The train didn’t just roar; it screamed like a metal god being flayed alive.

  Ved’s boots skidded on the wet roof of Carriage 402. Every jolt of the suspension sent a shudder through his spine. Rain lashed his face, tasting of coal dust.

  "Talk to me, Kael," Ved gasped into the comm-unit tucked into his collar. "The lock is a Gen-4 biometric. My fingers are too cold to trigger the heat sensor."

  "Cry me a river, little brother. Preferably one that doesn't freeze," Kael’s voice crackled through the static, impossibly calm, leaning into that familiar wit. "If you can't get that door open in the next ninety seconds, you’re going to hit the Western Tunnel. And unless you’ve suddenly developed the ability to become two-dimensional, you’re going to end up looking like a strawberry jam spread across a very long cracker."

  "My heart rate is at seventy-eight," Ved hissed, ignoring the joke. He could feel it—the familiar, terrifying hum in his marrow. The rainwater on his sleeve was no longer soaking in; it was crystallizing into tiny, jagged diamonds of ice.

  "Seventy-eight? That’s rookie numbers," Kael chirped, though Ved could hear the sound of a keyboard clattering frantically in the background. Kael was in a closeby damp basement in Sector 0, surrounded by screens and stolen electricity, fighting the same clock. "Think about something boring. Think about Varkas’s tax returns. Think about why we still owe that slab of rancid meat 15 million credit for a job that went sideways - because you decided to save a stray dog."

  "He was a puppy, Kael."

  "He was a liability with paws, Ved! Now, focus. If your pulse hits one-thirty, you’re going to short-circuit the train's mag-lev stabilizers. I’d really prefer my favorite brother not to be responsible for the largest kinetic disaster in the history. It’s bad for the brand."

  Ved pressed his palm against the lock. The heat from his skin was being sucked away by the rising "Pulse" in his blood. A thin layer of frost began to crawl over the keypad. The internal pins finally surrendered, snapping like glass teeth.

  "I'm in," Ved hissed as he slid the heavy door open and rolled into the darkness of Carriage 402. The silence inside was a physical weight, broken only by the muffled thunder of the wheels below. The air smelled of sterile plastic and something ancient—something that shouldn't be on a government freight line.

  "Check the crates, little brother," Kael’s voice was a low hum in his ear. "Look for the seal of the 'Ninth Hand.' If it’s there, we aren’t just stealing medicine. We’re stealing a death sentence."

  Ved clicked on a small penlight. The beam cut through the gloom, landing on a single, matte-black canister at the center of the floor. There were no labels. No barcodes. Just a single, etched symbol of a wave crashing against a mountain.

  "Kael... I found it. But it’s leaking."

  “You should have worn a diaper then.”, the voice sniggered from the earpiece.

  “KAEL!!”

  "Okay..okay! Leaking what? Coolant? Gas?"

  Ved knelt, his light catching a pool of liquid spreading from the base of the canister. It wasn't water. It was dark, viscous, and as his light hit it, the liquid began to crawl toward him.

  "It’s moving, Kael. It looks like... blood. But it’s cold. My pulse is at ninety-six. Kael, I’m losing the canister. The floor is turning to ice."

  "Get out of there, Ved! Grab the canister and jump! The tunnel is ending in five seconds!"

  "I can't... the liquid froze my shoe!"

  The dark liquid had latched onto Ved’s boot, turning into a jagged frozen tether. Outside, the light of the plains reappeared as the train burst from the tunnel, but inside 402, the temperature had dropped to a lethal negative forty.

  "Ved! If you don't jump, the trackers will lock on! That's a 10 million asset you're touching! Varkas won't just kill us—he'll harvest us!"

  Ved grabbed the handle of the canister with his right hand. As his skin made contact, his vision suddenly blurred, it turned into a deluge of memories that weren't his—of a world drowning in a sun, of a sword that wept for its master.

  Without any warning, the entire side of the carriage vanished in an explosion of crystalline shards.

  The scream tore from Ved's throat, but it was drowned by the roar of tearing metal. The explosive decompression of Carriage sent him hurtling out into the monsoon night, still fused to the canister by the tendrils of frozen, sentient blood. He tumbled end over end, the wind ripping at his clothes, the train shrinking behind him.

  "Ved! VED!" Kael’s voice, now raw panic, shrieked in his ear. "The train! It’s derailing! You just tore out the mag-lev array! You’re falling into the river! Drones! Incoming! Thirty seconds!"

  Ved hit the churning, rain-swollen river like a skipped stone. The impact ripped the comm-unit from his ear, plunging him into a deafening, freezing darkness. The crate, still fused to his arm, dragged him down, a lead weight pulling him into the cool depths. He thrashed, fighting the current, the weight, and the searing cold that felt like liquid nitrogen invading his veins. Above the surface, the train's crash and rattle echoed, screeching metal and exploding sparks as it twisted into a wreckage on the riverbank.

  He broke the surface, gasping, only to see the sky alight with a dozen red eyes – military drones descending, their searchlights cutting through the rain. Each drone carried a sonic disruptor, the kind that could turn a man's bones to jelly.

  He was bleeding. The freezing liquid from the crate had carved deep, icy gashes into his arm where it had fused to his skin. His pulse was a frantic hammer—105 BPM. The water around him began to solidify, trapping his legs in a vice of razor-sharp ice.

  Just as the first drone locked onto him, a blinding flash of white light erupted from the riverbank. A battered van skidded to a halt, its headlights cutting through the rain. The van door burst open.

  "VED! YOU IMBECILE! GRAB THE LINE!" screamed Kael.

  A grappling hook fired from Kael’s hand. It snagged on Ved’s arm, and the sudden pull was agonizing. He felt the crate tear away from him with a sickening crack, fell with a heavy thud on the icy surface, cracked the ice and went plunging back into the river. The sudden release of the freezing grip sent a wave of searing pain through his arm, but it was replaced by a profound, tingling relief as the ice around his legs melted.

  Kael pulled Ved into the van, slamming the door shut. The world outside dissolved into a blur of rain and the distant, growing howl of the drones. As Kael fumbled with a first-aid kit, his fingers rough but gentle, Ved’s mind drifted.

  He was 10, maybe 11. Kael, barely a teenager, was meticulously bandaging a gash on Ved’s knee. A street brawl, some bigger kids. Ved had thrown himself in front of a smaller boy, taking the hit. Kael had stitched him up, humming a tuneless, off-key song. "You’re too soft for this world, little brother," Kael had said, his voice gruff. "One day, that heart of yours is going to get you killed. Or worse, make you famous. And famous people always get harvested." Ved had just clutched his brother's hand, feeling safe.*

  The gray walls of the safe house dissolved into the golden, choking dust. "Snap out of it, little disaster-magnet!" Kael’s shout ripped Ved back to the present. "We’ve got company! A lot of company!"

  The van lurched violently. Kael gripped the wheel, his knuckles white. The drone swarm was overhead now, not just searching, but *locking on*. Their sonic cannons began to hum. The glass of the van's windshield rippled.

  "They just upgraded their toy kit," Kael growled, spinning the wheel. "These aren't Varkas’s goons. This is government-level overkill. Someone just realized what you just touched."

  The van swerved, narrowly avoiding a direct hit. The sonic blast shattered a nearby billboard, sending sharp pieces of metal and plastic flying.

  "What did I touch, Kael?" Ved whispered, clutching his bleeding arm.

  "You touched a ghost, Ved. And it just told the entire world where we are."

  Kael drove like a madman, weaving through alleys, slamming through market stalls, using the chaos of the city as a shield. The chase was relentless, screeching tires, shattering glass, and the high-pitched whine of the drones. Just as Ved thought his heart would simply explode from the stress, Kael threw the van into a final, violent turn down a forgotten alleyway.

  They skidded to a halt in front of a crumbling, nondescript building that looked like a stack of rusting shipping containers. Kael killed the engine, plunging them into sudden, terrifying silence. They waited for the whine of the searching drones to die down before making any move.

  "Home sweet home, little brother. Let’s hope Varkas doesn't believe in property taxes or he’d be collecting that as well from us instead of the government. The mission failed successfully!"

  The heavy metal door of the safe house groaned shut, but Ved didn't hear it. The world tilted, the cold in his veins finally winning the tug-of-war against his consciousness. "Ved? Hey, stay with me, you dramatic little—" Kael’s voice fractured. As Ved’s knees hit the concrete, the gray walls of the hideout dissolved into the golden, dusty haze of a memory from twelve years ago.

  The heat in the Sector-0 outskirts was thick enough to chew. The Sector-0 exists in the permanent shadow of the Spire, a suffocating labyrinth of oxidized iron and sun-bleached plastic that feels less like a neighborhood and more like a mass of compressed garbage. Here, the sleek chrome of the high-sector is a fairy tale; the reality is corrugated metal sheets, stacked five stories high and held together by rusted rebar and the desperate prayers of ten thousand squatters.

  Narrow, winding "gullies" serve as streets, choked with the knee-deep sediment of industrial runoff and the skeletal remains of stripped-down turbines. Everything is coated in a fine, persistent layer of "rust-dust" that turns the air into a gritty, copper-flavored haze. Sagging power lines, draped with drying laundry and scavenged copper wire, crisscross the overhead space. There are no lights here—only the dull, flickering orange of chemical fires in oil drums and the low groan of metal structures shifting against each other in the wind.

  In a place like this, a ten-year-old kid—too small for his oversized shirt—was pinned against a crumbling brick wall. His knuckles were white, clutching a brass locket he’d swiped from a merchant’s table.

  Three older boys closed in. The leader, a jagged-toothed teenager with a rusted pipe, spat on the dirt.

  "Give it here, brat. Or I’ll see if your ribs make the same sound as that pipe when they snap."

  The kid squeezed his eyes shut.

  "Is this the part where I'm supposed to be impressed?" A voice drifted down from a stack of shipping crates. "Because honestly, three-on-one? That’s just lazy. If you’re going to be a bully, at least have some professional standards."

  The bullies looked up. A fifteen-year-old Kael was perched on the edge, tossing a copper coin. He hopped down, stepping between the kid and the pipe.

  "Who the hell are you?" the leader growled.

  "I’m the guy who’s about to save you an expensive trip to the government hospital," Kael said. "Look, the kid’s a terrible thief. He practically announced his departure with a trumpet solo. But I’ve got a policy against watching orphans get turned into pulp. It’s bad for my digestion."

  The kid looked up at Kael's back, his eyes brimming with a mix of fear and mounting guilt. He reached out with a trembling hand, tugging weakly at Kael’s jacket. "Please... just go," the boy whispered, his voice cracking. "It’s my fault. I stole it. Don't stay here, they'll hurt you too."

  The leader roared and swung the pipe. Kael ducked, swept the leader’s legs out from under him, and grabbed the kid by the collar of his shirt.

  "Time to move, tiny! My legs are better at running than my mouth is at talking!". They sprinted twisting and turning in a labyrinth of rotting wood and narrow gaps.

  "Left! No, the other left—the one that doesn't lead into a wall!" Kael shouted, his laughter sounding insane amidst the chase. "Seriously, kid, do you even have a sense of direction or do you just enjoy running toward dead ends?"

  They scrambled behind a stack of stinking, wet burlap sacks. Kael shoved the kid into the shadows and pressed a hand over his mouth.

  Kael leaned into the kid's ear, his breath warm and steady despite the chase. "If you sneeze right now," he whispered with a terrifyingly calm smirk, "I am personally handing you over to them. I’ll even provide the salt and pepper for your barbeque." Ved held his breath until his lungs burned.

  Outside, the heavy thud of running footsteps approached. The shadows of the bullies flickered against the sacks. The kid felt a tickle in his nose—the dust from the burlap, the smell of rot—it was too much.

  Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.

  “Achoo!”. The sneeze from the kid was small, but in the silence of the alley, it sounded like a gunshot.

  "There! Behind the sacks!"

  "Great," Kael hissed, his eyes wide but still dancing with a manic light. "I’m rescuing a biological weapon. Run!"

  They burst out as the pipe shattered the burlap sacks behind them. Kael grabbed a loose wooden plank and jammed it into the spokes of a passing vegetable cart, sending a cascade of onions into the path of the pursuers.

  "Apologies to the farmers!" Kael yelled over his shoulder.

  They dived into a drainage pipe, sliding through the filth and emerging in a forgotten crawlspace beneath an old railway platform. They sat in the dark, chests heaving, listening as the shouts of the bullies grew distant. Kael slumped against the damp concrete and looked at the locket still gripped in the small, trembling hand.

  "300 credits for a brass locket?" Kael sighed. "You almost died for a piece of metal that’ll turn your skin green in two days. You’re an idiot, kid."

  "I needed the money," the kid whispered.

  Kael saw the ribs poking through the shirt, the raw loneliness in the boy’s eyes. He reached out and ruffled the kid's matted hair.

  "Well, 'Idiot,' I’m Kael. And since you clearly have the survival instincts of a suicidal lemming, I guess I’m stuck with you until you learn how to pull a job without sneezing. What do they call you, anyway?"

  "Ved," the kid whispered.

  "Ved. Alright, Ved. Welcome to the worst partnership in Sector-0. Let’s go find some food that hasn't been sat on by a merchant."

  The memory shattered. Ved’s eyes snapped open back in the present. He was on a grimy mattress. Kael was leaning over him, his face pale, his hands trembling as he cut away Ved's frozen sleeve to reveal the black, veined frostbite spreading from the wrist.

  The air in the safe house spiked with the smell of cheap antiseptic and burnt electrical wiring. Kael’s hands were usually as steady as a surgeon’s when he was stripping a motherboard, but now they were trembling. He wasn't looking at the glowing veins anymore—he was focused on the raw, jagged gashes where the canister’s "blood" had literally chewed into Ved’s flesh during the fall.

  "Hold still," Kael hissed, pulling a curved needle through Ved’s skin. "If you jump, I’m going to stitch your arm to your thigh by mistake."

  Ved didn't flinch. His eyes were fixed on the ceiling, his breathing shallow. "The river... it was too fast, Kael. The crate hit the silt near the pylon of the Old Mumbra Bridge. If the current didn't carry it, it's sitting under forty feet of mud and industrial runoff. The government divers will have a sonar net in the water by dawn."

  "Forget the government for a second," Kael muttered, knotting a suture with a vicious snap. He wiped a smear of dark, shimmering fluid from Ved's wrist. It didn't look like blood; it looked like liquid shadow. "Let's talk about the train. That wasn't a chemical leak. Chemicals don't crawl toward you. Chemicals don't melt mag-lev stabilizers by just existing in the same room. What the hell was in that box, Ved?"

  Ved finally looked at him. His pupils were blown wide, reflecting the blue flicker of the monitors. "It wasn't a 'what,' Kael. It felt like a 'who.' When I touched it... it didn't just burn. It spoke. Not words, but... flashes. I saw a sun that was the color of a bruise. I saw a blade—a black blade that looked like it was made of frozen smoke—and it was weeping. Not water. It was a weeping light."

  Kael stopped mid-motion, the needle hovering. He wanted to laugh, to make a joke about Ved's low oxygen levels, but the look in his brother's eyes stopped the breath in his throat. "You’re talking like a temple-dweller, Ved. It was a high-tech asset. Experimental cryo-tech, maybe. Not a 'weeping sword.'"

  "I know what I saw," Ved whispered, his voice cracking. "And that symbol... the wave hitting the mountain. It was on the sword too. It wasn't a logo. I think it was a warning."

  Kael stood up, wiping his bloodied hands on a rag, and turned to the workstation. "Yeah, you kept mumbling about some waves crashing rocks. I've been running the image through every state, nation and international database. Look."

  He gestured to the screen. It was a chaotic mess of digital noise. Thousands of images flickered past: Japanese woodblock prints, trekking company logos, ancient Norse etchings, modern surf brands.

  "Is it this one? The 'Great Wave' variant used by the Himalayan Mining Corp?" Kael clicked a file.

  "No," Ved said instantly. "Too soft."

  "The 'Obsidian Peak' emblem from the 2080 riots?"

  "No. The lines were... sharper. Like the wave wasn't just hitting the mountain—it was consuming it. They were part of each other."

  Kael slammed his fist onto the desk, the monitor wobbling. "Then it doesn't exist! I'm scraping the deep web, Ved! If it’s not in the archives, and it’s not in the trademark registries, then that canister came from somewhere that doesn't use a Wi-Fi signal. We are sitting on a 100 million mystery, and we don't even have the box to prove it."

  Before Ved could respond, a burner phone on the table shrieked. The ringtone was a jarring, distorted mechanical trill. Both brothers froze.

  Kael picked it up, sliding the speaker on. He didn't say hello.

  "Kael," the voice on the other end was a low, gravelly rasp. It was Varkas’s head enforcer. "I’m looking at the news. A train derailment. A missing cargo. And two shadows seen fleeing the riverbank."

  "The rain was heavy, Mahir," Kael said, his voice instantly dropping into his smooth, negotiator's tone. "Things got complicated. But we have the situation under control."

  "Do you? Because Varkas just doubled the interest. You don't owe us 1.5 million anymore. You owe us three million credits for the 'inconvenience' of the delay. And here is the ultimatum: You bring that canister to the South Dock by midnight, or we don't bother with a debt collector. We will send a special someone. Someone who recently got in our team and wouldn't want it on your tail."

  The line went dead.

  Kael pulled the phone away from his ear, staring at the darkened screen as if it had personally insulted his primary school teacher. He let out a sharp, dry bark of a laugh that had no humor in it.

  "Did you hear that?" Kael asked, gesturing wildly with the phone. "Three million. He said 'doubled the interest' and landed on three from 1.5. I mean, I know we’re dealing with career criminals who probably dropped out of school to learn how to break kneecaps, but for God's sake, Ved, the math is offensive."

  Ved rubbed his face with his uninjured hand. "Kael, they’re going to kill us. Who cares about math?"

  "I care!" Kael snapped, pace-walking across the cramped room. "If you owe one point five and the interest 'doubles,' you don't magically hit three unless you’re calculating it at a one-hundred-percent penalty rate per hour. It’s statistically illiterate. It’s greedy, yes, but more importantly, it’s just poor accounting. It’s like being robbed by someone who can’t read the numbers on the notes. It ruins the professional integrity of the whole 'threatening our lives' experience."

  He tossed the phone onto the desk with a clatter. "Three million credits. Honestly, at that price, they should be providing us with a catered lunch and a retirement plan, not sending someone special. And who is that special someone anyways? Mahir’s third girlfriend?."

  The bravado flickered for a second, his eyes darting back to the bandage on Ved’s arm.

  "But," Kael added, his voice dropping an octave, the levity vanishing as quickly as it had appeared. "The fact that they’re being that irrational means they’re desperate. Or scared. And a scared Varkas is a Varkas that starts pulling triggers before he asks questions. We need that canister, Ved. Even if I have to teach those idiots how to use a calculator after we deliver it to them."

  The silence that followed was ringing in the ears. Ved looked at his bandaged arm, the dark veins beginning to pulse faintly through the white gauze.

  "We can't go back there," Ved said, his voice trembling. "The police will be there. I can't... I can't touch that thing again, Kael. I felt it trying to pull me in."

  Kael grabbed his jacket, his eyes hardening into the look Ved had seen a thousand times when they were kids—the look of a man who was about to do something incredibly stupid to keep them alive.

  "We don't have a choice, little brother. We’ll think of a way to retrieve it without directly touching it. If we don't get that canister, Varkas kills us. We’re going back to the bridge. And this time, we're divers."

  ***

  The Old Mumbra Bridge loomed over the river like a skeletal titan. Inside the van, the smell of neoprene and adrenaline was suffocating. Kael tightened the straps of his stealth suit, his eyes darting to the digital pulse-monitor strapped to Ved’s bicep.

  "84 BPM," Kael whispered, his voice barely audible over the hammer of rain on the van's roof. "Keep it under eighty-five, Ved. I don't care how much that chemical burn stings. If you spike, you'll light us up like a flare on any thermal scanners around."

  Ved nodded, his jaw clenched. The dark gashes on his arm felt like they were filled with crushed glass. They both slipped out of the van, two shadows moving through the tall, wet grass toward the riverbank.

  Something felt wrong to Ved. There was strong silence. Almost artificial. No government floodlights. No drone hum. No military cordons. Just the roar of the brown, bloated river. "It’s a graveyard," Ved hissed, pulling his goggles down. "Either they’re done, or they haven't started."

  "Or they're waiting," Kael muttered, checking his tablet. "But we don't have three million credits or a new arm for you. We go in."

  They plunged. The water was a chaotic, freezing soup of silt and debris. For sixty grueling minutes, they fought the current, their high-lumen torches cutting through the murk to reveal nothing but rusted scrap and river stone. The pylon where the crate should have been was empty. The silt had been disturbed—too perfectly, too surgically.

  When they broke the surface, gasping and shivering, the shore was still dark.

  "It’s gone, Kael," Ved choked out, hauling himself onto the muddy bank. "They got it. We’re dead. Varkas is going to—"

  *CRACK.*

  A bullet shattered a rock inches from Kael’s head.

  "MOVE!" Kael screamed.

  The darkness erupted. Not with the orange flash of local police rifles, but with the silent, terrifying precision of suppressed high-velocity rounds. They sprinted toward the van, their boots slipping in the muck.

  "Arrgh!" Kael doubled over as a bullet tore through the fleshy part of his shoulder to his left. The impact spun him around, blood spraying into the rain.

  "KAEL!" Ved’s heart hammered against his ribs. The monitor on his arm shrieked: **92 BPM... 98 BPM.**

  "Keep running!" Kael wheezed, clutching his arm, his face turning ghostly in the dark.

  They reached the van, Ved sliding into the driver’s seat. As he gripped the steering wheel, the metal began to groan. A layer of white frost bloomed under his fingers, the steering column clicking as the grease inside froze solid.

  "Control it!" Kael yelled, collapsing into the passenger seat as bullets shredded the van's rear windows.

  Ved floored it, the tires screeching for a grip. In the rearview mirror, the nightmare finally revealed itself. Three sleek, matte-black SUVs—vehicles that didn't reflect light—tore out from the tree line. They didn't have headlights; they had narrow, glowing violet slits.

  Above them, a drone that looked more like a predatory insect hovered silently, casting a grid of violet lasers over the road.

  "That's not Varkas," Kael gasped, looking at the wound in his arm. "And that's not the cops."

  A harpoon-like projectile fired from the lead SUV, trailing a shimmering fiber-optic cable. It slammed into the van’s rear bumper. Instantly, the van’s electronics flickered. The dashboard died. The engine coughed.

  "They’re siphoning the battery!" Kael realized.

  Ved’s pulse hit **104 BPM**. He let out a strangled cry of agony as his veins flared. The rainwater hitting the windshield didn't run off anymore—it froze instantly into a thick, opaque sheet of ice. The interior of the van dropped thirty degrees in a second.

  "Ved, stop! You're freezing the fuel line!"

  Through the frosted glass, Ved saw the lead SUV pull alongside with a terrifying, silent grace. The window slid down to reveal a soldier encased in matte ivory-white armor, his visor a seamless sliver of dark glass. He held a sleek, over-engineered device that hummed with a low-frequency vibration so intense it made the fillings in Ved’s teeth ache. On the soldier’s pauldron was the mark of the aggressor: a cold, clinical emblem of a hand forming a ‘9’ with its fingers. Kael’s jaw dropped looking at the emblem.

  The van door was ripped off its hinges with a loud groan of metal that vibrated in Ved’s very marrow. Before he could draw breath, he was dragged through shattered glass, the shards biting into his skin, and slammed into the mud. Kael followed, a heavy boot to his ribs forcing him down.

  Ved looked at Kael. His older brother’s face was a mask of terror—not for himself, but for Ved. It was a look that made Ved’s chest tighten more than the injury ever could.

  The Ninth Hand didn't act like soldiers; they acted like a cleaning crew. Their silence was the worst part. To them, the brothers weren't enemies to be fought; they were debris to be swept. Kael felt a sickening hollow in his gut—the realization that his cleverness, his math, his plans, meant nothing to people who viewed human life as a rounding error.

  A man stepped out from the lead SUV. He wore a charcoal-grey coat that seemed to repel the monsoon rain as if the water itself was afraid to touch him. He stopped a foot away, looking down at them with the calm, flat curiosity of a child watching ants under a glass.

  "The Ninth Hand doesn't like loose ends," the leader said. His voice was a smooth. He knelt, his eyes locking onto Kael’s bullet wound. "A through-and-through. Messy."

  Kael tried to pull away, his mind screaming *not like this*, but a gloved hand pinned his shoulder. The leader withdrew a thin, silver calibration rod. As he began to slide it—slowly, almost tenderly—into the hole in Kael’s wound, Kael’s world narrowed to a white-hot point of agony. His scream died in his throat, replaced by a wet, choking sound as his vision fractured. *Don’t look at Ved,* he thought desperately through the red haze. *Don’t let him see me break.*

  "Where is the canister?" the leader asked, his voice never rising.

  Finding no answer in Kael’s glazed eyes, he turned to Ved, yanking the rod out swiftly. He traced the blackened, jagged veins on Ved's forearm with a ceramic blade. Ved felt the serrated edge snagging on the inflamed ridges of his skin. It felt like a violation. He felt the "Pulse" inside him thrashing like a caged animal, the coldness in his marrow screaming to be let out.

  Ved’s heart monitor wailed: **115 BPM... 120 BPM.** A thin layer of frost began to creep across the mud toward the leader's boots, a physical manifestation of Ved's sheer, helpless panic. *I’m going to kill us,* Ved thought, his mind spiraling. *I’m going to freeze us both right here in the dirt.*

  "It fell in the river," Ved gasped, his teeth clattering against each other. "We searched... it's gone. Please... he’s bleeding out."

  The leader stopped, his eyes taking a note of the creeping frost. He looked back at a soldier. "The boy says it’s gone. Wasn’t it your accountability?."

  "Sir, the storm—" The leader fired.

  The casualness of the execution made Ved’s stomach turn. There was no anger, no heat—just a correction. As the soldier’s body splashed into the river, Ved realized with a jolt of horror that they were dealing with something that didn't have a soul to appeal to.

  "It seems we all have a problem of incompetence," the leader said, wiping a speck of mud from his cuff with clinical disgust. "The Government has an asset that we are looking for…desperately! Breaking into their high-security vault is... loud. Expensive."

  He stood up, looking at the brothers as if they were already dead. "You have seven days. Retrieve it for me, and I might let you live long enough to see if that on your hand is terminal."

  He stepped back, the ivory-armored circle widening like an opening eye. "If you fail, I won't send a bullet. I’ll send a team to keep you both awake while they peel the skin off your bodies to see how your insides react to oxygen and….other chemicals."

  He signaled the SUVs. "Get out of my sight. I hope you are up to the task."As the SUVs glided away into the rain, Kael slumped into the mud, clutching his mangled arm. Ved crawled toward him, while the vehicles faded. They were alive, but the weight of the task felt heavy enough to crush their ribs.