Morning didn’t start with coffee or even a prayer, but with me nearly rolling off the bench under the weight of my own shoulder. The damned piece of iron had soaked up the night’s dampness and felt twice as heavy. I sat up, cradling my right forearm with my left hand, and felt my spine answer with a dry, sharp crack.

  [Status: 19%.]

  [Warning: Axial load shift detected. Projected skeletal deformation: 4% per week.]

  “Shut up,” I muttered to the system notification drifting lazily before my left eye. “I know I’m crooked.”

  The prosthetic Ephrem and I had cobbled together was an engineer’s nightmare made flesh. Rawhide straps bound it to my chest and good shoulder; overnight they’d rubbed my skin into angry red welts. Everything beneath them itched, but scratching was impossible. The claw at the end—three ugly, serrated fingers—hung motionless. To open them, I had to jerk my shoulder blade back. The motion sent a dull spike of pain through the pins drilled into bone.

  I stood, swaying. My center of gravity had drifted right. To keep from tipping over while walking, I had to lean left, which made me move like a drunken crab.

  Zeno stood in the corner by the main shaft gear. He hadn’t moved in ten hours. A fine coat of flour dust dulled his black armor, turning him into a gray phantom.

  “Resource?” I asked.

  “One percent overnight to maintain background processes and sensors,” the Golem replied, his voice stripped of its usual wall-shaking resonance. “My left knee support has three millimeters of play. Dust has entered the joint. If I do not clean it, the servo may seize during the next exertion.”

  “Don’t move,” I wiped my brow with my sleeve. “Save the charge. We’ve got dirty work today.”

  Ephrem was already outside in the yard. The old man looked awful—eyes bloodshot from lack of sleep, arms elbow-deep in something yellowish and foul. Three large vats stood by the mill entrance. The stench cut through the morning frost: ammonia, rot, and something sharp enough to sting the sinuses.

  “Boy,” Ephrem wiped his hands on what had once been a sack. “The villagers brought what you asked for. But they’re whispering. Hans says you’re planning to poison the wells. They pull their children indoors when they pass the mill. Say it reeks of devil’s brew.”

  “Let them whisper.” I approached the vats, my stomach rebelling. “It’s not devil’s brew, Ephrem. It’s saltpeter. Without it, we’re just targets for the Order.”

  The process was disgusting. To make powder in a world that worshiped magic, you had to sink to the bottom of biology. We scraped lime efflorescence from cellar walls, mixed it with manure and livestock urine, layered it with straw, and waited for chemistry to do its quiet work.

  I had Ephrem filter the slurry through layers of wood ash. My job was worse—I had to evaporate the solution to pull crystals from it. Doing that one-handed was hell. I tried using the prosthetic to steady the kettle over the fire, but the claw either slipped or clenched too hard, crumpling the copper rim.

  “Damn it!” I dropped the ladle again.

  It hit the dirt, splashing my trousers with stinking slurry. I stood there, breathing hard, staring at my right limb. It just hung there—heavy, cold, useless metal.

  [Status: 15%. Stress level: high.]

  “You must use inertia,” Zeno rumbled from the doorway. He had come out after all, conserving every millimeter of motion. “You are attempting to work with it as if it were a living arm. It is a pendulum. Use its mass.”

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  I tried again. Shifted my whole torso, let the prosthetic swing in an arc toward the kettle’s handle.

  Clack.

  The claw caught. I drew my shoulder back, locking the grip. This time it held. My spine answered with a vicious cramp.

  “Your effort’s efficiency is negligible, Iron,” Zeno observed. “You expend eighty percent of your energy merely to remain upright.”

  “I don’t have another body, teacher,” I snapped. “We work with what we have.”

  By noon we managed our first handful of grayish crystals. Dirty. Damp. Nothing like “the weapon of retribution.”

  Then came the sulfur. The highlanders had found it near hot springs up the slope. It came in chunks fused with stone. I had to grind it in a stone mortar. Torture. My left arm went numb quickly; my right could only brace the mortar by leaning my weight onto it.

  By evening we mixed the components. Saltpeter, sulfur, and charcoal Ephrem had burned from alder. I knew the ratios from chemistry textbooks I’d read back in the Zero Sector. But theory was one thing. Gray, reeking dust in an abandoned mill was another.

  “Shall we test it?” Ephrem eyed the narrow trail of powder laid across a flat stone.

  I took out the fire striker. My left hand trembled. Flint struck steel. Sparks rained onto the mix.

  Nothing.

  Again. And again.

  One spark landed dead center. The powder hissed, spat a thin jet of acrid white smoke… and died, leaving a smudge and the stink of rotten eggs.

  “That’s it?” Ephrem sniffed, disappointed. “All that stench, all that piss wasted—for this? The Order’s mages burn a hectare of forest with a snap of their fingers, and you…”

  I stared at the blackened mark.

  “It’s damp,” I said at last. “Poorly mixed. The charcoal’s too coarse. It needs to be ground to dust.”

  “Your powder is hygroscopic,” Zeno added, scanning the residue. “Humidity in this room is seventy-eight percent. The saltpeter absorbs water faster than you can ignite it. At this burn rate, gas expansion will not exceed one hundred meters per second. This is not an explosion, Iron. It is a very slow fire.”

  I slid down the wall and sat in the dirt. Grime had crusted over my hands. The prosthetic dragged at my shoulder, siphoning what little strength I had left.

  “We need granules,” I said into the void. “Moisten it with alcohol, press it through a sieve, dry it. Each grain will burn instantly.”

  “We don’t have time for ‘granules,’” Ephrem pointed out the window.

  Far below in the valley, among the dark firs, a pale blue light flickered. Not a campfire. The cold glow of the Hounds.

  “They are close,” Zeno stilled. His sensors shifted to active mode. “Twelve units. Speed—three kilometers per hour. They are unhurried. They know we are cornered.”

  I looked at my palm—soot-stained, scratched. In this world, magic built palaces and razed cities. And I was trying to fight it with urine and powdered charcoal.

  “Ephrem,” I forced myself upright. “Bring everything we’ve cooked. We’re making fougasses.”

  “Making what?”

  “Bombs, Ephrem. Big, heavy bombs. If the powder burns slow, we trap it in a strong casing. Let the pressure build until the metal bursts. Not magic. Just plain physics.”

  The rest of the evening we packed empty copper tubes and fragments of Kyle’s armor with our miserable mix. I tamped it tight, using the steel claw as a press. It was dangerous—one spark from metal on metal and I’d be headless. But fear was gone. Only a cold, blunt resolve remained.

  [Status: 11%. “The Will to Live” mode: Background threat monitoring active.]

  “Zeno,” I called. “I need trenches dug along the path. Narrow. Deep.”

  “You intend directional blasts? With such low detonation velocity, effectiveness is limited.”

  “I don’t need them dead. I need their legs broken. A mage with a shattered shin is just a screaming man in an expensive robe. Magic demands focus. Focus doesn’t pair well with splintered bone.”

  I stepped onto the porch. The air had turned sharp, metallic with the promise of snow. Hans and two other men stood at a distance, gripping axes. They’d seen the lights below.

  “Hey, engineer!” Hans shouted, voice shaking. “You promised your iron would protect us. If the mages burn our homes, I’ll strangle you myself, I swear to God!”

  I looked at his fear. His calloused hands.

  “Go inside, Hans. Board the windows. If you hear thunder, don’t come out. It’s not God’s wrath. It’s me working.”

  He spat and left, muttering curses.

  I remained alone on the porch. Zeno had vanished into the dark, his heavy steps barely audible—he’d learned to place his feet without sending tremors through the ground.

  I looked at my right hand. The claw glinted in the moonlight. Ugly. Heavy. Mine.

  From my pocket I took the last tube packed with powder. Plugged it with a rag soaked in fat. My final hope. My black magic.

  “Come on, saints,” I whispered as the blue lights began climbing the path. “Come see what a man can do when he has nothing left to lose but his own weight.”

  That night, the mill did not grind grain.

  That night, it prepared to grind bones—those who believed the world belonged only to the ones with sparks dancing between their fingers.

  And I… I sat on the steps, feeling the cold steel of the prosthetic slowly draw warmth from my body, waiting for the first click.