Chapter 31 - White Jackets

Maria looped the rope four times around the sniper's wrists, wrenching each turn with the leverage of someone cinching steel bands across a flatbed. She followed with three more turns around the man's shins, binding his legs against the crane's vertical cast-iron girder with twin square knots that no bare human hands could unpick without a sharp blade.

The youth remained unconscious, head slumped onto his chest as dark blood trickled along his secondary mandibles to drip onto the thighs of his leather trousers.

Dante sat on the gantry grating six feet away, resting his back against the air ventilator housing.

He had cleaned the graze along his left bicep with treated water and smeared a thin coat of healing salve over the raw flesh before rebinding the dressing. The wound still burned, but his health bar had climbed back to thirty out of thirty-four points.

He held the man's yellowed paper map in his right hand, scanning the patrol schedules scribbled in thick graphite.

[Identified Target: Miro.]

[Level: 19 (Slag Marksman).]

[Health Points: 48/110 (Regaining Consciousness).]

[Status: Mild Concussion, Fractured Secondary Mandible.]

"Miro," Dante murmured the name logged by the combat interface the moment his aether dart shattered the iron mask.

Maria leaned against the opposite girder, her forty-pound greatsword planted in the deck planking beside her right knee. She folded her arms over her brigandine, watching the sniper's chest rise and fall in shallow cycles.

"The cross caught him on the temple," she remarked. "Five more pounds of force behind it and I would have driven the bone into his brain."

"You measured the hit properly," Dante folded the map and slid it into his vest's inner pocket. "I need him awake. This map plots Legion convoy routes, but he could easily be a scout hired by one of the Low Ember guilds after seeing us buy conductive limestone last week. Nobody runs a five-day sniper vigil on a crane tower just to swipe a bin of copper without knowing who's down below."

"He was lying in wait for someone," Maria motioned with her chin toward the fifty-caliber casings scattered across the grating. "That anti-material rifle isn't built for shooting lizards in the brush."

A strangled gasp rasped from the captive's throat.

Miro dragged air violently through his shattered nose, hacking a clot of dark blood onto the iron grating.

His four dark, faceted corneas blinked out of sync, focusing first on Maria's armored boots, traveling up the broad flat of her greatsword, and finally fixing on the face of the six-foot-three girl looking down at him.

He tried to wrench his arms free, but the nylon lashing pinned his shoulders against the crane girder.

"Bitch..." his voice came out slurred, punctuated by the crack of fractured bone on the left side of his chitinous jaw. His smaller mouthparts twitched beneath his split lip. "Are you cutting my head off or just putting me on display like dead meat in the bazaar?"

Maria didn't flinch. She kept her arms crossed, watching him with a coldness heavier than solid iron.

Dante took two paces forward, crouching down before the youth.

"Who sent you here, Miro?"

The captive locked all four dark lenses onto Dante's face. He spat a bloody glob onto the girder.

"Nobody sent me, you pale runt. How the hell do you know my name?"

"My interface reads the husks of people who try to punch half-inch lead through my chest," Dante replied with habitual calm, gray eyes pinned to the stranger's faceted gaze. "I'll ask once more, and you will answer without raising your voice: who paid you to stake out that boiler?"

Miro let out a dry, raspy laugh that choked into a cough.

"Pay?" He shook his head from side to side against the iron beam. "Who pays anyone crawling through this gutter? You think I'm on the Legion payroll? Look at my clothes, you idiot. I'm wearing patched conveyor canvas and eating stale grease and flour mash for four straight months."

"You had three crates of heavy military ordnance in your pack," Dante pointed to the olive-drab metal tins propped against the railing. "Armor-piercing fifty-caliber with hardened steel penetrators goes for two hundred scrip a tin on the Low Ember black market. A common scavenger doesn't pack six hundred scrip in lead just to burn it on two unknowns without knowing the haul pays out."

Miro ground his teeth, the chitinous plates of his mouth clacking with bottled fury.

"I burned two years in clandestine slag pits to buy those three tins," he said, words drenched in bitter venom. "Two years breaking basalt ore with my bare hands in the southern shafts. I watched you two haul four hundred pounds of virgin copper out of the central foundry. I saw the girl carry half a ton of wood pallets in her bare arms. I knew you had capital. I knew your gear was worth more than my entire miserable existence."

Dante held his gaze, cross-referencing every detail with thirty-four Intelligence.

The rationale tracked. There was no registry of a formal bounty contract, no guild insignia tucked into his duster pockets, and the patrol map carried the notations of someone dodging Legion pickets, not working for them.

Yet something in Miro's anatomy remained out of place.

Dante reached out his right hand and touched the side of the youth's skull, brushing aside a greasy strand of thin hair.

Near the root of his left ear, where the pale skin merged with the first chitinous plate of his jaw, sat a perfect circular scar an inch wide, its puckered edges puckered by ancient wire sutures.

"This isn't an ore blast scar," Dante murmured. "This is a surgical incision from a laboratory. And you're no standard native of the basalt bloodlines. Those secondary mandibles on your face aren't congenital. They were grafted directly into your jaw muscles."

Miro tried to jerk his head back, but the iron beam behind him cut off retreat.

The hostility drained from his eyes for a split second, replaced by a shadow of ancient terror that made all four lenses quiver in their sockets.

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"Don't touch that," he hissed, a defensive snarl in his throat. "Get your cold hand off my skull."

"What did they do to you?" Maria took a step closer, curiosity puncturing her iron demeanor for the first time. "Who put that mark on you?"

Miro turned his face aside, staring down into the chasm where the titanic pistons kept pounding through the rising steam.

"Nobody you'd know," he rasped, his voice flat, shut tight like a rusted bulkhead. "I'm not pure demon, and I'm not a damned soul. My family came out of a free laborer settlement in the Second Minor Continent fifteen years back. We ran a machine lathe shop. We never crossed anyone."

He paused for three seconds, breathing with difficulty through his mouth.

"Then they came down."

"Who did?" Dante pressed.

"The bastards in the white jackets."

The air on the crane platform seemed to freeze solid.

Dante's hand froze in mid-air, his gray eyes widening by a fraction of a millimeter.

Maria gave an involuntary jolt, her crossed arms dropping rigid to her thighs. Her lips parted slightly, and her iron brigandine groaned as breath hitched in her lungs.

White jacket.

The exact same description.

The exact words Maria had spoken so many times since the night that stranger appeared in her back room with a wooden toothpick between his teeth and sneakers that never caught dirt from the street. The very same entity who had sat upon their bench press in the Acacias penthouse and frozen the tap water in the school restroom hours before they descended to the plains.

Dante swallowed dry, feeling the basilisk bone plate beneath his vest hum warm against his back under the [Ash Veil].

"What did you say?" Dante asked, his voice dropping low, razor-sharp. "Repeat that."

Miro looked from one to the other, noting the violent shift in their composure. He gave a bitter, bewildered chuckle.

"White jackets," Miro repeated, spitting another chip of tooth onto the deck. "People who walk through this hell in spotless clothes, never breathing this rotten soot and never tracking grease on their boots. They rounded up my entire family in our machine shop. Said my parents' bloodline had compatibility with Higher Tier experimental matrices."

He shut his dark eyes, his chitinous jaw clicking hard.

"I don't know everything they did inside that sealed warehouse. I was small, only seven years old. I remember thick brass needles and glass conduits pumping purple fluid down my throat until I blacked out. My parents and my two older brothers didn't survive the second week. Their bodies rotted from the inside out from rejecting the foreign energy forced into their marrow."

He opened his four eyes again, glaring up at Dante with profound loathing.

"I was the only one who didn't rot because my body adapted these beast mandibles to filter the toxicity. They dumped me into an ore ditch near the rail spur as a failed discard. Said I was useless for the final matrix because my mutation stalled before Level 20."

Miro looked down at Dante's hands, then at Maria's greatsword.

"You two talk just like them," the youth snarled. "Full of certainty, full of clinical interface jargon, casting pristine spells that don't smell of common sulfur. If you work for that pack of bright-coated butchers, just slit my throat and get it over with, because I'm not ending up on an autopsy table again."

Dante maintained his silence.

His mind, wielding the full analytical power of thirty-four Intelligence, assembled the implications of that confession like interlocking gears inside a monstrous apparatus.

The man in the white jacket was no isolated observer.

He belonged to an apparatus. An organization or a caste of beings operating across Hell for decades, conducting bio-arcane experiments on native bloodlines and penal souls alike, testing matrix compatibilities completely omitted from common system lore.

And Dante... Dante had been deposited in a suburban crib on Earth with his memories purged and an ancient Tier Zero quest branded onto his core: The Echo of the First Name.

He wasn't an ordinary soul dropped into the reincarnation cycle by accident. He was a subject of this very program, perhaps the culmination of an initiative that had devoured hundreds of families like Miro's.

Dante slowly pushed off the grating.

He turned his back to the captive and gave a subtle nod toward Maria.

"Over here."

Maria followed him to the southern lip of the platform, fifty feet clear of where Miro sat bound against the winch. The updraft roaring from the gorge ensured the grinding of gears drowned out every whisper between them.

"Dante..." Maria said under her breath, her large hands gripping the rim of her iron cuirass. "He described that guy. It's the exact same clothing."

"I know," Dante kept his eyes locked on the horizon, where the smoke plumes of the Capital smeared the distance in dark violet. "The man who handed you the Sentinel class and keeps herding us forward isn't some benevolent benefactor. He's one of them. A researcher or a warden using these continents as an operating theater."

"And we're doing exactly what he wants," she finished, her voice heavy with cold revolt. "We're grinding levels and hunting down an armored train because he dictated it in that hundred-and-eighty-day quest."

"We are getting stronger, Maria," Dante turned his face to hers, the cold, calculating composure that defined his intellect returning to his sharp features. "That's the only variable that matters right now. He thinks he holds the leash because he issues system prompts, but he doesn't know you sparked that furnace heat in the boiler, and he doesn't know what we're planning. If he's the final target at the end of this road, our only shot at snapping his neck is hitting Level 40 or 50."

"What do we do with the kid over there?" She gestured toward the girder where Miro sat bound. "We can't drag him onto the freight train, and we can't let him loose to put another round through your spine."

"We leave his pack on the deck with his rations and ammo," Dante replied. "Sever the ropes around his ankles and leave his wrists tied loosely enough that he can work the knot with his teeth in half an hour. If he makes it down the crane, his life is his own. We've burned too much daylight here already."

They turned together to walk back toward the center of the gantry.

Yet when Dante's gaze settled on the structural pylon, he froze mid-stride.

The girder was bare.

The ten-millimeter climbing rope lay sliced across the grating floor, sheared into four clean sections as though parted by a razor-sharp guillotine.

Beside the severed coils, two deep, jagged gouges scarred the cast iron of the girder, left by three-inch retractable chitinous talons that had extended from the tips of the youth's bare toes.

Miro was gone.

He hadn't taken the service ladder. Dante dashed to the railing and peered over the lip: he caught the blurred silhouette of the tattered youth scrambling like an iron spider down the diagonal trusses of the southern pylon, descending a hundred and twenty feet in three seconds flat with an agility no standard rope could ever restrain.

In under ten seconds, Miro's form vanished beneath the blanket of steam billowing over the canyon floor sluices.

Maria pulled up beside Dante, staring at the cleanly parted nylon cords on the grating.

She let out a dry, humorless chuckle through her nose.

"Bastard had claws in his toes."

Dante looked from the severed ropes toward the depths where the sniper had dissolved into the mist.

He felt no anger. There was no tactical reason to hunt down a maimed youth who could barely chew through his broken jaw and no longer had a long rifle to threaten them.

"Better this way," Dante said, picking up the canvas satchel holding the Legion patrol map left behind on the deck. "Spares us the argument over what to do with him."

He hitched the strap of his vest over his shoulder, feeling the cool draft against his bandaged arm.

"Grab your sword, Maria," Dante nodded toward the access ladder. "We head down now, haul the copper packs out of the boiler, and hit the trail for Coal Depot Twelve before noon."

Maria unlimbered her greatsword, tapped the pommel against her iron cuirass with a hollow clink, and fell in behind him, her heavy boots taking the metal rungs down toward the close of their first campaign in the gorge.