Chapter 13 — The Reason to Live

Before dawn, Emberfall Camp lay wrapped in a shrieking wind that dragged the stink of sulfur dust across the scrap-iron hovels, howling like something torn open.

Elias leaned against a cold corrugated wall, his clothes long since soaked through by the raging higher-dimensional negative energy. The bone-deep agony was ebbing now, like a retreating poison tide, leaving behind a stiffness and exhaustion — as if some cold force had sewn him shut and reassembled him by force. He could hear his own heart, heavy and strong, knocking inside his chest. Not the faint flutter of a man clinging to his last breath, but a forge-hammer sunk in mud, striking again and again against this fragile mortal shell.

In the next hovel, less than two meters away, the amnesiac refugee woman who called herself "Vespera" curled silent in the dim shadows. Elias tilted his head slightly; through the thin scrap wall, he could almost still feel the trace of absolute cold left on his forehead. That pulse of dark energy which had forced his life to hold, in the dead of his predicament, would not leave his battered senses.

He drew his gaze back and slowly opened his palm.

A dim chemical glow-stick threw a sickly green halo, lighting the hands mapped with callus and scar. In his palm lay half a star-core pendant, no bigger than a thumbnail.

It was the keepsake Aira, his sister, had shoved into his hand with her last ounce of strength, the instant before Tartarus was wiped away without mercy. The broken face of the pendant was rough and ugly, still smeared with his sister's dried blood and the black scars of high heat. In this black and freezing universe, it was the only proof Aira had ever existed.

Elias's fingers whitened with the force of his grip. He pressed the cold metal pendant hard against his forehead; its sharp edges bit into the skin, a thin, piercing sting.

"Aira…"

He called the name in his heart, silent. No tears — they had been boiled away in the death-light of Tartarus's melting. What remained was only the ice and iron-poison sunk to the deepest flesh.

He had thought he would not survive that suffocating night. In the dead silence of vacuum, in the cataclysm that took his home and his kin, death had been such a tempting release. But now, the dark energy and higher-dimensional negative force flowing in his veins were a chain, nailing him fast to this scarred wasteland.

"Live…" Elias opened his eyes; his deep lake-green eyes shone with a chilling light under the sickly glow. "Even if I have to tear and bite in the mud like a stray dog, I will live."

He would watch that lofty Sanctum stamped into the mire with his own eyes. He would personally drag the God of Darkness who dealt the Silent Strike down from the sky and smash him!

Creak—

The heavy metal blast door was shoved open, and a gust of cold wind, tinged with the smell of rusting metal, poured in.

Caleb stepped in wrapped in a shabby lead-weave tactical cloak; the crude military cybernetic eye in his left socket flickered a cold red in the black room. He held a half-crushed cigarette, his weathered face heavy with fatigue.

"You're up, kid," Caleb said, walking to the table and tucking the cigarette back in his pocket. "Looks like your life's hard as meteoric iron. I half thought the girl next door fed you some forbidden poison, to keep you dead to the world a whole day and night."

"How's the camp?" Elias's voice was raw as he struggled upright.

Caleb's face went cold; the red light of his cybernetic eye pulsed twice, urgent. "Bad. Worse than bad. The radiation storm took down two of our three air-purifiers, and the stock of life-support gas canisters won't stretch past five days. Worst of all, the water-filter cores — the ones we pulled off that crashed Mercury herald's wreck — are finished. Get no replacement parts, and two hundred-odd mortals in this camp either choke on radiation or die of thirst in these hovels."

He paused, and slammed his fist on the scrap-iron table, a ringing boom. "Earlier, some men in Block Three lost it — tried to rush the ration depot with cable-blades. If I hadn't blown out two of their thighs with the electromagnetic rifle, those last life-support canisters would be scrap by now."

Despair, like spreading poison, was fermenting fast in this corner the Divine Court had abandoned. No order, no civilization — before such extremity, mortals were already sliding from victims to beasts that tore each other apart.

Elias listened, his eyes never wavering. He stood and walked to the crude mining-world map. It was a hologram patched from ragged star-charts, marking the wreck-distribution for dozens of kilometers around Emberfall Camp.

"Anyone who robs his own kind's rations — stripped of three days' life-support rations, posted to clear radiation waste on the perimeter," Elias said, his voice flat, without a degree of warmth, but carrying a judgment that brooked no argument. "Tell everyone: if you want to live, take that cutting blade to steel — not to your neighbor's throat."

Caleb raised a brow, looking at the reborn boy with some surprise. "Easy words, kid. No ore, no replacement parts — you can't will gas and water out of nothing. We're sitting on a pile of scrap, and any patrol of celestial heralds that sweeps a detection wave our way grinds us to powder."

Elias's finger came down hard on a black region in the map's upper right.

It was marked with a glaring red skull — the Decay Dead Zone. Three light-years from where Tartarus died, the star-tracks torn open a permanent decay rift; the hulks of old Divine Court cruisers lay sunk in that distorted gravity abyss.

"There's everything we need," Elias said slowly. "Spare micro-pressure life-support arrays from god-class warships. High-purity heavy-hydrogen crystals. And… alloy armor that shrugs off high-energy radiation."

Caleb's cybernetic eye widened. "You're insane?! That's the dead zone at the Astrolabe's edge! Gravity there's twisted like a wrung rope, decay radiation thick enough to roast your lungs dry in a minute! Even the Divine Court's regular patrol craft won't go near it!"

"Precisely because the god-army won't go there, it's safe," Elias turned, meeting Caleb's horrified stare. "The Divine Court counts us as data and scrap, thinks mortals off their grace can only wait to die. But they forget — the hardest tools are always forged in the worst hell."

"We're going to strip those wrecks and arm ourselves with them."

Caleb stared at Elias a long while; the tight line of his mouth twitched, slowly, into a smile both cruel and rough. "Arm mortals with the scrap the gods threw away? Kid, do you know how many will die doing that?"

"Stay here, and everyone dies in five days," Elias drew the heavy industrial cutting blade at his waist; its edge flashed a cold, merciless light in the sickly green. "Go to the dead zone, and at least we die with blades in our hands."

A few walls away, in the shadows.

Umbra leaned against the cold wall, eyes half-shut. With the acuity of her higher-dimensional divine awareness, no sound in this crude hovel — not even the faint drift of particles in the air — escaped her.

She had heard Elias's cold, determined plan, and the vengeance-blood roaring in his veins.

"With a mortal body, challenge the decay dead zone where the star-tracks are torn…" Umbra gave a cold snort in her heart, her gaze clear and proud. "Foolish. And with no chance of winning."

Under the Divine Court's power structure, Jupiter the God-King decreed the absolute Law; the twelve Constellation Lords commanded the armies of annihilation. To the higher-dimensional gods, mortals were but faint fuel keeping the Sanctum's ledger turning. A boy who could not even cross the star-ring was plotting revolt against the lofty order.

And yet — when she recalled the night before, that stubborn will in Elias's body which had held back the dark-energy erosion and even fed back a true grief — her god-core, cold for ten million years, stirred with an impulse she could not explain.

Just then, a faint, timid sob came from outside the door.

A little girl, seven or eight, face caked in dust, clutched an empty life-support canister and curled in the wind-blown sand outside the hovel. Her parents had perished in the last storm; now starved of air, her face purpled, her small body shook violently in the cold wind.

In the Divine Court's order, the weak like her were among the first "optimized" away — invalid consumables. Astra might shed a hypocritical holy light in mourning, but would waste not a shred of energy on her; and Umbra herself would only watch coldly as she turned to ash.

And yet, Elias walked over.

The boy half-crouched; the face that had been all coldness and kill-intent softened, rare and fleeting. He pulled from his breast the half-block of compressed nutrient paste that was his only share, tore it open and pressed it into the girl's cold palm, then untied the spare micro-pressure gas-mask at his waist and fitted it himself over her small face.

"Take it," Elias's voice was low. "Get to the back. As long as I'm here, this camp won't fall."

The little girl looked at him timidly, hugged the food and mask tight, nodded hard, and ran for the shelter.

Umbra, standing in the shadows, watched in silence.

She watched Elias stand straight again, his eyes returning to that cold, hard steel of resolve.

"Can't even guarantee his own survival, yet wastes resources on a worthless fellow mortal…" Umbra slowly lifted her own palm, looking at fingers pale as jade, with not a trace of mortal warmth.

What meaning could there be in this "mortal bond" the Divine Court found so inefficient, even laughable? Why could this Anomaly called Elias, carrying grief and bonds so heavy, burst with a life-force no higher-dimensional negative energy could crush?

This was an exceedingly interesting experiment.

Umbra's lips curved, a faint, cold smile. She resolved to keep playing this fragile "Vespera," to keep watching the boy. She would see how far this mortal could walk, dragging his foolish bonds, through the god-ruled night.

"All right, kid," Caleb clapped Elias hard on the shoulder, eyes lit with a feverish, dangerous light. "My life's in your hands, then. Tell me — when do we move?"

Elias gripped his cutting blade, turned to the window, to the strange sky dyed sick-purple by higher-dimensional decay radiation.

"Now."