Chương 27: You Are What You Eat

The plate wouldn't cut, and Giulia took that personally. Two hours, and all she had to show was a polished spot and a dead disc. The Slag Crawler shell sat clamped in the vise, a curved section the size of a dinner plate, grey shot through with veins that caught the light like brushed steel. Ruggiero's people had pried it off a dead one in Lingotto and carried it back in a feed sack.

Cecilia had signed off on her keeping it, and Giulia had been pleased, the way she was pleased by a clean problem with an answer hidden somewhere inside it. The problem wasn't clean. The problem argued. Her good ceramic blade had skated off the surface like it was greased. The diamond file should have bitten. Diamond took hardened steel without complaint, she'd drawn one across a museum's worth of seized Renaissance iron and felt it cut every time.

This file sat on the shell and polished a bright patch and went no deeper. The angle grinder threw a fan of sparks pretty enough to photograph and accomplished the same nothing, the disc wearing down faster than the shell did. That was the part that bothered her. Not that it was hard. Plenty of things were hard, and hardness had a ceiling she knew by feel, a number her tools lived above. This sat above her tools, and steel didn't. The grinder hadn't lost to steel.

It had lost to something the shell was carrying that steel had no business carrying, and the gap between those two facts was where the answer was hiding. She set the grinder down, pulled her braids back over her shoulder, and looked at the thing properly. The workshop was warm and close and smelled of oil and hot metal, the only smell that had ever made her feel safe.

She'd built it into a sub-cellar room under the Palazzo, good ventilation, a bench Matteo had found for her without asking what she meant to do with it. Her white shirt had a fresh burn hole in the cuff. She didn't see it. She put her thumb on the brushed-steel vein. The reading came back wrong, and the wrongness was the answer. The vein was harder than the grey around it, she could feel that the way you feel a knot in wood through three coats of varnish.

Go down a layer, to where the System kept its books, and the vein and the grey logged as one shell. The hardness lived on top of that, bolted on from outside, a value the creature wore the way you'd wear borrowed armor cut for someone broader. Strapped on. Sitting proud of the body it covered. And it wouldn't hold still under her thumb. It hung there unfinished, a field the System hadn't closed. She pulled the field reports up on the tablet. The Crawlers came out of the industrial belt.

Lingotto, Mirafiori, the old factory zones. Insectoid, the rough size of a hippo, mandibles built to chew raw material. The reports said they ate metal, plastic, concrete and laid it into their shells. Then a flagged line, scribed clean the way Lorena scribed everything, dated and authenticated and free of opinion. Subject had consumed automotive steel prior to engagement. Standard slashing and kinetic attacks ineffective. Squad expended disproportionate ordnance. Giulia read it twice. Prior to engagement.

She looked at the shell. At the brushed-steel veins. Automotive steel. The Crawler this plate came off had been eating cars, and the eating had written car into its defense, and car, to the System, didn't mean as-hard-as-a-car. It meant immune. Immune to anything you swung. The number didn't care that a real grinder ate real steel for a living, because the number wasn't steel. It was a verdict, and the steel was only where the creature had gone shopping for it. The armor wasn't a property of the thing.

It was a receipt for its last meal. She went still, which was what she did instead of pacing, because pacing meant her hands had nothing to do and her hands hated that. Ermilio's audit notes were filed under the carcass logs, cramped and double-flagged the way he flagged anything he was sure of and braced to defend. There it was. The Crawler shell carried a defense value that wouldn't hold fixed. Most creatures had a number that sat where the System put it.

The Crawler's number had a second field beside it, and the second field was a material, and the material rewrote itself in the logs every time the thing fed. A car-fed Crawler read as a car. A concrete-fed one read as concrete. The number followed the meal and nothing else set it. Her stomach did a small bright flip, a switch thrown in a dark room.

She picked up the grinder, fitted a fresh disc, checked the clamps, and set it to the bare grey lip of the plate, the patch with no vein in it at all, where the field crew's blades had actually scored. Grey alone, nothing borrowed laid over it. The disc bit it like chalk. There it was, both halves in her hands at once. The shell was only ever as strong as the last hard thing it found, and under the borrowing it was chalk all the way down. You couldn't out-cut a car-fed Crawler. You fed it chalk.

And the other half, the half nobody had read forward: the same flagging that called the steel-fed shell immune called the grafted armor soft to acid and high-tier fire. The borrowed strength dragged a borrowed weakness in behind it, written on the same line, under the lock, in the same hand. She was still grinning when Dario opened the door without knocking. He leaned in the frame with his hands in his pockets and looked at the wrecked discs, then at her.

"I'm interrupting something?" he asked. She'd sent him out of this room twice for being loud at the wrong moment. She didn't send him out now. She set the grinder down and kept the grin.

"I think I just saved everyone a lot of bullets," she said. She told Luca next, because Luca was the one who decided whether an idea got a field test or got filed. He listened the way he listened, sitting forward, not interrupting, the model assembling behind his eyes. When she finished he was quiet a second.

"You want to control what it eats before we engage it," he said. This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author's work.

"Before. Not during. During is too late, the shell's already set." She had her hands flat on the table to hold them still, and she made herself lift her eyes to his, because this was the part she was certain of, and certainty was the only thing that let her hold a gaze.

"We bait it onto a material that's soft against what we're carrying. It eats. The shell re-states to the weak material. Then it cuts. We pick the armor it'll be wearing when we hit it." Luca held the look a moment longer than he needed to.

"How sure are you it re-states fast enough to matter?"

"Not sure at all. That's why it's a field test." She didn't look away.

"The logs show it happens. They don't show how fast. I need the time between the bite and the shell updating, and I need to see it, not infer it."

"And if it's slow?"

"Then it's useless, and I've wasted an afternoon and an escort." The honesty steadied her more than reassurance would have.

"But the field value updates inside a single engagement. Whatever that process is, it isn't slow." He nodded, his eyes already dropping to his screen like the test was writing itself out in parameters.

"Small team. Bianca's stretched, so you'll take a squad of Ruggiero's." He looked back up.

"You don't get close to it. You watch, you call what you see, and the second it stops being a controlled test, they put it down the expensive way and we go home. You're support. Not a combatant."

"I know what I am." She did. She was the person who understood how the thing was built. That had never once been the same as the person who fought it. The Lingotto edge was all rust and long sight lines. They set up in the bones of a parts depot, a long shed with half its roof gone and the floor a litter of seized machinery and the ghosts of an assembly line. Giulia liked it on sight, in the specific way she liked anywhere that showed its own making.

The escort, four of Ruggiero's, didn't, because long sheds had bad corners. She'd brought two baits. A pallet of cheap terracotta tiles, soft-fired, the kind that crumbled if you looked at them wrong. And a drum of industrial lime she'd had the worst time talking the quartermaster out of. Both soft. Both nothing. Both exactly the kind of thing that turned a Crawler's shell to chalk, if she was right about any of this. The squad lead was a broad, quiet man named Pino.

He set the tile pallet thirty meters down the shed in the open and laid a trail of crushed tile back toward the cover where they waited.

"How does it find food?" he asked.

"Vibration. Chewing sounds. Material it can sense." She crouched behind a dead lathe with the tablet on her knee.

"It'll come for the pallet. I want it eating before anyone fires. Nobody fires until I call the shell."

"Until you call the shell." He said it flat, and she heard him decide to trust her, the way people did when she talked about her work, because the certainty was real and people could tell. They waited. It came up through the floor. A section of old concrete heaved and split, and a wedge head shoved through mandibles-first, chitin grey and seamed, dragging chunks of the slab it had chewed on the way up.

The body followed, low and segmented and far too large, legs finding purchase, the whole of it the dull no-color of the concrete it had eaten to get here. Concrete-fed. She could read it without trying, the matte cured-cement look sitting over the shell like a coat of the wrong paint.

"Hold," she said, soft.

"It's wearing the floor. Don't touch it." The wedge head swung toward the pallet. It went for the tiles the way a starving thing goes for food, fast and total, mandibles working, and the terracotta came apart with a sound like someone crushing flowerpots by the armful. Tiles vanished. The grinding ran on, wet and industrial, a pink cloud of dust lifting off the pallet. She counted, eyes on the back of its head, and let the reading sit on the shell while she did.

The change started before the System bothered to tell her. A ripple ran back from the mandibles across the chitin, the cement-grey lightening, going porous, going the dull orange-pink of cheap roof tile, the whole armor re-stating to match the meal. Under it, her reading caught the thing she'd come for: the new shell and the body inside it weren't agreeing yet.

The borrowed state sat loose over the creature like a casting that hadn't cooled to its mold, and for as long as it stayed loose, the Crawler was wearing armor that didn't quite fit it. A notification flicked the count in the corner of her eye. CONCRETE → FIRED CLAY Eight seconds. Nine. From first bite to full change. She had the number, and it nearly took her voice with it.

"Shell's clay," she got out, then louder, level, certain.

"Shell's clay. It's soft, hit it now, hit it." Pino's people opened up. The first burst would have skated off concrete. These rounds punched in and stayed in, blooming dust where they tore out the far side. The Crawler reared and shrieked through its mandibles, a sound like a saw catching a nail, and it was hurt, actually hurt, the borrowed armor shedding off it in fired-clay flakes. Then it turned on them. It crossed the floor faster than its size promised, legs hammering the broken slab.

Every wire in her body said run. She stayed, because the lathe was bolted to the world and she had a job, and the job was to watch. So she read it instead. The shell that didn't fit was costing the thing. Too soft now to stop a round, still heavy enough to drag, and the body underneath was fighting its own armor to move. It came on and it came on wrong, a half-beat behind itself, the loose casting working against every leg.

Her reading had it before her eyes confirmed it, the mismatch between state and body laid out plain as a stress fracture in a beam that hadn't failed yet.

"It's slow," she said into the radio, fast.

"The re-state costs it, it's slow right after. Push now, the window's now." Pino flanked left with one man, the other two peeled right, firing to turn it. The Crawler spun, but the spin came heavy and late, the new armor lagging the body through the turn. Its legs went out under it on the floor it had climbed through. Pino walked his barrel onto the wedge head and put a single round through the soft point below the mandibles, and it was done. The shed went quiet.

Pink dust drifted down through the broken roof, catching the light. Giulia came out from behind the lathe. Her legs weren't entirely hers yet. She made them carry her to the carcass anyway, because the carcass was the whole point, and crouched by the wedge head with her hands already reaching. The shell flaked under her fingers. Fired clay, brittle, exactly the meal she'd fed it. She snapped a piece off and turned it in the light. Under the clay sat the same pure grey she'd ground like chalk on her bench.

Soft all the way down, wearing whatever it stole. MATERIAL SENSE — RANK 2 → RANK 3 She didn't read past the name. She didn't need to. She'd felt the thing the rank was for already, out loud, with a creature crossing the floor at her: she'd read a borrowed state fighting the body it sat on, and she'd called the cost before the cost showed. Her hands were already in her kit. The idea had grown a second half while she watched rounds bite clay that should have been concrete.

You didn't have to bring the bait to the creature. You could put the answer in the round. Match the ammunition to the meal. If she knew what a Crawler had eaten, and she would know, because the field value was readable, she could hand a squad ordnance keyed to crack exactly that material. Lime cores for the lime-fed. And for the steel-fed, the one her tiles couldn't help with, Ermilio's logs already named the key: acid, the weakness the System welded on under the strength. She hadn't proved that one today.

She'd prove it on a bench, where INFUSE had room to work. Pino crouched beside her, looking at the dead thing, then at her. He didn't ask. She answered anyway.

"I knew it'd go soft. I didn't know how fast." She held up the flake so he could see the grey under the clay.

"Nine seconds from the bite. That's the number we didn't have." She turned it over.

"It's not armored. It's never armored. It wears the last hard thing it found and counts on you bringing tools for that instead of the chalk underneath." The squad was watching her now, with the kind of respect she never knew where to put. Pino made a sound that was nearly a laugh, low and brief, the way Ruggiero's people laughed.

"Luca's going to like that," he said.

"Luca's going to want it in writing, with the timing data and a margin of error." She was already up, already counting what she'd need off the quartermaster, the lime, the acid stock, a rig to confirm the nine seconds held across different meals.

"He'll have it tonight." She took one more look at the carcass. It was collapsing now, slow, the System drawing back whatever it had spent. The clay was going to ash. The grey under it was softening toward nothing, no shape of its own left to hold once the borrowing was gone. A thing built to wear other things, empty the moment you took the stealing away. She picked up the good flake of clay for the bench, brushed the pink dust off her ruined cuff without seeing it, and went to find the rest of her samples.