Nesgon’s operation was still progressing without any major setbacks, though they had to pillage the medbay one more time to retrieve a few more parts and additional epipens. When Armless questioned the VI about their contents, he received a small data packet containing pertinent details. The black liquid was a medical nanite solution designed to assist in body modification when proper equipment wasn’t available, whilst the orange was highly concentrated biogel tailored to tissue repair and substitution. He couldn’t help but wonder how Vezkig knew to pick those out of the myriad of other, nearly identical epipen cases in the locker.

  He also queried the VI as to the nature of the spherical machine, but received no response. Not even a rejection message.

  The sun having set on another day of work, Armless decided to spend his evening in the back room watching the tinkerer work and drinking stimmix, his feet kicked up on the table. At some point, Rika walked in with a plate of sandswimmer noodles. She stopped briefly when Armless greeted her with a nod and set down the plate, disappeared through the door, and after around four minutes brought a second, even more heaping serving, which she set down next to him before returning to her own food.

  “I didn’t say I was hungry,” he remarked as he took his feet off the table so he could inhale the meal.

  She huffed and bit down so she could swallow, then retorted with an uncompromising rumble of “You’ve been working for as long as Vezkig has. I don’t recall seeing you take breaks to eat. He did.”

  He let out a small chuckle and began eating as well. It went down as easily as the first time, and tasted just as powerfully savory as the first time. Vezkig continued to work, Red-eye sat and drank, and the Marksman… The Marksman had retreated to a corner, and appeared to be tinkering with his rifle.

  At some point, Nesgon’s eyes wandered to his old gun, half-dismantled as it was, and an idea popped into his ancient mind.

  “Do you think you could replace the plasma projector in my right arm with that brother-killer’s firing mechanism and connect it to the self-repair module’s core?”

  Being very literally elbow-deep in his chest cavity and deeply focused on manipulating the numerous tendrils he had connected to himself, Vezkig allowed his train of thought to run freely and contemplate the idea out loud without regard for situational context.

  “Hrmm… It’s still an ammo plume… Yer void energy’s strong enough… The infrastructure’s there… Don’t see why it wouldn’t work...”

  The soft click-clacking of the Marksman’s tinkering stopped abruptly, and the chair he was sitting on creaked as his posture shifted.

  “So you fucking lied to me?!” a seething, distinctly female voice lashed out from the Marksman’s direction. Heads turned. The lanky youngster leapt from the corner of the room to the table in an almost beastial manner, briefly transitioning to all fours in the windup.

  The Marksman looked down on Vezkig from no further than an arm’s length, crouched among bloodied tools, claws digging into the table.

  Vezkig’s head turned to face the wrapped-up visage, just then having realized what he said. “Please, calm down. You can kill me once I finish fixing him,” he almost begged. His words implied an apology for a lie told with good intention.

  The outburst prompted the others to ready themselves to pull the hothead off the engineer, but a held-out hand and a shake of the head from him said enough to make them back down.

  The Marksman’s clawed hand reached up and tore away the bandages which had up until now almost entirely covered up her face, only leaving slits for the mouth and eyes. The head-wrappings, the loose clothing, the body wrappings, it all concealed enough to wipe away any identity in a Builder-caste.

  Vezkig saw the face of one who had more markings than normal scales, once. Before she got burned by the very same weapon she now wielded. He saw a nearly albino-white, scar-covered face, gaunt in its shape and set with a pair of raging embers.

  He heard a demand, one he couldn’t in good conscience oblige. Even if it were to cost him his life.

  “You will fix me,” she seethed.

  “The change you want ain’t for me to make. Even if I do you’ll go mad,” he pleaded once more.

  The Marksman turned to glance at those standing behind her, ready to subdue her at any moment, then turned back to Vezkig and whispered a phrase, quiet enough that nobody could hear it. He’d make it out by her breath on his face.

  “Then I will burn.”

  She pulled away, stalking her way across the table and back to her seat. As she returned to tinkering with her weapon, the sound of claws tapping against livingmetal made Armless turn his head to the side, ever so slightly, just so that she was in his field of vision. He masked it by raising his bottle in a gesture towards Rika, which she wordlessly reciprocated.

  Even without the acute focus he would gain by directly looking at the Marksman, Armless could tell she was shuddering, holding her rifle like a scared child would hold a stuffed animal. Still, she exuded an anger that could only be spurred on by the betrayal of one’s trust.

  Vezkig uneasily returned to his work without so much as a word, and an oppressive, tense silence fell over them. Rika and Armless both tried to return to their food, but found their appetites dispelled, and so resorted to drinking alongside Red-eye.

  Armless wondered what could’ve caused this. What did the Marksman want that Vezkig wouldn’t do? Why did that specific exchange trigger such an outburst that she ripped away a disguise she’d been wearing for the past several weeks? Considering Vezkig’s skill set, the situation at hand, and the void-burned state of the Marksman’s face, the only possible result was some sort of elaborate and presumably dangerous body modification to compensate for or partially revert the damage done by void energy exposure.

  Stolen novel; please report.

  A minute passed. Two. Three. Five. Ten. Twenty. Vezkig turned away from his work to take a short break and drink some stimmix. The Marksman took the opportunity to confront him further, this time much less overtly aggressive. She still stared at him like her eyes could burn, and her voice still wavered with a barely-contained anger.

  “Don’t bullshit me. You’ve all the supplies and tools you could ever possibly need. I bet there’s one of those super special medical beds down there, too.”

  Vezkig calmly finished drinking and looked to the Marksman, his eyes empty. Calm. Apologetic. He took a deep breath and let out a long sigh, resolved to explain himself at least partially.

  “That doesn’t change things,” he began, “those beds are for relatively small-scale operations, like this one. I’m just replacing a lost organ, the connections are already there. What you want is so fundamental and complex that it would require a device capable of rebuilding your body from the ground up all at once, and I’m not aware of such a thing existing. Even if humans likely had it.”

  Armless gathered every scrap of focus he could, combing his mind for any possible memory related to such a machine. There were huge gaps as he’d erased the memories that directly connected him to his past life, but even the sections he vividly remembered seemed like they had chunks ripped out. Huge, empty swathes of black nothing in his databanks, shaped like memories he couldn’t even begin to recognize.

  His past self must’ve selectively erased things before committing to the full wipe. The voice of his machine-self chimed in his head after a discordant ping.

  “Cognitive pressure threshold exceeded. Memory-lock No. 438 disengaged.”

  He knew what the machine was. His past self had chosen to lock the memory away instead of erasing it, in case he ever encountered the machine by chance and had to deal with it again. It was a bioforge, a device that bordered on the arcane even by human standards, capable of performing full-body modifications if appropriately supplied and instructed.

  “The sphere,” he said.

  “What?” came a confused question from Vezkig. Or was it… Disbelief?

  “The sphere in the medbay. It can perform full-body modifications.”

  The Marksman’s eyes lit up, whereas Vezkig’s widened. “E-even if it’s as y’say, I don’t got the expertise t’ use that sorta blacktech…” the engineer excused as he quickly returned to operating on Nesgon, now effectively just repairing some minor damage and optimizing connections.

  Although she repeatedly looked up and inhaled as if she wanted to say something, the Marksman remained silent, for whatever reason. She did seem to have a strong respect for Nesgon, so it perhaps motivated her to avoid interrupting the operation further for fear of endangering his life.

  More time passed. The operation continued. They continued drinking. The Marksman continued fiddling with her rifle. At some point, Rika took both meat-noodle plates and had the bar staff reheat them, which Armless appreciated greatly, considering that he couldn’t really go out into the bar himself without getting swarmed. As he ate, he allowed himself to drift into the closest equivalent for sleep he had, his eye-lights flickering and dimming to nothing a few minutes after he finished the meal.

  The feeling of Nesgon’s hand tapping his shoulder awoke the human. He surveyed his surroundings as he drifted into consciousness, and found that everyone was still present, though most of them were asleep in their seats. Nesgon and Vezkig were stood before him, the latter on the table, covered in blood, and barely holding onto consciousness. Some of the blood was his, leaking from the abused and undoubtedly sore dataports on his torso. The Marksman had retreated even further into the corner and curled up with her rifle. Red-eye and Rika were both face down on the table, using their own forearms as pillows.

  “It’s done?” he queried. The answer was a nod from the old man. There was a faint lilac glow in his eyes now, to accompany the nearly shining light that occasionally escaped the gaping hole in his chestplate. The exhaustion which had been ever-present in his face was now gone, replaced by a wizened face that spoke of empires outlived, comrades lost, unforgivable sins committed, yet one that remained unbent, unbowed, and unbroken.

  “The council will be convening soon, we should go,” the old man suggested. He looked to his left and continued with “And you’re coming with us. You will get more rest in the Town Hall back rooms than next to her,” nodding towards the sleeping Marksman with the final words. The engineer gave a tired “Aye,” as he climbed atop one of the hoverslates, input the commands to make it follow its remote, and handed the remote off to Nesgon. As the old man took hold of the device, Armless noticed that there was a different muzzle poking out of his right hand than before, and sure enough, his old gun lay on the table even more dismantled than before.

  He didn’t bring it up, but Nesgon knew he noticed. The old man didn’t see fit to bring it up either.

  As quickly as they could, they opened the back door, slipped into the tunnel network, and made their way to the Town Hall. The sun had just risen, the view of a blood-red sky was genuinely stunning from the uppermost walkways, and so Armless committed the image to memory.

  Left. Right. Left. Right.

  They settled in the Town Hall, Nesgon to his right and Vezkig to his left, the chair large enough for the tinkerer to comfortably sleep without being seen. The council convened a few minutes after they arrived, and immediately Nesgon’s helmetless face became the center of attention in the form of constant, poorly concealed glances. They debated for some time, but the group consensus quickly became clear - Nesgon would be the new leader, the first proper Town Elder in the history of Canyontown.

  Unfortunately, before the decision could be announced in an official capacity, the Deserter Chaplain burst through the door behind the throne and walked up to Armless with a measured urgency.

  “What is it?” the human asked before the Deserter Chaplain could say anything.

  “Sir, it appears we’ve received a zero-latency transmission. It’s marked as a severe emergency.”

  “What’s the message?”

  “The message must be extracted directly from the receiver. It’s in the ruler’s office, on the top floor of the hall.”

  Armless nodded in affirmation, then spoke once more to gain the attention of the council.

  “My apologies, but it appears I’ve received urgent news which I must attend to,” he proclaimed. A few disappointed voices resounded from the crowd, but the majority of the council didn’t appear any more upset than one would be if the town mayor left a meeting to deal with a phone call. Nesgon followed suit, which didn’t elicit much more of a reaction. Vezkig’s sleeping form floating behind them on his hoverslate would’ve gotten a few laughs, were he high up enough to be seen by the council.

  Left. Right. Left. Right.

  Through the hall’s back corridors.

  Up several sets of stairs.

  Through a salvaged high-security door, separated by a six-layered holoshroud.

  The office was almost disgustingly opulent compared to the rest of Canyontown. Like the Ecclesiarch’s throne or armor, but an entire room, a large writing desk and chair included.

  Behind the chair, however, stood a matte-black obelisk covered in symbols that not even Armless recognized, but he felt it calling. It came alive just at his approach, and he felt a ping in his mind.

  “Administrator recognized. Zero-Latency Comms Array: Online. You have one (1) message.” the transmitter’s voice chimed in his head matter-of-factly.

  “Open message one.”

  It was a sound file, and the comms array projected it just loud enough to be audible throughout the office.

  The sound of wind whipping past a microphone. Labored breathing. The ragged, roar-like voice of an exhausted Warrior-caste.

  “Exile-town razed, everyone dead, Clan Igron did it! Used assault rovers, sacrificed speed- and machine-blessed! Warn the Old Dragon!”