The knight didn’t die. He simply looked at the bleeding stump of his left arm. The stump didn’t bleed. Not one drop.

  Black-white armor sealed over the wound like liquid metal, edges knitting together with a sound like cracking ice.

  The severed arm on the ground was almost gone (flesh collapsing into black sand, armor plates flaking away like burnt paper). In seconds there was nothing left but a dark stain and the smell of something that had never been alive.

  Mereque’s HUD threw a new alert at him: ORGANIC MATTER NOT DETECTED. RECLASSIFICATION PENDING…

  He stared at the empty space where an arm had been. His system was confused. It wasn’t alone.

  The knight flexed the remaining hand, testing, as if losing a limb was an inconvenience on par with a torn cloak.

  Then those fractured wings unfolded again, jagged light tearing the air.

  Mereque felt the temperature plummet. The knight’s single remaining eye fixed on him (not angry, not afraid, just… measuring).

  He realized with cold clarity that the knight wasn’t retreating.

  He was going for reinforcements.

  The creature calling itself Sir Tarmour launched skyward on wings of broken light. A second later he was a black-white speck shrinking over the ridgeline.

  Mereque put three useless rounds after him anyway, then let the Pelter drop to low-ready. Running was smart. It meant the bastard could still feel something close to fear (or so he hoped).

  The clearing stank of ozone and black-sand blood. Forty-three corpses were already dissolving into tarry puddles. The animals in the cages had gone dead quiet, watching him like he was the new monster.

  He started with the iron-barred wagons.

  The metal was the same shifting alloy as Tarmour’s armor; it took three full-strength blows to snap each lock. Primitive humans bolted the instant their doors swung open (bare feet slapping dirt, not one backward glance). Mereque didn’t blame them. He looked like the thing that ate their nightmares.

  Last cage.

  The man inside rose slowly, as if in no hurry to owe anyone anything. Short black hair, black eyes hard as hull-plate, black composite armour cracked but still recognisably advanced. Despite being damaged, he could make out a stylized eight-pointed sigil on his shoulder.

  Mereque crushed the lock in one gauntleted fist. The prisoner stepped out, stretched, and gave a small, crooked grin.

  “Never thought it’d be a giant in bone-white armor who cut me loose. Name’s Jenker. Proud mariner of the Havenite Grand Fleet. You got one?”

  The implant spun up, tasted the language, fed Mereque the grammar in real time.

  “Mereque.” He tapped his chest. “You hurt?”

  “Only my pride.” Jenker’s gaze flicked over the dissolving bodies, lingered on the severed knight-arm already half-melted into slag. “Keel slugs, mate. You just handed one of those bastards his own arm. Haven’t seen a Knight run since the sinking of the Southern Rose.”

  He spoke fast, rough, every third word some sailor’s curse the translator flagged as “colorful but non-literal.” Mereque liked him immediately.

  Jenker sniffed, caught the smell of himself, grimaced. “Been a week since they hosed us down. You got anything that isn’t Blanched rations?”

  Mereque pulled a foil-wrapped protein brick from his belt. Jenker took it like it was solid gold, ripped it open with his teeth, and inhaled half in one bite.

  Between chews: “So. You from the moon, the deep, or somewhere worse?”

  Mereque snorted. “Somewhere else.”

  Jenker barked a short laugh. “Figures. Only thing worse than this shite luck is interesting luck.” He wiped his mouth with the back of a gauntlet. “Listen, Mereque-from-somewhere-else. You just painted a target the size of a battleship on your back. Those Knights don’t forget. But you also just saved my sorry hull, and every poor beast in these cages.”

  He offered his hand, human style, no flourish.

  “Debt’s mine. You want off this island, you want answers, or you just want someone who knows which way the wind blows around here, you stick with me.”

  Mereque looked the man over.

  Not Leopold. But close enough to hurt.

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  He thought of five hundred escape pods. Of holding Antoinette’s cold hand. Of waking up alone on a planet that ate fools for breakfast.

  Jenker waited, hand still out, steady despite the cages and the corpses and the sky that had just tried to kill them both.

  Mereque looked at the outstretched hand, then at the empty sky where Tarmour had vanished.

  He clasped the forearm, gauntlet to cracked composite.

  “Deal,” he said, voice rougher than he meant.

  Jenker’s grin went sharp. “Then let’s not be here when the rest of those boys show up.”

  Mereque felt something loosen in his chest he hadn’t realized was knotted.

  For the first time since leaving Grace behind on that distant shore, he wasn’t alone.

  Mereque tore off another bite of the protein brick. “Havenite Grand Fleet. Never heard of it. You military?”

  Jenker choked on his next mouthful. “Bilge sacks, big man! We are the navy. Every last soul born within smell of saltwater signs the articles before they can walk. You really are from the arse-end of nowhere.”

  “Leopold Seven,” Mereque said, offering the flask. “One swallow. Don’t chug.”

  Jenker eyed the matte-black container like it might bite him, then took a careful sip. His whole body straightened as the nano-hydrates hit his bloodstream. “Gods below… feels like I just crawled out of a fresh water tank.” He handed it back with new respect. “Your people make that?”

  “Lab-grown necessity,” Mereque said. “Space is dry.”

  Jenker barked a laugh and moved to the nearest wagon, yanking open a belly compartment. Crates spilled out.

  Mereque hauled the heavier ones free with one hand the way other men might move chairs.

  Jenker rooted like a terrier, cursing in three dialects when he came up empty, brightening when he found something small enough to tuck inside his cracked armor. Anything useful, he began tossing into one of the larger ones he’d emptied.

  “Leopold Seven,” he muttered, head half-buried in a trunk. “Still never heard of it.”

  “Feeling’s mutual.”

  That earned another rough laugh. Jenker straightened, wiped sweat and grime from his eyes. “Didn’t think I remembered how to laugh. You’re a dangerous man, Mereque-from-nowhere.”

  Mereque kicked open the last crate (broken pottery, rusted nails, one tarnished silver chalice that looked older than both their civilizations). “Those knights. The one I fought. Sir Tarmour. That what you call a Blanched Knight?”

  Jenker’s face went still. “Soppy sea-goose , aye, that was a Blanched Knight. Upper crust of the Weeping Wyrm’s church. Think regular Blanched are bad? Knights are what happens when the Wyrm’s tears finish the job. They don’t bleed, they don’t tire, and they don’t forgive. You cut his arm off, he’ll grow a new one meaner than the last. And he’ll bring friends.”

  “How’d you end up in that cage?”

  Jenker spat, wrenching open another crate. “Came out of the sky on some winged bone-chariot. Caught our boat while we were surfacing. Captain had ten seconds to choose: dive and save the ship or die with the deck division. He dove. Can’t fault him for that.”

  Mereque’s jaw tightened. “Still leaves men behind.”

  He stared at the empty cages, the footprints already fading in the dirt. He’d left people behind too. Five hundred pods. He still could taste the vacuum and burning metal.

  Jenker watched him, eyes sharp. “Captain’s job is to keep the most alive,” he said, softer. “Doesn’t make it feel any less like betrayal.”

  Mereque’s gauntlet clenched until the metal creaked. “I was second in command. My job was to make sure no one got left behind.” He laughed, bitter. “Failed spectacularly.”

  Jenker didn’t flinch. “Then you know the taste. Salt water and guilt. Same as me.” He clapped Mereque’s shoulder. “Difference is, you’re still walking. So am I. That counts for something.”

  “It’s something.”, he conceded.

  “Better twenty drowned than two hundred. That’s navy math.” Jenker yanked something free with a triumphant grunt. “Got you, you beautiful bastard.”

  It was a fist-sized wooden box, brass-capped, with a fold-out crank on the back. He started spinning the handle like a sailor hauling anchor. A rising electrical whine filled the air.

  The crank spun faster. The whine climbed (thin, angry, beautiful). Every turn was a middle finger to the sky.

  Mereque felt it in his bones: the same frequency his old comms officer used to call “fuck-you-and-the-horse-you-rode-in-on.” He found himself grinning despite everything.

  Jenker’s teeth flashed white in the gloom. “Hear that? That’s Haven singing.

  Green sparks spat from the box, lighting their faces like war-paint.

  Mereque’s grin widened. “What is it?”

  “Manual transmitter,” he said, grinning. “Old but unbreakable. Once Tarmour limps home, every pale freak on the island will come looking for the giant who cut his arm off. We need to be gone before then.”

  Mereque glanced north. “I need the northern shore.”

  Jenker stopped cranking. “North is the Shimmering City, mate. Suicide by cult. West is the way to go. My people run submarines under the Weeper’s nose. We reach the coast, send the signal, and a Havenite conning tower pops up, we sail you anywhere you want after that. Including north, with real guns this time.”

  “Question is,” Jenker said, as he fiddled with his box, “you planning to keep poking that particular leviathan, or you want to live long enough to regret it?”

  Mereque looked north, the direction Tarmour had flown. Then at the empty sky starting to bruise with evening.

  “I think I’m done here,” he said.

  Jenker clapped him on the shoulder plate, hard enough to ring metal. “Good. Because the nearest escape off this special shit-hole is my way. And I owe you a fleet’s worth of drinks. Come on.”

  Mereque weighed it in three heartbeats.

  North alone: certain ambush by fresh Knights. West with Jenker: a fighting chance, answers, and maybe a ride.

  He exhaled; he once crossed two hundred million kilometers of hard vacuum on worse odds.

  “West it is,” he said.

  Jenker slapped the crank home. The box began spitting green sparks. “Then quit standing there looking pretty. We’ve got a tide to catch and a whole church to outrun.”

  The transmitter’s whine climbed into a steady, defiant pulse that carried for kilometers: Come and get us, you pale bastards.

  Mereque shouldered the large crate of salvaged gear without asking, turned west, and started walking.

  Somewhere far north, something with too many wings answered the challenge.

  Mereque didn’t look back. He just lengthened his stride until Jenker had to jog to keep up.

  They walked west; the transmitter’s pulse raced somewhere ahead of them.

  Jenker glanced sideways. “You know, most men would’ve run the other way.”

  “Most men are stupid,” Mereque said.

  “Or they’re dead.”

  Silence for a dozen strides.

  Then Jenker, quieter: “Thanks for not being most men.”

  Mereque didn’t answer with words. Instead, he shifted the crate higher on his shoulder so Jenker wouldn’t have to carry it.

  The sky ahead was turning the color of old bruises, but the ground under their boots felt solid for the first time in since he came ashore.

  Two strangers from two different impossible worlds, walking away from a shared nightmare.

  It wasn’t much.

  But it was something.