Steel Fangs: Blood of the Machine
Season 2, Episode 25 — Markets of Blood
Night, cold enough to make bad ideas feel clean. Dock 13 wears a borrowed skyline and a smell like rusted coins.
⸻
They built the auction out of shipping containers and gall—six high, eight long, welded into a crooked cathedral with a crane for a steeple. Sodium lights threw jaundiced halos. A banner—THE MARKET—hung like a joke that knew it could afford lawyers. Men in suits and women in gowns drifted through metal aisles with numbered paddles and dead eyes. Everyone wore a wristband that blinked when the screens changed lots. Everyone looked upward a little too often, like guilt has gravity.
Zack watched from a roof of corrugated tin, knees bent, hoodie pulled up. The river behind the dock slapped pilings and pretended to mind its business. The invitation card was still folded in his pocket, the red wax smudged by steel fingerprints he couldn't quite wash off.
Luna lay next to him on her stomach, sighting down the haft of her axe like it was a rifle. "Whole place is a throat," she said. "One swallow, we're a snack."
"Then we choke it," he said.
Silas sat with his back against a vent, flicking his coin in silence—heads, tails, the bright blink catching in his eyes. "Doorways: four obvious, three hidden, two that aren't doors until you treat them like ones. Cameras: eight real, four fakes, one watching the others. Buyers: sixty-three. Shades: more. Priests: enough to make a choir. Surgeons: too many. Command node is under the crane. Marrow… not here yet, or he's being cute."
"He's always being cute," Luna muttered. "I'm going to ruin his mascara."
Zack scanned the container walls again, feeling the vow hum like a bassline. The HUD stayed quiet—his choice, not its—but he could still read edges. Hinges that weren't rated for panic. Power trunks run sloppy and hot. A grid of catwalks overhead, shadows trying to move like they belonged to something important. And down in the center, a stage. Glass cases on rolling plinths—coolers for hearts and lungs and livers, each with a price ticker. And cages behind them, not-for-display: "prep stock." People with oxygen cannulas and IVs, labeled with whiteboard scribbles. A girl about his age stared up at the crane hook and didn't blink. The Market didn't pretend to be anything but honest: everything has a price.
"Plan," Zack said, because he'd learned to say it out loud so his worst instincts had to argue with witnesses. "We split the board into three pieces and flip them at once."
Luna popped her gum and smiled. "Call 'em."
"Silas takes lights and lies," Zack said. "Cut their fake god's PA, make the exits look like salvation. Luna takes floor and fist—you're the wedge; you bust cages and ride the panic, keep it a river not a stampede. I take the stage. I pull stock, break the gavel, and if Marrow shows up I bite his hand."
"And the bell?" Silas asked. He didn't look worried; he never looked worried. He looked like someone who'd measured the room and found a way to cheat it.
Zack's jaw clicked. "No bell tonight."
The Market MC, a tall woman in a tux with a voice like silk over barbed wire, took the stage and tapped a stick on the microphone. Buyers hushed. Wristbands blinked in choreographed breath.
"Welcome, stakeholders," she purred. "Tonight's lots include three hearts, two pairs of lungs, seven livers, an aorta with excellent provenance, a pediatric kidney, and of course—rare inventory from recent rescue events." She let that hang, smiling when a murmur slid across the room. "As always, our ethics guarantee: no donors collected within city limits. We outsource our sins. Lot One in thirty seconds."
Silas sighed. "They invented a euphemism for kidnapping."
Luna's knuckles whitened around the axe. "Start the clock."
Zack nodded once. "On my mark."
They moved.
⸻
Luna dropped first, silent as rage, landing behind a stack of pallets with a cat's grace and a bar fight's intent. She counted under her breath—one, two, three—then went loud. The first Shade didn't even register the arc of her axe; one second he was a problem and the next he was particulate rage. She yanked the chain on the nearest cage—locked—and stepped aside. The axe fell. Lock split. Door groaned. "Move," she told the two inside. Her voice was rough and kind at the same time. "Follow my back, eyes down, hands on each other. That's it."
Zack took a different route. He didn't descend so much as fall into place. Hearthchain snapped out of him in clean lines—one to the stage rail, one to a catwalk, one to a light truss, one to the base of the crane—and he spidered down with a confidence he hadn't been born with. He hit the stage as Lot One rolled out and put his hand on the glass. The MC blinked at him like he was theater.
"Not yours," he told the cooler, and dragged it back across the stage.
The room inhaled sharply, a single polite gasp. Buyers frowned. Wristbands flashed red. Shades lifted weapons.
Silas bent the world twenty degrees to the left.
The stage lights died. So did the spotlights. So did the uplights that painted wealth onto guilt. What stayed lit—just for a second, just long enough—were the EXIT signs and the arrows painted on the floor for fire code compliance. They glowed brighter than they had any right to. The PA system crackled, then, in Silas's voice, said, "Evacuate calmly through nearest exit. This is a mandatory safety drill." People are stupid. People are smart. People do what voices tell them when the air smells like open wire insulation and the dark has teeth.
The Market MC made a slashing motion and her crew went for manual cutovers, but Silas had already rerouted the power to nowhere. He tapped a coin on the crane's control box and its logic forgot the word down.
That left noise. Panic's favorite friend.
"Luna?" Zack asked, not looking back.
"Already doing it," she said, and knocked a Priest off a rolling ladder with a kick that would've been illegal in most leagues. He tumbled into a buyer in a velvet dress; the dress ripped; the buyer screamed like a human for once; the nearest pair of men in tuxes tried to stop Luna the way you try to stop a train with opinion. She hurled one through a folding table. The other she just grabbed by the ear and walked into a pillar.
Zack's world narrowed to the stage and the coolers and the cages behind them. He didn't have time for poetry; he had people. Hearthchain split into a fan across the prep stock—clicks at four corners—and he yanked the cages right off their anchors. Wheels squealed. The cages slid into his reach. "Hold your breath," he told the first man tied into an IV, and ripped the tape off his arm with a gentleness he'd learned the hard way. Breath held; man up; door open; a push into the river of bodies shaping toward exits. Repeat. Repeat faster.
The Market responded in the only two ways it knew how: money and muscle. A buyer with cheekbones like a razor pulled a pistol that cost more than rent and fired. The bullet cracked glass where Lot Two waited. Zack threw a Shield Yank across the shot, dragging a rolling metal lectern into the bullet's way. It thunked and went quiet. The buyer blinked like his reality had been mis-filed.
"Guns down," Silas said, loud and bright, and half the room obeyed because the sentence arrived with the authority of now. The other half fired anyway. Luna crossed between rifles like an obscene ballet and convinced them they'd made scheduling errors with their fingers.
"Stop him," the MC snapped, dropping her silk voice, going full warehouse. Six Shades responded at once. They knew how to swarm. Zack knew how to be swarmed. He let them collapse a circle around him—one high, one low, two reaching for his arms, a fifth for his knees—and then he burst. Steel hit sinew in combinations he couldn't name, only felt. His left fist dented a cheek; his right elbow broke a collarbone; one steel shin snapped an ankle; his fangs punched into a wrist like a love letter from a wolf. He came out of it bloody, not his blood, dragging two coolers by their handle straps and one screaming man by his collar.
"Lot One closed," he told the MC, and grinned without humor. "Refunds available in hell."
She hissed—yes, hissed—and whistled. Up in the rafters, something uncoiled.
The choir dropped. Not Hollow Priests—those were obvious, robed and throat-sliced. These wore safety vests and safety smiles, hardhats askew, zipline harnesses squeaking as they slid. Each had a bell the size of a fist welded to their sternum, a clapper made of teeth. Each opened their mouth and let the bell talk for them.
The sound wasn't sound, but it still tried to shove Zack to his knees. A buyer fainted with elegance. A Shade laughed. Cages rattled like nightmares learning to clap.
"Silas," Zack said. His voice felt far away in his own skull.
"On it," Silas said, too calm, because being calm in the moment you break reality is part of the trick. He stepped onto a stack of pallets and said to the bells, "You're late for church." He snapped his coin. Once, twice, three times. The second ring missed. The third forgot to be a ring and became a hiccup. The fourth tried to ring and found paper in its throat. The choir stumbled as if someone had pulled the rug out from under their definition of mouth.
Luna took advantage and felled three like bowling pins with exactly zero sportsmanship.
A new voice cut through the chaos with the oil-slick calm of someone who'd practiced sounding reasonable at funerals.
"Pause," it said, and somehow the entire room hesitated a fraction, like brakes tapping.
Marrow stepped out from behind a curtain of heavy tarp, white suit crisp, hands bare. No bell in his palm this time. Just a clipboard. Of course.
"Welcome, Zack," he said, smile small. "Do you like our little flea market? We had to scale down after your boat trick."
"Shut it down," Zack said. He didn't shout. Shouting gives men like this permission to smirk.
"I could," Marrow said. He sounded like he meant it. He always sounded like he meant it. "But then where would all this need go? You can't save the city from itself. You can only invoice it."
Zack's vision tunneled for half a heartbeat. His mother's voice flickered around the edges of the world and made a fist in his spine. He didn't give it to Marrow. He gave it to the next lock on the next cage instead, ripping it free with a snarl and pushing the woman inside toward the tide.
"The city isn't your ledger," he said. "It's mine."
Marrow's smile slipped one tooth. "Then sign for this."
He lifted his free hand and made a tiny gesture. It wasn't magic. It was accounting.
Every wristband in the room blinked green. The screens lining the containers flipped from lot numbers to faces. Surveillance footage, phone screens, bank cams. A collage of rescues—Zack in the subway dragging four at once; Zack on the ferry; Zack braced against the wave at Battery; Zack in the senior home basement with a janitor over his shoulder. Numbers slid under each clip: value saved. A running total grew in the corner, obscene.
"See?" Marrow said pleasantly to the buyers. "He understands price. You all do. Nothing wrong with that. Tonight is a celebration of order. You feel bad because you want. He feels good because he wants to be needed. We translate between those wants. We're the adults."
Luna lunged. Marrow stepped aside like a matador, and her axe kissed tarp. He winked at her. "I adore you. Please never change."
The room's temperature changed. Not physically. Morally. People who had half thought of bolting with everyone else paused, floated back into indecision. If the man in the white suit could make it make sense, then maybe it wasn't so bad. Fewer steps between appetite and ritual is how civilization does its eating.
Zack didn't argue with Marrow. You don't argue with the weather. You re-route it.
He reached for a lever inside himself he hadn't trusted until tonight and yanked.
Oath Beacon.
It hurt—god, it hurt—like a hook popped through cartilage somewhere no doctor should touch. Light bled off him that wasn't light, more like an obviousness. Eyes that weren't looking at him suddenly were. Lanes that didn't exist bubbled up on the floor and people stepped into them because that's what people do when a voice in their animal brain tells them this way out.
"Beacon up," Silas breathed. Not approval. Relief.
Buyers flinched like fish seeing the boat. The ones who were cowards already ran—good. The ones who were devout paused and tried to turn toward the stage because the part of them that needed to believe in money needed a scapegoat. Zack threw Oathwave in a bow and turned their rage into movement past him instead. "Out," he said, and his voice wasn't a voice now; it was a direction painted on the air.
The choir tried to ring again. Silas clapped once, soft, and their bell-clappers fell off like baby teeth.
Luna cut two more cages and shoved bodies through the funnel he'd opened. She was sweating; her hair stuck to her jaw; her smile was feral. "Keep going," she snarled. "I'll bite anyone who falls down."
A Shade Captain in a hi-vis vest and a butcher's apron climbed the crane ladder with purpose and a radio. "Fallback Alpha," it barked into the mic. "Seal—"
A coil of chain whistled. Zack grabbed the free end and yanked. The Captain cartwheeled into a stack of crates and learned about faith.
Marrow watched Oath Beacon work for a full eight seconds, curiosity beating out annoyance. Then he shook his head. "Clever. Unsustainable."
"Same," Zack said, breathing like a train. "But it's enough."
He threw Hearthchain again, this time wider—ten micro-tethers, the skill pushing into a range that made his bones hum. Click on a lock, click on another, click on a cooler strap, click on a wristband, click click click click click on anything that would translate into a person moving now. It was messy. It worked. The aisles that had been a maze became a river mouth.
The MC finally broke. She dropped the stick, grabbed a bone flare from under the lectern, and popped it like a champagne cork of spite. White fire splashed and licked the tarp. The edge of the banner caught. The Market began to burn.
Good.
Sirens arrived not like cavalry but like muscle memory. Firefighters hit the perimeter and saw the lanes already there, the flow already flowing, and—god bless them—they just rode it. EMTs turned the dock lot into a triage grid like they'd always had blueprints. Cops did what cops do when they don't understand what they're seeing: some helped, some got in the way, none of it mattered because the city had decided: out.
The last cage gave Zack trouble. A boy—maybe eleven, eyes blown wide—crouched in the corner with a stuffed dog clutched to his ribs. The lock was jammed. Hearthchain clicked and slipped and refused. Zack put his hands on the bars and pulled.
"Back," he said.
The bars protested. He ignored them. Steel in his arms warmed and then went hot. His vision narrowed until he saw only lines and the space between them. The bars bent. The door shrieked. The boy flinched and then scuttled forward and put his small hand in Zack's and didn't let go even when he was safe. "Dog," the kid said, breathless, shoving the toy at him like proof of contract.
"Good dog," Zack said, because the universe needed one thing to be simple tonight.
Behind him, Marrow clapped. Slow. Mocking. "A triumph of logistics," he said. "Shall I send the city a thank-you note? Dear New York: your boy is a lighthouse; we find him useful. Love, Disaster."
Zack turned. It would've been smart to let Marrow leave. It would've been survivable. It would've kept his ledger happier. He didn't feel smart.
Marrow cocked his head. "Careful."
"You don't get to talk to me about careful," Zack said, and closed the distance between them like a statement.
Marrow met him mid-aisle with hands empty and contract air thick around him, every motion annotating itself. This blow lands. This bruise bills. Zack punched through the clause with a snarl. Their bodies hit. It was wrong and right and the kind of fight that writes on your bones. Marrow didn't hit like a monster; he hit like a surgeon—precise, small cuts that add up to an ending. Zack hit like a factory—loud, repetitive, inevitable.
Luna started toward them. Silas grabbed her wrist. "No. This one's a receipt."
"Fuck that," she growled.
"Trust me," he said, and didn't blink. "If he falls into a contract alone, he can crawl out of it alone. If we touch it, it owns us too."
She swore at him and stopped and watched with her teeth bared the way you watch the ocean take a breath and consider theft.
They traded. Blood. Skin. Paper. At some point Marrow smiled with real pleasure and Zack hated that more than any pain. Zack feinted low, stepped inside, and bit Marrow's collarbone again. The first mark had faded. He made another on top of it, sewing oath into blood with a thread his mother would've scolded and been proud of.
Marrow hissed and shoved him back, bleach-white and furious, a crack in the perfect. "Noted," he said. "Enjoy your lighthouse. It's a nice thing, being a point for ships to aim at. Pity about the rocks."
He took three steps backward into the tarp-curtain and was gone.
The choir crawled. The MC disappeared into flame. The Shades scattered. The buyers tripped over their shoes and dignity toward the exits Oath Beacon lit like an obvious map.
Silas snapped his coin down onto the crane's control box and the crane finally remembered down. The hook lowered as if embarrassed at the fuss. The last cooler on the stage slid off its plinth into an EMT's arms. Someone shouted "clear!" and a siren answered.
Zack stood in the middle of the stage and sucked air in until it hurt less. He let the Beacon gutter and die. It felt like blowing out a candle that had been chewing his ribs from the inside. He didn't fall. He wanted to.
Luna climbed the stairs and leaned her shoulder into his, pride and pressure both. "You did good," she said. It sounded like a verdict.
He nodded once, couldn't trust the voice that wanted to come out. He put his hand on the bent cage bar he'd pulled open and felt the heat from his own steel still clinging there. The dock looked like an autopsy with a better outcome than usual. Triage lines. People breathing. People weeping. People angry at the right targets for once.
Silas joined them, coin finally still. "You understand what you did," he said. He meant the Beacon. He meant the choice to burn himself to draw a map for strangers. He meant the way the room had believed.
Zack swallowed. "I turned myself into a street sign."
"You turned yourself into a promise," Silas said. "That's more dangerous."
The HUD slid a quiet notice across his vision like a waiter laying down a bill he hated to write.
BLOOD MARKET (Dock 13): Disrupted
Direct rescues: 41
Indirect: 120+
Collateral: 0
EXP: +2600
LEVEL: 80 → 82
New: Oath Beacon cost ↓ slightly; Hearthchain micro-tether capacity 10 → 12 (brief burst); Oathwave "mesh lanes" (split-flow)
City Acknowledgement: Myth threshold reached.
Self Lock: Unresolved. Pressure rising.
He closed his eyes. The word myth made his stomach roll. He wasn't a story; he was a person who bled and got hungry and missed a hand that would never hold his again. But the city had decided to put a mural somewhere brighter in its head, and you don't argue with a crowd's private saints. You steer them.
The boy with the stuffed dog popped up in front of him, cheeks dirty, mouth set like he'd learned from Luna by osmosis. He jabbed the toy at Zack's stomach again. "You forgot to say hi."
Zack blinked. "Hi."
"Hi," the kid said, satisfied, like the universe had just balanced. He pointed at the axe. "Is she your girlfriend?"
Luna inhaled a crumb of air and choked on it, eyes going wide. "I'll be— I'm— We're—"
"She's my favorite person who will kill me if I get sappy," Zack said, deadpan, and the kid looked at Luna with holy awe.
"Correct," Luna said, recovering, and ruffled the boy's hair. "Find an EMT with stickers. Tell them the axe queen sent you."
The kid sprinted off, dog underarm, joy like a small explosion behind him.
Sirens receded. Fire ate the edges of the banner, licking the word MARKET into smoke. The crane groaned and settled. An NYPD lieutenant walked up with his cap in his hands and a look like he'd swallowed contradictory orders. "I'm supposed to arrest you," he said. He didn't sound convinced.
Zack looked him in the eyes. "No, you're not. You're supposed to get those people rides and make sure nobody with a suit comes back to pick through what's left. You'll write it up as a gas leak and a rumor."
The lieutenant stood very still for a beat, soul choosing a team, then nodded. "Yeah," he said. "A rumor." He walked away with relief in his shoulders like he'd set down a heavy bag.
Silas watched him go. "You're getting good at this," he murmured. It wasn't a compliment. It was a warning.
"I hate that I am," Zack said.
"Good," Silas said. "Hold on to that."
A seagull—junkyard white, arrogant—landed on the bent stage rail, cocked its head, and screamed at nobody. It sounded like laughter. The river answered with a slosh that sounded like not tonight.
They left before the morning news trucks found angles. Back up the ladder, back down the alley, back into the city like drops back into a storm cloud. The night behind them smoked and hissed. The road ahead of them did what roads do: offered a line and a dare.
On the walk, Luna bumped his shoulder. "I know you heard it."
"What?" he asked.
"The city," she said. "It said your name."
He didn't lie. "Yeah."
They crossed under a viaduct with columns that looked like old bones. Zack touched one with his fingertips. It thrummed like something with a pulse and a mortgage. His phone buzzed like an insult. No number.
Two locks. the text said. City is open. Self is next. Let's pick something that won't hurt you too long. — M
He didn't answer. He deleted it. It didn't matter. The message was already in the air.
Back on the roof, the city swallowed them like it had missed them, like it had been waiting for them to make the next mistake correctly.
Zack stood at the ledge and looked at the hospital where he'd learned how much losing costs. He touched the spot over his heart where the vow sat like a hot coin. He tried to imagine what he could give up that would hurt right.
Luna lit a cigarette she didn't need and didn't smoke. She just held it, let the ember burn down to a bright dot and die. "Whatever you give," she said, not looking at him, "you give it to you. Not to him. Not to them. To you."
Silas leaned his shoulder against the vent and flipped his coin into the air. It didn't fall. It just hung there, rotating once, twice, the way some truths do. "Prestige," he said, soft enough the night had to lean in to hear it, "isn't the crown. It's the bruise you decide you can't live without."
Zack didn't say Prestige or die this time. Saying it had started to taste like tempting fate to show off.
He just nodded. Then he set his jaw and asked the only honest question left.
"Okay," he whispered to the city. "What do you need next?"
The city answered with a distant siren, a laugh off a balcony, a shop gate rattling open because dawn was rude and reliable. The answer wasn't words. It was direction.
He turned toward it and started moving.