Greyhaven, late afternoon. The wind carried dust like ground glass.
On the balcony, Lex Ward tracked the sun, checked his watch, and slid the cap over the telescope's eyepiece. A sheet of alloy shutters rattled down the rails with a chain-pull, swallowing the room in dusk.
Seventeen hundred. Ninety minutes of mercy.
Beyond the river of rooftops, the metropolis held its breath. No traffic, no birdsong—just a held note of pressure that made the sinuses ache. Fixed above the skyline, a bruised, mountain-sized clot of cloud didn't move a meter. It just was, the way cliffs are—patient, inevitable, and obscene in the sky.
A helicopter strayed beneath it, tail twitching. Lex keyed in the zoom. A girl's face flashed in a side window—white as chalk. Then the air itself seemed to tilt. The rotors shredded the wind. The aircraft buckled, lifted as if snatched by a string, and vanished into the dark wool of the cloud. Screams cut off like a wire.
"Yeah," he muttered. "Time to be home."
He killed the telescope, slid the balcony door, and locked the last two braces. The shutters thudded into place. Darkness flooded the living room until the battery-fed strips along the floor gave off a meek, red ember of a glow—just enough to keep a toe from catching and not enough to paint a bull's-eye on his windows.
The routine carried him: check the window seals, cycle the alarm, verify the fridge draw off the inverter, tap the voltmeter. Power for cold and ears, not for eyes. Light meant attention. Attention meant visitors. Visitors meant the kind of noise that pulled more visitors.
He ate over the sink: two tinny mouthfuls of canned something he refused to name, two swallows of water, and a stale chip that tasted like cardboard and regret. The backpack on the counter sagged open—meager food, plenty of what most people would call trash: broken phones, a scuffed Bluetooth speaker, a dead shaver, one hairdryer with the cord frayed to copper whiskers.
To Lex, they were not trash. They were calories.
He set the speaker on a towel, flexed his fingers once, and placed his palm on the plastic.
A faint, phosphorescent heat washed up in his pupils, an itch behind the eyes the color of static. His hair prickled as if a breeze had risen inside his skull. The current was not in the wires; it was in him—an algorithm chewing, unspooling a device into parts the world didn't have names for.
When the glow receded, he lifted his hand. The speaker sighed into a small cone of brown ash and collapsed.
[DEVOUR SUCCESS. MECHANICAL SOURCE +1. MECHANICAL DEVOUR PROFICIENCY +1. BONUS: STRENGTH +1.]
[MECHANICAL HEART: LV.1 — 176/500.]
[TIP: LEVEL THE MECHANICAL HEART TO UNLOCK SPECIAL SKILLS. AWAKENINGS AT LV3 / LV6 / LV9.]
[BASE ATTRIBUTES][STRENGTH: LV1 — 22/50][SPEED: LV0 — 28/30][DEFENSE: LV0 — 15/30]
Lex exhaled through his teeth. The numbers mattered. They meant fewer surprises and better odds when surprises happened anyway.
He pinched the dead shaver between two fingers, considered the weight, and put it aside. The hairdryer he kept in his palm longer. Heat gun? Maybe a filament trick? The devour pulled different flavors from different machines—sometimes just powder and a nudge of numbers, sometimes a knack.
He closed his eyes, pictured the dryer, the coil, the motor. Eat. The glow rose and folded again.
[DEVOUR SUCCESS. MECHANICAL SOURCE +1. PROFICIENCY +1.][NEW SKILL ACQUIRED: WIND CANNON.]
He went still. Skill? From a hairdryer? It wasn't that the Mechanical Heart cared about logic—it cared about patterns, echoes in the metal. Air moved. Make air a nail.
His pulse thudded. He lined up with the sofa across the room, raised his hand, extended one finger, and pinched the idea narrower—pressure, focus, release.
A sound like a needle tearing silk pricked the air. The throw pillow on the couch dimpled and burst, cotton snowing down in the red safety light.
"Holy—" He cut himself off and grinned, the quick sharp kind that came with not dying yet.
Test, don't flaunt. He lowered his hand and listened. The building answered with pipes clicking, the crawl of air in ducts, the faintest padding of footsteps above the ceiling—too light to be human. Rats in the soffit. Good. Rats meant the corridor ghouls weren't browsing this floor. Yet.
He swept the shreds into a trash bag, wiped the sofa with a damp cloth, and tied the bag off tight. Gunshot-quiet if you didn't know the sound. To a hungry thing, everything was a knock.
He keyed the alarm routes again and let the past two years unfurl in the dark like a map he hated.
In 2069, the sky broke open without breaking. Thirteen circles bloomed on the world like ink in water, each one a hole that wasn't a hole, hundreds of kilometers wide. The official word called them Star Abysses. The people called them mouths. From each, a Black Tide seeped—thin at first, then thicker—spreading like night poured downhill. Every other day—or every day?—the edge crawled outward by hundreds of kilometers. [CHECK] Sunlight shaved away. Temperatures wandered. Storms learned new tricks. Plants learned worse ones. The dead got…restless. Then there were the other things—things that didn't wait to be alive or dead to be a problem.
Some people changed and didn't shatter. The news made up a word and a logo—Awakened. You either were or you weren't. Lex hadn't asked to be anything. The Mechanical Heart had simply started counting.
He ran the numbers again in his head. Strength inching, Speed flirting with its first level, Defense lagging behind. The pillow burst meant the Wind Cannon was more than parlor smoke. At ten meters, it would bruise. At two, it would punch. In a corridor, with a doorframe to funnel it, it could break a kneecap, rip a throat, pop an eye. He didn't need gore. He needed decisions that kept him breathing.
He cracked the fridge, took a last sip of water, and checked the ice. Good. Generator fuel? Enough for the fridge and the alarms for a week if the heat wave broke. If it didn't, less. He could raid the maintenance room at dawn—fan belts, lubricants, maybe a spare breaker for the rail switches on the old line if he got lucky.
He stopped. Rail switches. The thought wasn't casual. It had been living in his skull since the map of the city and the Black Tide's advance first intersected.
The plan had sounded stupid the first time he said it aloud, even to the empty room: Don't outrun the night. Outspeed it on steel. The city's freight artery still cut through the industrial belt. The yards were half-abandoned, half-looted, but the rails were rails, and rails went where roads choked. A train, even a short one, could be a fortress and a bridge in one—mass, momentum, compartments, height, lines of fire, a platform that didn't care about potholes or stalled bodies.
Infinite Train Plan. Naming a thing made it more real and more ridiculous. He hadn't told anyone because there was no one to tell, and because saying it to another living mouth would make it sound like a cult.
He needed parts. Couplers, hand brakes that still bit, a diesel that still turned over or a battery bank that didn't mind lying about its pedigree. A way to move it that didn't announce itself to the entire district. And a crew. Or—he corrected himself—not a crew. A roster of problems with legs. Anyone he brought aboard became a vector. He would start with one car, one night, one kilometer. Prove it could move. Prove it could hide. Prove it could save time, and then save days.
The floor alarm buzzed once—a tiny insect of a sound. He froze. The vibration was from the hallway, not the stairwell. He thumbed the camera. The fisheye lens pushed static for a second, then found the corridor: gray carpet, emergency paint lines, the fire extinguisher case like a red tongue.
Something skated into frame on all fours, too fast for a person, too smooth for a dog. It paused at his door and lifted its head. No eyeshine. No eyes. Just a concave blur where faces happen.
He didn't breathe. The thing pressed a spread of fingers—not fingers, flukes—to the seam of the door, as if feeling the temperature through atomic gossip. It stayed there, listening with its skin.
Lex set his finger, very gently, at chest level and made the idea of air into a screw.
Careful. If it screams, more will come. If you miss, it will learn you.
The creature lowered its head. The flukes rasped on the metal plate. It inhaled. The sound was like paper dragged over teeth.
He sighted the height of a human temple, adjusted down half a span for the thing's posture, and let the pressure spool out to a point.
Pfft. A hiccup of air. The door didn't move. The hallway didn't echo. The thing's head snapped sideways as if someone had flicked it in the ear. It skittered backward, a jerky crab-dance, then poured itself down the corridor on all fours and was gone.
Lex waited. One minute. Two. His pulse slowed by small, stubborn fractions.
He reached for the notebook where he kept numbers that the system didn't bother with.
WIND CANNON: minimum noise at finger-pad release, effective at five meters for distraction, two meters for disruption, unknown lethal threshold. Door seams damp the report. Test in stairwell for ricochet and funnel effect.Test on meat. He underlined the last and hated the word enough to put two lines through it. Test on carcass. Better. Honest.
He added three parts to the scav list: rail tool kit, grease, switch key. Then, after a breath, masking paint. The train would be useless if it shined like a promise.
When he closed the notebook, night had finished swallowing the last gold out of the room. The red floor strips made islands of dull, stubborn ember along the baseboards. He could hear the city now—not the city of before, but the post-city: the far metallic shout of something large falling a long way, the soft hiss of wind that wasn't wind, an uneven chorus of moans caught under the skin of the buildings like trapped wasps.
He sat with the dark like it was company. He centered the map in his head: the Black Tide's edge, the expected crawl by morning [CHECK], the rail line's southern bend where the yard opened into the warehouses. If he could reach just the signal house, pull a diagram, find a key, he could trace an escape vector that didn't cross the mouths of the worst blocks.
His finger rested against the dead hairdryer's handle, now a smear of powder in a tray. Thank you for the nail gun, princess, he thought, and snorted at himself.
In the silence, another sound arrived—the quiet click of a stairwell door two units down. Not a slam. A click. Intentional. Followed by a whisper of rubber on concrete.
Neighbors? He hadn't seen living ones in days. Or he had and chose not to mark it.
He stood, moved to the door, and put his ear to the metal. The whisper came again, closer this time, rope against fabric.
Lex lifted his hand, pointed at the doorframe this time, at the spot that would put a gust right past anyone fool enough to press close.
He did not breathe. He did not plan. He simply decided.
[MECHANICAL HEART — READY.]
Do I open—and start the Infinite Train—or do I stay another night pretending stillness is safety?
The handle twitched.
Choose.