The brass incense burner reeked of cheap tallow and dried wormwood, doing absolutely nothing to mask the stench of Grandfather’s rapidly spoiling carcass.
Zarrin Tarokh stood at the lip of the sunken crypt, her knuckles dusted in powdered iron from the morning's salvage run. Her mourning tunic bore engine-oil streaks around the collar that two vinegar washes had failed to scour. Across the stone dais, Elder Morad held the signet ring—a jagged slab of volcanic glass set into unpolished scrap-steel. The mantle of House Tarokh. A title saddled with three dry water-bore licenses, twelve unpaid refinery debts, and a mob of starving cousins who treated scrap-hunting like a spectator sport.
"Zarrin of the Direct Branch," Morad droned, his voice wheezing through a clogged particulate respirator. "Take the stone. Speak the vow of iron and water, before the dust reclaims—"
An elbow caught Zarrin dead in the ribs.
She stumbled sideways against the basalt bier, boots scraping the flagstones as Parisa shoved past her. Her cousin wore silk—actual, pre-collapse weave that shimmered like fuel slick on gutter water. Parisa’s eyes were bloodshot, pupils pinpricks of frantic, manic heat, her chest heaving as if she had just sprinted five miles through a silica tempest.
"Stop the ritual!" Parisa shrieked, voice cracking against the vaulted ceiling. "Stop it right now!"
The family gathered around the pit stiffened. Dozens of scavengers, cutpurses, and pipe-runners clamped their mouths shut, their hands dropping toward hydro-wrenches and holstered flechette pistols.
"Parisa," Zarrin said, straightening her vest with a steady, dry drag of her thumb. "Grandfather’s body has been dead for forty minutes. Could you at least wait until the flies set in before throwing a tantrum?"
"Shut up, Zarrin! Just shut your arrogant mouth!" Parisa wheeled on the elders, tears cutting frantic trenches through the rice-powder on her cheeks. She pointed a trembling, manicured finger toward the eastern gallery where the betrothed sat. "I will not marry him. I won't! You forced me to take Bahram Vahdat because his father died in the Siege of the Red Sieve, but I refuse! He’s a broken cripple with rotting lungs and no pension! I am taking Kaveh!"
A collective hiss traveled through the crypt.
Kaveh Shirazi stood up so fast his silk sash snagged on the bench. He was Zarrin’s betrothed—or had been since dawn. His face washed completely pale. "Parisa? What madness is this? Zarrin and I—"
"Don't play dumb, Kaveh!" Parisa screamed, lunging toward him, clutching the lapels of his embroidered duster. Her grip was hysterical, nails digging into the cloth. "I know about the deed to the subterranean reservoir under the Old Mint! I know your maternal uncle died three nights ago in the Upper Bastion and left you three hundred thousand imperial hydros! You don't have to hide it anymore! Marry me. You must marry me today!"
Kaveh froze. The secret was supposed to be buried under three layers of forged ledger-sheets. Zarrin watched his throat bob as he swallowed hard, his eyes flicking from Parisa’s manic grin over to Zarrin’s impassive face.
"How..." Kaveh croaked. "How do you know that?"
"It doesn't matter how!" Parisa laughed, a ragged, shrill sound that set Zarrin’s teeth on edge. "We take the vows today. The storm is coming, Kaveh! In thirty days, the glass-front wipes Sector Four off the map, and we have to reach the inner spires before the ramparts fall!"
She clamped her own mouth shut, realizing she had said too much. Her gaze darted sideways, terrified, as if waiting for a lightning strike from the bare rock vault.
Thirty days. A storm.
Zarrin’s mind clicked through the seasonal charts. The Scourge-Wastes weren't due for a major atmospheric inversion for another four months. Yet Parisa had named the exact legal status of an unprobated inheritance from the Upper Bastion, and she was sweating like a rat trapped in a furnace flue.
She knows, Zarrin realized. She never guessed. She remembers.
Elder Morad let out an outraged squawk. "Kaveh Shirazi is pledged to the heir! To Zarrin! The contract was signed in blood-ink!"
"Then let her have the trash!" Parisa spat, gesturing violently toward the corner of the gallery. "She loves rummaging through garbage anyway! Take Bahram, Zarrin! Take the half-dead hero and choke on him!"
All eyes shifted to the shadows beneath the intake vents.
Bahram Vahdat sat slumped in a hand-cranked iron wheelchair, entirely motionless. His left sleeve was pinned flat against his ribcage with a tarnished brass safety pin; his right pant leg ended in a frayed knot above the knee. Oil-stained bandages peeked through the collar of his faded militia coat, and his skin bore the sickly grey tinge of someone whose blood had met too much copper-dust. He said nothing. He kept his chin down toward his lap, where his single, calloused hand rested limply.
Beside the chair’s wheel, crouched low on four splayed, reptilian haunches, was Jiveh. The scaled hound was the size of a boar, covered in mottled grey osteoderms instead of fur, with two sets of nostrils that flared and whistled. Jiveh curled its upper lip, exposing three rows of serrated, needle-like teeth, emitting a deep, hydraulic growl directed squarely at Parisa’s throat.
Bahram’s fingers tapped the hound’s thick neck once. The beast fell silent, though its amber slit-eyes never left the bride-stealer.
Kaveh looked at Zarrin. There was guilt in his expression, but beneath the guilt lay raw, greedy calculation. Three hundred thousand hydros meant escape from the dirt. It meant silk, clean water, and an escape from the soot-haze of District Four.
"Zarrin," Kaveh muttered, taking a half-step toward Parisa. "The family... the family needs an alliance that brings immediate liquidity. If Parisa insists..."
"Save your breath, Kaveh," Zarrin said, her voice cutting clean through his stammering. "Your spine was always made of soft solder. It was bound to melt the first time someone put a flame to it."
She never spared him another glance. She turned her back on her former fiancé, stepped across the bier, and took the black glass ring straight from Elder Morad’s trembling palm, jamming it onto her middle finger. The edge bit into her knuckle, drawing a thin drop of dark blood.
"The contract is transferred," Zarrin announced to the stunned room. "House Tarokh takes Bahram Vahdat into its register. Get out of my sight, Parisa. Take your purchased pet and buy yourself a pretty headstone."
Parisa sneered, dragging Kaveh toward the heavy brass exit doors by his wrist. "Enjoy the Rust-Yards, cousin! Let's see how long you survive on scrap when the clouds turn yellow!"
***
Two hours later, the afternoon wind off the Scourge-Wastes began to howl through the corrugated plating of the industrial fringe.
The Rust-Yards smelled of scorched oil, rusted plating, and the acrid musk of Jiveh, who trotted ahead through the maze of discarded armored hulls and dead crawler-tanks. Zarrin dragged the squeaking iron wheelchair over the gravel, her shoulders aching from the grade. Bahram had not uttered a single syllable during the entire walk down from the upper quarter. He sat with his head tilted back, watching the brown smog churn across the low sky.
Their shack was built into the gutted flank of an imperial land-dreadnought, tucked deep between two toppled gantry towers.
Zarrin kicked the bent sheet-metal door open. "Thirty days," she muttered, letting go of the chair's handles and walking straight to her workbench. She slammed a dented brass lantern down and spun the wick up. "The lunatic slipped. She said thirty days until the glass-front hits. Which means the upper atmospheric wall is collapsing ahead of cycle. If we aren't airborne before then, the silica will strip the skin off our bones before we can even choke on the dust."
She unrolled a soot-blackened schematic across the iron table, pinning its edges down with spent casing slugs. "I need an intact turbine core. A dual-chamber pressure converter, and at least forty meters of copper-alloy hydraulic line. We have to finish the skiff. We—"
A small, metallic clink bounced off the edge of her work boots.
Zarrin looked down.
A brass split-ring lay in the grime between her toes, attached to a bent cotter pin. A grenade pin.
She froze, then turned her head slowly.
Bahram was no longer slumped. He had hauled himself up onto his single boot, leaning with terrifying balance against the rusted interior frame of the dreadnought hull. His dead, glassy expression was gone. In his lone right hand, he held a stripped-down concussion mine, wired through a makeshift pressure-fuse into six heavy demolition charges he had somehow strapped to the central support beams of their shelter.
"You're loud," Bahram said. His voice was rough, like gravel ground between two millstones. "And you talk too much when you're angry."
"Bahram," Zarrin said, keeping her hands flat on the schematic. "Why did you unpin an ordnance charge inside our living room?"
Bahram held her stare without wavering. He used his thumb to adjust the spring tension on the striker, the metal clicking softly in the cramped space.
"Because your cousin sold our sector coordinates to the Iron-Spur raiders on her way to the Upper Bastion," he said evenly. "Three skimmers just crested the perimeter dune. They'll breach that door in four minutes. Grab the cutting torch, wife. We're going to blow the roof onto their heads."