Mara found him coming off shift, grabbed his sleeve before he’d cleared the tunnel mouth, and pulled him aside where the foot traffic thinned.
“There’s talk,” she said, low, close enough that nobody else would catch it over the noise of the crews filing past.
“One of the night-shift men swears he saw a beast down in the old processing levels.
Says it was metal and meat both, moving wrong, and he’s telling anyone who’ll buy him a drink.” “Which one?” “Does it matter which one?
He’s drunk on fermented akulite half the time, but three of his friends are sober enough to believe him now, and one of them’s already talking about a hunt.” “There have been two others before this.
A pack animal from a supply convoy.
A guard-hound that wandered too close.” “I hadn’t heard about those.” “Nobody’s connected them yet.
A dead animal here, a dead animal there, that’s just the badlands doing what the badlands do.
A drunk man swearing he saw something moving with the wrong number of joints, that’s a story people repeat at every meal until somebody organizes torches to go look for the thing that started it.” “So it’s getting worse.” “It’s getting hungrier.
That’s not the same as worse, except that it is, eventually, if I can’t outpace it.” It mattered more than she knew.
Kael had hidden the construct three levels below the active tunnels, in an abandoned processing shaft the crews avoided on their own, air gone bad down there and the supports worse.
He’d been feeding it trickles of Force-energy in the gaps between shifts, just enough to keep it quiet, and every trickle left him shaking and hollow afterward in a way sleep never quite fixed.
“How long ago did he see it?” “Two nights.
It’s had time to grow into three beasts and a demon by the time it reached me.” “I need to get down there before the hunt does.” “Then go.
I’ll keep the story small up here as long as I can.” Mara’s eyes tracked past his shoulder, toward the tunnel entrance where a knot of miners had gathered, voices pitched with the particular excitement of men who’d finally found something more interesting than their own shift schedules to discuss.
“Don’t take long, Kael.
That’s not a crowd that stays small on its own.” He didn’t take long.
He went down through service shafts that hadn’t seen a maintenance crew in years, past rusted equipment and air scrubbers that wheezed rather than worked, until the temperature dropped and the dark thickened into something with weight to it.
Three levels below the active tunnels, the mine stopped pretending to be a workplace and started being simply a hole in a dead world, forgotten by everyone except the man who’d chosen it as a hiding place for something that shouldn’t have needed one at all.
He’d learned the maintenance the hard way, over the past several nights.
The construct’s organic components didn’t run on nothing, and nothing about mechu-deru had come with an instruction manual.
Every session taught him a little more: how much energy bought how many hours of quiet, how the crystal matrices threading through what remained of its nervous system reacted badly to being starved too long between feedings, how the whole arrangement worked less like ownership and more like an unpaid debt that accrued interest whether or not he could see the ledger.
The construct was already moving when he reached the lower level.
It had torn through the makeshift barrier he’d built weeks ago and was working its way toward the old access tunnel, the one that eventually surfaced near the equipment sheds and the drunk night-shift worker’s favorite smoking spot.
Its organic components, muscle fibers grown from tissue nobody sane would have chosen to grow, nerve clusters routed through crystal matrices that had never once been designed with maintenance in mind, had degraded past whatever threshold kept its autonomous protocols dormant.
Left hungry long enough, it didn’t wait for permission.
It just went looking.
“No,” Kael said, and the word carried weight this time, dark-side weight, cold and absolute.
“Not tonight.
Not this close to the surface.” ⟦ASCENDANT⟧ ASCENT — EMBER I, CRESTING RESERVE — 12 / 55 DRAW — THE MACHINE FEEDS WHETHER HE WILLS IT OR NOT COST.
A CHRONIC TAX NO CALM OUTPACES WITNESS.
DEAD ANIMALS AND A HUNT FORMING The construct’s head turned toward him, red eyes dim but present, some fragment of obedience still fighting the hunger for control of the same body.
Kael pushed Force-energy into it, more than he’d planned to spend, more than his reserve wanted to give up on a night this thin.
His vision blurred at the edges.
His burned arm went numb to the elbow, a cold that had nothing to do with the shaft’s bad air.
The construct shuddered, fought him for three long seconds that felt considerably longer, and then stilled, folding back down into the crouch he’d left it in two nights ago like nothing had happened at all.
No third kill tonight, at least.
The drunk night-shift worker had caught his flash of it two nights back, near enough to the smoking spot to see metal and meat both moving wrong in the dark, and he’d been right to be afraid even if nobody believed him yet.
Two more nights like tonight, unchecked, and there would have been a third body to explain instead of just a third rumor.
Kael dragged the barrier’s broken sections back into some approximation of a wall and packed the gap with rubble from the collapsed side tunnel, buying himself another few nights before the construct found a second way out.
By the time he climbed back up into the active tunnels, his hands wouldn’t stop shaking and his knees felt like they belonged to a much older man.
Mara was waiting exactly where he’d left her.
“Well?” she said, the moment he was close enough to hear her without raising her voice.
“Handled.
For tonight.” “And tomorrow night?” “I don’t have a good answer for tomorrow night, or the night after that.
Every time I feed it enough to keep it quiet, it costs me more than I actually have to spare.
Every time I don’t feed it enough, it goes looking for its own dinner instead.” Kael leaned against the tunnel wall, letting the numbness in his arm fade back into ordinary ache.
“It’s not a weapon.
It’s a debt that comes due whether I’ve got the coin or not.” “Then get rid of it.” “I can’t.
Not yet.
Getting rid of it costs more right now than keeping it fed does.” “That sounds exactly like the reason people give themselves right before the thing they’re keeping finally gets them killed.” “It probably is,” Kael said.
“I’m keeping it anyway, for now.” Mara studied him a moment, then let out a breath that carried more exhaustion than judgment.
“The hunt talk will die down in a few days if nothing else turns up.
Keep it fed enough that nothing else does.” “That’s the plan.” “You say that like it’s a good one.” “It’s the only one I’ve got tonight.
Ask me again in a week and maybe I’ll have a better answer.” She didn’t push further.
She fell in step beside him instead, and together they walked back toward the barracks past the last of the miners still trading rumors about beasts and metal and things that moved wrong in the dark, none of them any closer to the truth than they’d been an hour ago.
Kael’s arm ached the whole walk back, a deep bone-ache that had nothing to do with the burn scar and everything to do with how much of himself he’d just poured into keeping one hungry machine quiet for a single night.
He did the arithmetic without wanting to: two kills already logged as unremarkable badlands losses, one sighting now circulating as a drinking story, and a reserve that dropped a little further every time he made the trip down those service shafts.
The construct wasn’t getting less hungry as the weeks passed.
If anything, the degradation was accelerating, each feeding buying slightly less quiet than the one before it.
That wasn’t a problem with an obvious solution.
Destroying the thing outright would cost him a resource he couldn’t easily replace and would draw exactly the attention he was trying hardest to avoid, a controlled detonation three levels down being a difficult thing to explain to a mine boss who already thought Kael’s whole crew had brought him nothing but paperwork.
Feeding it indefinitely wasn’t sustainable either, not on a bondsman’s meager reserve of anything, Force-related or otherwise.
He needed time he didn’t have and options he hadn’t found yet, and until he found them, the construct would keep eating whatever the dark quietly offered it, one careful, exhausting feeding at a time.