Chapter 30 - The Weight of a Life

The top rung of the iron ladder groaned half an inch downward as Maria's heavy boot hit the crane's platform deck.

The sharp ring of stressed metal echoed along the narrow catwalk two hundred and fifty feet up. The girl vaulted through the rail opening without hesitation, holding the forty-pound greatsword gripped two-handed before her brigandine cuirass. Her breath hissed hot through parted lips, trailing faint wisps of black smoke that still dissipated from her throat.

The man lay huddled back against the cylindrical iron winch drum.

The four warped fragments of his cast-iron mask lay scattered across the grating floor, slick with the dark blood dripping from his jaw.

His hands were empty. The heavy six-shooter had vanished into the abyss, and the double-barreled carbine lay twisted six feet away, caked in soot from the grenade blast.

Maria closed the distance in three wide strides. The steel of her blade whipped upward, checking itself a mere two inches from the sniper's bare throat.

The gorge wind dragged grit between them.

"Get up," Maria ordered, her voice gravelly, thick with a visceral fury that set the tendons in her forearms vibrating against the leather hilt. "Get up and draw a knife, you coward. I want to see you try hitting me up close."

The man didn't move.

He kept his back plastered to the winch drum, long arms resting slack across the worn leather of his trousers.

He lifted his face slowly.

It was at that exact second that Maria's forty-pound blade froze in the air.

The sniper was no scarred, grizzled Legion veteran or dead-eyed bounty hunter tracking souls for scrip. He looked to be about their age, nineteen or twenty at most. His skin was starkly pale, almost ashen, lined with chemical burn scars that ran from his left cheek down to his collarbone.

Yet what arrested Maria's swing were his mouth and eyes.

His lower jaw lacked standard human lips. In their place, twin secondary mandibles, short and sheathed in dark chitin, met asymmetrically over needle teeth. And his eyes were not round with standard pupils. Four smaller orbs sat aligned in two tiers beneath his brow ridges, their faceted, glassy corneas mirroring the purple sky of the plain without blinking.

He was a native demon. A breed Maria had never encountered in Earth biology texts, nor among the market stalls of Low Ember.

Yet it was not the alien anatomy that stayed her hand.

It was the vacant hollow behind those eyes.

The youth wasn't shaking with terror. He wasn't begging for his life, nor was he reaching for a hidden boot knife with some treacherous twitch. He had simply given up. His shoulders slumped in the posture of someone who had been waiting for that blade to fall for a very long time.

There was a raw loneliness staring back from those dark lenses.

Maria couldn't pinpoint where the certainty originated. The interface held no terms to quantify it, yet she recognized the expression instantly, as if she could feel it in her own chest. It was the same look she had seen in stray dogs lying in the dirt by the train tracks back in the human city, waiting out the rain with nowhere to go. It was the face of the penal laborers she had watched in the foundries of Low Ember, men who had long forgotten their own names and labored only because their hearts pumped on mechanical momentum.

She looked down at the honed edge of her greatsword.

Over the past seven years, Maria had dismantled dozens of horrors. She had crushed the skulls of cog hounds, severed the limbs of twelve-foot automata, and cracked the carapace of the Black Boiler Colossus without a drop of hesitation in her grip.

Those things had been iron, grease, and drive trains. Blind abominations biting out of machine code or predatory starvation.

The entity before her now was a person.

A person bleeding from the nose, dressed in hand-stitched leather patched with heavy cobbler's twine, who had spent days shivering in the cold of an iron beam just to loot scrap copper so he could survive another week in this grease pit.

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Maria's fingers loosened by a fraction of a millimeter on the leather wrap.

I've never killed a person. Not someone who speaks, not someone who thinks.

The realization sank into her stomach with the weight of lead.

She wanted to despise him. He had ambushed Dante. That half-inch slug had nearly sheared the boy's arm off at the hatch minutes ago. Had the shot drifted two inches to the right, Dante would be lying dead on the floor with his head blown open.

The fury still burned in her chest, yet the blade refused to fall.

The sniper closed his multifaceted eyes, tilting his bloody chin aside, offering his pale neck where a thick pulse drummed erratic and fast. He was waiting for the cleave.

Maria ground her teeth so violently she tasted iron on her tongue.

"You piece of shit..." she growled between her teeth. "You're a miserable bastard."

She did not bring the sword down.

With a sharp flick of her right arm, Maria swept the forty-pound greatsword backward, driving its chisel point straight into the wooden planks of the catwalk with a heavy crack that split the planking down the grain.

Her left hand balled into an iron fist.

She did not trigger [Lead Impact]. She didn't spend a single point of Mana. She relied on the raw, unadorned leverage of her thirty-three Strength, pulling the punch just enough to keep from pulverizing the youth's skull against the steel drum.

Her left cross drove straight in, catching the side of the man's chitinous jaw with the dull thud of a rubber mallet striking timber.

BAM.

The sniper's head whipped sideways, slamming against the steel winch drum.

His multi-faceted eyes rolled back instantly, his body shedding all muscle tension as he slumped down the iron plating to collapse on his side across the gantry grating.

He was out cold. Air wheezed in short gasps through his broken nose, but consciousness had deserted him completely.

Maria stood over the motionless body for ten full seconds, breathing deeply through her nose, her left knuckles bruised red from the impact.

Sweat trickled down her brow, spattering the rusted plates beneath her boots.

Hurried, limping footsteps climbed the final ladder rungs behind her.

Dante emerged onto the platform, gripping the handrail with his right hand, his left sleeve torn and sodden with blood from the makeshift dressing. His chalk case hung unlatched at his belt, Mana primed to manifest another runic barrier.

He saw the forty-pound greatsword impaled in the timber floorboards.

Then his eyes fell upon the man sprawled on the grating, his face bloody, the shattered shards of his iron mask scattered around his head.

Dante stopped two paces away, slowly letting out his breath.

"You didn't kill him," Dante said. It wasn't a question, but a clinical observation, delivered in the neutral, detached cadence he reserved for interface logs.

Maria didn't look back. She kept her eyes on the unconscious youth on the deck.

"He had surrendered," she answered, her voice thick and gravelly. "He dropped his rifle and closed his eyes. I don't cut the throat of someone sitting in the dirt waiting to die."

Dante stepped over to the body with measured strides.

With the toe of his boot, he nudged the fragments of the iron mask aside and crouched beside the shooter. Using his uninjured right hand, he pulled back the collar of the leather duster to check the side of the neck.

There was no intake serial tattooed on the skin. No brand of the damned.

"Second-generation native from the basalt quarries," Dante observed, glancing over the secondary mandibles and the chemical burn scars mapped across the youth's arms. "Probably born in the southern slag colonies and broke out from Legion labor to try his luck scavenging scrap inside the gorge."

He reached for the canvas satchel slung across the man's chest and worked the metal zipper.

Inside sat three small cardboard boxes of fifty-caliber rifle rounds, two nearly empty tins of edible mineral grease, a worn brass fire-striker, and a yellowed map marked with handwritten notes charting the patrol routines of freight trains passing Depot Twelve.

Dante studied the notations on the map.

"He was timing the rails," Dante said, angling the sheet toward Maria. "He didn't take a shot at us under Legion contract. He fired because he spotted two newcomers hauling hundreds of pounds of refined copper and marked us as an easy score to buy food and ammunition at the next depot."

Maria wrenched her greatsword free from the deck with a single heave, wiped the flat against her trouser leg, and sheathed the steel into the scabbard on her back.

"What do we do with him?" she asked, crossing her heavy arms over her brigandine. "Leave this wreck up here unconscious, and the boiler steam will cook his brains before sundown."

Dante folded the patrol chart into the inside pocket of his heat-resistant leather vest.

He looked down at the sniper, then out toward the canyon horizon where purple smoke was beginning to blend with the oncoming dusk rolling across the Plain of Iron Souls.

The optimal solution resolved in his mind a second later. Information was the truest leverage for a mind like his.

"We interrogate him.”