Kazran's torn palms skidded over the wet flags as Sivya's muffled cry dissolved into the gale. His carefully constructed intellectual fortress, his arrogant detachment, had been a cage for his own heart, and Barris had just ripped the bars open, exposing the raw, aching void. He pushed with his arms, trying to leverage his torso, but his legs, numb and unfeeling, offered no resistance. He was a broken doll, a discarded plaything. He needed to move. He had to move. “Barris!” His voice was a rasp, swallowed by the howling wind that now tore through the gaping hole in the wall, whipping his hair, lashing his face with freezing rain. Dakhan, having dispatched the last of Barris’s enforcers with brutal efficiency, stomped over, his heavy boots splashing through the rapidly pooling water. He knelt beside a twitching enforcer, his massive hand clamping down on the man’s throat. “Speak. Where is he taking her?” he growled, his voice a low thunder against the storm’s shriek. The enforcer gurgled, blood bubbling at his lips. “Spire… Grand Vault… public… frame…” His eyes rolled back, then fixed on a point beyond Dakhan, glazed with death. Dakhan tossed the man’s limp body aside, turning to Kazran, who was still futilely dragging himself across the floor towards the ruined wall. “The Grand Vault,” Dakhan said. “He’s hauling her to the high spire.” Kazran’s skull pulsed with sudden focus. The trading fortress. The spire. He had drafted its auction stages himself, intending them as the grand platform for Sivya’s financial ruin. Barris was seizing his design and bending it toward a public butchery, cementing his own syndicate rule while wiping out Sivya and leaving the blame on Kazran. The irony was a bitter, metallic taste in his mouth. “No,” Kazran breathed. “He’ll time it for the gale's peak. When the deluge reaches its height. A spectacle.” Dakhan’s mouth twisted. “Then we climb to the spire.” He eyed Kazran’s inert legs, then the broken hover-chair. “You’ll be a liability.” “Not if I can stand,” Kazran snarled, his eyes scanning the debris-strewn safe house. He spotted it – a discarded pair of heavy industrial braces, used for moving collapsed structural beams after a building breach. They were crude, made of riveted girder-plate, with thick hydraulic pistons meant to mimic the power of a construction drone. They were not designed for walking, but for brute force lifting. “Help me,” Kazran commanded, pointing a shaking hand. “The girder-plate braces.” Dakhan grunted, clearly skeptical, but moved to retrieve them. Each brace was a heavy, articulated cage of metal, designed to strap around a worker’s legs, with thick, crude servos at the knee and ankle joints. They were meant for temporary, desperate measures, not sustained mobility. Kazran, with Dakhan’s reluctant assistance, began the agonizing process of strapping the first brace to his left leg. The cold metal bit into his skin, and as the rough leather straps were cinched tight, an inferno of phantom pain erupted in his useless limb. He bit back a scream, a sheen of sweat instantly coating his pale face. Dakhan watched, a strange, calculating intensity in his eyes. The second brace was worse. When Dakhan cinched the buckle, the pressure against atrophied muscle shot white fire up Kazran's spine. Kazran choked on cold air, the room spinning gray. “Power them,” he choked out, his voice thin. Dakhan found the regulator box on the brace’s hip, a series of iron levers and pressure gauges. He engaged the internal power cells. A low hum vibrated through the metal, and the servos whined, struggling to find purchase in their inactive state. “Now,” Kazran gritted out, forcing himself to push up, using the raw strength of his arms. The articulated frames locked into place, rigid and unyielding. His legs, enclosed in the metallic cages, felt alien, distant. He put weight on them. A scream tore from him, primal and involuntary, as every damaged nerve ending protested. The room blurred. He collapsed back down, gasping for air, clutching at the metal frame. “It’s no good,” Dakhan stated, a hint of grim satisfaction in his tone. “You can’t.” “I can.” Kazran pushed up again, his face a mask of contorted pain. This time, he focused. He visualized the movement, the mechanics of walking, forcing his mind to override the screaming agony of his physical body. The servos creaked, then groaned, trying to follow the commands of a brain that knew how to walk, but a body that couldn't. He leveraged himself, one excruciating inch at a time. The muscles in his thighs, long dormant, screamed in protest, but the brace held. He took a single, shuddering step. Then another. Each movement was a Herculean task, a battle against his own ravaged flesh. Sweat poured down his face, mixing with the frigid rain. His torso shook with the effort. But he was standing. Precariously, agonizingly, but standing. “There’s a service shaft in the utility corridor, two levels up,” Kazran panted. “An industrial lift. It reaches the summit fastest. Before the deluge peaks.” Dakhan nodded, a flicker of something akin to respect in his hard gaze. “Lead the way, cripple.” The trek to the hoist was a slow, halting crawl. Each step ground bone against unyielding iron. The world outside the safe house was chaos – debris, a rising tide of corrosive water, and the relentless shriek of the monsoon. They reached the service shaft, a massive, grime-coated vertical tunnel carved deep into the ancient rock of Othes. The freight platform, a cage of scarred, blackened iron large enough to haul structural beams, sat idle. Kazran bypassed the archaic contact relays. The heavy mechanism shuddered to life, groaning as the massive counterweights began their ascent. The air in the shaft was thick with the smell of ozone and damp metal. The iron cage lurched upward, slowly at first, then gaining rattling speed. The wind howled through the open grating, and streaks of blinding lightning illuminated the dizzying drop below. “How much time?” Dakhan yelled over the rising roar of the ascent and the storm. “If Barris is aiming for the Zenith, we have minutes before the rain becomes impenetrable. Less if he wants a quicker spectacle.” Kazran’s breath was shallow, his focus split between the controls and the searing agony in his legs. His vision tunnelled. Every hinge in the leg frames groaned under his dead weight. They neared the high rafters, where the faceted glass cupola began to emerge from the mist. A harsh screech of sheared teeth ripped down the vertical shaft. Sparks showered down. The platform shuddered violently, then dropped. The heavy cables screamed against the pulleys. “They cut the magnetic brakes!” Dakhan roared, bracing himself against the wall. Kazran’s stomach lurched. Below, through the open floor grating, the vast gut of the auction halls yawned open, bathed in the sickly green light of the Phosphor-Cauldrons—the acid vats that powered the municipal works. The iron cage plummeted.

Iron and Bone