Chapter 31 : Armor Diagnostic
The copper wire burned.
I pressed it against my forearm where the Armor plates overlapped, and the reaction was immediate—a feedback loop of pain that shot through my nervous system like electricity. The Armor writhed against my skin, constricting and releasing in spasms that felt like a seizure localized to the affected area.
"Four seconds," Toast said, her pen moving across her notebook. "Tolerance estimate before incapacitation risk."
I ripped the copper away, gasping. The pain faded slowly, leaving a phantom ache that throbbed in time with my heartbeat.
"You're sure about this?" Nux asked. He stood near the workshop door, ready to run for help if something went worse than expected.
"The Bullet Farmer's studying me." I flexed my arm, watching the Armor plates resettle into their normal configuration. "I need to know my weaknesses before he does."
Toast had prepared the testing materials—small samples of different metals, a strip of leather to bite on, clean water for rinsing. This was science in her hands, controlled pain applied methodically to generate usable data.
"Next material," she said.
The lead was worse.
I pressed a fragment from a salvaged bullet casing against the Armor, and everything stopped.
The plates seized across my torso—locked rigid, immobile, completely frozen. I couldn't move my arms, couldn't turn my head, couldn't even breathe deeply. The Armor had gone from symbiotic partner to prison in a single instant.
"Landon?" Nux's voice was sharp with alarm.
I tried to speak. Couldn't. The lead's contact with the Armor had triggered some kind of emergency shutdown, and my body was trapped inside the locked plates.
Toast was counting. "Five seconds. Six. Seven."
Twelve seconds before the Armor released.
I staggered forward, gasping for air, my chest aching from the shallow breaths I'd been limited to. The lead fragment had fallen to the workshop floor—I kicked it away instinctively, and the Armor shuddered against my skin in what felt like relief.
"Lead causes full seizure," Toast recorded. "Twelve-second duration from contact. Complete immobilization including respiratory restriction. Critical vulnerability."
The words hung in the air. Twelve seconds of paralysis. In a fight, that was death.
"One more," I said. My voice came out hoarse.
Nux shook his head. "You've proven your point. The Bullet Farmer hits you with lead ammunition, you're done."
"Plastic."
Toast paused, her pen hovering over her notebook. "Why plastic?"
"Because it's everywhere, and the Armor never seems to acknowledge it." I picked up the test sample—shavings from a salvaged container, the kind that might have held food before the world ended. "Metals I understand. But the Armor's relationship with synthetic materials... I need to know."
I pressed the plastic shavings against my arm.
The Armor tried to consume them.
It reached for the plastic the way it reached for any potential food source—extending microscopic tendrils, beginning the absorption process that had dissolved three wrecked vehicles during the salvage run. But plastic wasn't metal. The Armor couldn't digest it.
The rejection started in my stomach.
I doubled over as nausea hit—a deep, violent sickness that felt like my insides were trying to escape through my throat. The Armor writhed across my torso, trying to expel material it couldn't process, and I vomited black metallic sludge onto the workshop floor.
And kept vomiting.
For an hour, I crouched over a bucket while Nux held my head and Toast recorded observations with steady hands. The Armor purged everything—not just the plastic, but a portion of its stored reserves, contaminated by the attempted absorption. Black liquid pooled in the bucket, smelling of rust and oil and something else I couldn't identify.
When it finally stopped, I was shaking, dehydrated, barely able to lift my head.
"You're an idiot," Toast said.
She handed me a cup of water with one hand while continuing to write with the other. Her care expressed through precision—documenting the exact duration of the purge, the approximate volume of expelled material, the recovery time before I could stand again.
"Tell me something I don't know," I managed.
"Plastic causes purge rejection. Approximately one hour, plus significant reserve depletion and dehydration." She closed her notebook. "The Bullet Farmer won't need lead rounds if he can just force-feed you a plastic bag."
Dark humor. Toast's way of processing difficult information.
Nux helped me to a sitting position against the workshop wall. My arms were still trembling, the Armor pressed flat against my skin like an apologetic pet.
"Who knows about this?" I asked.
"Just us." Toast looked at Nux, who nodded. "We share it through the Network with the others—the Dag and Mors—but it stays internal. No one outside the connected group learns how to disable you."
I thought about Furiosa's conditional trust. About her promise to kill me if I became a threat. About the fourteen marks on the leather strip that represented everything I'd revealed without meaning to.
"What if they need to know? If the Bullet Farmer attacks and someone needs to—"
"Then we tell them when the need is immediate." Toast's voice was firm. "Until then, this data is the most dangerous information in the Citadel. We protect it."
Three words joined the calculations on her workshop wall, circled in red:
LEAD — COPPER — PLASTIC
And below them, a single question: "Who else knows?"
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