Shmuel braced his mechanical hand against the cracked floor and pushed himself upright. Dust sifted from his coat in pale grey streams. Opportunity was still crouched beside him, her dark red hair tangled with plaster fragments, her eyes darting across the ruined office as though trying to reassemble the sequence of events that had deposited her here.
"You alright?" Shmuel's voice was level, but there was a tightness at the edges. "I'd appreciate it if you could stand. My back's giving me grief and if what Rowbotham's saying holds water then we've landed in hell."
Opportunity blinked and scrambled to her feet. "Oh! I'm sorry. It's just… everything happened out of nowhere. One moment we were on Mercury, the next…" She gestured helplessly at the shattered window, the smoke-filled sky, the distant sounds of carnage.
"Not your fault," Shmuel said.
Rowbotham had not moved from the window. His silhouette was outlined against the grey-brown haze, his white cloak stirring in the acrid breeze that seeped through the broken glass.
"Come here. Look out of this window. Check it for yourself before you decide anything."
Shmuel hesitated. Rowbotham was an unknown variable. He had tried to kill them. He had warned them. He had appeared on Mercury without explanation. And now he was standing in a ruined office building, his back to them both, talking like a man who had already assessed the situation and reached a conclusion he wasn't sharing.
Shmuel crossed the room. His boots crunched on broken glass. He stopped at the window and looked out.
The sky was gone. Not the sepia-toned grey of T Corp's Nest or the black void of the Mercury observation. This sky was a churning mass of smoke, thick and yellow-brown, shot through with veins of something darker that pulsed and coiled like living tissue. It stretched from horizon to horizon, a lid screwed tight over the earth, smothering everything beneath it in a pall of chemical reek. The smell was indescribable, not simply foul, but fundamentally wrong. It triggered something primal, a warning system buried in the deepest parts of the brain that screamed at the body to flee, to hide, to seal every orifice against the invasive presence of the smoke.
Below the smoke, the ground was a charnel house.
Bodies lay in heaps. Not dozens. Not hundreds. Thousands upon thousands of them, tangled together in the trenches and craters that scarred the landscape like wounds that had never been allowed to heal. Some wore the insectoid augmentations of Old G Corp, their chitinous limbs twisted. Others wore the white cloaks of the Index, their fabric stained brown with dried blood and chemical residue. Still more were simply soldiers, ordinary men and women caught in the gears of a war that had consumed everything they were and everything they might have become.
And the battle was still raging.
On the far side of the field, a line of G Corp soldiers advanced through the smoke, their bug-like prosthetics gleaming with moisture. Their mandibles clicked. Their wings buzzed. They moved in formations that had been drilled into them by a Wing that no longer existed, fighting for a cause that had already been lost. The Index met them, white cloaks flashing as they cut and parried and died and were replaced.
Shmuel stared at it all. His mechanical fingers tightened on the windowsill.
"This looks exactly like the pictures," he said quietly. "I learned about this in school. When I was still living in the Nest." He paused. The smoke coiled beyond the glass. "Wait. If this is the past, if we're really here, then my parents should be alive somewhere in this battlefield. If I could find them. If I could save them. I could have a normal life. I could have…"
He stopped.
Opportunity reached toward him. Her hand extended through the dusty air, her fingers almost brushing his sleeve.
Before she could touch him, Shmuel burst out laughing.
It was hollow and self-mockery that cut through the distant thunder of artillery. He doubled over slightly, one hand pressed to his forehead, the laugh spilling out of him in short, jagged bursts.
"How stupid is that line of thought," he said. His voice was steadier now, the laughter fading as quickly as it had come. "Let the past be the past. What good does change make when it's unpredictable?" He straightened and looked at Opportunity, and his expression was not sad. It was peaceful, almost. "Well. Except for Kamina, of course. He's the exception to every rule."
He turned back to the window. "I've got someone I need to hate for the rest of my life. I can't afford to lose that hate."
Rowbotham regarded him for a long moment. Then he nodded, a single slow inclination of his head. "There will be an alliance between us. Until this problem is resolved."
Shmuel met his eyes. "Agreed. This is hell below hell."
Opportunity had moved to the window. She was looking out at the battlefield, at the smoke and the bodies and the insectoid soldiers swarming through the trenches, and her face was pale. But her mind was already working. Even in the face of horror, she was still a researcher.
"If this truly is the past," she said slowly, "then there's something off about the horizon. The curvature, it's a bit wrong. Or perhaps not wrong, but like… it's incomplete." She pointed toward the distant edge of the battlefield, where the smoke thinned to a hazy line. "We need to move to the outskirts of District 12. If we can get out of the active war zone, we might find a way to regroup with the others. And we can confirm whether this is really the past or something else wearing its shape."
Rowbotham considered this. "Staying here won't help much. It would be devastating if G Corp sends out their Specimens."
Shmuel glanced at him. "How much do you know about the Smoke War?"
Rowbotham's hand drifted to his side, where the greatsword would have been. It was not there now but his fingers closed on empty air with the habit of decades. "Enough to survive it," he said. "With a lot of luck in your hands. And your eyes. And your back. And your weapon."
Shmuel looked at Rowbotham's face, the lines around his eye, the set of his jaw, the stillness of a man who had stood in places like this before and had never expected to stand in them again. Opportunity looked too, and her sharp mind made the connection a fraction of a second after Shmuel's did.
A veteran. Rowbotham was a Smoke War veteran.
The building next to them exploded.
It was force. Pure, concussive, shattering. The shockwave hit the office building like a hammer, blowing out the remaining windows and sending a cascade of debris through the air. Shmuel grabbed Opportunity and pulled her down behind a fallen desk. Rowbotham braced himself against the wall, his body absorbing the impact.
When the dust cleared, they saw it.
It rose above the ruined skyline like a mountain given legs. Fifteen stories of chitin and muscle and clicking, segmented limbs. Its head was a nightmare of compound eyes and dripping mandibles, each one the size of a freight container. Its body was armored in plates of organic steel, scarred and pitted from a hundred battles. It moved with the slow, grinding inevitability of a glacier, and everything in its path was crushed.
Rowbotham looked at it.
"The time we were sent to," he said, "is during the first mobilization of those Specimens."
He turned to Opportunity. His eye was hard, but not unkind. "Little Researcher. This is what humanity is capable of creating. We would kill ourselves first before any of you reach the unreachable in your group."
Opportunity said nothing. Her eyes were fixed on the titan insect as it plowed through a row of buildings half a kilometer away. The ground trembled with each step. The smoke swirled in its wake.
Shmuel was already moving toward the stairwell. His voice cut through the silence, sharp and urgent.
"It's not safe to stay here. Let's move."
They descended the stairwell in silence. The walls were cracked and stained, the concrete bearing the scars of a war that had been grinding on for years. The sounds of battle filtered through the structure, distant explosions, the chittering shriek of insectoid soldiers, the occasional scream cut short. Shmuel led the way. Opportunity followed close behind. Rowbotham brought up the rear, his footsteps unhurried despite everything.
The ground floor was a ruin. The lobby had been gutted by shelling, the reception desk reduced to splinters, the floor tiles shattered into a mosaic of grey and brown. Through the gaping hole where the front entrance had once stood, the smoke-filled street was visible. And in the center of the lobby, motionless as a statue, stood a woman.
She wore the white cloak of the Index. The length marked her as a Proxy, equal in rank to Rowbotham. Her hair was pale and cropped short. Her expression was calm, almost serene.
In her hands, she held a greatsword.
It was wrapped in red cloth, the fabric wound tight around the blade and hilt, obscuring every detail of the weapon beneath. But the size was unmistakable. It was the same size as the one Rowbotham had wielded on the bus, the same size as the one that had sent Shmuel flying with a single swing. The woman held it horizontally across both palms, offering it without speaking.
Rowbotham stopped. He looked at the sword. He looked at the Proxy.
He crossed the lobby and took the sword from her hands. The red cloth fell away as he lifted it, revealing the black blade beneath. He tested the weight, adjusted his grip, and then rested the flat of the steel against his shoulder.
"The Will of the City," Rowbotham said, "guides us all."
The female Proxy inclined her head. "The Prescript instructed me to stand here. To hold this sword. To wait until a person came to take it." Her voice was matter-of-fact, as though she were reciting a grocery list rather than describing an act of prophetic precision. "I have been waiting for three hours. You must be the person."
Shmuel stared at her. Opportunity stared at her. The implications of what she had just said were staggering and too vast to process in the middle of a war zone, too strange to fit into any framework of logic they carried. The Prescripts had known. Somehow, impossibly, the Prescripts had known that people from the future would arrive in this exact place at this exact time and that one of them would need a weapon.
Shmuel opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.
"That's…" He stopped. There was no word for what that was.
"Unprecedented," Opportunity said quietly. Her researcher's mind was turning the problem over, examining it from every angle, finding no purchase. "The predictive capacity required to anticipate an event of this nature. It's orders of magnitude beyond anything we understand about the Prescripts. It suggests a level of awareness that transcends temporal linearity. It…"
"It suggests we keep moving," Shmuel said. He was already walking toward the ruined entrance. "Whatever the Prescripts are, whatever they know, we can't stand here trying to figure it out while that thing…" he jerked his head toward the distant titan insect, visible through the smoke, "...is tearing the district apart."
Rowbotham did not question the Prescript. He never did. But Shmuel noticed the way his eyes lingered on the female Proxy, the way his brow furrowed imperceptibly. He was looking for loopholes. He was finding none. The Prescript had given him a sword and asked nothing in return.
The female Proxy raised her hand in a small wave. Her smile was gentle, almost fond, the smile of someone watching a friend depart on a long journey. It was the type of smile that did not belong in the middle of a war zone. It was the type of smile that raised questions Rowbotham did not ask aloud.
He turned away from her. The greatsword rested on his shoulder, its black blade drinking the smoke-filled light. "The outskirts of District 12," he said. "That is where we are going. Keep close. Keep quiet. And do not stop for anything."
They stepped out into the street. The smoke swallowed them whole. Behind them, the female Proxy remained in the ruined lobby, her hand still raised, her smile still lingering. Whether the Prescript had told her to wave or whether she had done it of her own accord, none of them could say.
Rowbotham did not look back. But his grip on the greatsword tightened, and his jaw was set with the particular tension of a man whose certainty had been disturbed by something he could not name.
The alleys of the war-torn district were narrow and treacherous, the walls pocked with shrapnel scars and stained with substances that had dried long ago into dark, unidentifiable patches. They moved in single file. Rowbotham led, his claimed greatsword resting on his shoulder, his white cloak ghosting through the dim passages. Shmuel followed with Opportunity at his side, his eyes scanning every shadow for movement. The sounds of the Smoke War were omnipresent. The chittering screams of G Corp's insectoid soldiers. The rhythmic clash of steel against chitin.
They emerged from the alley into a scene of chaos.
The street before them was a war zone in microcosm. On one side, the Thumb's Soldatos advanced in formation. A Capo stood at their center, barking orders in a language that was half Italian and half the universal vocabulary of violence. On the other side, G Corp employees in grey-blue uniforms surged forward, their insectoid augmentations twitching and clicking as they met the Thumb's advance with chitinous blades and compound eyes that reflected the smoke-filled sky in a thousand fragmented images.
The two forces clashed in the middle of the street. A Soldato fell with a mantis arm driven through his chest. A G Corp soldier was cut down by three precise strokes from the Capo's blade. The battle was too close, too dense, too chaotic to cross.
Rowbotham stopped at the edge of the alley. Shmuel and Opportunity pressed themselves against the wall behind him, their breathing shallow in the acrid air.
"We need another route," Opportunity whispered. "We can't go through that."
Shmuel was looking at Rowbotham. The Proxy's face was unreadable, his eye fixed on the battle ahead, but there was a stillness to him that suggested his mind was elsewhere. Calculating. Assessing.
"Can I ask you something?" Shmuel said.
Rowbotham did not turn. "Fit yourself with the question."
Shmuel hesitated. He knew the answer to the question he was about to ask, knew it in the way one knows the shape of a room even in darkness. But he wanted to hear it spoken. "The answer you said you'd have for Kamina. The next time you met. What would it be?"
"I do not have it yet," Rowbotham said.. "You seem to know this."
"I know. But you must have a shape of it. A vague idea."
Rowbotham's hand tightened on the hilt of his greatsword. "It would remain unchanged. My view. My belief. The world is flat. That is what I would tell him." He paused. "But he would not accept it. He would argue. He would grin and say something absurd and make me question things I have spent decades building." A pause seemed unnatural. "Perhaps that is the answer. That I am still standing. That my view remains my own, even after everything. That I have not fallen off the edge."
Shmuel nodded slowly. He did not press further.
Opportunity spoke up. Her voice was tentative but insistent, the voice of someone who saw a resource and could not understand why it was not being used. "The Proselytes. The ones fighting out there. Could you get them to help us? They're Index, same as you. They'd listen to a Proxy."
Rowbotham turned his head. His eye met hers, and there was no anger in it. Only a kind of weary certainty. "Their own will is erroneous. Only the Prescript can lead us to the right path. They would not help us unless a Prescript led them. And no Prescript has."
Opportunity opened her mouth to argue, to ask how he could stand there and say that while fighting alongside two people he had tried to kill mere hours ago, to ask how he could justify the contradiction. But before the words could form, Rowbotham moved.
His greatsword came off his shoulder in a single fluid slash. He turned to the wall on his right, a thin partition of crumbling brick that separated the alley from the building beside it and drove the blade through it. The steel punched through brick and mortar like a knife through paper. He pulled it back.
The blade was wet. The fluid coating the black steel was viscous and yellowish, flecked with bits of chitin and something that might have been muscle tissue. The smell that followed was unmistakable, insect, rot, the particular stench of G Corp's bio-augmented soldiers packed together in close quarters.
They had been waiting. Ambush.
Shmuel reacted without thought. Both mechanical hands came up, the servos in his arms screaming as he drove his fists into the wall. The impact cratered the brick, the force of the blow carrying through the partition and into the soldiers hidden behind it. He heard bodies tumble. He heard chitin crack. He did not stop.
The wall came down. And behind it, the G Corp soldiers poured through.
They wore the grey-blue uniforms of the fallen Wing, their bodies twisted by augmentations that had been designed for war and then abandoned to rot. Some had mantis arms, long and serrated, the blades still wet from their previous kills. Others had compound eyes that glittered in the smoke-light, their heads swiveling with the mechanical precision of insects tracking prey. They swarmed through the breach in the wall with the mindless coordination of a hive, their mandibles clicking, their wings buzzing.
Shmuel planted himself between them and Opportunity.
He was not thinking. He was moving. His left arm came up to block a mantis strike, the reinforced plating of his forearm absorbing the blow with a screech of metal on chitin. His right hand closed around the soldier's throat and squeezed. The soldier crumpled. Another took its place. Another behind that.
"Stay behind me," Shmuel said. His voice was tight with exertion.
Opportunity pressed herself against the alley wall. Her body was mechanical arms and legs replaced with Asan Company prosthetics, designed for precision work rather than combat. Functional, durable under normal conditions, but never intended to withstand a direct blow from a soldier bio-engineered for war. She knew this. She had helped design some of the components herself. She knew exactly how fragile she was.
A soldier lunged past Shmuel's guard. He caught it with his right arm, the motion jarring his shoulder, and threw it back into the swarm. Another struck low, aiming for his legs. He stomped down, felt something crack beneath his boot. Another. Another. They kept coming.
Rowbotham was a force of nature.
He moved through the G Corp soldiers like a blade through water. His greatsword made slashes of black steel that left trails of yellow blood and severed limbs in their wake. One soldier swung at him with a mantis arm. Rowbotham stepped inside the strike and drove his shoulder into the soldier's chest, sending him sprawling, then brought the greatsword around in a horizontal sweep that cleared three more. A soldier lunged at his back. He spun, the greatsword following the motion, and the soldier fell in two pieces.
None of them could touch him. None of them could even slow him down.
But Shmuel was not on Rowbotham's level. Shmuel was taking hits shallow cuts across his shoulders, a gash along his ribs where a mantis blade had found a gap in his coat. He was bleeding. Not badly. But the damage was accumulating, and he could feel it in the way his left arm was starting to lag, the freshly repaired servos straining under the sustained assault.
Opportunity watched from behind him. Her hands were clenched at her sides. She wanted to help. She could not. Her body was not built for this. Her world was not this world.
And yet, Shmuel thought as he blocked another strike and drove his fist through another soldier's chest, this was her world now. Whether she had chosen it or not. Whether any of them had chosen it or not. The Smoke War was not a place. It was a lesson. A lesson about what happened when one world tried to destroy another. When the L Corp had decided that their view of the City was the only view that mattered, and everyone else had paid the price.
Rowbotham's greatsword sang through the air. Shmuel's fists cratered flesh and chitin.
The G Corp soldiers broke.
It was not a retreat born of strategy nor tactical withdrawal. It was the scattered, desperate flight of creatures who had encountered a predator beyond their capacity. Rowbotham stood at the center of the alley, his greatsword dripping with fluids on it, his white cloak spattered and stained. The bodies of insectoid soldiers lay in heaps around him, their chitinous limbs still twitching with the residual impulses of a hive mind that had already fled.
The world was always cruel. Rowbotham knew this with the same bone-deep certainty with which he knew the earth was flat. Cruelty was the default, the baseline, the constant hum beneath every human endeavor. The Smoke War was not an aberration. It was the truth of existence made visible, the lie of civilization stripped away to reveal the carnage beneath. Even in his flat world, where corners existed and kindness might theoretically hide, he had never found it. Not once. Not in all his decades of searching. The corners were empty. The kindness was a myth. What he fought for, the structure, the certainty, the unshakeable belief in a world with edges might be useless. A madman might call him mad.
Shmuel checked his body quickly. A shallow gash ran along his ribs, already clotting. His left arm's servo whined slightly when he flexed it, but the motion was smooth. No major damage. He would hold.
They turned to move. The alley ahead was clear. The sounds of battle had shifted eastward, the Thumb and G Corp forces grinding against each other in a different part of the district. There was a path through the ruins. A way out.
And then Shmuel saw her.
A little girl. She was standing in the middle of the street, directly between the Thumb's advancing line and the G Corp soldiers regrouping for another push. Her dress was torn at the hem. Her face was streaked with tears and smoke residue. She was crying, the silent, helpless crying of a child who had screamed until her voice gave out and was now simply waiting for the end.
No one was helping her. The Soldatos moved past her without looking. The G Corp soldiers swarmed around her without noticing. She was invisible. Insignificant. A piece of collateral damage that had not yet been collected.
Opportunity saw her. Her mechanical hand tightened on Shmuel's sleeve. "We can't…"
Shmuel was already moving.
Toward the little girl. His boots pounded against the broken asphalt, his coat streaming behind him, his eyes fixed on the small figure in the middle of the carnage. He did not think about the danger. He did not calculate the odds. He simply moved, because Kamina had drilled that lesson into his head not through words but through living. You didn't wait for the right moment. You made the right moment. You didn't weigh the cost. You paid it.
He sprinted into the battle zone. A G Corp soldier swung at him with a mantis arm. He ducked under it, felt the blade pass close enough to shear the air above his head. A Soldato lunged at him with a sword. He sidestepped, the blade missing his shoulder by inches. They were not targeting him specifically. They simply did not know what he was. Ally or foe. It did not matter. In the chaos of war, anything that moved was a threat, and anything that was a threat was struck at.
He reached the little girl. He scooped her up with his right arm, the mechanical limb cradling her against his chest. She was light. Too light. Her sobs were small, hiccupping things, the cries of a child who had exhausted every emotion and was now running on the dregs of fear.
"I'm getting you out of here," Shmuel said. "Hold on."
Behind them, the tall building shuddered.
It was not an explosion. It was two blades, moving in tandem, wielded by a woman who laughed as she fought. She stood atop the building's roof, her rose-red jacket bright against the smoke, her dirty blonde hair whipping across her face. A wide-brimmed hat sat crooked on her head. A cigar smoldered between her teeth. In one hand she held a straight sword with a revolver barrel at its guard. In the other, a curved sword with yellow ribbons on its grip. Both blades had golden, ribbed edges that caught the light with every swing. She was tall. Her sea-green eyes gleamed with joy.
She cut the building in half.
The top floors slid sideways and then the entire structure began to fall. Debris rained down. Concrete and rebar and shattered glass descended toward the street in a cascade of ruin.
Shmuel dropped to his knees. He curled his body over the little girl, his back to the falling building, his arms forming a shell around her. He could not outrun it. He could not deflect it. He could only shield her and hope that when the debris hit, there would be enough of him left to keep her safe.
The impact did not come.
Rowbotham stood over them. His greatsword was raised above his head, the black blade still vibrating from the force of the strike he had just delivered. A chunk of the building, a slab of concrete the size of a freight container, lay split in two on either side of them. He had carved a hole in the falling debris. A corner, cut out of the chaos by sheer, applied force.
Rowbotham looked down at Shmuel. At the little girl, still cradled against his chest. At the debris that surrounded them on all sides. His expression was unreadable.
He thought of Kamina. The man who had challenged his view. The man who had answered the question of the earth's shape with an absurdity that still rattled in Rowbotham's skull. A round world can have corners too. You just have to make them yourself. He had dismissed it at the time. He had dismissed it as the rambling of a mind that did not understand the stakes of certainty. But here, in the middle of a war zone, with his sword still humming from the strike that had carved safety out of destruction, the words returned to him.
Create that kindness.
He still believed the world was flat. He would always believe it. But the answer he had been searching for, the answer he would give Kamina when they met again, was beginning to take shape. Perhaps something adjacent to understanding.
"The answer," Rowbotham said. "It is starting to be given form."
Shmuel looked up at him. The little girl was still crying, but quieter now, her small hands clutching Shmuel's torn coat.
"Good," Shmuel said. "Hold onto it. We're not done yet."