Desmond had burned through three torch heads and still hadn’t opened a seam.
He pressed his palm flat against the plating where the neck had been, reading the join.
Cold, even through the glove.
The metal underneath — if it was metal — held an edge that had taken three torch heads already, and the crew had another hour before the NYPD cordon swept close enough to ask what they were doing on condemned salvage in the dark.
He counted without looking like he was counting.
Marce on the cutting rig, hunched over the acetylene hiss.
Jiro and Kev hauling cable, moving like men who knew what tired felt like and had another shift left in them anyway.
All present.
Nobody eating, but that was the week, not the day.
“Boss,” Marce said, not looking up from the seam he was nursing.
“Floodlights went by twice in ten minutes.
That’s not a patrol, that’s a search grid tightening.”
“Noted.”
“Noted.
Right.” Marce killed the torch and straightened, one hand pressed to the small of his back.
“You want me to say it, or you want to just do the quiet thing where we all pretend we’re not thinking it?”
Desmond glanced north.
The cordon’s floods painted the low clouds sodium-orange, close enough now to throw shadows across the waterline.
Close enough that he could see which buildings still had glass.
“We’re an hour out,” he said.
“An hour exposed on a carcass everybody and their mum wants a piece of.
There’s a boat at the far pier just sitting there, watching us work.” Marce jerked his chin toward the dark water.
A low hull, no running lights, engine idling.
Desmond had clocked it twenty minutes ago and left it there — a problem for later, if later came.
“They’re welcome to watch.”
“Yeah?
And when we crack this and pull something worth having, they’re welcome to that too?”
Desmond looked at the seam Marce had been cutting.
Three hours of work for four inches of progress, and the plating underneath still carried no edge, no warp, nothing that said it wanted to come apart.
He ran the geometry in his head: where the load would have sat when the thing was flying, where the weight would have crushed inward when it came down.
A flying fortress the size of a city block didn’t just float.
It had a spine, and the spine had a core, and the core was exactly the kind of prize that kept a crew off the street for a month.
Or it was a waste of an evening and a ruined pier.
He touched the plating again, fingertips this time, feeling for the lie.
Everything was either holding weight or about to stop.
This one was holding.
It had been holding for nine days, which meant whatever was underneath had survived the fall, the fire, and the harbour.
That was the part that made it worth the hour.
“It’ll hold,” he said.
“Give me the precision head and go wide on the brace.
I’ll take it from the load-path, not the seam.”
Marce stared at him.
“You’re going to cut toward the core.
While it’s live.”
“It’s not live.
It’s been dead since it hit the water.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I know it hasn’t moved, melted, or exploded in nine days.
That’s the same as dead for anything that used to fly.”
Marce looked at the seam, then the boat, then Desmond.
He pulled off one glove and dragged a hand down his face.
“Right,” he said.
“Right.
Precision cut toward the expensive bit while the police close in and some bastard with a boat times us for the grab.
Lovely.
Career progression, nobody talks about it.”
Desmond almost smiled.
“Pass me the head.”
The cut took forty minutes.
He worked the torch the way his demo instructor had taught him a lifetime ago: let the metal tell you where it wants to go, then go there slow.
The Leviathan’s plating didn’t want to go anywhere.
It sat under the flame like something that had forgotten how to burn, throwing sparks that smelled wrong — burnt copper and low tide and something faintly sweet underneath, like marrow-fat gone cold.
Jiro watched the cordon.
Kev watched the boat.
Marce watched Desmond, and Desmond watched the cut, and the whole city watched nothing because nobody looked at the piers anymore.
There were bodies in the rubble and wreckage in the streets and gods on the television, and a few men with torches and a dead alien were four blocks too far south to matter.
The plating peeled back like a lid.
Underneath, the core sat in a nest of fused bone and cabling, ridged like coral, still faintly warm to the glove.
Not metal.
Not entirely.
Desmond touched it and felt it hum — a low note, dry, felt in the teeth more than heard.
“That’s not a battery,” Marce said, very quietly.
It wasn’t.
It was a seed.
The size of his palm, slightly oblong, ridged in a spiral that looked deliberate and felt old.
The hum came from it, and the warmth, and when he closed his hand around it the hum stopped.
The cold started instead.
It latched.
Not to his hand — through it.
Through the glove, through the skin, straight to the bone underneath, and then it pulled.
Not outward.
Inward.
He felt it move up his forearm, a cold that was not pain and not nothing, a thing that knew where it was going and did not ask.
His chest.
The sternum.
It fused there, under the skin, a ridge of something that was not his pressed flat against the bone.
He staggered.
Caught himself on the plating, one knee down, the other screaming.
His chest was full of cold and his mouth tasted like burnt metal and somewhere far away Marce was saying his name.
“Boss.
Boss, what—”
“I’m all right.” His voice sounded fine.
That was a lie, but it was the right lie.
He got his feet under him and straightened, slow, testing the weight.
The cold was still there.
The ridge was still there.
He could feel it under his shirt, faintly warm now, like a coal that would not go out.
Marce was staring at him.
So was Jiro.
Kev’s hand had found the pry-bar and stayed there, weighing it.
“What happened?” Marce said.
“Nothing.
Seized up.
Bad knee.” Desmond looked at the core.
The seed was gone.
The nest was empty, just fused plating and carbon scoring and nothing else.
He reached in and pulled a rib of the spinal metal free — ten inches of ridged, faintly iridescent alloy that felt heavier than it looked.
He weighed it in his hand.
Sellable.
Exotic, but not strange enough to draw the kind of attention that followed strange.
The boat’s engine revved once, low, across the water.
Desmond turned and looked at it.
Two men visible in the stern, both watching.
He couldn’t see their faces, but he could see the shape of them: patient, interested, waiting to see what came out of the carcass and whether it was worth taking.
He raised his voice, not shouting, just carrying.
“Dead battery,” he called.
“Cracked the casing for nothing.
You want the scraps, they’re yours.”
One of the men moved.
A hand-sign Desmond couldn’t read at this distance.
The engine cut.
The boat sat there, dark and quiet, and did not leave.
Marce was watching him now, not the boat.
“What are you doing?”
“Selling low.” Desmond pocketed the rib and turned back to the crew.
“Pack it.
We’re done.”
“Boss—”
“We’re done.
Cordon’s close, the prize was a lie, and I’m not spending an hour arguing over scrap.
Move.”
They moved.
The ride back to the dock was short and silent.
Kev drove.
Jiro watched the water.
Marce watched Desmond, and Desmond kept one hand pressed flat to his chest where the ridge sat under his shirt, warm and wrong and not going anywhere.
Del Mercer was waiting at the pier’s landward edge, leaning on a piling with her arms crossed and the look of a woman who had spent three hours pricing something she had not yet seen.
“Well?” she said.
Desmond pulled the rib from his pocket and held it out.
She took it, turned it over twice, and weighed it in her palm the way he had.
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.
Spinal plating.
Exotic, but not rare.
You want it, I’ll quote you volume rate.”
“Volume rate.
For ten inches of maybe-metal from a flying fortress.” She looked at him, then at the crew.
Marce was staring at the deck like it owed him money.
Jiro was coiling cable with the focus of a man trying very hard not to be part of a conversation.
“You cracked the core,” Del said.
“Three hours of exposure and a NYPD cordon breathing down your neck, and you pulled ten inches of scrap.
You want me to believe that?”
“I want you to pay me for it or give it back.”
She watched him for a long moment, weighing something that was not the metal.
Then she handed the rib back.
“Pass,” she said.
“Come see me when you’ve got something real.”
She walked.
Desmond watched her go, the rib heavy in his hand and heavier in his chest, and tried to tell himself it was just scrap.
The cold under his sternum pulsed once, faint, like a heartbeat half a beat wrong.
He pocketed the rib and turned to the crew.
“Right,” he said.
“Everybody off.
We’ll try again tomorrow.”
Marce gave him a look that said they both knew tomorrow was a lie, but he went anyway.
They all did.
Desmond waited until they were gone, until the pier was empty and the boat at the far end had finally killed its engine and drifted into the dark.
Then he pressed his hand to his chest and felt the ridge, warm and wrong, and tried to make himself believe he had stolen it instead of the other way around.
It did not work.