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Chapter 1
Chapter One: Night Work
Rivenport never slept. It clanked and steamed and whispered in the dark, a city of cranes and scaffolds perched on the ribs of dead machines. Between the long shadows of toppled mechs, scavenger crews drifted like lanternfish. They moved in silence, midnight being the safest hour to pry choicest parts from the bones of history.
Kesh knew the Yard’s map the way a pickpocket knows wrists. The Field was a maze of armor plates and skeletal hydraulics, long since fused into a neighborhood. We lived on what we could cut, Kesh thought, sliding a pry bar into a cracked seam. Our homes lay inside cargo boxes and repurposed thoraxes. Our days were smoke and barter. Nights were when we worked.
“Take the servo clusters,” Brann Kell whispered behind him, the crew boss with the voice like a dull saw. “And anything with markings. Ministry pays for provenance.”
Kesh’s headlamp slipped across a cavalry of giant knees frozen mid-stride, a forest of rust. The beams of other crews bobbed far off like drowned stars.
Something hummed under his feet. Faint. Old. Not the wind. Not the old drift-currents through the mechs’ plastrons. It vibrated the pry bar like a tuning fork pressed to bone.
Kesh froze. “You feel that?” he asked, low.
Rigg Toller, perched in a tangle of cables, shook his head. “Feel what?”
Kesh knelt, listening. The hum came and went, like a heartbeat remembering itself.
He lowered himself into the cracked chest cavity of a toppled titan—and the hum answered.
