(One Week Before the Attack)
The winds of Neo-Shanghai howled like a dying engine, carrying grit that scoured flesh from bone. Elion Voss pressed his back against the collapsed refinery tower, his magno-boots locking onto the rusted steel. Through his patched breather mask, the air tasted of ionized metal and decay—the signature stench of Mars' corpse-cities, where the Guild's waste became the slums' lifeline.
Below him, the quarantine district pulsed with fever-light. Makeshift clinics glowed through their plastic sheeting, each one packed with bodies writhing under Null Fever's kiss. And in the worst of them, his mother waited.
The Coolant Rods
Three stories down, two Guild enforcers flanked the shipment. Their exo-suits gleamed like obsidian beetles, visors reflecting the storm. The crate between them bore the Guild's crimson sigil—a stylized abacus dripping with liquid stars. Inside, twelve rods of Cerberus-III isotope, each capable of staving off Null Fever's necrosis for three more days.
"You won't make it back in time if you go for all twelve," Selene's voice echoed in his memory. "Take six. Live."
Elion's fingers found the plasma torch at his belt. The tool he'd rebuilt from a dozen corpses of its kind, its coils wrapped with scavenged Qi-conducting wire.
The Diversion
He hurled a scrap-metal canister into the refinery's corpse-chute. The explosion wasn't loud—just a dull whump that sent a tower of ancient dust billowing skyward. But it was enough. The enforcers turned, their suit-lights slicing through the orange haze as they charged toward the sound.
Elion dropped.
His boots hit the crate with a muffled clang. Six rods went into his insulated pack, their cores thrumming against his spine like captured lightning. The seventh—he hesitated. Then he left it.
A shadow moved to his right.
Elion rolled as the stun bolt seared the air where his head had been. The third enforcer—a rookie, by the unsteady grip on his rifle—fumbled for another shot. Elion's torch flared. A single, precise cut sent the Guildsman's oxygen line hissing into the storm.
No killing. Selene's rule.
The Return
The sickhouse was a gutted freighter module, its walls vibrating with the moans of the dying. Null Fever did its work in stages: first the black veins, then the forgetting, then the collapse. Most didn't survive to the third phase.
Selene Voss sat propped against a shattered viewport, her silhouette backlit by the bleeding sunset. Once, she'd been the finest engineer in the outer colonies—the woman who'd jury-rigged the Eos Dawn's core with nothing but scrap and spite. Now her hands trembled as she pressed a coolant rod to her throat, the isotope's glow painting her ruined face in ghost-light.
The veins had reached her jawline.
The Touch
"You're late," she croaked. The words cost her—Elion saw the tremor in her ruined lungs.
"Guild's got new patrol routes." He knelt, unpacking the rods with practiced efficiency. "They're prepping for Magnus's departure."
Selene's breath hitched. Her fingers closed around his wrist as he reached for her next dose. "They scanned you yet?"
Elion shook his head.
"Look at me." Her grip was iron, despite the sickness. "When they test your Qi at the docks, you hide it. You hear? Play the dullard. The Guild doesn't recruit janitors—they harvest them."
A cough wracked her body. When she pulled her hand away, the monitor beside her flickered—its readings dissolving into static where her fingers had brushed the screen.
The Gift
From the folds of her stained robe, she produced it: a sliver of metal no larger than a thumbprint, its surface etched with constellations that moved when stared at too long.
The Celestial Key.
Elion recoiled. "Where the hell did you—"
"Your father's last gift." She pressed it into his palm. The moment skin met metal, the Key burned, searing his flesh with golden light. Selene gasped—for a heartbeat, the veins under her skin dimmed. "It's reacting to you. Just like it did to him."
Outside, the storm wailed. The Key's light pulsed once, twice—then winked out, leaving Elion's hand throbbing with phantom constellations.
The Warning
Selene slumped back, her voice a whisper. "They'll come for it. The Guild. The pirates. The thing in the dark." Her fingers traced the air, drawing shapes only she could see. "When they do, you run. Not for me. For the Key."
A shadow passed over the clinic's flickering lights. Too large for the storm.
Elion didn't need to look up to know—a Guild surveillance drone, its lens focused squarely on his mother's trembling hands.