The transport lurched, and Jinx's head bounced off the porthole glass.
The crawler was a twenty-ton coffin on treads, bone-plated hull, steam-driven engine, no suspension worth mentioning. The Reavers called it "The Meat Wagon," which was either dark humor or accurate product description, depending on the mission. Inside, the air stank of oil, sweat, and something older: rust and dried blood baked into the metal from decades of hard use.
'Eight hours,' the rookie thought, rubbing the fresh bruise. 'Eight hours of this.'
He hadn't slept. Couldn't sleep. None of them could, except Boiler, whose cooling suit hummed in a low mechanical snore. The massive Heavy sat motionless, chin tucked against his chest, steam-cannon cradled in his arms like a sleeping child. How he stayed upright through the constant jolts was a mystery. Maybe he'd rusted in place. Maybe he was dead and nobody had noticed.
The transport shuddered again. Something crashed beneath them, a pothole, a corpse, a body that wasn't quite dead yet. It didn't matter. The driver didn't slow.
Through the dirty porthole, the Dis Highway stretched on.
---
Jinx had never seen so many people.
Not people. That was the wrong word. Inventory. That's what Varris would say. The slave columns shuffled along the margins of the road, manacled souls connected by rust-chains that clinked with every shuffling step. Handlers walked beside them with shock-prods, their faces blank, their movements mechanical. One prodded a stumbling figure back into line without looking. Muscle memory. You didn't need to see the merchandise to keep it moving.
'That could've been me,' Jinx thought, then immediately killed the thought. Bad luck to think things like that. The Stigmata liked to listen.
He pressed his face closer to the glass. The columns never ended. They stretched behind them, ahead of them, branching off at junctions he couldn't count. How many slaves passed through this road every day? A thousand? Ten thousand? Where did they all come from? Where were they all going?
Somewhere worse, probably. That's how it worked here. Every destination was worse than the last.
---
The architecture changed the further they traveled.
Dis was an amalgamation, that was the only word for it. Like someone had taken a thousand cities from a thousand different eras and crushed them together, layer upon layer, until the weight compressed them into something new. Something unnatural.
Near the Kennels, the buildings had been brutalist slabs of concrete and bone-reinforced steel. Industrial. Almost modern, if you could call anything in Hell modern. But as the transport rumbled outward, the styles shifted. Gothic spires rose beside Byzantine domes. Wooden shacks from forgotten centuries leaned against stone temples covered in dead languages. A pagoda stood wedged between two tenement blocks, its eaves charred black but still standing.
And everywhere, the rust.
The rain had stopped an hour ago, but its residue coated everything — roads, walls, the transport's hull. Brown-red streaks dripped from every surface, pooling in the gutters, staining the chains of the slave columns. Jinx had been in Hell for six months. He still wasn't used to the smell. Iron and decay. Blood that never quite dried.
Twitch spat a glob of grey paste onto the floor. His eyes were too wide, pupils shrunk to pinpricks from the Grit, the residue still visible in the grey crust at the corners of his mouth. His fingers kept twitching, tapping rhythms on his thigh that had no pattern.
"Approaching the outer districts." The scout's voice came too fast, words tumbling over each other. "Architecture gets worse from here. Less maintained. More collapsed. More places to hide. More places to get hidden, if you know what I mean—"
"Twitch." Varris didn't look up from his warhammer. "Breathe."
The scout's jaw clenched. He pulled his goggles down over his eyes, multi-lens arrays that clicked and whirred as they auto-focused, and pressed his face to the porthole like he could see through the rust-rain by sheer paranoia.
"Less authority out here," Varris continued. "Keep your eyes open."
"My eyes are always open, Sarge." Twitch tapped the goggles. His leg was still twitching. "That's the problem."
---
The checkpoint emerged from the grey like a tumor.
It squatted across the highway, a fortified chokepoint of scrap metal and sandbags, manned by figures in patchwork armor who watched the approaching traffic with the patient hunger of toll collectors. Torches burned at intervals, casting flickering light across a sign that someone had bolted above the gate: polished bones lashed together into a frame, the words carved deep and painted in dry, brownish-red blood that had long since faded to rust.
Jinx had never heard of the Bone Collectors. But then, he'd never been this far from the Garrison Belt after he left the Hatchery Fields in S-01. Out here on the Surface, different factions held different ground. The Kennels were a power — Region U-03 of the Under-Sprawl, the Garrison Belt — but that meant nothing to a Surface gang who'd never descended past the Iron Crust.
The crawler slowed. Ahead, a corpse-cart had been pulled aside, its drivers arguing with a checkpoint guard while others rifled through the stacked bodies. Looking for contraband, probably. Or just fresh organs. Hard to tell the difference.
Craw's hands started rubbing.
"Friction heating," Suture observed, not looking up from the needle she was threading. "Lieutenant's nervous."
"Shut up," Craw hissed.
"Just an observation. Medical concern." The medic's smile was all teeth. "Wouldn't want you to set yourself on fire before the actual fighting."
The transport ground to a halt. Through the front viewport, Jinx could see a guard approaching, heavyset, bored, carrying a ledger bound in stretched human skin. Standard shakedown. Jinx had seen a dozen of them since joining the Reavers.
This one wouldn't end the same way.
---
The rear hatch opened, and the guard's eyes immediately found Desmond.
It was always like that. Something about the General drew attention the way gravity drew mass. He sat in the shadows at the back of the transport, amber eyes gleaming like coins in the dark, and the guard's expression shifted from boredom to calculation in the space of a heartbeat.
'Weighing him,' Jinx realized. 'Wondering if he's worth the trouble.'
The guard's ledger lowered.
"Bone Collector checkpoint," he announced, his voice carefully neutral.
"All traffic subject to tithe and inspection. State your affiliation and—"
He stopped.
Desmond hadn't moved. Hadn't spoken. But something in the transport had shifted. The metal floor groaned. The guard's eyes flicked downward, toward the General's feet, where the steel plate was beginning to sag under invisible weight.
"Garrison Belt," Desmond said. His voice was soft. Almost pleasant. "Under-Sprawl. The Kennels."
The guard's expression flickered. Calculating. Jinx could almost see the arithmetic happening behind his eyes: a Garrison Belt transport, this far out, meant military. The hull plating meant resources. The General's calm meant Adept.
And you didn't shake down an Adept unless you had an Adept of your own.
"The Kennels." The guard's tone shifted — not deferential, but careful. "Long way from the Belt."
"Retrieval operation." Desmond extended a leather folder. He didn't lean forward, didn't stand. Made the man come to him. "Transit authorization. Signed by the Kennel Master."
The guard hesitated. Looked at the folder. Looked at Desmond. Looked at Boiler, who had woken and was now watching the exchange with the calm attention of an artillery piece acquiring a target.
Three seconds of silence.
'He's going to challenge it,' Jinx thought. His hand drifted toward his sidearm. 'He's going to push, and then—'
The guard took the folder. Opened it. Read.
His jaw tightened. The Bone Collectors were a Surface power, but the Kennels were Under-Sprawl. Different Layer, different jurisdiction. And whoever had signed this document had the authority to make inter-Layer agreements. That meant connections. That meant politics.
That meant this wasn't worth the trouble.
"Transit approved." The ledger snapped shut. "Don't linger in our territory, General."
He stepped back. The hatch closed. The Meat Wagon lurched forward.
And just like that, they were through.
---
Varris let out a breath he'd been holding. "I hate checkpoints."
"Everyone hates checkpoints," Twitch replied, already chewing again. "That's why they exist. Power and hatred. The building blocks of civilization."
"Hell of a philosophy."
"Hell of a place."
Jinx said nothing. He was still watching Desmond, who had returned the folder to somewhere inside his coat and resumed his stillness. The General's gaze had drifted to the forward viewport, where the road ahead dissolved into grey.
The architecture was changing again. Less compressed. More ruined. The buildings weren't just worn down here — they were collapsing. Crumbling. Returning to rubble.
And beyond them, Jinx could see it: the edge of the world.
The Ash Coast.
Where the road ended. Where the rust-rain stopped. Where the familiar structure of Dis gave way to... nothing.
Just grey.
"Four hours to the Coast," Varris announced. "Then we're off-road. Then we're in the Wastes."
Nobody replied.
Boiler's cooling suit hummed. Suture threaded another needle. Twitch chewed. Craw's hands rubbed themselves raw inside his gloves.
And somewhere ahead, in the grey that swallowed everything, something screamed.
Not a scream. A voice. A specific voice. Familiar.
"Sam?" The word floated through the fog, distant, confused.
"Sam, is that you? Where are you, baby?"
Jinx's blood went cold.
That was his mother's voice. His dead mother's voice. The woman who'd overdosed when he was twelve, who'd called for him in the hospital with that same confused terror before the machines flatlined.
'She's not out there. She can't be out there. She's—'
The fog laughed. A dozen voices joined the laughter, then a hundred, then silence.
The road stretched on.