Vesper moved through the smog of District 9 like a shark through bloody water.
The "Holy Purge" was less a military operation and more a riot with state approval.
White-Blood squads kicked down doors, dragging coughing families into the street. They burned mattresses. They broke fingers looking for heresy in the bone structure. The air was thick with the smell of scorched fabric and the metallic tang of fear.
Vesper hated it. It was inefficient. It was messy. It was the kind of chaos that hid the very thing she was trying to find.
She stopped at the intersection of Third and Carbon. A junior officer was beating a kneeling man with the stock of his rifle. The man was screaming, confessing to crimes he hadn't committed just to make the pain stop.
Vesper reached out and caught the descending rifle stock. Her gauntlet slammed against the weapon, stopping it dead. The officer spun around, his visor flashing with a sudden, panicked light.
"Interference with a Purge is treason—"
He stopped when he saw the hydraulic hammer.
"He is confessing to theft," Vesper said. Her voice was flat, a low vibration that seemed to come from the iron floor. "We are hunting a phantom, not a pickpocket. You are wasting calories. You are creating noise where I need a signal."
"The High Priest ordered chaos," the officer sneered, blood flecking his visor. "He said to shake the hive."
Vesper looked at the kneeling man, then back to the officer. She didn't argue theology. She grabbed the barrel of the officer's rifle and squeezed. The ceramic composite crunched. The metal barrel bent forty degrees to the left. She released it.
"I am the Anvil," she said. "I do not shake. I strike. Get out of my sight."
She walked away, leaving the officer staring at his ruined weapon. She checked her tracker. The radiation trail was faint, dissipating in the wind, but she didn't need a Geiger counter to find the rat. She needed psychology.
The Null was smart. He used science, not faith. He wouldn't run to the slums where the chaos was thickest; that was a variable he couldn't control. He would seek structure. He would seek a place where the laws of physics were rigid, where lines of sight were clear, and where heavy machinery could be weaponized.
She looked up at the rusting underbelly of the Ribs. There was only one place in District 9 that still used Pre-Somatic hydraulics to regulate the air pressure.
The Steam Works.
Vesper adjusted her grip on the hammer. She didn't run. Running implied a chance of failure. She walked with the steady, inevitable pace of a landslide.
The Kill Box
The Steam Works was a cathedral of noise.
Massive pistons, each the size of a townhouse, hammered up and down in the dark, driving the ventilation fans that kept the district from suffocating.
The air here was hot, thick with grease and the rhythmic thump-hiss of pressurized steam. The "Hum" of the ship was deafening here, a subterranean roar that vibrated the teeth.
Kaelen sat on a catwalk thirty meters above the grinding machinery.
He was tired. The iodine tablets and the time-reversal scrub Doc had given him kept the organ failure at bay, but the fatigue remained. It sat in his marrow, heavy and cold. The scrub bought him forty-eight hours. After that, the physics would catch up.
He watched the door.
He had chosen this spot carefully. The walkway was narrow—single file only. The railing was rusted through. Below, the pistons churned with enough force to crush a tank.
Every angle led down.
The heavy iron door at the far end of the gantry groaned open. Vesper stepped inside.
She didn't look around. She didn't check the corners. She looked straight up, her helmet reflecting the orange glow of the furnace lights. She locked onto him instantly.
"You picked a loud room," she called out. Her voice cut through the mechanical din, amplified by the vox-caster in her gorget.
"Hoping the noise would hide your heartbeat?"
Kaelen didn't stand. He stayed seated on the crate, his legs dangling over the abyss.
"I picked a room with one exit," Kaelen said. His voice was flat, stripped of all resonance.
Vesper began to walk up the stairs.
Clang. Clang. Clang.
Each step shook the rusted metal. She was inevitable. A force of nature wrapped in white ceramic. She reached the catwalk. She stopped ten meters away. She didn't raise the hammer. The sheer mass of her presence filled the narrow space.
"You have something that belongs to the Church," she said.
"I have a lot of things," Kaelen replied. "Radiation poisoning. A criminal record. A bad attitude."
"The Key," Vesper said. She took a step forward. "Give it to me, and I'll make it quick. I'll break your neck. You won't feel the radiation rot your eyes out."
"Generous." Kaelen reached into his pocket. He pulled out the Cylinder.
Vesper tensed. Her muscles coiled, ready to close the distance in a blur of violence. Kaelen held the cylinder over the railing.
Below them, the pistons hammered.
Thump. Hiss.
If he dropped it, the cylinder would be ground into metal filings in less than a second. Vesper stopped. Her boot hovered an inch above the grating.
"Physics," Kaelen said, his voice calm.
"Gravity accelerates objects at 9.8 meters per second squared. You are ten meters away. You can cover that distance in roughly 1.5 seconds. It takes me 0.3 seconds to open my fingers. Do the math, Paladin."
Vesper stared at him. The silence stretched, tight as a bowstring. She looked at the cylinder, then at the grinding machinery below.
"You're bluffing," she said. "You didn't break into the Canker just to destroy the prize."
"I didn't break in for the prize," Kaelen corrected. "I broke in for the truth. And right now, the truth is useless to me if I'm dead. You know what this is. I saw the screen. I saw the map. You aren't protecting a relic, Vesper. You're protecting an instruction manual."
The name "Vesper" hung in the air, unauthorized. No one called the Anvil by her name. She went very still.
"Wake the Pilot," Kaelen continued. "The Church preaches the God is dead. A sacrifice. But you and I know corpses don't need cryogenics. They don't need pilots."
Vesper lowered the hammer. The head rested on the grating with a heavy thud.
"Heresy," she whispered. But there was no heat in it. Only exhaustion.
"It's not heresy if it's true," Kaelen said. "I have the Key. You have the access to the Vault where the Manual of Pre-Deity Physics is kept. Alone, I'm a fugitive with a paperweight. Alone, you're a guard dog for a lie you don't believe in."
He gestured to the door behind her, to the sounds of the Purge outside.
"They're burning the district, Vesper. They're killing innocent people to find me. Is that the order you fight for? Chaos? Slaughter?"
Vesper looked back at the door. Through the grating, she could see the red glow of the searchlights sweeping the district. Screams echoed up from below. A woman's voice, begging.
Then silence.
She turned back to Kaelen. She unclipped her helmet. A hiss of pressurized air escaped.
Kaelen braced for scars. Instead, he saw sharp features. Pale skin. Eyes the color of cold iron. Her hair was cropped short, utilitarian. She looked tired. Not the tiredness of sleep deprivation, but the tiredness of someone holding up a collapsing ceiling.
"The Vault is biometric," she said. "It requires a High Priest's retina to open. Or..."
She looked at her hammer.
"...sufficient force applied to a structural weak point."
Kaelen lowered the cylinder. He didn't put it away. "I need the book," he said. "To read the Key. To stop the noise."
"To wake the Pilot," Vesper corrected. She looked at the machinery below.
"If the God wakes... the magic ends. The Dictum fails. The floating cities fall."
"Maybe," Kaelen said. "Or maybe they finally fly."
Vesper looked at him for a long time. She was measuring his resolve. She respected force.
"The Purge is intensifying," she said.
"The White-Bloods will sweep this building in ten minutes. If they find you, they won't ask for the key. They'll just incinerate the room."
She turned around. She didn't offer him a hand.
"Stay close," she said. "If you fall behind, I leave you."
Kaelen pocketed the cylinder. He stood up, his legs trembling from the effort. The room tilted dangerously. He grabbed the railing to keep from pitching forward into the gears.
"Where are we going?"
Vesper didn't wait. She was already walking.
"We are going to rob a church."