Will stopped at the edge of the treeline, staring at broken branches that ended, half a kilometer out, at a rockfall.
The Robot had come this way three days ago, and then the trail just stopped not turned, not hidden, stopped.
“Thermal scarring,” Maureen said, kneeling beside a stone that bore a black handprint.
“Recent. Within forty-eight hours.”
Ivo stood back and let the Assay read the stone.
Basalt.
Seventy-nine percent.
Indigestible.
The ache in his molars stayed quiet.
But the air tasted wrong metal and ozone, like the moment before a storm, and his fingertips itched.
“There,” Will said, pointing up.
The rockfall wasn’t a rockfall.
It was a hull.
The alien craft had come down nose-first and buried itself twenty meters into the hillside, shedding plating and structure across a hundred-meter scatter field.
What remained was a ribcage curved spars of blackened alloy rising out of the dirt like the bones of something that had tried to claw its way back out.
Ivo’s vision went white.
PRIORITY MATERIAL DETECTED: Living alloy composite, 94% purity, 47kg accessible mass.
DIGESTIBLE.
WARNING: toxicity index 4.7 (lethal at current HEAT).
The numbers burned across his sight in rust-orange, then cooler blue, then hot white again as the Assay recalculated.
Forty-seven kilograms.
Enough to vault him past Heat III if he survived the eating.
Enough to build anything, hold anything, become
His molars screamed.
Ivo bit down and tasted iron that wasn’t there yet.
“Ivo?”
Maureen’s voice.
Ivo blinked the Assay down and found her watching him.
“I’m fine.”
“You’re staring.”
“Habit.” He nodded toward the hull.
“I read metal.”
She studied him a beat longer, then turned back to the wreck.
“Will, stay close. Smith, don’t touch anything until I’ve cleared it.”
Smith smiled from the edge of the scatter field.
“I’m only here to help.”
They picked their way through the debris.
Shattered plating.
Conduit that had melted and rehardened into glass.
A piece of framework that might have been a seat or might have been a rib Ivo couldn’t tell, and the Assay offered no opinion because it was too busy screaming about the hull.
Forty-seven kilograms.
The hull itself was still half-buried, canted at forty degrees, its surface rippled like poured metal that had frozen mid-flow.
Up close the blackening was burn scoring, and underneath it the alloy still held a faint iridescence oil-slick colors that shifted when Ivo moved.
Maureen ran a gloved hand over it.
“It’s warm.”
“It’s dying,” Will said quietly.
Will was standing very still, one hand almost but not quite touching the hull, his face doing something complicated.
“The Robot came from here,” Will said.
“This was… theirs. The ones who made it.”
Maureen pulled a scanner from her pack and swept it across the plating.
The readout stayed flat.
“No radiation. No electrical signature. Metallurgically it shouldn’t exist this composition can’t hold structural integrity at these temperatures, but it does.”
Because it’s alive, Ivo thought, and did not say.
The ache in his molars sharpened to a spike.
His fingers curled.
Four point seven toxicity index.
Lethal at Heat II.
The Line had told him, and the Line never lied about what would kill him arithmetic he carried now the way he carried his own name.
Forty-seven kilograms.
Enough.
Ivo’s hand moved before he caught it halfway to the hull, fingers spread, the hunger pulling like a tide.
He stopped.
Stepped back.
Shoved both hands in his pockets and felt the gloves bunch.
Maureen didn’t notice.
She was tracing a seam in the plating, murmuring notes into her recorder.
Smith had drifted toward the scatter field’s edge, eyeing a tangle of wire that might have been valuable if it hadn’t melted.
Will stood beside the hull with his hand flat against it now, his mouth a thin line.
“They didn’t make it,” Will said.
Nobody answered him.
Ivo watched Maureen work while the hunger sank lower in him, patient and vast, a current that didn’t care if he said no now because the alloy wasn’t going anywhere and neither was he.
The Line surfaced a second observation, cool and factual as a range table.
NOTE: This material is the path to operational self-sufficiency.
Scrap iron makes you functional.
This makes you whole.
Ivo went very still.
The system had never done that before.
Offered commentary.
Framed a choice.
The hunger wasn’t just his anymore.
He pulled his hands out of his pockets.
Turned away from the hull.
Walked ten meters into the scatter field and crouched beside a chunk of plating the size of his palm small, sealed along every edge by the reentry burn, no larger than a ration tin.
The Assay read it.
Living alloy composite, 94% purity, 140g.
DIGESTIBLE.
WARNING: toxicity index 4.7 (lethal at current HEAT).
One hundred forty grams.
Not enough to vault a tier.
Enough to taste.
Ivo picked it up.
The fragment was still warm.
He turned it in his palm, watching the colors shift, and felt the ache in his teeth go quiet not sated, just… waiting.
Later, the hunger whispered.
When you’re strong enough.
When it won’t kill you.
When you’re ready to be more than the boy who scavenges scraps to survive.
Ivo slipped the fragment into his jacket pocket.
Stood.
Walked back.
Maureen had pried a panel loose and was photographing the underlying structure lattices that looked grown, not machined.
She glanced up as Ivo approached.
“Find something?”
“Plating. Inert.” The lie came out smooth because it was mostly true.
She nodded and went back to her work.
Will was still standing beside the hull, his hand against the alloy, and his face was the kind of still that came just before crying.
“They were trying to get home,” Will said.
Ivo looked at the buried nose, the clawed-out dirt, the ribs rising toward a sky they’d never see again.
“Yeah,” he said.
Smith returned from the scatter field carrying a coil of wire and an intact module she’d probably already decided was worth something.
“Are we cataloging tragedy, or are we salvaging? The clock’s still running.”
Maureen powered off her scanner.
“We’re done here. Mark the location I want a second pass when we have better equipment.”
She led them out of the scatter field.
Will followed last, walking backwards for the first three steps, watching the wreck until the trees swallowed it.
Ivo touched the fragment in his pocket once warm, even through the fabric.
Forty-seven kilograms, waiting in the grave.
One hundred forty grams, waiting in his coat.
The Line didn’t speak again.
It only went quiet not satisfied, not sated, just patient, and patience from a thing that hungry should have been impossible.
The system wasn’t describing his power anymore.
It was arguing for its own appetite.
Ivo followed the others back toward the Jupiter, carrying the sealed sliver of the enemy’s substance out of the makers’ grave, and felt the hunger hum a lullaby that sounded like later, like soon, like when you’re ready I’ll still be here.
The most frightening thing it had done yet was learn to wait.
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