The swap hit like someone yanking a rug out from under a guy already limping, and I landed mid-stride on a catwalk of riveted iron, boots skidding on grated metal slick with condensation.
Cold air.
Smoke somewhere close.
My shoulder screamed its usual complaint, my knee reminded me it existed, and the palm under my glove throbbed in a rhythm I’d learned to tune out over the last however-many hours.
Odrance.
I knew the taste of this place by now, that particular flavor of machine oil and rust that Vhaldrèche never had.
A man in a mechanic’s harness grabbed my arm before I’d even finished orienting myself.
“You’re Torvek’s replacement?”
“Apparently,” I said, checking my bracelet out of habit.
Credits still there.
Location tag updated: Odrance, Outer Perimeter, District Nine.
“How long before the doors close?”
“Nine minutes, give or take whatever the broadcast decides to do with the clock.” He said it like a man who’d stopped being surprised by anything a long time ago.
“Commander’s up on the ridge. Three turrets left, two fronts, and everybody who isn’t dead is supposed to be inside by the time the gate teeth meet the ground.”
Nine minutes.
I’d worked with worse windows.
I followed him along the catwalk toward a cluster of sandbags and a turret crew arguing about elevation angles.
That was when I heard the second commotion: a woman’s voice climbing toward panic thirty meters off, and past her, near a squat brick building with a faded sign, a man in a field medic’s apron standing very still next to an artillery piece as though it might bite him.
That turned out to be exactly the problem.
“I can’t do this,” the medic was saying, both hands raised as if the cannon were a dog that hadn’t decided whether to like him.
“I’ve never touched one of these. I don’t know the tables, I don’t know the ranging marks, I don’t know any of it.”
The artillerist standing over him, a broad woman with soot on her forearms and a voice that could carry over a bombardment, looked ready to throttle somebody.
“You were just Dhor two seconds ago.”
“I wasn’t Dhor two seconds ago, I was elbow-deep in somebody’s leg wound in Kharvoss two seconds ago.” The medic’s name tag, stenciled crooked onto his coat, read Halvek.
He looked like a man doing math on how many ways this could go wrong and not liking any of the sums.
“I can set a splint blind. I cannot hit a target three hundred meters out with a piece of artillery I’ve never seen a schematic for.”
I walked over, because standing around watching a medic have a crisis wasn’t going to load anybody’s shells.
“Then don’t,” I said.
“Nobody’s asking you to guess. Guessing with a cannon gets people killed on our side, not theirs.”
Halvek turned to me with the kind of relief usually reserved for finding out a deadline got pushed.
“You’re in charge here?”
“I’m in charge of nothing. I’m the guy who just fell out of the sky into your war.” I glanced at the artillerist, whose expression suggested she was already recalculating the entire defense in her head.
“You’ve got wounded coming off that ridgeline eventually. He knows triage. I don’t. Let him do what he actually knows how to do, and put me on shells. I can lift, I can count, and I won’t touch the aiming mechanism unless somebody explicitly tells me to.”
The artillerist, whose patch read Sohl in block letters, looked between us for maybe two seconds before deciding this was the best deal she was going to get out of a randomized swap system. Read the latest chapters at novelping dot com.
“Fine.
You,” she pointed at Halvek, “there’s a dressing station forming up behind the second rampart, go make yourself useful before people start bleeding out from something you could’ve stopped.” Halvek didn’t need telling twice.
He was gone at a jog before she’d even finished the sentence, apron flapping.
She turned to me.
“You. Loading station, there.” She indicated a stack of shell crates lashed with rope, each one heavier than it had any right to be given how casually the previous crew had apparently been stacking them.
“I call the number, you feed the breech, you do not touch anything else. You do not guess my elevation. You do not adjust my sights because you saw someone do it once. Understood?”
“Understood.” I meant it.
I’d learned that lesson the expensive way more than once already, and I wasn’t in the market for a repeat performance where the tuition got paid in somebody’s blood.
We fell into a rhythm fast, because that’s what a nine-minute countdown does to a group of strangers.
Sohl called numbers, I hauled and fed, and somewhere down the line another crew was doing the same thing on the second turret, their shouts bouncing off brick and iron in a way that made the whole district sound like one continuous argument nobody was winning.
That’s when the runner came sprinting up the lane, breathless, pointing back toward the workshop with the faded sign.
“Family in there won’t leave. They say they’re not going without the cabinets.”
“Cabinets,” I repeated, mostly to make sure I’d heard that correctly and not misjudged the acoustics of a man having the worst day of his life.
“Filing cabinets. Records office, used to handle property insurance for half the district before the front moved in. They’re saying the whole neighborhood’s inheritance is in there. Deeds, payout claims, beneficiary paperwork. They won’t budge.”
I looked at Sohl.
She looked at the gate mechanism farther down the wall, already grinding its gears in preparation, then back at me with the flat expression of someone deciding whether this was worth the manpower.
“Go,” she said.
“Take two of the loaders. You’ve got maybe five minutes before that gate starts its final drop, and once it starts, it doesn’t stop for anybody, so don’t be a hero about it.”
I grabbed two of the shell crew, both of whom looked equally thrilled to trade artillery duty for furniture moving, and we jogged for the workshop.
Inside, an older man stood in front of three iron filing cabinets as if he were guarding a vault, his wife and what looked like a teenage son flanking him, all three of them refusing to look at the door the way people do when they’ve already decided arguing is easier than accepting reality.
“You need to leave,” I said, skipping past any pretense of diplomacy because the clock didn’t leave room for it.
“Now. Not in ten minutes.”
“These records outlive us,” the man said.
His voice didn’t waver, which told me he’d rehearsed this conviction long before I showed up.
“Every family in this district has their claims in these drawers. Land, workshops, insurance on their homes. If they burn, there’s nothing left to settle when this is over. No proof of who owned what, who’s owed what, who inherits what when the dust clears.”
I didn’t have time to argue philosophy with a man about the sanctity of paperwork while a gate the size of a building prepared to seal us all inside a war zone.
So I didn’t.
“Then we carry the cabinets,” I said.
“You get your family moving, we get the drawers. Nobody dies over ledgers today.”
The two loaders exchanged a look that said this was well outside their job description, but neither of them argued, because the alternative was standing there watching a family get crushed under falling iron over a filing system.
We each grabbed a cabinet, and god, they were heavier than they had any business being, packed edge to edge with paper that apparently represented every mortgage, every claim, every quiet family arrangement in the entire district.
My shoulder didn’t appreciate the additional weight, but it held, mostly out of spite.
“Attention, valued residents of District Nine!” Vassago’s voice, bright as ever, cut through the grinding of gears and the distant crump of something exploding on the other front.
“We at the network would like to extend our warmest congratulations to the Halveth family for their forward-thinking decision to secure their insurance beneficiary documentation before potential incineration! Nothing says responsible estate planning quite like doing it under a 90-second gate closure timer! Look at that family unity, folks, that’s the kind of content that tests through the roof with our 45–60 demographic!”
Nobody laughed.
The father didn’t even look up, too busy hustling his wife and son toward the inner gate, and I couldn’t blame him one bit.
There’s a version of that joke that lands, somewhere, on some other day, but not while you’re sprinting with a filing cabinet digging into your ribs and a countdown you can feel in your teeth.
We made it to the inner checkpoint with maybe 90 seconds left on whatever clock the gate mechanism was running on.
A mechanic there, sleeves rolled to the elbow, grease past his wrists, was frantically adjusting something at the base of the gate housing, muttering to himself in a way that suggested either genius or complete breakdown.
“You,” he said, pointing at me with a wrench like it was a summons.
“You’re strong, you’re standing there, help me with this.”
“With what, exactly?”
“The gate’s coming down whether we like it or not, that’s eleven meters of solid iron falling under its own weight, and right now all that energy just goes into the ground and does nothing for anybody.
But if I re-rig the drop gears here”—he gestured at a knot of chains and cogs that looked like it belonged in three different machines that had been forced into an unhappy marriage—”I can route that momentum through the flywheel line, straight into the kinetic accumulator feeding the Western redoubt.
Free power.
Every gate that drops from here to the end of this siege charges the batteries that keep the last defense running.”
“You need hands or you need an engineer?” I asked, because I wasn’t about to pretend I knew the first thing about flywheel ratios.
“I need somebody to hold this gear in alignment while I lock the secondary chain, and I need it done before that gate starts moving, because once it starts, this whole housing becomes a very efficient way to lose fingers.”
I set the cabinet down, ignored the warning ache radiating from my shoulder, and got my good hand on the gear he indicated, bracing it against the frame while he worked the chain into a new configuration with the kind of speed that only comes from a man who has already accepted he might not get a second attempt.
Somewhere behind me I heard the loaders setting down the other two cabinets, the family being ushered through by a soldier who looked like he’d rather be anywhere else, and the grinding of the outer gate beginning its final descent with a sound like the whole world clearing its throat.
“Now,” the mechanic said, and I held the gear exactly where it needed to be while he drove a locking pin through the housing with two solid strikes of a mallet.
The chain caught, the whole assembly shuddered, and somewhere beneath us I felt more than heard a low hum start up, steady and mechanical, entirely unlike the chaos of gunfire and screaming from the fronts on either side.
“That’s the accumulator taking the charge,” he said, wiping his forehead with a wrist that only smeared more grease across it.
“Every gate we drop from here on adds to it. Won’t win the war by itself, but it’ll keep the Western redoubt’s systems running longer than they would’ve otherwise.”
The outer gate finished its drop with a boom that I felt in the soles of my boots, iron teeth meeting the ground and sealing away whatever remained of the district behind it, the workshop, the sign, the empty street where a family had almost died over paperwork that mattered more to them than their own lives.
The last of the civilians filed through the inner checkpoint just as the mechanism locked, a straggling line of maybe a dozen people carrying what little they’d managed to grab, and then the neighborhood was gone, sealed off behind iron the way you’d close a book you weren’t planning to reopen.
Sohl found me a few minutes later, checking the shell crates that had been redistributed closer to the two remaining fronts.
“Three wheels,” she said, not bothering with any preamble.
“Three turrets, two fronts, and whatever’s left in these crates has to last us the next wave.”
“How long?”
She checked something on a wrist unit that looked older than most of the buildings still standing.
“Under two hours before they hit us again. Assuming the broadcast doesn’t decide to speed that up for ratings.”
I looked past her at the two fronts, the ridgeline where soldiers were repositioning what few defenses remained, the hum of the accumulator working somewhere beneath our feet, and the family from the workshop being led toward whatever passed for shelter this deep into the siege, their cabinets stacked beside them like the world’s least practical luggage.
“Then let’s not waste any of it,” I said, and went back to the shells.