"Sidearms," she said, and did not need to say it twice.
They went on foot, Lyn and Alita and Taisen, through a wood of pale, leafless trunks that Alita told them, in a whisper that kept catching in her throat, were evergreens back home: they only looked skeletal because the permanent night starved them slow, over centuries, rather than killing them outright, every needle shed decades ago and never regrown, so that what remained was less a forest than the memory of one, standing exactly where a forest used to be. Fitting, Taisen thought, and said nothing, because saying it wouldn't have helped either of them. Their boots found no undergrowth to disturb, no leaf litter to crunch, only bare grey soil packed hard by centuries of windless dark, and the silence swallowed even that sound before it had properly finished making it.
His forearm still throbbed under its dressing, a tight, hot line from wrist to elbow where Simika had opened him up not a week gone, and his ribs sang a low, protesting note every time the ground under his boots dipped and he had to correct his balance for it. Not enough to slow him. Enough that he was aware of his own body in a way he usually wasn't: cataloguing what still worked, what worked but would cost him for it, sorting each one into the place where he kept every other useful fact about a fight before it started. He kept his sword arm loose at his side and let the other hand do the climbing over roots and rockfall, a small mercy he hadn't needed to grant himself in longer than he could remember.
The city, when the trees finally gave way to it, rose up out of a broad rock shelf in straight black lines and hard angles: no domes, no curves, nothing that looked like it had been shaped for the pleasure of the eye rather than the efficiency of standing upright in cold. Every crevice held a light fixture, unlit. A city built entirely to be seen by its own lamps, and every one of those lamps dark.
"There," Alita breathed, and pointed.
Two shapes stood sentry along the road ahead: squat, boxy things on legs that bent the wrong way, backward like a bird's, throwing long shadows in the faint gray spill of starlight. Lyn had her blaster up before either of the other two had finished registering the shapes as a threat, and put three rounds into the nearest one dead center. The shots did nothing. Not a scorch mark, not a stagger. The thing simply turned, unhurried, and answered.
The return fire came in a wash of heat and light that took a chunk out of the boulder Alita had thrown herself behind a half-second earlier, molten rock running down the stone in a bright orange thread. Lyn's own cover took the second blast and groaned under it.
Taisen was already moving.
He'd never fought one of these before. That didn't matter as much as the fact that he'd watched two seconds of its firing pattern, which told him the guns were mounted to the chassis and couldn't track a target that got inside the minimum arc, which meant the only real danger in closing the distance was the legs. He went in low and fast under the first sentry's next volley, felt the current answer his call before he'd finished deciding to make it, and put every ounce of the borrowed strength into a single cut across the back of its nearest leg, where two hydraulic lines ran taut and exposed beneath a plate that had never been designed to protect against a blade. The leg buckled. The sentry's whole chassis canted sideways, guns swinging wild, and Taisen was already past it and turning for the second before the first had finished falling.
The numbness found his fingertips on the third strike (sooner than it should have, his body still running a debt from Simika's afternoon that hadn't come close to paying itself off), and by the time he severed the second sentry's leg the same way, his sword hand had gone from numb to something closer to absent, a hand-shaped space where feeling used to be. He finished the second one on instinct rather than sensation, driving the blade in above the collapsed leg joint until the thing stopped moving at all, and only then let himself stagger half a step and catch his breath against a boulder that was still warm from the fight.
"Taisen." Lyn, already at his side, her hand hovering near his shoulder without quite landing on it. "Your eyes."
He didn't need a mirror to know what she meant. He could feel the fine gray thread of it at the edges of his vision, the same ash-ring Simika had pressed her fingers to a week ago and told him to learn to ration better.
"I'm fine," he said, which was true in the sense that mattered and false in every other one.
Alita crouched beside the fallen sentry, running her scanner over the ruptured plating with the single-minded focus of someone who badly wanted to be looking at anything other than the smoking crater where her cover used to be. "Lyn. You need to see this."
Lyn knelt. Beneath the shattered plate, threaded through the machinery like something grown rather than built, ran unmistakable tissue: a slow, dark ooze of blood where Taisen's blade had gone in, the faint residual twitch of something that had, until a few minutes ago, had a pulse.
"That's not a machine," Lyn said, very quietly. "That's not a machine at all."
"I told you I had a bad feeling," Taisen said.
"Synthetic life is banned under the Sundhal Convention," Lyn said, more to herself than to either of them, standing slowly with her scanner still in hand as if the readout might change if she gave it long enough. "Banned. Not restricted, not regulated: banned, full stop, on every world that ever signed the treaty. Someone built this and put it out here to stand guard over an entire planet, and either the UN doesn't know, or the UN knows and has decided this is a conversation for another day."