Chapter 5

Emily Varen

I dreamed I'd become a machine.

Not a metaphor. Literally — something was crawling under my skin, thin metal filaments threading through my nervous system, rewiring everything from the inside. It wasn't pain. It was worse than pain.

It was the feeling of being rewritten, like someone had jacked a data cable into my brainstem and was force-formatting every instinct I owned. No Rust-Walkers. No wasteland. Just black data streaming through the dark, and one line of text looping over and over: Compatibility check in progress... compatibility check in progress...

Then a system error tone cut through everything.

I woke up grabbing for my hip. Nothing there. The rifle wasn't on me, and that absence hit like a fist — my fingers clenched around empty air, my pulse spiked into my throat. It took three full seconds to sort "danger"from "safe" again.

The Faraday cage's emergency light was still on. Pale. Cold. Throwing grid shadows up through the copper mesh overhead.

I sat up and checked the injection site first. The burning was gone, but when I pressed the skin there was a strange dense heaviness underneath — like something had settled into the muscle and decided to stay. No redness. No necrosis. None of the failure signs I'd been most afraid of.

"Still alive."

No relief. No tears. Just a flat acknowledgment — like crossing a bad bet off a ledger and moving on.

Then I saw the mechanical timer in the corner.

Seventy-one hours, fourteen minutes.

I picked it up and checked the mainspring. Checked whether the hand had skipped a tooth. Looking for a reason the number was wrong.

It wasn't wrong.

Not one night. Nearly three days.

I drank the last of my filtered water, slung the rifle back on, and pushed open the shielded door.

The air hit me wrong immediately. Underneath the usual machine oil and metal corrosion was something sweet and organic — the smell of things rotting. The chemical stench covered most of it, but not all.

I stayed in the doorway and listened.

No server fans. No metal ticking. No Rust-Walkers turning through scrap piles. Nothing. The perimeter power grid had gone completely dark.

I clicked the safety off and walked out.

Two hundred meters in, I turned past a wall of stacked server racks and stopped.

The main corridor looked like something massive had been dragged through it. Every EMP tripwire I'd rigged was triggered. The decoy signal emitters were smashed to fragments. The ground was covered in overlapping mechanical footprints and dark patches of dried Rust-Walker fluid — deep brown, oxidized hard.

I crouched and touched the nearest patch. Fully hardened. At least thirty-six hours old.

Seventy-one hours unconscious. Surge hit thirty-six hours ago. Roughly thirty-five hours after the injection, the Trench had been overrun.

And the Faraday cage had been shielding my bioelectric signature the whole time. The Rust-Walkers never found me.

I had slept through it.

I stayed crouched for a long time, staring at nothing.

Old Dake's shop sat in the southeast corner of the Trench, backed against a wall built from decommissioned nuclear reactor shells. Highest radiation output in the whole area — which scrambled most Rust-Walker thermal sensors. The old man always knew what he was doing.

I knocked on the frame with my rifle barrel. Three times. Our signal.

No response.

I knocked again, spacing the taps wider.

Nothing.

My legs went soft for a second. I pressed it down, moved around to the side of the shop, and found the small window pieced together from salvaged circuit boards. The interior latch was broken. The iron frame bent outward.

Forced from the outside.

I slid through, landed without a sound. Scanned the room — no active Rust-Walkers, no other human presence.

Clear.

Then I let myself look at Old Dake.

He was slumped against the side of his worn ergonomic chair, wearing a heavy protective jacket I'd never seen on him before. A small plasma cutting knife was in his chest, handle facing out. Wrong profile for a Rust-Walker attack.

He'd done it himself.

I crouched beside him and stayed there. I thought about something he'd said three months back, when we'd been sitting in the shop sharing synthetic paste. He'd set his cup on his knee and said, in that offhand but completely serious way he had: "At my age, getting torn apart by a Rust-Walker — I could live with that, so to speak. But turning into one of those things." He'd shaken his head. "That's where I draw the line."

I hadn't said anything back then.

Then I noticed the jacket. Last time I'd come, he was wearing his faded blue-grey work coat. This jacket was something he'd put on deliberately. He'd had time to prepare. He'd known what was coming.

I stood and worked through the shop.

All the electromagnetic shielding material was gone. High-density alloy sheeting, gone. Copper mesh rolls for Faraday cages, gone. Every missing item had one thing in common: bioelectric signal suppression.

His inventory log was on the workbench — paper only, always. The last several pages showed all the shielding stock had been sold or given away in the two days before the surge.

Someone had known it was coming.

I stood at the bench for a long time. Something had happened out there during those seventy-one hours — something big enough to drive a mass Rust-Walker movement across the Trench. I thought about the lab. About Alpha-Zero tearing down the facility's defense barriers. About the shockwave and the electromagnetic pulse rolling outward after the explosion.

"That's what drew them here."

The storage room was at the back. I pushed the door open.

A sealed metal box, three letters cut into the lid:

"R.G."

Rachel Grey. My alias.

Inside: four tubes of high-calorie synthetic nutrient paste, two bottles of filtered water, one compact backup EMP pulse generator, and a folded note. One line, in Old Dake's cramped handwriting:

"This place isn't safe anymore. Go find living people."

I folded the note and put it in my chest pocket. Opened a nutrient tube, squeezed it into my mouth, and started counting what was left.

I didn't cry.

But my hands moved a little slower than usual while I worked through the box.

I found a thermal blanket at the bottom of a shelf and spread it over Old Dake. Then I pulled the plasma knife from his chest, wiped it clean, and put it in my kit.

I thought about the first time he'd seen me — just out of the lab, covered in blood and machine oil, running an identity so thin it barely held up. He'd looked me over and said: "Those are mechanic's hands. I can always tell. The name doesn't matter — what you can actually do does." He'd given me my first batch of shielding material, mentioned that District 7 Isolation Zone was quietly recruiting survivors with technical backgrounds, and told me to cut my hair short. "You'll look harder to mess with."

I stopped for a moment.

"I'm leaving now. I'll try to stay alive as long as I can."

I picked up my pack and the rifle and walked to the side window.

I climbed out, landed, and straightened up.

The Trench sat quiet in the morning fog. The low EMP hum was still there, but weaker than usual. This place wasn't the same kind of safe anymore.

I tightened my pack straps, checked the rifle's charge, and looked up. The sky was the same murky orange-grey it always was — neon exhaust and suspended nanite particulates turning the light into something that felt more like a bruise than a sunrise. But today there was a thin pale band cutting through from the east, above the scrap-metal ridge line.

I looked at it for a second.

Then I turned southeast and started walking.

District 7 Isolation Zone was in that direction.