Day 1: The Scent of the Grave

  The trek back to Sector-0 was a blur of grey rain and the metallic tang of Kael’s blood. The safehouse—a term that felt increasingly like a cruel joke—was a single room in a crumbling tenement near the docks with a strong smell of salty air. The walls were damp, the wallpaper peeling, mold-bloomed beneath concrete. The brothers had many such hidey holes in the sector.

  Kael collapsed onto a moth-eaten mattress, his face was white. The adrenaline that had carried them away from the river had evaporated, leaving behind a raw, pulsing exhaustion. Ved didn't wait for him to ask. He moved with a frantic, focused energy, kicking away a pile of rusted cans to get to their meagre medical kit.

  "Sit up," Ved commanded, his voice shaking but firm. "Kael, sit up. I need to see the back of the shoulder."

  Kael groaned in protest. "It’s fine, Ved. Just a scratch. The math... the math says it didn't hit anything vital." he said with a faint grin.

  "Shut up about the math," Ved snapped, his eyes stinging. He moved behind his brother, his breath hitching as he saw the state of Kael’s shirt. The fabric was fused to the wound, a crater of torn muscle and clotted blood. "He pushed a metal rod into you, Kael. You’re burning up. If the Ninth Hand doesn’t kill us, the infection will."

  Ved’s hands were trembling as blackened veins on his own arm throbbed. He boiled a bowl of water and a clean-ish rag, beginning the agonizing process of dabbing away the river mud.

  "What do you think is in it?" Ved asked quietly, his eyes fixed on the wound to avoid Kael’s pained expression, trying to keep Kael’s mind occupied. "The canister. It wasn't just a chemical. The way that leader looked for it... like it was a holy relic. And he—he killed his own man like he was swatting a fly. People don't do that for gold or drugs. They do that for something that changes the rules."

  Kael let out a sharp hiss as the cloth hit a raw nerve. "It’s a stabilizer, probably. If the Ninth Hand is looking for it, they aren't just collectors, Ved. I heard whispers about them. They’re architects of world changing rules. They’re building something, and we’re the dust they’re kicking up. Collateral" Kael turned his head slightly, looking at Ved with a sudden, sharp intensity. "Ved, your arm. How does it feel?"

  Ved looked down at the dark, ink-like streaks. "It just hurts, Kael. It feels like my blood is made of ground glass. But it’s healing."

  "We’ll find a way to cure it," Kael whispered, though he looked like he was about to lose consciousness. "We have to. Because Varkas... Varkas won't wait for the Ninth Hand to finish us."

  As if summoned by the name, the heavy wooden door of the flat rattled under a massive blow. Then another. The rusted bolt groaned, the wood splintering around the frame. Ved lunged for a kitchen knife, but the door gave way with a final, violent crack. Four of Varkas’s men stepped in, their heavy leather jackets slick with rain. They brought with them the smell of cheap cigarettes and unwashed aggression. But it was the fifth figure that made the air in the room turn stagnant.

  He was tall, unnaturally bulky, and wrapped from head to toe in layers of tea-brown bandages that looked as old as the city itself. There was no skin visible, only the dark, wet slits for eyes and a nose that twitched incessantly. The bandages were stiff with dried, rusted blood, and tucked into the folds of his torso were several iron sickles and serrated knives, their handles bone-white and worn. Even Varkas’s men were wary of this creature. They had been told only his name—Vellum—and that they had to pick him up outside a graveyard, a detail that had sent shivers down their spines.

  "Who the fuck is that?," Ved breathed. Kael simply stared, a cold dread creeping into his gut.

  One of Varkas’s men, a brute with a scarred lip, stepped forward, deliberately avoiding eye contact with the bandaged creep, and kicked Kael’s wounded shoulder. Kael screamed, a high, thin sound that tore through Ved’s chest.

  "Varkas is disappointed," the brute growled, his voice a little too high, laced with his own fear. "He heard you had visitors. He heard you were making new friends in white armour. That makes the 'insurance' go up. Three million credits, boys. Seven days. Or the Vellum here gets to start his collection early." He glanced a look at the creature and gave an odd shiver, a nervousness shared by the other men who shifted uncomfortably, keeping their distance from their 'associate'.

  Vellum didn't speak. It moved with a disjointed, jerky grace, leaning down toward the floor where Ved had dropped his torn jacket. The others gave it a wide berth and moved aside, their faces pale. The creature made a wet, slurping sound—a deep, predatory sniff that seemed to vibrate in the floorboards.

  It reached into its own side, pulling a small, curved blade from beneath a layer of clotted bandage. With a movement too fast to follow, it stepped toward the brothers. Ved tried to move, but a heavy boot pinned his chest to the floor. Vellum ignored Ved’s struggle, leaning over and slicing a square of fabric from Kael’s blood-soaked shirt and another from Ved’s sleeve. He held the two scraps of cloth to his face, inhaling deeply. A low, rattling purr came from behind the bandages.

  "It has your scent now," the brute gave a nervous laugh, the sound brittle and strained as he looked down at the brothers with genuine pity, eager to get out of the room. "Seven days, Kael. Don't make us come back."

  The men scrambled out, nearly tripping over their own feet to get away from their "associate." The Vellum lingered for a second longer, its head tilting at a sickening, impossible angle—a full ninety degrees—as it stared at Ved’s blackened arm. Then, with a sound like dry leaves skittering on pavement, it was gone.

  The silence that followed wasn't peaceful but was heavy with the lingering scent of rot and old iron. Ved didn't move at first. He couldn't. His lungs felt seized, as if the creature had inhaled all the oxygen in the room and left only rot behind. He let out a hitching breath that sounded more like a sob, his hands shaking so violently he had to press them into the floorboards to stop from vibrating.

  "What... what was that?" Ved’s voice was a raw whisper, his eyes wide and fixed on the empty doorway. He felt a wave of nausea roll over him. "Kael, that wasn't... that wasn't a man. Did you see its eyes? There was….there was….just..."

  He frantically scrambled on his hands and knees over to his brother. He pulled Kael up quickly as if checking to make sure he hadn't been turned into something else by the creature’s touch.

  Kael was shaking even harder than Ved, his skin a waxen, sickly grey. He didn't answer immediately; he just stared at the ceiling, his pupils blown wide. When he finally spoke, his voice was hoarse.

  "I think..." Kael swallowed hard. "I think Varkas just stopped playing by the rules of this world."

  "What do we do?," Ved gripped his brother harder until his knuckles went white. "Kael, he’s not just sending debt collectors anymore. We’re being hunted by something from a nightmare."

  Kael let out a weak, pathetic chuckle, though it ended in a wet cough. "You know... the math is actually getting simpler, Ved. We either get the canister, or we become a pair of very expensive rugs for that Mummy’s collection."

  "Don't," Ved snapped, his voice cracking with genuine terror. "Don't joke about that. Not after... not after that thing breathed on us."

  "I have to," Kael breathed, his head lolling as the adrenaline began to crash, leaving only the searing pain of his shoulder. "If I don't laugh, Ved, I'm going to start screaming, and I don't think my lungs can handle it. Just... give me a second. I need to know the room has stopped moving before I try to stand."

  The morning brought a shift in the shade of grey pressing against the high, grime-streaked windows of their new refuge. They had abandoned Sector-0 at 4:00 AM. The scent of the Vellum seemed to cling to their clothes.

  Their new "home" was the hollowed-out basement of a defunct printing press, hidden behind stacks of yellowing, water-logged paper and rusted, cast-iron machinery.

  Kael was in a bad way. The fever had settled deep into his bones, making his movements jerky and his breath a constant, whistling struggle against the pain in his shoulder. Every time he shifted, a fresh bloom of red appeared on his makeshift bandages. Yet, his mind refused to shut down.

  "I can't go with you to see the contact," Kael rasped, leaning his head against the cold frame of an old offset press. "I’m a liability today, Ved. You need to find the runner for us. We need the whereabouts of the canister and one data shard of the security systems holding it. That's all."

  Ved looked at him, it's always Kael who protects him. He was furious with himself. If he hadn't messed up on getting the canister instead of losing it in the river, by now they would be enjoying their freedom. He reached out, his blackened fingers pressing against Kael’s forehead. It was like touching a furnace. "You need a doctor, Kael. The old man. Not information. Your pulse is erratic—I can hear it from here."

  "We need that canister!," Kael snapped, the effort triggering a brutal coughing fit that left him clutching his ribs. "Don't you get it? Varkas is the least of our problems now. Securing the canister is only half the problem solved. Do we give it to Varkas like originally planned? Because his new friend, that bandaged creep, seems to enjoy human barbecue! Or do we give it to the Ninth hand? Because if not, they’ll professionally erase us”. He took a pause to cough again. “Go. I’ll stay here and run the deep-dive on that symbol. If we know what we’re actually carrying, we might have enough leverage to keep our skin."

  ‘And I don’t even want to open the door of why the canister fused itself to Ved.’ Kael thought internally.

  Ved hesitated, his own arm throbbing. He didn't want to leave Kael alone, not with the knowledge that the Vellum was out there. But the logic was unassailable. They were going out of time and out of options. He grabbed a tattered, oil-stained hoodie, pulling it low to hide the dark streaks on his forearm, and slipped out into the grey curtain of the rain.

  ***

  Left in the silence of the bunker, Kael sat before a high-end terminal, his fingers sliding over the keys with a feverish speed. He had set up a multi-layered scraper to hunt for the "Wave and Mountain" mark across every corner of the grid, but the results were coming back as a series of hollow voids.

  He dived into the corporate registries first. Usually, every experimental asset had a paper trail—a shell company, a patent filing, a budget leak. But here, the archives looked like they had been hit by localized scrapware. Files were missing. Servers were wiped. There wasn't even a placeholder.

  "Nothing," Kael murmured in disbelief. "It’s like someone went through the archives with a digital flamethrower."

  He reluctantly pivoted to "digital ossuary"—the occult forums where myth-hunters and conspiracy theorists traded secrets. He found a thread titled **THE GREAT RESET**, but as he clicked, the text began to loop. The same three sentences repeated endlessly which led nowhere. The mark—the Crashing Wave against the Mountain—appeared in a thumbnail, but when he tried to enlarge it, the image dissolved into static.

  He pushed deeper, into the military black-sites. He hit a firewall that blocked him. The clearance level required was beyond anything he had ever seen—names of departments that didn't exist, encrypted under protocols that shouldn't be possible. The files were there, but they were black blocks of redacted text. What's more, he realized that the website started tracing his location and closed it quickly with a jolt.

  Finally, he hit the myth sites—the old archives of ancient history and folklore. He found references to a "cleansing tide" and a "mountain-breaker," but the names had been surgically removed. Every time he thought something specific was mentioned, the text was corrupted, replaced by a string of nonsensical symbols that made his head ache.

  Kael looked at his shaking hands, the light from the terminal casting long, shadows against the bunker wall. Physics was his god, but he was staring into a hole where information went to die.

  "It’s quite disturbing that there are traces of information but someone took enough pain to wipe out all the data, in the fucking internet!," Kael whispered, the realization chilling his blood.

  ***

  Three hours later, Ved returned. He was drenched, his boots caked in a thick, foul-smelling mud from the docks, "I found the runner," Ved panted, his chest heaving. “She’s in the inner city. We need to get to her to get some sensible information if we are to do something stupid about that canister.”

  The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  Kael came out of his deep thoughts. He looked at Ved, seeing the way his brother was stressed. "Ved, listen to me. The canister symbol, I tried racking the internet for some level of information on it to understand what we are up against but there's nothing. I mean there are traces of the symbol in weird places on the internet but I keep hitting walls. There's no concrete information on what the canister is about."

  He turned the laptop screen. Ved check this—*blurred image of the symbol*. He clicked it, and the page loaded back to the previous page.

  "Kael, this is extremely weird," Ved whispered, pulling his hand back as if the laptop were hot. "We’re scavengers. We steal copper and data. We don't steal unknown shit like this, this is beyond us."

  "The Ninth Hand doesn't care what we are," Kael said, standing up with an agonizing groan, his face a mask of grim determination. "They’re using us because we’re small enough to slip through the cracks they can't. We have to find the runner, get the info on the canister's location, info on how its secured and how to get it out."

  "We’ll go tonight," Ved said, his concern for Kael overriding his fear of the vault. "But you can barely stand. Let me—"

  "We’re leaving this basement now," Kael interrupted, his voice cutting through the air. "Grab the bag."

  "Why? We’re safe here for a few more hours."

  "No, we aren't," Kael said, pointing toward the heavy, rusted steel door. "The Varkas men who followed us? I heard them outside an hour ago. They were arguing about who got to hold the umbrella. Now? I don't hear anything. Not even the rain hitting their jackets."

  They stepped out into the narrow, trash-strewn alleyway, the monsoon wind whipping around them. Ten feet from the exit, four bodies were slumped against a rusted dumpster.

  Ved froze. They were the same thugs who had broken into their Sector-0 the night before. One still had a cigarette tucked behind his ear. Each of them had a single, clinical bullet hole in the dead centre of their forehead. There were no signs of a struggle, no shells on the ground, and no blood on the walls—just a professional, silent execution.

  The Vellum was nowhere to be seen, but the air held a lingering, sickly-sweet scent of rot and old bandages that cut right through the smell of the city’s exhaust.

  "They're cleaning up," Ved whispered, his pulse beginning to hum a low, terrifying note of panic. "The Ninth Hand... they're not letting anyone else touch us. They're keeping us in a vacuum until we fetch that canister."

  "They're not protecting us," Kael corrected, his eyes darting to the rooftops. "They're just making sure there are no witnesses when they finally close the gap. Move, Ved. Before the smell gets any closer."

  The brothers disappeared into the curtain of the rain, leaving the dead men and the myths behind, the weight of the "Double Interest" now feeling like a mountain ready to be swallowed by the sea.

  Day 3: Maya

  The wind inside the tunnel smelled of ozone and impending death. Maya crouched on a high-tension girder, her lithe, athletic frame coiled like a spring. Her matte-black tactical bodysuit, a high-compression second skin that highlighted her toned limbs and narrow waist, hummed slightly as it dampened her thermal signature. Through the lenses of her eye implants, the world was a map of heat and cold.

  She had been tracking the Ninth Hand’s logistical trail for weeks. When the train derailed, she didn't see a tragedy; she saw an opportunity. But as she watched from her perch, her determined curiosity turned into a cold, paralyzing puzzlement.

  The younger one—Ved—wasn't just holding the canister. It was fused to him. Even from fifty meters up, Maya could see the blackened veins snaking up his arm, emitting a signature that made her scanners glitch. It wasn't radiation. It resonated. When the train groaned and shifted, she watched him fall, a frantic knot forming in her stomach. She prepared to dive, to intercept the prize before the Ninth Hand could arrive, but the sound of rotors cut through the air.

  Government drones.

  She retreated into the rafters, her teeth clenched in a snarl of frustration. She watched, resentful and silent, as the Government's recovery teams swarmed the riverbank like ants. They retrieved the canister with clinical precision. She had been too slow. The prize was gone, tucked away in a government transport, but her eyes remained fixed on the brothers. The 9th was sure to target them now that they meddled with their interest.

  She followed them.

  Maya moved across the city’s skyline with fluid grace. She watched them return to the river, watched their pathetic attempt to find a treasure that had already been moved. But then, the Ninth Hand appeared with the silence of a tomb.

  From her vantage point behind a rusted water tank, Maya deployed a 'Mosquito'—a tiny, buzzing electronic eavesdropper no larger than a grain of rice. The feed hissed in her ear. She heard the wet thud of the Ninth Hand leader executing his own man without a second thought. She heard the ultimatum: seven days.

  "Seven days," she whispered to herself, her amber eyes narrowing as she watched the brothers limp away. "You idiots are either the luckiest men or the most cursed."

  But the night held a darker shadow. As she tracked the brothers back to their crumbling unit in Sector-0, a sudden, icy prickle erupted at the base of her neck. It was a sensation she hadn’t felt since her father’s funeral—the absolute, skin-crawling certainty of being hunted.

  Below, in the rain-lashed street, she saw him.

  Maya froze, her breath hitching in her throat. She had seen the dregs of the underworld, but this—this was an obscenity. The Vellum. Every time he shifted, she imagined she could hear the wet friction of rot against cloth.

  He stopped. He didn’t look at the brothers’ door. Instead, he tilted his head back in a slow, sickening snap, his bandaged face turning toward the high rooftop where Maya was hidden.

  Maya’s blood turned to slush. Even through the filters of her tactical HUD, she felt his gaze pierce her stealth suit as if it were tissue paper. Her heart hammered. He didn't move; he just stood there, sniffing the air with a twitching, unseen nose, marking her presence. It was a long, agonizing beat before he finally turned and entered the building.

  A violent shudder ran through her. "What the hell are you?" she whispered, her hands trembling as she adjusted her grip on her vantage point. This wasn’t a thug. This was a nightmare that could sniff out a secret.

  Later, when the brothers fled to their new safehouse, Maya was there, a silent silhouette against the smog. She watched Ved leave to find information, her conscience gnawing at her. Should she step in? But she saw a movement in the alley below.

  Varkas’s men were there, closing in on the wounded Kael like vultures. But before they could draw their weapons, the shadows themselves seemed to bleed into the light. The Ninth Hand’s 'Erasers' arrived. No shouting. No struggle. Just the muffled thwip of suppressed muzzles. In seconds, Varkas’s men were cooling corpses.

  Maya’s eyes darted frantically across the rooftops. Her first instinct was not to watch the Erasers—it was to find the bandage-wrapped creep. Her breath came in shallow gasps. "Where is he?" she hissed, her finger hovering over the trigger of her sidearm. The alley was empty of the creature, but the scent of rot and old iron still seemed to cling to the wind.

  With a jolt, she saw a shadow flickered in her periphery. She spun around, weapon raised, her vision tunnelling. On a far rooftop, three blocks away, a figure stood atop a crumbling chimney.

  The Vellum.

  He wasn't looking at the brothers. He was staring directly at her again. He raised a hand, a rusted sickle glinting with a dull light, and for a second, Maya felt a wave of nausea so strong she nearly gagged. Then, with that same disjointed grace, he simply turned and vanished into the night.

  "He's playing with me," she hissed, her pulse thundering in her ears. She looked down at her hands and realized she was shaking. For the first time in years, the hunter felt like the prey.

  She couldn't stay here. She needed to close the distance. She pulled her multi-tool—a compact, matte-finish grappling gun. *Pfft.* One shot at a far, lower roof fired an anchor, the thin, high-tensile line surprisingly strong as it bit into the masonry. *Pfft.* A second shot anchored the line to her current roof.

  With a practiced, sensual fluidity, she hooked her carabiner to the line and slid. The wind whipped her short bob against her face, the city a blur of neon and rain beneath her. She landed silently, her knees absorbing the impact, and immediately broke into a sprint.

  The brothers were moving again, heading toward the heart of the district. Maya didn't look back. She didn't need to. She could still feel the Vellum’s gaze on her back, a cold promise that their paths wouldn't just cross—they would collide.

  ***

  The Vitreous-9 bike sat at the edge of the transit plaza, a low-slung predator of matte-carbon and exposed hydraulics. It was tethered to a high-voltage charging pillar, its internal cooling fans emitting a rhythmic, metallic purr.

  "Good! It's biometric," Kael whispered as he pulled a silver-tipped bypass shard from his pocket. He jammed the shard into the port. The bike screamed—a sharp, electronic yelp that was instantly choked out by the bypass. The dash flared to life, casting a cyan HUD into the air.

  "Go!" Kael hissed, scrambling onto the seat behind his brother.

  Ved kicked the drive into gear. The bike lunged. They tore out of the industrial shadows of the outskirts and into the Inner Sector. One moment, they were threading through the grey, soot-stained alleys of their past; the next, they were swallowed by a vertical jungle of chrome and light.

  “We’re going to the Old Man. Add the coordinates of his clinic into the GPS. Switch to incognito before you do that. He’s been fixing our messes since we were ten. He’ll find some way to fix us..” Kael shouted into Ved’s ear.

  Towering spires of carbon-glass rose, their surfaces shimmering with liquid-crystal advertisements for synthetic perfumes and neural-links. The air here tasted of ionized copper and recycled oxygen. Beneath the tires, the road was a smooth, translucent polymer. Deep under the surface, massive fibre-optic grids pulsed with a rhythmic blue light, illuminating the undercarriage of the bike in a steady heartbeat.

  As they hit the main artery, the ground beneath their tires erupted in real-time navigation. Glowing amber arrows streaked across the dark pavement, pointing the way forward. Ved glanced at a glowing red toggle on the handlebars: [FLIGHT_ENGAGE]. He slammed his thumb against it, desperate to put distance between them and the ground.

  A digital error flashed across the dash: *Hydraulic Malfunction - Grounded.*

  "Dammit!" Ved yelled over the roar of the wind. "Of course it's broken."

  Kael leaned his forehead against Ved’s back, his hands locked around his brother’s waist. The speed was the only thing keeping the terror at bay. He watched the world turn from grey to neon violet.

  "Ved," Kael shouted, his voice cracking. "What if it wasn't a hallucination? The symbol... the way the Ninth Hand acted... what if the data I saw was right?"

  Ved didn't look back. He leaned the bike hard into a curve, weaving through a cluster of automated transport pods. "It’s a city of glass and fusion cells, Kael! Look around you! You think some ancient legend is real in a place that has mag-lev trains? You’re a self made scientist. Act like one."

  "The files said—"

  "The files were probably encrypted corporate nonsense!" Ved countered, his voice gaining a hard, cynical edge as the neon lights blurred past them. "We saw a man in bandages and we got scared. We saw a canister that’s probably leaking some high-end industrial coolant. That’s why your lungs are burning, Kael. That’s why my arm is cold. It’s chemistry. It’s a leak. It’s a prototype battery rejection."

  Kael tightened his grip, the logic acting like a cold splash of water. He looked at the skyscrapers, their indifference making the 'myth' feel small and foolish. "The canister was a battery. Right. A bio-battery with a chemical leak. That makes sense. That’s... that’s manageable."

  "Exactly," Ved said, his voice desperate to believe his own words. "It’s just tech. We’re not part of a legend, Kael. We’re just two thieves who got hit by a bad prototype."

  The bike banked right, following the amber arrows into a sub-level where the neon grew dim and the walls were stained with the grime of a thousand illegal repairs.

  The bike skidded to a halt in a sub-level alley where the neon glow of the upper city filtered through layers of grime and heavy industrial smog. The air here was thick with the scent of ozone and discarded hydraulic fluid. Ved killed the engine, the sudden silence of the alleyway feeling heavier than the roar they had left behind.

  They stood before a reinforced steel hatch, recessed into a wall of weeping concrete. There was no buzzer, only a hand-painted caduceus wrapped in copper wire, the paint peeling like sunburnt skin.

  The hatch groaned open before Ved could lift a hand.

  The man standing on the threshold was a patchwork of survival. His skin was the texture of old parchment, mapped with fine, silvery scars that caught the flickering orange light of the interior. One of his eyes was a dull, whirring mechanical lens that clicked with every shift in focus, and his hands—thick-fingered and steady—were stained with a permanent grime that no solvent could touch. He wore a heavy leather apron over a grease-streaked thermal shirt, looking at them with the weary, practiced irritation of a man who had been sewing them back together since they were tall enough to reach his workbench.

  He didn't look at their faces. He looked at Kael’s slumped shoulder and the way Ved’s arm was held stiffly away from his body.

  "Get in," the Old Man rasped, the sound like a shovel hitting gravel. "If you drop dead on the threshold, I’m leaving you for the sweepers."

  The clinic was a claustrophobic cavern of high-tech debris. Racks of salvaged servos and jars of synthetic marrow lined the walls, illuminated by the cold, flickering blue of diagnostic monitors. In the centre of the room sat two Medical Pods—long, horizontal tanks that looked more like coffins than healing chambers, their glass lids clouded with years of chemical residue.

  "The Sector-0," Ved began, his voice shaky as he helped Kael toward the nearest pod. "The Ninth Hand... they hit us at the river. Then at the safehouse. They have this thing, this canister. It fused to me and was torn off while we were escaping."

  The Old Man stopped mid-stride, his mechanical eye whirring as it zoomed in on Ved’s blackened veins. He didn't ask about the Ninth Hand's politics; he just reached out and gripped Ved’s wrist with a strength that felt like a vice.

  "Fever's high. Tissue is necrotic," the Old Man muttered, more to himself than to them. He turned to Kael, pulling back the blood-soaked fabric of his shirt to reveal the jagged, ruined mess where the rod had been driven through. "And this... I’ve patched your lungs with organic muscle three times this year, Kael. Your body is done with it. It’s rejecting the soft stuff. You want to live? We stop pretending you’re all human."

  "Do it," Kael gasped, his face pale as he climbed into the pod. "Whatever it takes."

  As the Old Man prepped the local anaesthesia, the brothers lay in the parallel tanks. The machines hissed to life, filling the pods with a cooling, translucent gel that numbed the skin but left their minds sharp.

  "It’s just a prototype, Doc," Ved said, his eyes fixed on the ceiling as a robotic arm began to scrub the black ichor from his arm with a high-frequency sonic pulse. "A bio-battery or a coolant leak. That’s what Kael thinks. The Ninth Hand... they’re just chasing a paycheque. It’s not... it’s not what they said it was."

  The Old Man didn't look up from his monitors. "Believe whatever lie helps the anaesthesia go down, kid. I just fix the plumbing."

  Over in Kael’s pod, the mechanical arms worked with brutal precision. They weren't just stitching skin; they were removing the ruined mass of his shoulder. Kael watched through the glass, his breath hitching as he felt the tug of the machine. The Old Man reached into a bin of premium spare parts—heavy-duty, threaded alloys meant for industrial loaders.

  With a series of mechanical clicks and the smell of cauterized flesh, a matte-chrome implant was fused directly into Kael’s scapula and clavicle. It wasn't a smooth replacement; it was a structural anchor. At the center of his new shoulder, a circular, threaded hole sat flush against the skin—a universal mount, cold and hollow, waiting for a purpose.

  "There," the Old Man grunted, wiping his hands on his apron as the machines hummed toward the finish. "You've got a socket now, Kael. If you’re going to keep getting holes punched in you, I might as well give you one you can use."

  Ved stood by the reinforced door, his hand resting on the hilt of a rusted pipe-wrench he’d picked up from the floor—a poor substitute for a weapon, but better than nothing. He looked at Kael, then at the Old Man. The fever-dreams of legend had been replaced by the cold, calculating reality of two men with a price on their heads.

  "We’re patched up," Ved said, his tone low and sharp. "Now we just need to find a way to fall off the grid before the Ninth Hand tracks our biometrics to this sector. The Government has the canister, the 9th Hand is on our asses to get the canister. Varkas is on our asses to get the canister. We’re doing a high rank heist and we are not even getting paid for it."

  The Old Man didn't look up from his terminal, his mechanical eye whirring as he scrolled through lines of encrypted code. "Then you better start running. The Ninth Hand doesn't like mistakes, and they like 'anomalies' even less. You’ve got new serial numbers on those parts I gave you—standard industrial scrap. Use 'em to blend in."

  "Industrial scrap," Kael muttered, adjusting the weight of his new shoulder. "Right. Just another pair of drones in the machine." He looked at his brother, "So, what’s the plan, Ved? We go back to the outskirts and play dead, or do we try to find a way to sell the story of what we saw to a rival Corp?"

  "We survive first," Ved replied, checking the alleyway through the door's narrow view-port. "We get to the mid-sector hubs. No more myths. No more legends."

  The Old Man waved a dismissive, grease-stained hand toward the exit. "Get out of my clinic. And take your bad luck with you. If I see either of you back here before next month, I'll charge triple."

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