A plan begins to form in the half-spoiled pumpkin I call a head. Normally, I don’t play with plans. Planning is a concession fallen into by those who do not have totally sweet muscles and a big sword. But I’m not perfect, and things have moved on without me while I was underground. Sitting at my desk, I crumple a piece of paper into a ball and light it on fire in my ashtray.

A summons. From AERO.

They must’ve come by sometime yesterday to try and collect me. I wasn’t here, so they stuck a notice to my door. I’m to report to the AERO processing building in Sector Three for interview, inspection, and, in the event that they don’t like what they see and hear, detention. Noncompliance means an upgraded threat category. Which means I become a fugitive.

I’ve also got some messages.

One from the Lieutenant. He hopes my op is going well, and informs me that the two pyromancers are awake. Horsebreaker came to just a couple hours after hospitalization. Littlerock took longer, but is also expected to make a full recovery. He wasn’t able to get in on the interview, but he does know that both of them are landed in the clinic for observation. Under guard. They’re to be remanded to Watch custody on suspicion of murder the instant they’re declared medically sound. All told, those two are having an even shittier week than me.

Then another message from Deepwell. And one from Em. And one from Voldzet. Another one from Voldzet. And one from Berix.

I’ll digest all these into the pile of shit they amount to - the inquest came down in the middle of the evening while I was sitting on my ass. The High Marshal lost too much ground against Lord Rediron and his coalition within the Tribunal, and the media did its job as well as it ever does. They fanned the flames, and the resulting public outcry made it politically unsound for the moderates in the Tribunal to stay firm. The people want answers. Lord Rediron wants answers. Usually, the one answer to all these questions is blood.

Emaphra, Littlerock, Horsebreaker, Delpo, old Ex-General Highclaw, and myself are all under either warrant or arrest, among some others. Apparently Em went quietly. She’s in detention at the AERO facility now.

Voldzet wants blood for blood. They’ve put their hands on his little girl and he’s killed for far less than that. His plan is to start throwing darts at a Dynamic Brotherhood personnel registry and murder whoever he hits until they give her back. He held out on sowing mayhem from the shadows only long enough to hear my report. He’s not mad. Voldzet doesn’t get mad. He’s just explaining what happens next. But it’ll lead to a street war, and we don’t need that right now. No one does.

I might have a better solution. So I call him and tell him so. At first he’s not having it. After listening to my plan, he’s still not having it, but he’s willing to hold off and wait just long enough for me to try my way. If it doesn’t work, or any harm comes to Emaphra, the Surgeons will reply with a little harm of their own. And no one does harm like a Surgeon.

Five in the morning.

I light a smoke and take in that warm dawn wind. The city is still abed, wisps of dreamstuff still clinging. Or most of it is, anyway. Some people aren’t. For some people, there are no dreams. Some people are in cells, being put to the question.

I walk out of my apartment, into the old waterway. Up the stairs and onto the street. Through an old unused door and into the old unused water utility building that sits on top of my house. Climb up to the moldering concrete roof. Look toward the budding sunrise. Already cloudy. That sky’s gonna break any day now. The brand new sunlight casts an insane watercolor nova of colors through all the rain that hasn’t arrived yet.

I’m awake too.

And I’ll fucking drag everyone into the waking world with me.

Starting with Tennima.

She picks up after only a couple rings. Up early. Or didn’t sleep.

“I was wondering when you were going to fucking call. I hope whatever you found down there was worth it, because-”

“How soon can you get to the arena.”

“... In twenty minutes. Why?”

“I have a broken, unconscious robot wizard tied up in my apartment and I would like you to fix him.”

“You have a. The. You caught it? You were right?”

“I’m right about everything. A decade in you’d think you’d know by now. It’s an animech, no doubt about it. And it can fucking do magic. I can show you the burns on my coat. You’re the only person in the city I know who’s insane enough to be an animech engineer, so.”

Silence on the other end.

I continue, “I know it’s asking a lot. Getting involved with this is basically jumping into boiling water. But you’re the only one I can turn t-”

“Baulric, I’d do this just for the historical precedent, let alone the fact that it might be the only thing between us and a mage pogrom. Get to the arena, I’ll meet you there.”

I wonder how many people have ever walked through Wellspring City with a busted malfunctioning robot wizard in their backpacks before. Probably not that many, is my guess.

I tune in to the early morning forecast on the radio and pay particular attention to the Wellwarden patrol patterns. I don’t know if a Wellwarden would be able to pick up on Niner, but Rocky can, and he’s the closest thing to a Wellwarden I’ve ever met. I don’t want to chance it. I have to take a detour through some Sector Eleven backstreets to avoid one Warden (a minor disaster - every time a Wellwarden crosses the Gate Thoroughfare the entire global economy grinds to a halt for about fifteen minutes), but apart from that everything’s ducky. Springberry’s on watch at the gate again. He lets me through without any grief because Ten called ahead, but I can tell he’s itching to search my bag. Maybe next time, pal.

Ten intercepts me in the middle of the pitch. Nobody’s here, and I’m glad for it. The less eyes on this situation the better.

It’s a strangely picturesque scene. I don’t think I’ve ever seen the League field under an overcast sky before. It casts the color of the dirt very differently. And there’s little Ten, smoking a cigarette right in the middle of the wide open space. Once she sees me, she wordlessly starts toward her garage, where Mr. Crunch is waiting. He’s playing with his toys. Looks like the same shock absorber I saw him playing with the other day.

When we arrive, he shakes the ground by standing up and thuds over to me. The iron titan looms over my head, frowning, because he can’t make any other facial expression.

“Beewop.”

Crunch can’t pronounce my name, so I’m Beewop, until Ten can figure out how to properly set him up with language protocol.

I give him a playful punch in the chest. “Mornin’, Crunchy.”

He laughs, or does the noise that approximates laughter. “Beewop.”

From inside the garage, Ten says while pulling out tools, “Leave Uncle Baulric alone and play with your toys, Crunch. We have work to do.”

The giant stomps back inside and gingerly lowers all three tons of its body into the corner, where it continues fiddling with the pile of castoff parts and rusty trinkets he likes.

Workbench now laden with apparatus both familiar and esoteric, Ten hits a lever on the wall, and the huge yellow automech charging rack in the middle of the room reclines backward until it’s lying flat like a surgical table.

She motions toward it. “Lay it out there.”

I take the big equipment bag off my back and dump Niner out all over the table. He’s a complete mess, but I take all his clothes off and get him into the best arrangement I can. Now that he’s under sterile white fluorescents and naked as the day he was built, he looks… this is going to sound weird, but beautiful. And sad. Without all the padding he’s really not that big. He doesn’t look anything like the automechs you see walking around the city. There’s an artistry to his design that you can see even through all the smashing I had to do.

The weirdest part of him that I can immediately identify is the upper arms. They’re why his shoulders looked so lumpy to me - they’re large rotating racks, like the cylinder of an old revolver handgun. But instead of recesses to put bullets in, these two drums have brackets that are loaded with curious canister-shaped things. Each of them has engravings all over the outside, and one large embossed symbol somewhere on it.

One has a picture of a flame. Another, a wave of water. And a third looks like a simple representation of a gust of wind.

Magic bottles.

Tennima just looks down at the construct silently, for a while. Eyes jittering all over, trying to take it all in at once.

“This is amazing.”

I nod. “Robot wizard.”

“Did you have to fuck it up this badly?”

“Yeah. If it makes you feel better, it told me to.”

“... What.”

I give her the whole story. I’ve never seen Ten so dumbstruck. She even makes me cable out some of the footage to a monitor so she can see Niner in action for herself.

Once done, she goes back to admiring the machine on her table. Her eyes might as well be fixed with glue.

“I’ve never, ever seen anything like this. I’ve never heard of or read about anything like this. I have so many goddamn questions.”

“Yeah, you and me both.”

“Shielding… shielding. It was very emphatic about that. That’s fascinating - it knew what was wrong with it and came up with a fix all by itself. It just couldn’t implement it. That says so much about this thing’s mind. That’s problem solving. Self-awareness. Self-preservation. So many things humans take for granted, but have dodged roboticists for decades.”

She huffs smoke and stares, almost motionless, like a fuming statue of some Queen of the Foundry.

“And that’s why it’s been… acting the way it has? No shielding?”

“We can’t know for sure until we install the shields and get it back online, but I think that’s the most reasonable theory. Whoever made this, whenever it was made, it was made without appropriate EM insulation. Humans don’t have EM insulation, but our brains can’t have currents induced in them. Automechs can. My bet is that these transmissions you mentioned were literally too much for its brain to handle. I think whoever designed this never imagined that it would encounter so much ambient or directed EM radiation, and just never accounted for it like we do today.”

I frown. “What do you mean, like we do today?”

She frowns back. “What do you mean? This thing is hundreds of years old. I can tell just from glancing at it.”

“Hundreds of years? As in triple fucking digits?”

“Yeah. Parts of it are, at least. You can tell just by the outer chassis and these rotating rack mechanisms. The metal. It’s well-forged, but it was done manually, no machine assistance. You can even see some stray hammer marks in some of the plates.” She points to a few on Niner’s chest, which I never would have noticed. “And the metal is good, and clean, but very outdated. Modern metallurgy made this titanium structural alloy obsolete… a while ago. It’s stuff I’ve seen in books, not any real workshop today.”

“So the Brotherhood didn’t build this.”

She scoffs. “Well not recently, no. Assuming they were willing to go back on their doctrine against automechs in the first place… no, see, that doesn’t make sense either. Either this predates the invention of the automech by a long, long while, or they went against their code and built one using very obsolete engineering techniques. Something’s funky either way.”

My frown is becoming permanent. “You saw the footage, though. Those kinds of speech synthesizers didn’t exist post-Rec or anything.”

“Nope. See how this arm isn’t the same color as the other one?”

I look, and they’re not. It’s subtle, but one is slightly darker and more matte.

“Most of this is old as hell, not all of it. Someone worked on this over time. Replacing some parts, adding new ones. Including the ability to talk, at one point. I’m not going to be able to be specific until I get in there. But its shielding problem makes sense if you look at it being built at a time where ambient noise wasn’t really a problem.”

I look down at Niner’s weird, lifeless head.

“He was hearing voices.”

She grabs a power driver and pulls her goggles down. “Maybe. There’s no way of knowing what all that signal induced in this thing’s brain, but from the footage I saw, it looks like it was pretty awful. Maybe it was like some kind of debilitating mental disorder. Or something else. Ugh, these fucking bolts are irregular.” She trades the power driver for a huge adjustable wrench. “Old fashioned way, then.”

Her bright emerald eyes land on mine. “This might take a while. I don’t think it’ll be a complicated install, but this is a totally foreign platform entirely made of custom hardware. My computers probably won’t be able to talk to it, so I’ll have some serious research and coding to do. And that’s just getting the thing awake and thinking. Putting its arms and legs back into working order is gonna need custom forging, realignments, power plant examination, the works. Could even be days, depending.”

I nod. “Okay. For right now, just focus on waking him up and washing out his brain. I need him to be able to think and talk. We can walk and run later.”

She raises an eyebrow. “What are you planning?”

I smile, but I don’t say a word.

After scrambling around for a little bit begging and borrowing some pieces of specialist equipment, I get on the train toward Sector Three. Those last eight words are usually spoken in a much more funereal tone, and under armed escort, but hey, I’m just a free guy minding his own business. For the moment.

All the early morning commuters get pissy with me before I climb on. One particularly incensed woman in a gray skirt throws her coffee at me, which frankly costs her a lot more than it damages me, in the long run. The instant my ID lights up the platform, I see a couple people start dialing on their comms. Good citizens just doing their duty, reporting a wanted aberration when they see one. As if the tollbooth didn’t flag my location the instant I scanned in. If I was headed anywhere other than Sector Three, they’d be calling a full halt on this line before diverting my car to go there anyway, so. It feels good to be all cooperative and whatnot.

I call Deepwell while the car carries me over the city and under the clouds.

“Featherlight. You’d better be on a train toward the AERO office.”

“I am, actually. You know, the O in ‘AERO’ stands for Office. AERO office is kind of redundant. And inaccurate, frankly. I don’t know any offices that have quite so many armed guards and holding cells.”

He sighs. “If you just… cooperate, it’ll all shake out. Nobody has any evidence that can put you near anywhere near the killings. The cross-investigation might take a while-”

“Weeks, mhm, maybe months.”

“- but I think that’s better than the alternative.”

“The alternative is just me living in the Subterrane for the rest of my life. Have you seen the people down there? I’d be their king within a season. Your argument sucks, Deepwell.”

“Yeah. Yeah I guess it does.” I hear him light a smoke exhaustedly.

“And they’ve got Em. She’s a pyromancer, they’ll hold her for who knows how long while they take their time pretending to sort all this out. She’ll lose the orphanage. Since her magic came in she’s barely been able to live rent payment to rent payment, the fact she was able to keep her certifications at all is a miracle.”

“... I’m sorry, they’ve got who?”

“Oh. My uh. One of my friends.”

“One of your friends has an orphanage?”

“Runs it, yeah. Family business from her mom’s side. For now, that is. She’s a very kind and loving person, Deepwell. Sacrifices a lot. None of us deserve her at all, least of all the fucking Dynamic Brotherhood. Yet there in their cells she sits. So, I’m going to get her out. Along with all the other people they’ve wrongfully imprisoned. Even Highclaw, though the idea of Highclaw being executed as an example to the rest of the arcane community is deliciously ironic.”

“First of all, no one liked Highclaw even before his magic came in. Second of all no you are not going to do that.”

“Do you remember all that shit I said about being tired of sitting around, Lieutenant? In the car?”

“... Yeah.”

“Well I’m also tired of eating the shit people throw at me. It’s my turn to throw some.”

“Featherlight, if you start a fight at AERO during an inquest, they will probably just kill you. And they’d have jurisdiction. The gods will not be able to protect you, much less me.”

“Then it’s a damn good thing I’m not planning on starting a fight. You know me, Deepwell, I’m not the first punch kind of guy.”

“... You kind of are, though.”

“Well not this time. There’s more at stake than just me and my fun. Okay, here’s the platform. You’d better get down here with some backup if you wanna get out ahead of this. Or just let Tallowmire find out about it in about twenty minutes, whichever you think is funnier.”

“Don’t do anything stupid, Featherlight.”

“Too late.”

I hang up and step off the platform, to a whole gallery of dirty looks from people who look like they’ve never encountered a wrinkle in their whole steam-pressed double-breasted lives. I walk past them and out into the Sector Three streets.

Ah, Three. I haven’t been here since my last inspection. Pretty much everything is one shade of stony gray or another, and the vista is all orderly blocks and angles. The buildings are tall and imposing, and seem to be staring down at you, like they think you're up to something. All the Watchmen and Judicators walking around are staring at you, because they definitely think you're up to something. Especially me. I’m not even wearing a shirt.

I can only think of three reasons to willingly visit Sector Three. Gray is your favorite color, you think criminal justice is hysterical, or you want to commit an atrocity, but you're an impatient little weirdo and you want to do it in the one place where you can get arrested, sentenced, and executed all in the same afternoon. For the most part, the only people who live here are lawyers, judges, Watch officers, and people with enough money to afford housing in the only virtually crime-free part of the city.

Paradoxically enough, it's something of an open secret that a lot of that last group are criminals, because crime is one of the only things that pays that well. They're just the kind of criminals that wear suits and are really good at pretending they're something else while bribing the only people with the power to stop them. Bigshot gang leaders, really talented thieves, crooked executives, politicians, et cetera. The kind of people that know the long arm of the law has a much harder time grabbing you if you stuff its hand with cash first.

AERO Central isn’t hard to find. It’s the gigantic rectangular brutalist monster squatting like a concrete bullfrog on the Iron Circus’s south side. It’s even got the warts - weird little angular protrusions jutting off its back and flanks, like this is the only building in the city that’s figured out how to reproduce by budding. One eye above the glass teeth - the carved insignia of the Dynamic Brotherhood. A fist grasping a lightning bolt, within a nine-pointed star.

Standing in front of it, out in the middle of the street with all the gray little people flowing past me, I wish I’d brought my sword. I’m getting used to having it with me. And before me is a great beast that must be slain. I’m going to have to do it from the inside, with words and pictures instead of blades and guns. People have been killed by this monster for trying less. I’ll just have to hope their own complacency and my… stupidity? Daring. Daring is the present tense of stupidity. Are going to be enough to see me through to the end.

I wish it was anyone else standing here, having to do this. It would be grand to just go home. Let Voldzet have his way. Let Ten have the machine man. Have some faith in the system and let it process my friends. Things are the way they are, right? And they’re gonna be how they’re gonna be. I’m just one guy with a couple of cameras and some very capable associates.

Gods above and below, it would be so, so easy to not risk my own hide, and let someone else spit in the creature’s eye.

I huff a tired breath, and walk directly into the mouth of the monster.