Phantom pain doesn't just affect amputated limbs. Sometimes, it affects entire family trees.

  My left arm, now a Black Crystal prosthesis, rested cold and numb on the window of the Dreadnought Truck. I could move the volcanic glass fingers, I felt the hum of mana running through the optic filaments, but the tactile sensation was a lie. My brain was still searching for the flesh that antimatter had erased in Rio de Janeiro. In the same way, my mind was still searching for the mother I had just euthanized.

  "Vital signs stable, but your blood pressure is miserable, Doctor," said Luna. She was sitting in the backseat, reading the medical monitor Valéria had improvised on the dashboard.

  "It's just post-operative shock," I replied, voice dry, eyes fixed on the landscape rolling by outside. "The surgeon bleeds too, Luna. We just don't do it on the table."

  Outside, the death of Hélio Veras's "Eden" was spreading like an oil slick. The megaflora of the hypertrophic jungle was rotting at a staggering pace. The colossal trees, once pulsing with red sap, were now dehydrating, becoming hollow, gray trunks. The meat-grass beneath our treads cracked like broken glass, crumbling into a fine dust that the wind scattered across the opaque horizon.

  Without the "Matrix" to sustain the impossible cycle, the alien biology yielded rapidly to thermodynamics.

  Valéria drove in silence. Her hands, normally smeared with grease and full of nervous energy, gripped the steering wheel with rigid force. The atmosphere in the cabin was heavy. They knew what I had done up there. They didn't need to ask.

  "We're entering the old industrial ring of Minas Gerais," Valéria announced, hours later, breaking the silence so as not to go mad with it. "The GPS is fried, but judging by the chimney ruins, I'd say we're near Contagem."

  I looked through the cracked windshield. The scenery changed from rotten to rusted.

  Before the apocalypse, Contagem was a logistical and manufacturing heart. Now, it was a cemetery of concrete and steel. The carcasses of old steel mills rose like the skeletons of metallic dinosaurs, embraced by dead vines.

  The Parasite in my liver, which had been lethargic digesting the mana stolen from my father, shifted suddenly.

  [VIBRATION ALERT: MULTIPLE MECHANICAL SOURCES DETECTED.]

  [NOT MONSTERS. HEAVY INDUSTRY.]

  "Valéria, slow down. We're not alone."

  Gristle, who had been dozing hugging her cleaver, opened a yellow eye.

  "More tree-bark clones?"

  "No. This smells like diesel and rust," the Orc sniffed, standing up to peek through the turret hatch. "Roadblock, five hundred meters ahead!"

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  The Dreadnought stopped with a screech of brakes.

  The old expressway was cut off. Not by mutant trees or magic, but by a formidable barricade made of welded train cars, cargo shipping containers, and backhoes modified with bone armor plating.

  Over the barricade, dozens of figures pointed heavy weapons at us. They weren't polished steam weapons like the ones from Petrópolis, nor clean antimatter like the ones from Europe. They were scrap cannons, diesel flamethrowers, and rustic but lethal pneumatic harpoons.

  From the middle of the barricade, a vehicle rolled down an improvised ramp. It looked like a military jeep fused with the thoracic skeleton of a Behemoth.

  The jeep stopped twenty meters from our truck.

  A woman stepped out. She was tall, thin, with skin tanned by a toxic sun. She wore a thick leather jacket and a welder's helmet pushed up on her forehead. What drew the most attention were her arms: industrial prosthetics made of steel pistons and hydraulic pincers, stained with dark oil.

  "Vultures," I muttered. "Survivors of the industrial zone. They don't run from the apocalypse, they dismantle it and sell the parts."

  I opened the Dreadnought's door and stepped down, my boots crunching the gravel. My white lab coat was irreparably stained. I raised my human hand in a sign of truce, keeping my Black Crystal arm relaxed by my side, though its purple glow warned of danger.

  The woman with piston arms walked halfway, flanked by two guards with sawed-off shotguns and gas masks.

  "You've got a very expensive vehicle to be cruising through my junkyard, stranger," her voice was harsh, with the metallic accent of someone who had breathed welding fumes since childhood. "I am the Baroness of Rust. And you are stepping on my claim."

  "I am Doctor Arthur Veras. And I'm not interested in your junkyard, Baroness. I just want to use the road to get back to the coast."

  She narrowed her eyes, analyzing my deplorable state and the smoking truck behind me. Her gaze stopped on my left arm.

  "Doctor Veras? The surgeon who drained Guanabara Bay? The man who put the preppies of Petrópolis in line?" She let out a hoarse, metallic laugh. "They said you were ten meters tall and ate Leviathans for breakfast. You just look like a man who just took a beating."

  "It was a long shift. Can I pass or are we going to have to discuss surgical anatomy?" My patience was zero. The Babel Code still echoed at the edges of my mind, making me irritable.

  The Baroness stopped laughing. She crossed her hydraulic arms, and the pistons hissed.

  "I like you, Doctor. And I like what you did. We felt the earthquake a few hours ago. The red forest of the 'God of the Cerrado' suddenly withered." She pointed to the ashes falling from the sky like dirty snow. "That was you, wasn't it? You pulled the plug on his Eden."

  "I discharged the patient."

  "Good. His Gardeners had been stealing our scrap to feed that biological abomination. You did us a service." She waved at the barricade. The men started moving one of the containers, opening a path. "You can pass. But take this as a courtesy warning."

  She took a step forward, lowering her voice.

  "Killing the God of the Forest didn't make you king of the world. It just rang the dinner bell. The death pulse of that city traveled through the tectonic plates. All the sleeping tyrants on the continent felt the power vacuum."

  "There's blood in the water, Arthur. The interior is going to boil, and the beasts are waking up to claim your father's empty throne."

  I looked at the Baroness. There was no fear in her eyes, only the calculating pragmatism of someone who knows how to profit from war.

  "Let them come," I replied, with an apathy that frightened my own human side. "My tools are sharp and the operating table is clear."

  I walked back to the Dreadnought.

  Valéria put it in first gear, and the war truck crossed the corridor of scrap, under the watchful eye of the Vultures of Contagem.

  The aftermath was over. I hadn't healed the world by killing my father. I had merely cleared the way for a larger infection.