I woke up to the feeling that the earth was trying to swallow me.

  At first I thought I was dead. It was quiet—except for the drip of water somewhere nearby and the distant, ragged caw of a crow. I was lying face down in mud mixed with ash. I tried to roll onto my back, and the world exploded in a white flash of pain.

  Something jerked me short. My right arm—had grown fast into the cooled clay. It was heavy. God, it was heavy. Seven kilograms of dead metal on a body like mine—it wasn’t a weapon.

  It was an anchor.

  “Lie still,” Ephrem’s voice sounded as if he were speaking from inside a barrel. Muffled. Far away. “Don’t move, Malek. It’s stuck fast.”

  I opened my eyes. The sky was gray, low and heavy, like wet wool. Ephrem was crouching beside me. He looked terrible. His face black with soot, his eyebrows gone—burned off by the heat. His jacket torn across the chest. He held a flask, but his hands were shaking so badly the water spilled past the mouth.

  I glanced down at my shoulder.

  I shouldn’t have.

  The metal had cooled overnight. Before that, it had been red-hot. The rags wrapped around the joint, the leather straps, my jacket—and, I think, my own skin—had fused into a single black-and-crimson crust. The iron had welded itself to flesh.

  System messages floated before my eyes, doubling, fragmenting into pixels. The “Will to Live” skill no longer offered advice. It simply stated the fact that I was dying.

  “Where…” My tongue felt like sandpaper. “Where is he?”

  Ephrem nodded somewhere behind him.

  With effort, I turned my head. My neck crunched.

  Zeno was there.

  He hadn’t fallen. He stood in the middle of what had once been the mill’s first floor, buried up to his knees in charred beams. Frozen in the posture in which he’d taken the final surge of pressure: legs braced wide, back bent, arms gripping emptiness where the pipes had been.

  He was blackened, wet—and utterly, terrifyingly still. His ocular lens was dark. No servo whine. No reactor hum. Just four hundred kilograms of complex engineering turned into a monument.

  “He isn’t breathing, Malek,” Ephrem said quietly. The old man sniffed. “I pushed him. I knocked on his helm. Hollow sound. Like striking a bell with no clapper.”

  I tried to sit up. Managed on the third attempt—only because Ephrem caught me under the arms like a rag doll. My right arm dragged in the dirt. I felt the pins inside the bone shift, tearing what hadn’t yet healed.

  “We… need to go,” I whispered. “The Order…”

  “The Order’s gone,” Ephrem cut in. He held out the flask. “Drink. It’s warm—I heated it on the coals. They think everyone here is dead. And they’re almost right.”

  Then we heard gravel crunch.

  Out of the mist, from the direction of the village, people emerged. Hans walked first. Behind him—the blacksmith and three other men with axes.

  They didn’t look like rescuers.

  They looked like men who had come to finish off a wounded beast so it wouldn’t suffer—and wouldn’t draw wolves.

  They stopped ten paces away. Hans stared at the ruins of the mill. At the place where flour had been ground for centuries, and now only charred piles remained. Then he looked at me.

  I knew that look.

  The look you give a circus freak. A mix of fear, disgust, and pity. I was a small, filthy boy with a monstrous iron claw bolted to him. I was the reason their children might starve next winter.

  “Alive, then,” Hans said. No joy in his voice.

  “Alive, Hans,” Ephrem stood, placing himself between them and me. “And the mages are dead. Every last one.”

  “So is the mill,” the blacksmith spat. “What are we supposed to feed the children with, old man? Ash?”

  “If not for this boy,” Ephrem pointed at me with a shaking finger, “your children would be hanging along the road by tonight. You know the Hounds, Peter. They leave no witnesses.”

  The men were silent. They knew. But knowing is one thing. Standing before ashes is another.

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  “Leave,” Hans finally said. He didn’t meet my eyes. “Right now. If a patrol comes back and finds you here… they’ll burn the village.”

  “We can’t,” Ephrem said firmly. “Look at him. He can’t walk. And that thing—” he nodded toward Zeno, “—I can’t carry on my back.”

  “Leave the iron,” someone muttered. “And leave the boy. He’s not going to make it. Look at his shoulder. It’s already rotting.”

  Ephrem straightened.

  He was a head shorter than the blacksmith—thin, old—but he stepped forward so sharply the men flinched.

  “Just try,” he hissed. “Just touch him. I know where each of you hides your grain. I know who poaches in the king’s forest. I’ll tell them all. I swear it—if the boy dies here, I’ll go to the Inquisitor myself and confess everything.”

  Hans grimaced as if from toothache.

  “You’ve grown cruel, Ephrem.”

  “Life’s cruel, Hans. Help us. Drag us to Bear’s Cleft. Two kilometers uphill. And we’ll disappear. You’ll never see us again.”

  Hans was silent for a long time. He looked at my thin legs, at the grotesque iron arm lying in the dirt. Then he waved a hand.

  “Get ropes. And logs.”

  The next two hours were hell.

  Not the heroic kind written about in books. The sweaty, filthy, swearing hell of physical labor.

  Zeno weighed nearly half a ton. To move him, the men used what remained of the mill shaft as levers, cursing the whole time.

  “One—two—heave! Damn it, why’s he so heavy!”

  Zeno crashed onto his side with a clang that rang in my teeth. They loaded him onto a crude sled hammered together from floorboards. Six strong men harnessed themselves to the ropes.

  They made a smaller sled for me—just an old door. Ephrem laid me on it, cushioning it with his jacket.

  “Arm… tie the arm,” I rasped as he bent over me. “Or it’ll tear off.”

  He nodded. Lashed my prosthetic to the boards so it wouldn’t swing. I felt like a prisoner. Crucified on wood.

  The procession moved.

  Shrrrkh…

  The sound of runners over stone and wet snow drilled into my skull. I lay staring at the sky. Every bump shot through my shoulder like a knife.

  I heard the men breathing.

  “Damn demon… cursed scrap…”

  They hated Zeno. To them he was just metal they were forced to haul. They didn’t know that scrap metal had taught me physics. Had shielded me from arrows.

  I turned my head. Zeno followed behind, head lolling, mud clogging the seams of his armor. The great machine of the Precursors dragged through the dirt like a butchered bear.

  “Hold on, Malek, hold on,” Ephrem whispered, walking beside me. He wasn’t pulling—he had no strength left. He just walked, holding my good hand.

  I drifted in and out of delirium.

  When we reached Bear’s Cleft—a narrow crack in the rock leading into the karst caves—the men stopped. Wet with sweat. Angry. Exhausted.

  Hans cut the ropes with his knife.

  “That’s it,” he said, breathing hard. “You’re on your own. That’s the edge of the hunting grounds. We don’t go farther. The rock falls.”

  “Thank you, Hans,” Ephrem said.

  “Nothing to thank for,” the headman spat. He came closer. Looked down at me.

  I was shivering uncontrollably. My teeth chattered so hard I couldn’t unclench them.

  “He won’t live, Ephrem,” Hans said quietly. “You’re dragging a corpse and a pile of iron. Should’ve left them by the river. You’re taking sin on your soul, stretching out the suffering.”

  “Go,” Ephrem said sharply.

  They left quickly. Turned and vanished into the forest without looking back.

  We were alone.

  The wind in the cleft howled colder, crueler.

  Ephrem stood at the cave entrance. Narrow. Choked with stones. He had to drag me inside.

  And Zeno.

  Alone.

  I don’t know where he found the strength. Adrenaline, maybe. Or stubbornness.

  He pulled me first. Straining against the rope, boots braced against rock, wheezing curses under his breath. Inside it was dry—but cold as a crypt. Smelled of bat droppings and dust.

  Then he went back for Zeno.

  I lay in the darkness and listened.

  Scrape. Thud. The old man’s groan. Scrape again.

  It went on forever. An hour? Two? He used stones as steps, inch by inch hauling four hundred kilograms uphill.

  When Zeno’s shadow finally blocked the pale light from the entrance, Ephrem collapsed. Just fell beside the Golem and lay there ten minutes without moving.

  “Ephrem…” I called weakly.

  “Alive…” he rasped from the floor. “Let me breathe… Alive.”

  He crawled to me, covered me with the filthy blanket the men had left.

  “Cold, Malek. Need a fire… no wood. No strength.”

  “Zeno…” I tried to pull my left hand free. “Move me… closer.”

  “Why? He’s cold as ice.”

  “Need to.”

  He didn’t argue.

  He dragged me until my head rested against the Golem’s side. The armor was icy. Rough. Dented.

  I pressed my left palm to his chest plate. Where, beneath layers of plating, his nuclear heart should beat.

  Silence.

  “Come on,” I thought. “You’re a machine. You’re perfection. You can’t just shut down because of some water and steam. Turn on. Call me an idiot. Tell me about efficiency. Anything.”

  Sleep dragged me under.

  And then I felt it.

  Not heard—felt. A faint vibration beneath my palm. As if somewhere deep inside the vast mechanism, a single string had trembled.

  Zzzt…

  Like a dying fly.

  Static crackled from the speaker grille at his neck. Ephrem flinched back.

  “S-sys… tem…” The voice was mangled beyond recognition. Not Zeno’s bass, but a needle scraping glass. “Crit… fail…”

  “Zeno?” I pressed my ear to his armor. “I’m here. What do you need? Diagnostics!”

  Pause. Long. Agonizing.

  “C-c…”

  “What?”

  “M-m…”

  “Speak!”

  “C-copper…”

  The word hung in the freezing cave air.

  “C-circuit… break… conductor… need… c-copper…”

  Silence.

  The vibration vanished. Stone again.

  I stared into the dark.

  Copper. Best conductor after silver. He needed to bridge a burned launch circuit. A piece of wire.

  But we were in a cave. Rock. Moss. Bat droppings.

  I started laughing. Hysterical, bubbling laughter that turned into coughing.

  “You’re burning up,” Ephrem said, touching my forehead.

  “Copper…” I whispered through tears and laughter. “He needs copper, Ephrem.”

  “Where would we get that? Hans didn’t even own a copper pot.”

  I shifted my right shoulder. Pain lanced through me—but now it had meaning.

  “It’s here,” I said quietly. “Right here.”

  “Where?”

  “In my arm.”

  Ephrem fell silent. He understood.

  “No,” he said firmly. “Don’t even think it. I won’t do it.”

  “You have to,” I closed my eyes. “You’ll have to take it apart, Ephrem. Or Zeno won’t wake up. And without him… we won’t last till morning.”

  Darkness took me.

  To bring my teacher back, I would have to let them destroy the thing that had made me strong.