The pain wasn't hot like fire. It was cold. It felt like someone was pulling Julian's veins out through his fingertips, one by one.
He was kneeling in the center of the cage, his wrists shackled to heavy copper leads. The cables snaked back to Rigg's massive generator wall, which hummed with a greedy, rhythmic throb.
Thrum... thrum... thrum...
With every beat, the blue light in Julian's crystal hand dimmed, sucked away into the machine. And with it went his warmth, his strength, and his will.
"Beautiful," Rigg murmured. The Scavenger King was sitting in a reclined dentist's chair wired into the same system. His hydraulic arm twitched in ecstasy. "Pure, filtered resonance. It tastes like... champagne."
Rigg's mechanical eye whirred, focusing on Julian.
"Most scavengers run on dirty coal or unstable chemical batteries," Rigg boasted, his voice vibrating through the floor grating. "But me? I'm running on you. My hydraulics are faster. My sensors are sharper. I can feel the rust on a bolt three miles away."
Julian gritted his teeth, sweat dripping from his nose. "I... hope... you... choke."
"Save your breath," Rigg chuckled, adjusting a dial. The drain increased. Julian gasped, his back arching involuntarily. "You're not a person anymore, sparky. You're a Duracell with an attitude."
The Hold
Thirty feet below, Lyra landed in darkness.
She hit a pile of something soft and dry. It crunched under her weight. She froze, waiting for the pain of a broken bone, but she was intact. The adrenaline of the fall was fading, replaced by the cold damp of the ship's belly.
She reached for her belt. Her flare pouch was gone—lost in the scuffle. She felt for her knife. Still there.
"Okay," she whispered to the dark. "Don't panic. Evaluate."
She reached out to feel what she had landed on. It felt like sticks. Brittle, hollow sticks. She traced a shape. A ribcage. A skull.
Lyra recoiled, scrambling backward until her back hit a cold metal wall. She wasn't sitting on trash. She was sitting on a pile of skeletons.
"Previous batteries," she realized, a shiver running down her spine. This was where Rigg threw the people he had drained dry.
She looked up. The trapdoor was sealed shut. A faint sliver of light bled through the cracks, miles above. No way to climb. The walls were smooth steel.
Think, Lyra. Rigg is a cyborg. Cyborgs need maintenance.
She scanned the dark, her eyes adjusting. This was a battleship. Battleships had service crawlspaces for the engine crew.
She crawled over the bones, whispering apologies to the dead. She felt along the wall. Rivets. Seams. Rust.
There.
A draft. A tiny stream of air smelling of oil and ozone.
It was coming from a loose panel near the floor. Lyra jammed her knife into the seam and pried. The rusted bolts shrieked in protest.
Snap.
The panel popped off. Behind it was a narrow, greasy chute barely wide enough for a human shoulders. It led upward, wrapped around thick bundles of hydraulic cables.
"Into the veins," Lyra muttered. She sheathed her knife and squeezed into the claustrophobic tube.
The Cage
Julian's vision was tunneling. He was seeing spots of black in his peripheral vision.
I'm dying, he thought. This is how it ends. Drained dry in a junk pile.
No, the voice of the crystal whispered. Not empty. Connected.
Julian lifted his head. He looked at the copper cables shackled to his wrists. He looked at the generator. He looked at Rigg.
Rigg had said he was wired to every plate. He said he could feel the ship.
If the machine was drinking from Julian... that meant there was a bridge. A two-way street.
Serafina said: Don't scream at the metal. Whisper to it.
Julian stopped fighting the drain. He stopped trying to hold his energy in. instead, he pushed.
He didn't push power. He pushed awareness.
He let his mind ride the current out of his body, down the copper wires, into the generator.
It was chaotic inside. A storm of electricity and gears. But Julian navigated it. He felt the spinning turbines. He felt the rectifiers converting his soul into voltage. And then, he felt the output lines.
One line went to the lights.
One line went to the door locks.
And the biggest line went to Rigg.
Julian felt Rigg's mechanical heart. He felt the hydraulic fluid pumping through the giant's artificial arm. It was a rhythmic, arrogant pressure.
Thump-hiss. Thump-hiss.
I know that rhythm, Julian thought. And I hate it.
He focused on the fluid inside Rigg's arm. He visualized the liquid not as oil, but as sand. He visualized the gears not as smooth circles, but as squares.
He introduced a Dissonance. A subtle, corrupted frequency.
The Control Deck
Rigg frowned.
The champagne taste of the energy had turned... sour. It tasted like grit.
"What are you doing?" Rigg sat up.
His hydraulic arm jerked.
Clank.
"What the—" Rigg tried to flex his claw, but instead of opening, it locked shut.
The hum of the generator changed pitch. It went from a steady drone to a stuttering, grinding whine.
Whirr-GRIND-whirr-GRIND.
In the cage, Julian lifted his head. His eyes were glowing with a terrifying intensity. He wasn't the victim anymore. He was the virus.
"You wanted my frequency, Rigg," Julian rasped, his voice buzzing with static. "You can keep it."
He slammed his crystal hands together.
BOOM.
He sent a pulse of pure chaotic feedback down the line.
The generator sparked violently, blowing a fuse box on the wall.
Rigg screamed. Not in anger, but in agony. The feedback loop hit his nervous system. His mechanical leg kicked out uncontrollably, smashing the console. His excavator arm seized up, the hydraulics over-pressurizing.
POP-HISSS!
A hydraulic line in Rigg's shoulder burst, spraying boiling hot oil across the room.
At the same moment, the floor beneath the generator grated open.
Lyra burst out of the maintenance hatch like a demon covered in grease. She didn't hesitate. She saw the chaos. She saw the cage lock flickering.
She grabbed a heavy pipe wrench from a workbench and threw it at the control panel of the cage.
SMASH.
The delicate electronics sparked and died. The magnetic lock on the cage disengaged.
Julian kicked the door open. He stumbled out, ripping the copper shackles from his wrists. He was weak, trembling, but the connection was broken.
Rigg was thrashing on the floor, tangled in his own wires, his body fighting itself.
"You... little... rats!" Rigg roared, trying to stand, but his piston leg refused to bend.
"Come on!" Lyra grabbed Julian's arm. "Before he reboots!"
They didn't look back. They sprinted out of the battleship's belly, down the ramp, and into the purple twilight of the scrapyard.
Behind them, the lights of the Goliath flickered and died, plunging the Scavenger King into darkness.
"Did you kill him?" Lyra asked as they scrambled over a pile of rusted fuselages.
"No," Julian panted, clutching his chest. "I just gave him a seizure. He'll fix himself. We need to move."
"Where?"
"The train," Julian pointed to the horizon. "We need to get back to the rails. But we can't use the skiff. He'll hear the engine."
"Then we walk," Lyra said, looking at the endless expanse of junk. "And we pray the acid rain holds off until we find a roof."
Julian looked at his hand. It was dim again, but it felt different. Lighter. He had touched a mind—a mechanical mind—and overwhelmed it.
He was learning. And that terrified him almost as much as the monsters in the dark.