Chương 98: 89. Xenia

"The first wave arms itself with whatever the dead world left within reach. The ones worth watching are the ones who stop scavenging and begin to quarry." — Codex of the Long Watch, Watcher's Commentary Eleni fed them before she would hear a word about lorries. The midday table filled with bread and cheese and a bowl of olives that emptied at an alarming rate.

"I'm pretty sure a higher constitution helps with weight management," Steve said.

"Someone could write a research paper on this." Petros came up from the yard and settled himself at the table with a questioning look.

"Did Stavros have anything good?" he asked.

"We'll get to that, but before that, there is something we need to do," Donna said. Donna waited until the plates were mostly empty and then she held out a hand to Steve, who surrendered the core pouch.

"We have made a deal with Stavros and we only need three cores. The other three stay in this house," she said, placing three cores onto the table. Eleni came out of the kitchen doorway with a dish towel still in her hands.

"We do not need—""You have six of your own under this roof and four guests eating your bread," Donna said.

"These are not charity. These are rent and board, in the only money we have."

"You got Sarah out of that awful place. I don't need rent from you, you are family," Eleni protested.

"If we are family, then we have the right to share our cores," Arthur replied, smiling.

"Donna," Eleni began again. Yiayia put her cup down. She leaned across the table, took one of the three stones, pressed it into her daughter's palm and closed Eleni's fingers over it with both of her own.

"Xenia," Yiayia said. Eleni looked at Donna, nodded once and went back into the kitchen. Sarah gave Arthur's shoulder a squeeze and went after her mother. Petros had not taken his eyes off the two stones still on the wood.

"There is a farmer past the silos who made a barrel that holds ten times the water it should," he said.

"I have been thinking about that barrel ever since I heard of it. A cold store that stays cold. A light for the slip." He looked up.

"Can I think about it?"

"They're yours to think about," Arthur said.

"We'll show you how the binding works when we do ours. After that, you choose, and you do it yourself."

"Then I will think very hard." Petros wrapped the stones in a rag with a small nod, and that was when Sarah came back from the kitchen.

"We need you on the lorry runs," she said.

"You, and a cart from the yard. Four foreigners hauling steel through Piraeus would turn into a story. The Vassilou boy doing salvage with some hired hands would just be a normal day."

"Ne." Petros was on his feet before she finished.

"I have a flat trolley that we used for engine blocks."

"Petros." Maria's voice came from the stairs, where she stood with the younger child on her hip.

"The wolves came from that hill."

"The wolves are dead," Sarah said.

"We killed them. There is nothing between here and that yard that can pose a threat right now." Eleni had come back to the doorway with the dish towel over her shoulder.

"And yesterday this one came through my gate with his back opened," she said, pointing at Arthur with her chin.

"Was that also nothing?"

"That was six of them, on their own ground, before we knew what they were," Donna said, looking at Eleni and Maria.

"This is different and we will keep it different. We will work in daylight only and we will stay off the slope. We withdraw at the first sign of trouble. Petros will not swing at anything. Just a boring, routine salvage run." Maria looked at Donna for a long moment, the child working a fist into her collar.

"Before dark," she said. Donna nodded and agreed. Yiayia had gone back to her cup somewhere in the middle of her explanation, which in that house was a ruling of its own.

"Endaxi." Petros clapped his hands once and stood.

"I will get the trolley. Try to look like hired hands. Cheap ones." * The site of the lorry smelled of dried blood and spilled entrails. Flies rose off the wolf carcasses in a body as they came up the access road. Something had been snacking at the nearest carcass. The haunch was opened to the bone, and the drag marks around it were small, four-toed, busy.

"Scavengers," Donna said without slowing.

"Small ones, working in a group. The neighbourhood is filling back in."

"That was fast," Steve said.

"It's been just over a day. An ecosystem does not usually reoccupy a top predator's range in a day." He had the ledger out of his jacket before he finished the sentence.

"It does when somebody murders the top predator and leaves six of them lying about as a buffet," Donna said.

"Eyes up, professor. You have the hill." Steve took the watch position on the bonnet of the lorry with the ledger on his knee and his focus rod across it, facing Kastella. Arthur walked around the lorry once and then got under it. The metal felt different the moment he put a hand to it. The chassis rails were a deep blue-purple, but the colour was deep in the grain. The leaf packs above the rear axles were darker still, the colour sunk to the core of the steel.

He counted eleven leaves to a pack, four packs in total, and put each pack at sixty kilos if it was anything. If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

"Steve was right," he said, sliding back out.

"This is the best steel we have seen so far. We should get the springs first. Steve, switch with Donna. I need heat on the shackle bolts." The work found a rhythm that Petros disrupted only once, when Arthur backed out from under the chassis with the first full leaf pack balanced across one forearm, set it on the trolley and went back for the second. Petros looked at the trolley where a sixty-kilo spring pack lay, having been taken off its mount by hand.

"I have a crane," he said, to the air.

"In my yard I have a crane, with two chain hoists."

"He is cheaper than the crane," Donna said from her perch on the bonnet.

"He is, po po po." Steve laid his palms on the next set of shackle bolts. Under his hands the seized bolts took on a shimmer of heat. The rust lost its grip as the metal swelled, so that after a minute or two each one turned like it had been oiled. He pulled himself out after loosening the bolts on the third leaf pack.

"Level 17 mage being used as a glorified WD-40," Steve said.

"I'm the glorified forklift," Arthur said from under the lorry. By early afternoon they had three packs on the trolley and Arthur was on his back under the rear axle, taking the last one off its pins.

"You think these will make good weapons?" Petros asked, lashing the load with Sarah's help.

"Spring steel is the right alloy," Arthur said while working.

"Enough carbon to take a hard edge, and tough enough that it will not chip easily. The catch is the heat treatment. A spring is left soft enough on purpose to flex and snap back, and an edge needs to be harder than that, so Stavros has to anneal it right down, forge the shape, then harden it past spring temper without—""Contact," Donna said.

"Left, through the treeline. Five, small, coming low." They came out of the dark, silent and fast. These looked like foxes, if foxes went up to a man's knees and had their ears pinned flat. They bounded straight in at the party, in a ragged formation. The carrion had been theirs since last night and they meant to keep it. Donna killed the first on the draw and the second on the backswing. Three seconds, two strokes.

The third lunged at Arthur as he came off the ground, and he put it down with the pry bar, one backhand blow, the creature crashing against a nearby tree. The fourth swung wide only to be met with a spike of fire from Steve that dropped it mid-stride, its momentum rolling the body another full length through the dust. The fifth came around the trolley's blind side, where Petros was lashing the load and Sarah knelt over the straps. Petros got there first.

He had Sarah's arm in one fist and a length of spring steel in the other, hauling his sister behind his own body, the bar up like a club, knuckles white on it. The fox came over the lashed load with a lunge. Sarah leaned past her brother's guard and laid two fingers behind the animal's ear as it landed. The fox convulsed, then dropped as Steve finished it with fire. The whole fight had taken less than fifteen seconds. It was all quiet again.

"Anyone?" Sarah asked, already looking.

"No? Good."

"Low level," Donna commented.

"If I had to guess, maybe nine or ten, something like that." Correct. Three eights and two nines, Archie said in their heads. Petros stood where he was, breathing hard, the bar still raised over the dead fox at his feet. He looked from the animal to his sister, then put the spring steel down on the trolley with exaggerated care.

"The noise pulled them in," Donna said. She was cleaning the axe with a rag from her belt, unhurried as a woman wiping down a counter.

"I think it is time to go. The fight will pull other things. Tomorrow we work faster." Arthur pulled the last leaf pack out from under the axle and stood it on the trolley with the others.

"—without cracking it on the quench," he said.

"That is the part that goes wrong. Anyway." Petros stared at him across the trolley for a long moment.

"You finished the sentence," he said.

"You killed five of those things, then just finished the sentence."

"I thought you wanted to know if these would make good weapons or not," Arthur said. A laugh went around the trolley, and Petros joined in while still looking at the dead creature.

"You know, we ought to start looking into how to make use of these bodies. I'm positive the leather from such creatures would be a great crafting material. And the bone," Steve said. ETHER ABSORBED: +150 INTEGRATION: 2, 314 / 2, 944 SARAH INTEGRATION: 1, 776 / 2, 688 Sarah was going around the dead creatures, checking them for cores, while Petros looked on, horrified at her casual use of a knife. She found two, dull and small.

"Practically useless," she said, tossing them to Steve.

"Except for food, maybe." She was still wiping her hands when Petros went still. They had seen the same stillness in each other and they smiled.

"I levelled," Petros said.

"Just now. It says level four."

"From standing near the kills," Sarah said. She crossed to him and turned him by the shoulder to face her, then gave him a quick hug.

"I learned that in Malta, behind a line of other people's fighting. It's a trickle, but it adds up."

"So have you decided on a build yet? Your first technique is at level five, you know," Steve said, moving up to Petros excitedly.

"There he goes," Donna said. * Arthur pulled the trolley as Donna stabilised it from behind. Sarah was walking at Arthur's side, their shoulders almost but not quite touching. Steve walked beside the trolley, explaining various theoretical builds to Petros.

"What level are you, Sarah?" Petros asked.

"Sixteen," Sarah said.

"Éla re," Petros murmured and continued walking. The party entered the container yard and stopped talking, making their way towards Petros's yard in silence. Petros was in the lead now, walking with confidence. From the top of the dead crane in the container yard, a pair of binoculars followed them. THE ETHER ATLAS — FIELD NOTES OF STEVEN PARR Piraeus PROVENANCE I was taught, and taught in turn, that metallurgy is a ladder of process. Better furnaces, better fluxes, better steel; the smith makes the metal.

The cases that did not fit the ladder were filed as curiosities, and I am starting to suspect the curiosities were the syllabus. Wootz, first. For a thousand years the best steel on earth was smelted in southern India, shipped out through Golconda as cakes, and forged in Damascus into blades with a watered pattern nobody else could reproduce. Europeans carried home descriptions of the process, followed them faithfully and produced ordinary steel, because the process was never the secret. The ore was.

When the old deposits gave out, sometime in the eighteenth century by the best accounts, wootz died with its recipe intact. In 2006 a Dresden team put a seventeenth-century blade under an electron microscope and found carbide nanowires grown in the steel, structures we struggle to make on purpose, seeded by trace elements in one region's ground.

Then the pillar of Delhi: six tonnes of iron standing sixteen centuries in open weather without rusting, because the ore it came from was rich in phosphorus and the metal grew its own protective skin. Then Cape York, where for centuries the Greenland Inuit chipped knife and harpoon edges off three iron meteorites they called the Tent, the Woman and the Dog. Peary hauled all three to New York between 1894 and 1897, the largest last.

The material carries its history inside it, and the System has not changed that rule. It has only made the carrying visible, and turned one dead lorry at the foot of a saturated hill into the richest seam in Attica. ✎ The smith makes half the blade. The ground it came from makes the other half, and for the first time in history, that half glows.