Nine Gods, One Grudge

The first thing Roderick felt was the cold. It had crawled inside his chest, pooling where his heartbeat should have been loud. He opened his eyes to a sky the color of a bruise. Rain fell through a haze of chemical smoke. Each drop stung his face. Somewhere above the smoke, engines hummed, a deep and polished sound, nothing like the coughing trucks of Sector 7. Off-world transports. Leaving. He tried to sit up. His body answered with a scream he did not have the breath to release. Roderick looked down. His chest was open. Not cut. Open. Someone had carved a clean line from his collarbone to his stomach and pried the edges apart like the lid of a crate. Under the rain, something pale and wet moved when he breathed. His stomach lurched. He turned his head and vomited bile into the waste beside him. Don't pass out. You pass out, you don't wake up. He knew this place. Every child in Sector 7 knew it. The discard pit. The place where the factories dumped broken machinery, spoiled chemicals, and people nobody would come looking for. Around him, the pit rose in walls of rusted car frames, burst drums, and plastic sheeting. The smell was sour and metallic, like a battery left in vinegar. He did not remember falling. He remembered a glass of wine. "You're shaking, Rod." Evelyn's voice. Soft. Close to his ear. "Long week," he had said. "Warehouse shifts. Kael's been covering for me." "I know." She had smoothed his collar the way she did before every important dinner. "Drink. It's a celebration." "Of what?" She had smiled. He had loved that smile for eleven years. "Of us finally getting out." The floor had tilted. The glass had rolled from his hand. Kael had caught him before he hit the ground, strong arms hooked under his shoulders. Roderick had once carried Kael out of a g**g fight on Rook Street exactly like that, when they were both fifteen. "Easy, brother," Kael had whispered. "Easy. It's almost done." Then the knife. Then the golden light pouring out of his own body into a crystal vial held by a man in white gloves, whose face Roderick never saw. "Origin Physique extracted," the gloved man had said. "No degradation. The Beast Throne thanks you both." "And our passage?" Evelyn had asked. Not a tremor in her voice. "Tonight." "And him?" A pause. Then Kael, laughing a little, like it was a joke between friends. "He's trash, Eve. Put him where trash goes." Roderick's hand closed around a jagged strip of metal. He had not decided to grab it. His body had done it for him, fingers tightening until the rusted edge split his palm and fresh blood ran down his wrist. "Kael," he rasped. The name came out as a wet whisper. Rainwater filled his mouth. He spat it out and said it again, louder. "Kael." Above him, a blue running light blinked through the smoke. A transport, sleek and silver, already higher than any tower in Sector 7 and still climbing. Its engines left a pulsing hum in his bones. They were on it. He knew it the way he knew his own name. He pushed himself onto his elbows. Pain tore across his ribs, bright and total. His vision flashed white at the edges. He gritted his teeth until his jaw ached and dragged himself forward one arm length, then another. He had no plan. He had no body left to make a plan with. He only knew the lights were getting smaller, and that if he stopped moving, they would win. Get up. Get up and follow them. It was a dying man's thought. He could never reach that light. Still he crawled toward it, eyes fixed on that shrinking blue point, while his blood left a dark trail in the slush. He did not hear the whirring until it was directly behind him. A thin beam of red light swept across the garbage. It passed over a dead dog. A broken refrigerator. A shoe. Then it stopped on Roderick's back. "Organic material detected." The voice was flat and synthetic, crackling through a damaged speaker. Roderick rolled onto his side. The scavenger drone hovered two meters away. It was the size of a motorbike, all welded plates and exposed wiring. Beneath it hung two claw-arms stained brown, and between them, a rotary drill as long as his forearm. Syndicate machines. They swept the pit every night for anything that could be sold. Including organs. "Biological salvage protocol active," the drone announced. "Condition assessment: deceased." "Not—" Roderick coughed. Blood. "Not dead." The red beam flicked across his face. "Vital signs below threshold. Classification: deceased. Commencing harvest." The drill began to spin. The sound was high and grinding, like a dentist's tool magnified a hundred times. Rain hissed where it struck the steel. Roderick shoved backward with his heels. His spine hit a wall of crushed metal. No room. He swung the strip of rusted steel in his hand. It struck the drone's claw with a pathetic clink. The claw snapped shut around his forearm and slammed it against the scrap wall. Something in his wrist cracked. The metal strip fell into the slush. The second claw pressed flat against his shoulder, pinning him. Patient. The machine had done this before. "Priority salvage: ocular tissue. Estimated value: forty-two credits." Forty-two. He almost laughed. Eleven years of loyalty. A stolen bloodline worth a noble title in another universe. And what was left of Roderick Vance was worth forty-two credits. The drill tilted toward his face. He twisted away. The claw tightened, pressing his cheek into the wet ground, and his free hand scrabbled blindly through the slush, looking for anything. A rock. A pipe. Anything. His fingers struck something smooth. It was buried just under the surface, cold as ice and perfectly flat. Not rust. Not plastic. Fine grooves ran across its face in tight spirals, too regular to be scratches, almost like writing. His b****y fingertips slid across an edge so sharp it opened his skin without resistance. His blood touched it. The world went silent. The rain stopped hitting his face. It still fell, he could see it falling, but he could not hear it. The drill still spun, but its scream had vanished. Even the pain in his chest drew back, like a tide pulling away from the shore before a wave. Under his hand, the grooves filled with his blood and began to glow a dull, dying red. Then the fragment grew hot. Then it pulled. It drank from the cut in his fingers. He felt it draw his blood upward through his arm, into his shoulder, toward the ruined cavity in his chest. Evelyn and Kael had taken the golden light. They had not reached what lay beneath it. And down there, behind his broken ribs, something opened one eye. Black text appeared across his vision. It did not glow. It swallowed light, letters cut from darkness itself. [SYSTEM WARNING] Host vital functions: CRITICAL. Organ failure: IMMINENT. The text flickered. Behind it, the drill crept closer. He could see the rain running along its grooves. [FOREIGN CONTACT DETECTED] Compatibility check running... What are you? The question did not reach his lips. He was not sure it reached anything. [ANALYSIS: INCOMPLETE] [UNKNOWN VARIABLE DETECTED IN HOST BLOOD] The letters stuttered, broke apart, and reassembled. [ORIGIN CORE — AWAKENING] His heart gave one massive beat. It was not a human heartbeat. It struck the inside of his ribs like a hammer on a sealed door, and every drop of blood in his body answered it at once. The sound came back all at once. Rain. Rotors. The drill, shrieking an inch from his face. "Harvest commencing." The steel tip touched his eyelashes. Roderick did not flinch. He could not look away from his right hand. The fingers buried in the slush had turned black. Not bruised. Not burned. Black like a hole in the night, and the blackness was spreading up his wrist in thin, living threads, crawling over his skin and swallowing the rain before it could land. The broken bones in his wrist shifted back into place with a sound like knuckles cracking. And his hand began to rise.