The fall had manners at first. It took him by the collar and led him into dark like a host into a room he wasn't invited to. Then the floor forgot its job entirely.
Breuk dropped.
All around him: shards of somebody else's life—splintered rail, sheared bolts, a ribbon of wire peeling from its moorings, a spray of gravel chasing him as if speed were contagious. Water threaded the air in long, cold stitches, whispering its one word: down.
Above, the reactor's pall shrank to a coin, then to a pin, then to a rumor drowned by fog and steel. Below, something glowed faintly green—as if moss had learned a trick, as if mushrooms had remembered electricity. The chasm breathed in slow drafts; wind combed his hair the wrong way.
It doesn't stop, a voice inside him thought, quiet, italic, a thought too tired to panic.
His body had started the business of turning into contour. He rolled, a breathless barrel, shoulder over hip, knee and his metal left arm caroming off falling debris. The prosthesis complained in a language of servos: whirr—catch—overload. He tasted metal that wasn't blood.
The pocket over his heart woke up.
Not heat at first—weight. A deliberate, living weight, as if a second heart had chosen to beat once, and only once, to make its point. The fabric pressed inward, then outward; the world around him thickened. Air went slow, honeyed. Edges softened into a circle he felt rather than saw.
The chain's disc—a coin of translucent not-quite-glass—pulsed once against his sternum.
For a heartbeat, the chasm forgot how to be a chasm.
Velocity bled. The scream his ribs were arranging for later unclenched. His spine uncurled a fraction. The fall loosened its bite and became, very briefly, a descent—manageable, almost kind.
Then the moment ended. The second heart went still. Gravity remembered his name with sudden intimacy.
Steel flashed in the corner of his vision—struts jutting from a tilted wall of root and scrap, the slope of a place that had learned to be a hillside out of broken girders and stubborn dirt. Instinct outran pain. His right hand—flesh—went to his belt and found the hook-thrower, that piece of stubbornness Tara had rebuilt from six bad ideas and a prayer.
He yanked the lever.
The grapple spat, a cough with convictions. Cable hissed. The claw bit into a triangle of rust between two beams and held. The line went tight—ZACK—and the world tried to fold him in half. His shoulder asked to resign; the joint cracked, a dull crunch like old ice giving up.
Breuk's breath broke into coins. He hung, pendulum-still for a sliver of time, the cable singing, the chasm's wind raising gooseflesh down his neck.
Hold, he thought at the metal, at the beam, at the nothing.
His left arm—the prosthetic—jerked with the sudden load, trying to stabilize. Motors surged, then howled. A tremor ran the length of the alloy forearm, through carbon struts and cheap gears. Somewhere inside the elbow, a tooth sheared. He felt it as a buzz in the bones he no longer had there. Ozone kissed his tongue.
Below, the green light waited like a patient audience.
The hook shivered. He looked up.
The claw had set in rust, not steel. The first hard kiss had held; now rain and weight negotiated. A hairline crack widened with bureaucratic certainty. A drop of his blood fell—absurdly neat—onto the cable.
It snapped.
No bang. No drama. Just absence—the clean punctuation of failure.
The world took him again.
He slammed hip-first into the slanted wall. Metal rasped his side; earth bruised his ribs. His metal arm flung itself out to catch. It met a rib of iron at speed. The shock ran into the wrist assembly like a hammer into teeth.
Gears cracked. A bearing seized with a quiet, obscene tch. The servos screamed once and then went into that peaceful, final whine a dying machine makes when it agrees to be history. The hand—four fingers and a thumb Tara had carved into almost grace—twisted too far and stayed there, palm rotated backward at a useless, obscene angle. A cable snapped inside, a tendon that would never heal.
Sparks stitched along the knuckles. He smelled his own sleeve burn.
Then gravity turned him over and down resumed its sermon.
He bounced. Clay smeared his face. A frill of leaves slapped him blind. He heard the small, bright noises of glass beads breaking and realized they were pieces of his own arm's shock dampers. A rusted plate clipped his calf and drew a line of fire there, neat as a ruler. He tumbled into a shag of roots and slid, arms—one dead, one frantic—clawing for purchase in a world that had none.
Branches caught him. Not to save. To argue. They whipped his shins, ripped his jacket, traced shallow red scripts into his skin. Something big gave way beneath him—a bough that had pretended too long to be a beam—and he plunged the last distance into a nest the forest had been making out of stubbornness: roots braided with rebar, ferns nursing in old bolt holes, moss fat with water, all of it cupped into a bowl deeper than any human hand.
He landed in softness that had been paid for with every hardness he'd met on the way.
Silence.
He lay there, arranged by chance, breathing like a man trying to move air uphill. Green light wrote careful letters on his cheeks: fungi speaking in a wavelength he had no name for. The chasm above had contracted to a black coin, an eye through which the reactor's tired glow peered like a god that had missed a meeting.
His right hand shook. His left arm did not.
He rolled his face to look. The prosthetic hung from his shoulder at a wrong, drooping pitch, elbow kinked in a way elbows didn't. The wrist's actuator had spun to the stop and then kept going; the hand was a broken question mark. Little threads of smoke climbed from the seam at the forearm. Each thread argued for retirement.
He flexed his shoulder. Pain made the world narrow and bright and very honest. He tried to curl the metal fingers—habit, order, plea. The glove lights didn't blink; the motors didn't answer. Somewhere in the bicep housing, a capacitor let go with a tender pop. Warmth bled out of the casing like apology.
"Great," he rasped, the sound small and unpersuasive. "Real great."
He lifted his head and the sky in the hole pressed back—far, far up, the reactor-sun burned in its socket, no larger than a bright coin at the bottom of a well. Around him, roots had married pipes; cilia of white fungus feathered an old valve; a sapling had pushed a leaf through a seam in the steel and found it sufficient.
How deep… did I go…?
The necklace lay exactly where it had chosen to be: against his sternum, under the wet fabric, cold with authority. He could feel its smooth disc through cloth, a foreign planet under skin. He remembered the way the air had thickened, the single pulse that had turned fall into mere descent. He placed the back of his right hand over it, not to check but to reassure, and felt the calm of the thing that doesn't need to explain itself.
He tried to move. Pain shook him like an old friend, familiar, insistent.
"Come on," he told his body, and then less bravely, "Come…"
His core obeyed; his limbs negotiated. He propped himself on the right elbow, the flesh one, and immediately the left shoulder snarled back, hot and white. He had a scream bookmarked for this, but when he opened his mouth his breath was a saw without teeth. The sound that escaped was not a sound, more a debt acknowledged.
He collapsed back into the nest, panting like a man who had run too hard in a dream.
He looked at the dead arm again, at the way it had given itself on the slope to buy him another thirty seconds of not dying. "You did your job," he said to it, and it was ridiculous, and it was true. Tara would hate him for breaking it. Tara would fix it. If I get back, he bargained with himself, with the necklace, with the trees.
Above, something dripped. Not rain. The slow, uncurated water that collects in roots and chose this moment to let go. A cold drop struck his cheek and startled a wince into a laugh. He turned his face up and opened his mouth like a child.
The next drop hit his tongue.
It tasted like stone and leaf and old pipe and almost-light.
That's… water… The thought rose whole, reverent and stupid and absolutely true.
He closed his eyes. For one long second, all the contracts he had with the city—its clocks, its valves, its men with tally books and guns—expired. Only the contract with thirst remained. He renewed it with that single drop.
I'm alive, he told no one, and believed it enough to keep the heart doing its work.
The nest hummed. Not sound—feeling. A slow vibration in the wood, in the rust, in the dirt. The necklace answered, or his bones did, or the ground. He couldn't tell and decided not to try.
He rolled carefully to his back. The canopy—the impossible canopy—made a ceiling of leaves and scavenged metal. Bioluminescent fronds painted constellations on his boots. Something small and curious skittered in the damp and thought better of it. In the black coin of the sky, the reactor sun blinked once, a tired lid over a tired eye.
Breuk breathed and let the world be large again.
His metal arm lay crooked beside him, elegant and useless. The hand's backward angle would have been funny if it weren't his. He reached across with the right hand and pressed the release catch at the elbow, hoping reflex could do what power could not. The latch refused him with quiet dignity. He thumped the casing once—mechanic's sacrament—and a faint blue status diode flickered in an exhausted stutter, then died.
"Yeah," he said to the trees, to the pipes that had grown bark, to the necklace that had spared him a splatter. "Me too."
He let the breath go. The nest held. The chasm kept its secrets. Up above, a bowl lifted at noon or six and caught the city's gift; down here, a root leaked enough to keep one man honest. The chain at his chest cooled until it felt like nothing more than metal.
The camera—if there had been one—would have pulled back until Breuk was only a dark comma in a paragraph of green. The hum under the moss would have grown the way a heartbeat grows when you notice it. The chapter closed its eyes with him.