“There have been Poison Memories scouting along Mercy.”
“Sure.”
“The bakery has weak locks.”
“Of course.”
“The old woman who works there smokes beside an open fuel line.”
Al lowers the thermos and stares at me. “Darlene? Hell, everybody knows Darlene. She’ll outlive all of us through pure spite. If fire takes her, she’ll bully it into apologizing.”
I should not know the old woman’s name. I know it anyway. I have heard the baker say it often enough. Evie says names with warmth, even when she is scolding. She gives every syllable weight, like people become more real because she speaks them.
That is foolish. Dangerous. A person cannot afford to make everyone real.
Al’s voice softens, which is worse than his mockery. “She wave at you again?”
The memory strikes before I can brace against it. Her hand lifting through the mist. Her face open and bright beneath rain-damp blonde hair. The blue of her eyes finding mine without flinching. Hi, she had called, as if I were simply another neighbor passing through the plaza and not a thing mothers pulled children away from.
I curl my fingers inside my coat pockets until my claws press into my palms.
“She should not do that,” I say.
“Wave?”
“Notice me.”
Al laughs once, but there is no humor in it. “Bit late for that, big man. You’re seven feet of scales and bad mood. People notice.”
“She noticed wrong.”
“Maybe she noticed fine.”
“She is careless.”
“She’s kind.”
“Kindness is often carelessness wearing perfume.”
“Listen to you. Damn. That war really did turn you into a poetry machine with fists.”
I look at him.
He lifts both hands, thermos and all. “All right. No jokes about the war. I’m an insensitive jackass, but I’m not suicidal.”
The tunnel settles around us. Water clicks through the drainage channels. Someone murmurs in sleep. Far away, machinery groans as the tide-control pumps adjust pressure beneath the harbor. The sound is similar enough to distant artillery that my spine hardens.
Horus IV had machines beneath the cities too. Pumps, rails, buried generators, emergency filtration systems. For the first months, we told ourselves the infrastructure meant civilians could survive underground until extraction. We escorted families through service tunnels while the sky burned white above us. Children carried toys in one hand and ration masks in the other. Their parents kept asking when the ships would come.
The ships came late.
Some did not come at all.
I smell smoke that is not here. Hot dust. Melted insulation. Blood cooked onto armor seals. I hear a little girl asking whether the stars were broken because she could not see them through the bombardment haze. I remember her hand in mine, impossibly small against my gauntlet.
My chest tightens until breath scrapes through all four lungs like broken glass.
“Kauss.”
