The Neural-Rig did not ask permission. It took.
The bio-needles punched through Ash’s skin at the shoulder, the spine, the base of the skull—sixteen points of entry, each one a cold, surgical violation that threaded steel-tipped filaments into the nerve bundles beneath. His mummified stump screamed. The green fluid in his veins surged to meet the intrusion, and for one stretched, unbreathing second, the Rig’s hydraulic pressure redlined, threatening to crush his bones inside their sockets.
Ash did not lose consciousness. He forced his Data-Tongue to speak.
The handshake code was not language. It was voltage. It was frequency. It was a sequence of electrical pulses that the dead pilot’s exoskeleton had been waiting decades to receive, and Ash sent it directly through the bio-needles, through the green fluid, through the corrupted protocol that still hummed in the hollow of his shoulder. I am the operator, the code said. I am the successor. You will recognize me, and you will obey.
The Rig’s pressure stabilized. The hydraulic scream dropped to a low, steady hum. The iron fingers—skeletal, segmented, cold as the mud they had been buried in—flexed once, twice, and then locked into alignment with Ash’s remaining nerves. He could feel them. Not as flesh. As data. As torque and resistance and the faint, distant ache of servos that had been still for too long.
He reached out with the iron hand and gripped a piece of rusted plating torn from the pod’s hull.
Hiss-clack. The valves opened and closed in sequence, and the fingers closed around the scrap with a force that was not human and not mechanical but something between. The plating crumpled. Folded. Compressed into a dense, flat sheet of iron that dropped into the mud with a heavy thud. Ash stared at it. His human hand was trembling with the permanent tremor the green electricity had left in his nerves, but the iron hand was steady. The iron hand was still.
The stranger stopped sharpening the hook-blade. The grey eyes tracked from the crumpled scrap to Ash’s face, and something in them shifted—not approval, not quite, but a recalibration. The stranger had been hauling cargo for days. The cargo had just crushed steel.
“Can you walk with it?” The voice was flat, but the question was not.
Ash pushed himself upright. The Rig’s frame was heavier than his old body, the servos humming against his spine, the straps cutting into his shoulders. He took one step. The iron hand swung at his side, counterbalancing his weight. He took another. The mud sucked at his boots, but the Rig’s legs—the frame extended down to his knees, bracing his joints—pushed back with hydraulic patience.
“Yes.”
The stranger nodded once and threw a heavy scrap-leather strap across the pod’s floor. “Secure the battery pack. If it shifts while you’re moving, it’ll pull the needles out of your spine.” A pause. The grey eyes flicked to the iron hand. “You’re not cargo anymore. Don’t make me regret that.”
The Walking Scrapper appeared on the horizon as a heat-signature first.
Ash saw it through the green static of his new vision—a massive, multi-legged silhouette, its engine a blazing red smear in the thermal spectrum, its joints leaking yellow-white plumes of waste heat. It was moving toward the Rust-Hulk’s smoking corpse, drawn by the same explosion that had nearly killed them. Scavengers. Wasteland harvesters. The kind who picked through dead factories and stripped them down to their bones, and who would not hesitate to do the same to two survivors if they got in the way.
Ash’s mechanical sight dissected the vehicle before his human eyes could resolve its shape.
Front left leg. Hydraulic cylinder, unarmored. The fluid line ran exposed along the exterior of the joint, protected only by a thin mesh of rusted wire. If it ruptured, the pressure loss would collapse the limb in under two seconds. Fuel manifold. Right side, ventral. Leaking. The thermal bloom was bright enough to hurt, a constant, wavering plume of vaporized diesel. A single spark in the wrong place and the whole rig would go up like a grease fire.
Ash leaned close to the stranger. His voice was low, rattling with the vibration of the Rig’s servos. “The left knee. Cut the hydraulic line there. The whole thing will tilt west. I’ll handle the pilot.”
The stranger tested the hook-blade’s edge with a thumb. The skin was already calloused, already scarred, but the blade was sharp enough to slice a fresh line of red. “You’re sure about the tilt?”
“If the line blows, the leg has no redundancy. I can see the schematics in the heat-bleed. It’ll drop like a hammer.”
The stranger’s grey eyes glinted. Not approval. Anticipation. The cruel, cold gleam of a hunter who had just been handed a weapon they knew how to use. They slipped into the mud, using the blizzard and the roaring diesel engine of the Scrapper to mask their approach, the hook-blade held low and ready. They were no longer protecting a liability. They were executing a synchronized strike.
Ash crouched in the silt. The iron hand buried itself in the frozen mud, anchoring him against the wind, and the Rig’s frame locked into a low, coiled position. The servos hummed against his spine. The bio-needles throbbed in his shoulder. He watched the Scrapper’s heat-signature grow larger, brighter, until the sound of its engine was a physical weight in the air and the ground beneath him was trembling with every step of its massive legs.
The stranger struck.
The hook-blade caught the exposed hydraulic line and tore. The rubber split. The metal braid shredded. A high-pressure geyser of hot fluid—black, viscous, steaming—erupted into the sleet, and the Scrapper’s left knee buckled. The leg collapsed inward, the joint locking, the piston snapping free of its housing with a shriek of tortured metal. Forty tons of salvaged iron tilted violently to the west. Exactly as Ash had predicted. The pilot inside screamed, his manual levers suddenly useless, his cockpit tilting toward the mud like a sinking ship.
Ash launched himself out of the silt.
The Rig’s high-torque mode engaged with a hiss-clack of valves, and the iron hand pulled him out of the mud and through the air in a single, fluid motion. He hit the cabin door with both feet, the Rig’s frame absorbing the impact, the hydraulic fingers of his iron hand burying into the seam between the door and its frame. The metal screamed. The hinges buckled. The green fluid in Ash’s veins sparked, and he commanded the hand to rip.
The door tore free of its hinges with a sound like a giant’s spine snapping. It spun away into the sleet, and Ash dropped into the cabin, his iron hand raised, his green-rimmed eyes painting the interior in thermal ghosts.
The pilot lunged for a rusty revolver on the dash. Ash’s iron hand slammed down on his chest before his fingers closed around the grip. The crunch of ribs was a wet, muffled sound, lost beneath the roar of the Scrapper’s dying engine. The pilot gasped, his mouth opening and closing, his eyes wide and white and full of the sudden, terrible knowledge that he was already dead.
The stranger slipped in through the side hatch. The hook-blade moved once—a short, clean strike that opened the second scavenger’s throat before he could raise his weapon. The body dropped. The blood pooled on the cabin floor, hot and metallic and already freezing at the edges.
The cabin went silent.
Ash did not relax. The iron hand was still pressing the pilot into the seat, and his mechanical sight was already scanning the cabin for anything useful. The Scrapper was a wreck. The leg was gone, the fuel manifold was still leaking, and the engine was cycling down into a death rattle. But it was carrying cargo.
He released the pilot—unconscious now, or dead, it did not matter—and turned to the supply racks at the rear of the cabin.
They stripped the Scrapper methodically.
Ash’s mechanical sight guided his hands. The Fuel-Core was the first priority—a pressurized cylinder of refined diesel, still three-quarters full, its casing warm to the touch and heavy with potential. He tore it out of its housing with the iron hand, the Rig’s servos groaning at the weight, and set it aside. Next, the ration crate. Dry winter rations, vacuum-sealed in oiled canvas, each pack dense with rendered fat and compressed protein. The smell of preserved meat filled the cabin, and Ash’s stomach cramped with a hunger he had been ignoring for days. Later. There would be time for food later.
The stranger salvaged ammunition from the dead scavengers—a handful of cartridges for the revolver, still usable—and pulled a long, oil-skin cloak from a hook on the wall. It was heavy, waxed, its surface still slick with the grease that would keep the sleet from soaking through. They wrapped it around their shoulders, and the grey eyes closed for a moment as the warmth took hold. Then they were moving again, stripping wires, prying open panels, taking everything that could be taken.
Ash’s nose was bleeding. The black fluid—not quite blood, not quite the green corruption—dripped down his lip and spattered onto the Fuel-Core’s casing. The Rig was groaning. The bio-needles were a constant, grinding ache in his spine. Every time he commanded the iron hand to grip or tear or lift, the feedback loop between his nerves and the hydraulic pistons sent a fresh spike of pain through his mummified stump. But the Fuel-Core was warm in his grip. The rations were solid. The cloak was heavy on the stranger’s shoulders.
He had traded blood for fuel. Pain for power. It was an investment, and it would keep them moving through the blizzard, through the mud-flats, through whatever lay between them and the Iron Grave.
They left the Walking Scrapper to sink into the mud. The storm was closing in again, the sleet thickening into a wall of white that swallowed the horizon. But they were no longer refugees. They were no longer cargo and carrier. Ash walked with the Rig’s heavy, hydraulic stride, the iron hand cradling the Fuel-Core against his chest, the green light from his eyes cutting through the blizzard like a beacon. The stranger walked beside him, wrapped in oil-skin, the hook-blade hanging at their hip, their grey eyes fixed on the distant, invisible point where the Iron Grave was waiting.
A hunting party. Small. Wounded. But armed. Fueled. Cloaked against the cold. They had teeth now. They had fire. And the wasteland, vast and frozen and hungry, did not yet know what it had just armed.