“I had to crash it into the garbage pile,” Yohan explained as they clawed their way up through the trash. “I couldn’t just park it. It’s harder to hide from Feyr’s Dart than that. The Dart’s the best scout in the fleet, and Jorge isn’t a fool.”

If hiking through the junk was difficult during the day - well, doing it in the dead of night was downright stupid. If things had gone normally, if Asmundre had gotten the plasma and there were not a couple of Midgard in the village, if he had come home and his father hadn’t been dead and his sister was still there and those two goons hadn’t taken her - if, if, if. Apparently these were the circumstances it took to get him to risk making this trip by starlight. It’d be damn ironic if he fell down a chasm out here.

In the night, all the bright colors and enamled bits of metal faded away into a uniform gray. The world flattened, and obstacles he thought far away loomed out suddenly.

“The Blood Fist is mostly metal, you know?” Yohan said. “So I had to bury it in metal. They’d have to search for it by hand. No metal detectors.”

Yeah, Asmundre had figured that out. “You didn’t have a better plan when you stole it?”

Yohan was unreadable in the dark. Asmundre hadn’t been willing to power his father’s mech suit, so Yohan limped along the path Asmundre indicated, occasionally peering up the wall and setting their course. Asmundre could tell they were tracking, more or less, in the direction he had seen the mech come down.

“I had a plan,” Yohan grumbled. “But it rather involved having a full reservoir when I left Valhalla. That didn’t work out and I ran out of blood about ten clicks out - well. You know the rest. And I didn’t steal her. She’s mine.”

“But what was the plan?”

Yohan paused, checking their course again. Years ago Asmundre’s father had taught him to tell the time by looking for which stars had set behind the wall. It had never seemed useful when he could just look at a clock but now the stars told him it was well after midnight. Maybe two or three.

A cry, almost a sob, echoed over the junk. A squeal like a small child.

“Was that -?” Yohan gasped.

“Fox,” Asmundre said. “They hunt at night. But you didn’t answer the question. Was the plan to just run? You had to know you’d run out of blood eventually.”

“I hoped I’d have enough to get over the wall.”

Asmundre arrested their progress to peer back at the fallen Midgard. “Over it? You can’t go over it.”

“I can’t, no. But a blood mech can.”

“There’s nothing out there. Nothing the Jotnar havn’t destroyed. It’s a wasteland.”

“Have you seen it?”

No - no, he hadn’t.

Yohan must have read his face through the darkness. Or just guessed. “Having everything you thought turned upside down is tough, I know. It just happened to me not that long ago - but you’ve got it backwards kid. The wasteland’s right here.”

The wall blotted out the stars. It cast a long shadow over the land, and the discarded machinary from it’s construction and maintence formed the mountains they scaled now.

“I think were in the right spot,” Yohan said. “Blood Fist should be under us.”

Getting down there was a different story. Father had never made many excursions into the deep junk. Just crawling across the top was dangerous enough.

Asmundre wasn’t yet allowed to go alone.

Yohan limped over to the edge of a metal plate and peered down into the dark crack beside it. “Down there,” he said.

Asmundre swallowed. The junk could shift and swallow someone up whole. His father had a dozen stories of junkers that had fallen into a crevice and vanished, never to be seen again, their bones ground into powder by the unstoppable power of the metal. Of course, nobody ever found the bone meal. They were never seen again, so maybe everyone just assumed they - this wasn’t helping. Asmundre lowered himself on the edge. The gap was just wide enough for him, and dropping his feet into it he found two sides of rough metal mesh, good for climbing.

He addressed Yohan in the darkness. “You know this is insane, right?”

“You want to fly it or not?”

Love what you're reading? Discover and support the author on the platform they originally published on.

Right. Opportunity, all that nonsense. Eons ago, or maybe that morning, he’d wished to leave the junk behind. His wish had come true. Why was he hesitating? Sliding down into the chasm, he followed the mesh a dozen spans before it abruptly ended. He locked his fingers into the mesh and let his legs dangle in the air for a moment while he stretched, searching with his toes for anything solid. His flesh fingers began to ache and he let his metal ones take the full load of his weight.

“How hard is the climb?” The junk twisted Yohan’s voice and it echoed three or four times.

“I don’t know yet,” Asmundre called back. “I ran out of foot holds.” After shaking out his fingers he took hold again and lowered his gauntlet, grabbing on as near the edge as he could. And he hung. His shoulder let him know how bad of an idea this was, and he still couldn’t feel anything below him - and then the mesh snapped, metal tearing, and all his gauntlet held was a rusted iron rod that was no longer connected to anything.

The floor of the cavern rushed up and slapped him in the face. Stars flashed in the darkness and a loud hollow clang echoed back off the walls.

“Kid! Hey, kid!”

Asmundre groaned. He lay on a smooth metal surface with the slick texture of old enamel, the dark sky visible through the crack above bright in comparison to this tomb.

“Kid? Fuck, are you dead?”

“No,” Asmundre managed. “No, fell.”

“Break anything?”

Asmundre checked. “Not that I’ve noticed yet.”

“You must have landed on it. Listen kid, there’s no way I can climb down there. Not with this leg. So you’ll have to start her up yourself. Use the knife. Do you think you can do that?”

On it? Asmundre’s stomach lurched. He’d thought he’d landed on the floor, but now he imaged himself perched on the head of a metal monstrosity. The world rocked around him, though it didn’t move, and he grabbed at the cold dome below him but found nothing to catch his fingers on. The surface curved away from him in all directions, seamless, smooth but not slick.

“Go toward the back,” Yohan called from above. “There’s a hatch where the head meets the neck.”

Great - but which way was the front? Which way was the back? Groping along the featureless surface, Asmundre probed with his fingers for anything. Anything at all. The nature of the enamled metal surface kept him from sliding down the slope and into the looming darkness - until it didn’t. With a gasp and rising panic in his stomach, and the squeal of his metal fingers on enamel, he fell again, swinging out into the black until his fingers caught suddenly on a protruding edge. Asmundre slammed hard into a vertical surface and all the air rushed out of his lungs.

He’d caught something, but he couldn’t tell what. The cavern above had been dark with just the meager starlight leaking down through the crack. In comparison, that now seemed bright.

“Kid?” Yohan called, fainter now. Gods, couldn’t the Midgard just use his damn name?

The vertical plane below the - Seam? Edge? - had a multitude of ridges and protrusions and one large rod that turned under his touch. Then light burst out from around a rectangle, blinding against the deep black of the chasm. It glowed blue, spilling over the shoulders of the blood mech to which Asmundre clung, gleaming off rivets and bolts. The hatch swung out, Asmundre with it, until he climbed around and slipped inside.

He found a space not much larger than that machine cab he and his father had ridden through the junk quake. An obloid chamber, a little further across and tall and deep than he could reach, but not by much. Shining black panels covered the walls, reflecting back the blue lights of the hatchway like strings of dew suspended on the edges of knives.

In the center of it, demanding his attention the moment his eyes fell upon it, stood a figure of metal and sharp edges, draped in straps and buckles like old sagging bandages. A mech suit not unlike his father’s. It hung on a rod from the ceiling. It did not touch the floor.

Before the suit stood a narrow pedastle, about chest high, with a slot in the top.

Asmundre pulled the hatch shut. It had a handle on the inside too. As soon as it closed, the lights cut off, and for a moment he worried he would have to fumble around in darkness inside here too, but then a faint orange glow grew in the seams between the panels that covered the interior and quickly spread until the entire space was filled with the glaring red glow. The glow dimmed, leaving a series of bright runes etched from one wall to the other. No language Asmundre knew. Then those too faded, and the chamber was bathed in only the soft and warm orange. A single red figure blinked on and off on the far right.

He’d seen the old tech. He even thought he understood how it worked. A little. In a general sense.

But this was something else.

Asmundre strapped himself in. The joints of the hanging exoskeleton moved as freely as his own arm, the weight so well balanced he could twist and turn it as easily as his own body. The straps were padded in just the right places to not chafe. It almost felt like the machine had been made for him - he knew it hadn’t, but it fit him perfectly. He expected needles, but nothing pricked him.

So how did he start it? Yohan hadn’t said. Asmundre twisted the exoskeleton around, searching for anything. A button. Maybe a lever. The panels remained featureless; not black, definitely lit. But the sort of bright-black of the indicator on a blood battery that had just enough power left to tell you it was good as dead. Only that one blinking object stood out. Shaped like a single drop, red as blood. He didn’t find any levers or anything else on the exoskeleton, either.

Nothing except that pedastle. Now that he was strapped in, the slot was in easy reach. Drawing Yohan’s knife, he held it up in the faint glow of the panels. The barb at the end mirrored the knife Jorge had drawn on him in the village. Asmundre slid it into the pedastle and it settled with a sharp click.

And then nothing happened. Asmundre tried to turn it. It stood fast. It moved no direction, it did not sink further, but it did draw out again without resistence. It fit in the slot so perfectly that it had to belong there. The knife had to be the key. He flexed his gauntlet, adding mechanical force to the knife, and the needles stabbed into his arm to power it -

Of course! That symbol, still flashing in his peripheral vision, made sense now.

Drawing the knife out, Asmundre pressed the edge against his palm. It felt sharp even before it cut. A little pressure would split his skin and spill his blood. Here was what he’d wanted at last - He had the touch. The idea that the Midgard did not still tasted odd. He had the mech. He was going to pilot the thing.

He had to, if he wanted to find Lilian.

Asmundre slashed his palm and jammed the bloody knife home, and the blood mech came to life around him.