I opened my mouth to ask—
Something tore through my right arm.
The pain was so sudden that I struck the edge of the table with my knee. My fingers clenched. All five of them. I felt every joint and nail pulled backward.
Lust turned toward me.
Her face stretched into light.
The table disappeared beneath my hands. The stars went with it.
Then someone was holding me down.
"Keep his shoulder still!"
I screamed through clenched teeth.
There was light above me. White cloth. A face behind a stained mask. Something cold pressed against my chest while something else burned inside my arm.
"Kaspar. Hold still. We have to finish."
I tried to turn toward the voice.
Hands caught my head.
"Hold still!"
Pain fired from my shoulder to the tips of my fingers. It struck in separate bursts. Each one arched my back off the surface beneath me.
There was no space between them to breathe.
A man bent over my right side. Green light shone between his fingers. His sleeves were wet to the elbow.
Something snapped inside my shoulder.
It wasn't like the burning. It was sharp and dry, a crack of light jumping between two points, and it ran down the length of an arm that didn't feel like mine. My teeth clicked together. The air smelled of scorched metal.
"The last channel isn't seated," the man said.
"Then seat it."
"I'm trying. We have to finish connecting the arm before his body rejects the link."
"Almost," someone said. "Stay with us."
Another snap tore through me. Then another, faster, from my collarbone to fingertips I couldn't find.
My heels struck something hard. A metal instrument clattered to the floor.
"Sedate him!"
"We already—"
"Then give him more! He's going back into shock!"
A woman answered from somewhere beyond my feet.
"The healing is at its limit. If we push another restoration through him, we lose him."
"Then stop pushing and hold what you have!"
The light over my shoulder trembled.
Something pressed against the inside of my left elbow. A small, sharp pain.
"Breathe, Kaspar."
I tried.
My lungs caught halfway through.
"Again."
A hand settled against my forehead.
"Good. Again."
The room softened.
This time, the darkness held no stars.
I woke to someone peeling cloth from my side.
The dressing resisted. A woman supported the skin with two fingers and worked warm water beneath the stuck edge.
"Slowly," I whispered.
Her hand stopped.
For a moment, she looked at my face instead of the wound.
"There you are."
Morning light lay across the blanket.
Morning.
My heart stumbled.
I tried to sit up.
Pain caught beneath my ribs and drove me flat again.
"None of that." The woman set the dressing aside. "You've pulled this open once already."
I looked toward the right side of the bed.
My arm lay beneath the blanket.
I tried to move my fingers.
Something clenched in empty space.
"Where?"
"Grenzheim. Garrison infirmary."
I stared at her.
She dipped a cloth into a basin and wiped dried blood from my hip. The water had already gone pink.
"You were brought from the western installation. Doctor Brennan is overseeing your treatment."
"How long?"
She glanced toward the door.
"I'll fetch him when we're finished."
"How long?"
Her expression changed slightly.
"Three days."
My mouth opened, but I had no question left that she could answer.
The next few days arrived in pieces.
A spoon against my lower lip. Broth cooling before I managed to swallow it.
Someone lifting my head to change the pillow.
A man at the foot of the bed asking whether I knew my name.
"Kaspar."
"And where are you?"
I told him.
"Good. Stay with me a moment longer."
I never managed it.
Sometimes I woke with my right hand twisted into a fist so tight that I could feel the nails digging into my palm.
Sometimes the fingers were burning.
Once, I spent an hour trying to straighten the little finger. It had bent beneath the others. I could feel the angle.
Doctor Brennan stood beside the bed one afternoon, holding my left wrist while he watched the pulse beat beneath the skin.
"You've made this more difficult than it needed to be," he said.
He released my wrist.
"The tissue around your injuries is unusually dense. Closing a wound is one thing. Reestablishing blood flow through damaged tissue that resists the spell is another."
I looked at the dressing around my shoulder.
"What were you doing?"
"When you woke during treatment?"
I nodded.
"Preserving what we could. Removing what we couldn't."
He drew the blanket back from my leg.
I could remember the wind blade opening it.
The memory was clearer than the last several days.
"Most of the damage is repaired," Brennan said. "That doesn't mean you're fit to stand."
He pulled the blanket back into place.
"Keep it gentle while you're awake. No experiments. No testing your limits. If I find you trying to tear this room apart, I'll have the bed bolted to the floor."
"I wouldn't dream."
He left me with a cup I could barely lift.
Thom came when I could remain awake long enough.
His boots stopped outside the door. There was a quiet exchange with someone in the corridor.
He carried a folded stack of newspapers beneath his left arm.
His mechanical hand closed the door.
Neither of us spoke.
There was a cut above his eyebrow. Three stitches. His uniform had been cleaned, but one sleeve bore a pale line where blood had soaked into it.
"Kaspar."
"Did we... hold?"
He nodded.
"We did."
I let my head rest against the pillow.
Thom pulled a chair beside the bed and sat.
"It was ugly for the first night. We had enough cover to crouch behind and not much else."
"How many?"
His eyes stayed on mine.
"Three dead. Henrik and two of the volunteers."
I swallowed.
"One in the first large spell," Thom continued. "The other beneath the collapsed timber. Several wounded badly enough that they're still here."
"What happened afterward?"
"Wendt got the adjoining sectors moving."
He placed the newspapers on his knee.
"They kept enough attention on the rest of the line that the elves couldn't simply walk everything west. We fortified and got more ammunition after that."
"And the grid?"
"Being extended. The engineers are figuring out how to relocate."
His mouth moved toward a smile.
"The elves tried to face us," he said. "Small groups. Testing the approaches. We drove them off. They're improving their defenses."
He lifted the top newspaper.
Across the front page, large black letters announced the century's greatest attack.
Beneath them was a grainy reproduction of men hauling a copper plate into place. A broken magi-car stood behind them. One of the figures had a shovel lifted over his shoulder.
"Every paper has it," Thom said. "The first human advance in living memory."
"Who took that?"
"The Chronicle man. He's a crazy son of a bitch."
I looked at him.
"He crossed with a supply team and got himself stranded on our side."
Thom set the paper on the table.
"There are messages waiting. Varen's office. High Command. Your team."
His brass fingers settled over the living ones.
"Henrik's funeral was four days ago. Brennan said moving you wasn't possible."
Thom continued carefully.
"He was buried with Knight's honors."
I looked at the newspaper.
"They put the sword with him?"
"What we recovered."
I nodded once.
I wanted to ask whether someone had cleaned his face. Whether they had put him back together before closing the coffin. Whether his hands were still locked around the hilt when they tried to take it away.
Thom waited.
I bit down harder until pain spread through my teeth.
I closed my eyes.
My stomach turned.
Thom reached for the water cup.
I took it with my left hand before he could help.
Water shook against the rim.
Neither of us mentioned it.
Before he left, Thom asked to see the arm.
I looked toward the blanket.
Thom waited until I pulled the blanket aside.
Black metal lay against white linen.
The replacement began beneath a padded fitting around the shortened upper arm. From there, overlapping dark plates narrowed toward an articulated elbow. Smaller plates enclosed the forearm. The hand rested palm-down beside my hip.
Fine glyphs covered the surface.
They were smaller than the markings on Thom's prosthetic. Some lay exposed in shallow channels. Others disappeared beneath joints or continued across the edges of overlapping plates.
"They did everything they could," Thom said.
I tried to lift my hand.
The metal thumb moved.
Nothing else.
Pain flashed through the palm that wasn't there.
I turned toward him.
"What moves it?"
"A crystal in the forearm, along with your internal mana. The glyphs carry what you want down to the fingers." He held up his own hand. "Don't ask me how. I'm a sergeant, not an engineer. Mine ends below the elbow. Yours needs to do more. That means more training."
The metal fingers opened one at a time.
He leaned forward and touched a recessed catch near my wrist.
A plate lifted the width of a fingernail. Beneath it, dark space ran back along the inside of the forearm. Then he pressed it shut.
"Keep grit out of the joints. If the elbow begins stuttering, stop using it."
He placed a folded cloth beside the metal fingers.
"Try to pick that up."
My right hand had held a sword through hundreds of deaths. I knew the distance between the heel of my palm and the first knuckle of every finger. I knew how a hilt shifted when my grip was too tight.
I tried to lift a scrap of cloth.
The prosthetic scraped over the sheet.
Its fingers closed before reaching the fabric.
The empty fist clicked shut.
I felt nothing.
"Again," Thom said.
I looked at the closed hand instead.
It had done what I asked. Too early, and too hard, but it had closed. That wasn't the same as not working.
Thom didn't ask for the second attempt.
"It can become good," he said. "Good enough that some days you forget about it."
"Almost as good as the original?"
"It can be, but it depends. You'll have to train, maybe even make a few upgrades. I only have two cores, so I can't spare any more mana for mine. But... well, you have a lot more than I do. Maybe you'll find a way to push it beyond their normal limits."
He flexed his mechanical fingers.
"But at least I can hold a hot pan without burning myself."
"Useful."
"I also broke three cups before I learned how gently I had to hold them."
After he left, I lay looking at the black plates.
Never the same. It doesn't need to be the same.
The original had been flesh, and I had already pushed flesh as far as I could.
This had screws and mana. I could push much further.
The watch was in the bedside drawer.
I opened it with my left hand and let the pale display rise above the blanket.
Messages filled the air.
Two levels of swordsmanship, and no hand to hold the sword. The skill was still mine. The hand was a part now, and parts could be changed.
I stared at the number.
I opened the entry.
Somewhere south of the ridge, elves were telling other elves about the white-haired human. A commander with one arm and no legs might be telling them too.
Good.
I closed the display.
Nearly two weeks after the ridge, Brennan let me leave the room.
"Walk," he said.
"I heard you."
"Walking doesn't mean running. It doesn't mean fighting elves. Am I clear?"
"Crystal."
He inspected the fitting one last time before letting the sleeve fall over it.
"No hard impacts. If the attachment hurts sharply, you stop."
I nodded.
He held my gaze until I did it again.
The first few days were nothing but learning how to live with the new arm.
I relearned the weight of a cup.
The first one slipped between the metal fingers and shattered against the floor. The second survived long enough for me to lift it, but I squeezed too hard when it tilted. The thin clay cracked beneath my grip. Water ran through the joints and dripped from the elbow.
The third cup reached my mouth.
That felt like a victory until I tried to put it down and crushed the handle.
Pens were worse.
I snapped one across the middle on my first attempt. The metal fingers closed too quickly, and the rune-etched shaft broke with a brittle crack, spraying black ink across my hand, the table, and the front of Brennan's notes.
He stared at the stains.
I stared back.
"That," he said, "was one of my good pens."
"I'll buy you another."
"You have money, so buy the infirmary a crate."
By the end of the second day, I could hold one without breaking it. I still couldn't write. The prosthetic had a strange sense of pressure. My name came out as a row of gouges and interrupted lines.
Sword work was out of the question.
That didn't stop me from asking.
Brennan answered by pointing at the door and telling two orderlies to throw me back into bed if I went near the training yard.
So I practiced with scraps of cloth, wooden blocks, spoons, buckles, and buttons. I opened and closed the hand until the glyph channels grew warm beneath the plates.
During the day, I taught the new hand obedience.
Open, close, turn. Release before the cup broke.
At night, I opened Mana Perception and watched it.
The glyphs lit along their channels like water finding a ditch. In the hand, the light ran clean. Near the fitting, where metal met what was left of me, it thinned and stuttered, as if something were drinking from it before it could pass.
I closed the fingers again. The light broke in the same place.
I didn't know what that meant. I didn't know whether Thom's arm did the same.
At the end of another week, I crossed the infirmary room without limping badly enough for Brennan to order me back to bed. I buttoned my own coat. I lifted a full cup, drank from it, and set it down without cracking the clay.
The shoulder still ached where flesh met the padded fitting. My thigh tightened after a few dozen steps. The wound beneath my ribs pulled whenever I breathed too deeply.
I fastened the pocket watch inside my coat and looked toward the infirmary door.
I couldn't stay in this room waiting to become ready.
The countdown was still moving. The Titan cannon remained unfinished. The elves had a portal somewhere in their capital, and in seven years that crossing would open.
Time hadn't stopped because I was wounded.