The market smoke and the cleaver and Mavra’s borrowed rigidity in her legs vanished all at once, and in their place came noise.
A grinding, tortured shriek of metal fighting itself, so loud it filled my skull before my eyes had even settled on where I’d landed.
My palm throbbed under its staple job, a dull counterpoint to whatever fresh nightmare I’d been dropped into this time.
I was standing on a raised iron platform inside some kind of gear house, all soot-black beams and chain housings the size of tree trunks.
Directly in front of me sat a winch wheel taller than I was, spokes as thick as my leg, spinning backward with a violence that suggested it had very recently been under control and had just kicked free to tear through its housing.
A heavy steel crowbar hung clipped to the platform railing beside me, rattling against the metal rungs from the vibration of the machinery.
My wristband buzzed against my forearm, already scrolling text I didn’t have time to fully read.
Exchange confirmed.
Rulven — Odrance to Vhaldrèche.
Cable integrity: failing.
Estimated shear: 30 seconds.
Thirty seconds.
I’d been in this exact position, more or less, for about four hours of subjective time across two cities, and I was starting to develop a professional opinion about broadcast producers who thought thirty seconds was a generous handover window.
“Brake it! Brake the wheel, don’t touch the lever, the red one, don’t you dare touch the red one!”
The voice belonged to a man about my age, wedged against a support strut with a length of chain wrapped twice around his forearm like a makeshift anchor, his boots skidding an inch at a time across grated steel.
Soot streaked one side of his face.
He looked like he’d been fighting this wheel since long before I’d shown up to replace whoever had been standing here a second ago, and from the state of his voice, he wasn’t enjoying the experience.
“Which one’s red?” I shouted back, because that seemed like a reasonable question given that I could see at least three levers within arm’s reach, and exactly none of them were labeled in a language I recognized.
“The one that looks like it wants you to pull it! Just brake the damn wheel, it’s going to snap the main cable and drop the whole load basket into sector six!”
That was, admittedly, more information than I usually got.
I filed away the man’s face for later—Zekh, according to the small embossed tag riveted to his harness, because apparently even mid-collapse this production cared about crediting its talent—and looked around for something that wasn’t a lever with an unclear disposition.
The crowbar rattling on the railing was right within reach, left there by whoever had held this post before the swap ripped them away.
I unhitched it, jammed the flat end between two spinning spokes, and threw my whole weight against it.
The wheel didn’t so much stop as it argued with me about stopping.
I felt the crowbar bite, felt my shoulder—the one already unhappy from an earlier disagreement with a doorframe I didn’t have time to think about right now—scream in protest as the spin fought to rip the bar loose.
I planted a boot against the railing for leverage and leaned harder, my full body weight now doing the job my one bad shoulder couldn’t manage alone.
I thought, briefly, about just letting the passenger take the wheel instead.
Programming would have solved this cleanly, cold and mechanical, no guesswork required.
But I didn’t know this machine, didn’t know what she’d need to know about it to do the job right, and handing off control to someone executing tactical objectives on an unfamiliar rig felt like exactly the kind of decision that got people’s arms taken off.
Better to fumble through it myself and stay conscious enough to notice when things went wrong.
“That’s it, hold it, hold it—” Zekh’s chain went taut as he threw his own weight the opposite direction, and between the two of us the wheel’s furious backward spin slowed to a groan, then a shudder, then something almost resembling stillness.
The relief lasted about as long as it took me to notice the sound hadn’t stopped.
It had just moved.
A deep structural groan rolled through the gear house floor, up through my boots, the kind of sound a building makes right before it tells you it’s had enough.
I looked past Zekh toward a wide viewing slit cut into the far wall, and through it I could see stonework—an outer rampart, already scarred with cracks wide enough to lose a hand in—bowing outward under a load it hadn’t been built to carry.
“We stopped the cable,” Zekh said, following my line of sight with an expression that suggested he already knew what I was thinking, “but the tension had to go somewhere. It just went into the wall instead of the wire.”
“Great,” I said.
“So we saved the winch by murdering the fortification.”
“Welcome to Odrance.” He said it flat, like a man reciting a line he’d already said too many times to find funny anymore.
“You’re new. I can tell because you’re not already crying.”
A tactical board bolted to the wall beside the levers flickered to life, throwing a grid of amber icons across its surface—a map of the whole complex, nine sectors ringed around a central keep, hundreds of small markers scattered across it like a spilled box of pins.
Three of the markers glowed steady gold: redoubts, according to the scrolling legend along the bottom edge, the points that needed to hold through whatever final wave the clock in the corner was counting down toward.
Everything else blinked in a slower, more anxious rhythm.
I did some quick, unpleasant math.
Hundreds of contestants, spread across nine sectors, all of them apparently expected to keep this entire structure standing until some invisible finish line.
I’d assumed Odrance was one building.
It was a city wearing a building’s clothes, and I was standing in one gear housing out of what looked like dozens.
A soft chime sounded above the winch wheel, and a translucent panel bloomed into the air right where I’d have to look at it whether I wanted to or not.
A cheerful animated limb—prosthetic, gleaming, articulated at every joint a real arm would envy—rotated slowly against a corporate blue background.
“Lost a hand today?” the panel read, Vassago’s voice piping in underneath the text with the particular warmth of someone who has never once lost a hand.
“Fenrik & Cole Orthopedics has you covered, guaranteed grip strength within six weeks or your next amputation is free! And speaking of losses—our viewers are voting live right now on which of our two lovely mechanics loses a limb first! Current odds favor the new guy, folks, so get those bets in before the wall decides for you!”
“They’re betting on us,” I said, mostly to make sure I’d heard it right.
“They’re always betting on us,” Zekh said, already moving past the panel toward a pressure gauge mounted lower on the housing, its needle climbing steadily into a red band that looked recently painted, as if the machine’s designers had assumed nobody would ever need to look at it.
“Second problem. That cable tension had to bleed off through the hydraulic chamber below us, and now the chamber’s holding more pressure than it was built for. If it blows on its own, it takes this whole platform with it, and probably the sector under us too.”
“How long?”
“Faster than the last thing you fixed, I’d guess, since you’re already looking worried.”
I found the secondary valve without much trouble—it was the only fitting on the whole housing with a hazard placard bolted next to it, hand-lettered rather than printed, which told me someone had learned the hard way that this particular valve mattered.
A release handle sat above a narrow pipe that ran, as far as I could trace it through the gaps in the flooring, directly toward the outer wall I’d just watched crack under load.
“If I dump this,” I said, my fingers already locked around the iron release pin while the needle nudged deeper past the red line, “where does the blowoff go?”
Zekh checked the pipe route himself, tracing it with two fingers like he was reading a map he already half-knew the answer to.
“Straight into the rampart’s support column. The same one that’s already cracking.”
“So I either let the chamber detonate under our feet, or I open the wall up and let whatever’s outside walk in through the hole.”
“That’s the general shape of it, yeah.”
Neither option had a version where I got to keep both feet, my dignity, and a fortification that didn’t have a hole in it.
I looked at the gauge needle, then at the tactical board, then back at the needle, and did the only math that mattered—a wall breach was a problem I could survive fighting.
A chamber explosion under a platform I was currently standing on was something else entirely.
“Get clear,” I said, and pulled the handle before Zekh had fully finished backing away.
The valve screamed open with a jet of superheated vapor that fogged the whole housing white for a second, and somewhere below and outside, stone met pressure it had no intention of surviving.
The groan I’d heard earlier became a crack, sharp and final, followed by a concussive roar as tons of fractured masonry blew outward and dropped into the ravine, gutting the foundation beneath our feet.
Through the viewing slit, dust rolled outward in a gray curtain, and past it, in the gap where solid stone had been standing a moment ago, I caught the first shapes moving—low, fast, too many joints in places joints shouldn’t be.
The alarm bells that had been quiet since I’d arrived started up all at once, layered over each other from what sounded like every sector in the complex.
“Well,” Zekh said, wiping soot off his face with the back of a hand that only smeared it worse, “you saved the winch.”
“I’m aware of what I did.”
“Just checking. Sometimes it helps to say it out loud so the guilt has somewhere to go.”
My wristband buzzed again, and I glanced down at it more out of habit than any expectation of good news.
The handover log had updated, clean and indifferent to the smoke pouring through the new hole in the wall behind me.
Rulven — status: active, Vhaldrèche, paired: Mavra.
Infiltration objective: inherited.
Rulven had my coat, my contact, and my mission, and from where I was standing, he’d gotten the better end of the trade by a wide margin.
I looked past Zekh toward the breach, toward the dust still settling and the shapes already crossing the threshold I’d personally opened for them, and understood, with the particular clarity that comes from watching a bad decision finish arriving, that I’d just traded a mechanical failure for a military one.
“So,” Zekh said, hefting a length of pipe off the platform floor like it was the most natural weapon in the world, “you want the good news or the bad news first?”
“There’s good news?”
“No. But I figured I’d ask anyway. Feels rude not to.”