue screamed. The pain didn't climb; it detonated—white edges, the world narrowing to a tunnel with a lamp at the far end. His jaw locked. Veins stood on his neck. The sagging lamp finally surrendered and tapped the bench with a tiny, ridiculous clink.
He slid off the stool and hit the floor on one knee, one hand braced on oil-spotted concrete. Breath came back in ragged pulls. The tremor in his fingers ran up his elbow and shook the shoulder like a dog worrying a rag.
Not the first time. The agony never got shy.
Minutes—maybe half an hour—peeled away. When the wave finally drained, he rolled to the wall and levered himself up. Sweat cooled and made him shake harder. He capped the spent needle, dropped it into the tin that served as a sharps box, and ate from a jar of greenish plant mash that tasted like lint and medicine. Calories. That was all it had to be.
He cleaned the spot, taped gauze over it, and checked his arm. The purple edge looked the same. Maybe a hairline better. Maybe not. The mirror by the door was spidered from when a rifle stock had fallen the wrong way; it returned a cracked version of him—too thin, left hand steady, right hand not.
He clicked the bench lamp off. It bounced back to dim. He clicked it again; it sulked brighter. He snorted, then took the cart's canvas cover and threw it over the pile of guns. His mentor—old man with hands like blueprint paper—had taught him to cover work as if dust were an enemy that could read your secrets. The old man had lasted longer than his charts said he should; stubbornness disguised as care. Then his lungs had gone to glass, and Jace had learned what grief looked like in a place that couldn't…
He unrolled the padlock cable and looped it through the bench legs and the cart's frame. The shop's door latch stuck on every third try; he jiggled, cursed softly, jiggled again until it caught. Outside, boots thumped in the corridor—patrol cadence—and then faded. The sound got behind his ribs before it left his ears. Nightfall liked to make itself heard.
On the pegboard, a row of sockets hung by size. He counted them without thinking, came up short by one eight-millimeter he did not own, and felt the old hunger to go out and scavenge something worth having. Later. Earn first, risk later. The vial on the bench sent up a thin solvent smell where a drop had wet the ring. He wiped it, then wiped again to push down the urge to lick his finger like a thief.
His right hand told the truth when he made it open and close. The muscles fired late. The thumb underperformed. He imagined trying to hold a file steady while a firing pin wanted to skate; he imagined botching it and turning a rifle into a noise that killed the wrong person. If the rot crosses the wrist, you're done. The thought pressed at his throat. He swallowed it.
"Work," he said, to give the room a shape. "Then sleep."
He didn't sleep much, and what he got arrived in raids: ten minutes at the bench with his eyes closed, a quarter hour on the cot, the kind of dreaming that stole energy and left the taste of broken batteries behind. A whole night? Luxury. He didn't have to look at the cot's blanket to know it was stiff with dust and oil. He looked anyway, and the looking felt like an apology to no one specific.
He picked up the vial's cap, rolled it on the tabletop with one finger until it spun itself out and fell flat. The sound was a cheap coin dying. He picked it up and put it in the little tin with the sharps—habits built a fence you could lean on when other things buckled. He checked the power to the extraction fan and listened to the blades complain. He could solve that tomorrow with a shim cut from a soda can. Tomorrow assumed he had enough arm left to cut straight.
Someone in the hall dragged something heavy—scrap or a drunk. The dragging stopped when a second set of boots arrived. Voices, muffled. The vault knew how sound traveled, which meant everyone talked like someone else was always listening. Jace listened anyway. One laugh, not kind. One order, short. Metal tapped metal. Then quiet.
He took the plant mash again, a second mean spoonful to cover the cortisol drop, and chased it with water that tasted faintly of pipe. The clock on the wall had never told truth; the battery had died, but the second hand still twitched once a minute like it wanted to. Time here was a body metric: how long until your hands steadied, how long until they shook again.
He checked the arm one more time under the lamp. The purple edge—if it had retreated, it had retreated by the width of a lie. He wanted to believe anyway. Give me a centimeter and I'll trade you an hour. That was how you bargained when money was medicine.
Jace turned off the bench power and the lamp. Darkness took a breath and then settled. He palmed the emergency key under the table lip, checked the door latch twice, then a third time for the habit of it, and crossed to the cot against the back wall. He sat first. He listened to the vault again: the slow respirator hush of the air system, the faint clatter in the mess, the rhythmic tap of condensate in the wastepipe. Somewhere beyond concrete and dirt and metal, a storm dragged its nails across the plane—
He lay back without undressing, one arm over his eyes to keep the exit light from etching a rectangle on his skull. The vial's glass clicked against the stain ring as the bench settled, a tiny sound that echoed bigger than it had any right to.
If the dose works, the rot stalls, he thought. If it fails…
The thought refused to finish.
He was still awake; he just stopped trying to control the drift. The room narrowed until only the bench lamp's afterimage remained, a thin blue coin floating under his eyelids. He told himself he'd get up in five minutes and put the lampshade back where the glare couldn't catch the mirror and bounce into the hall. He told himself he'd move the cart so the squeak didn't announce he had hardware. He told himself he'd check the filter on the fan. He told himself a list long enough to pass for comfort.
From somewhere he couldn't name—outside the room or inside his skull—something flickered once, a colder blue inside the blue.
Not a sound, not a word. Just a shape. For an instant it looked like the outline of a bracket seen edge-on, a geometry more felt than seen, the way heat above a burner makes the air ripple.
Jace opened his eyes into the dark.
The blue was gone; the afterimage wasn't.
He heard his own breath loud in the small room. He didn't move. The habit of not moving had saved him more than once: let the other thing declare itself first. If it's a leak, I'll smell it. If it's a short, I'll hear it. If it's in my head… He didn't finish that one either.
The vault breathed. The bench clicked as metal cooled. The gooseneck lamp, unwilling to hold a pose even when off, sagged another millimeter and found a new angle to be useless at. Somewhere beyond the corridor, a door opened and shut like a book being closed with care.
The thin blue coin under his eyelids dimmed to a line.
It held.
Then, just before it went, the blue line tried to square itself, like a box testing its corners in the dark.