By dawn, the Pride was preparing to return to the Citadel, their banners snapping faintly in the wind. Sarah lingered near the caravan, her eyes drawn again and again to the figure in the long coat. Ash was already walking, revolvers at his hips, stride set eastward with no fanfare, no farewell.
"Where's he headed?" one of the knights asked quietly.
Sarah didn't answer. She only watched him vanish down the boulevard, the boy who fought like no soldier she'd ever known.
Ash's boots carried him through the cracked skeleton of the city, smoke still clinging to streets where mutants had fallen the night before. He'd heard it weeks back in a market stall—some doctor in the belly of a half-sunken carrier who could weave machine into flesh. A man who worked in shadows, unbound by laws or conscience.
It wasn't trust that drove Ash. It was possibility. The same restless pull that had pushed him to refine his revolvers, to sketch out a bike from the guts of a jet engine. If there were men who knew how to bind steel to bone, he needed to see it for himself.
The Potomac wind bit sharp as he reached the river. There, stretched across the water like a broken rib cage, lay the bridge to Rivet City. Shanties and guardposts clung to the old carrier's deck, the sound of voices echoing faintly over the waves.
He paused at the bridge's edge, coat tugged by the wind, revolvers humming faintly with each pulse of their cores.
Another step forward.
The guards watched him approach with narrowed eyes. A boy, but not just a boy—the kind of presence that made men's fingers hover closer to their triggers. They checked his weapons, asked his name, let him pass with muttered warnings about keeping his business clean.
Inside Rivet City, the air was thick with rust, oil, and the damp musk of the river. Traders haggled over scavenged goods, children darted between bulkheads, and the hum of the great ship's bones filled every step.
Ash kept moving, ignoring the noise, until whispers and directions led him deeper—toward the rusted half of the carrier, where the outcasts and undesirables made their homes. Toward the man who was said to stitch miracles and monstrosities in equal measure.
The door he stopped at was unmarked, save for the faint scarring of heat around its frame. Ash rested his hand on the butt of his revolver, eyes narrowing.
If half the rumors were true, what he found inside could change everything.