Blood & Steel

Peri's eyes opened to riveted steel and the water stain she'd been watching spread since winter. Industrial windows letting in the first gray suggestion of dawn. The air held the damp chill of the canal, her breath misting white above the wool blanket.

Her hand found the nightstand, fingers closing around chrome before her mind caught up. Stopwatch.

She sat up. Her feet hit the floor, shock traveling through her ankles.

She dressed in darkness. Shirt. Pants. Boots—soles worn thin enough to feel gravel through them—laced with fingers that didn't need her. Jacket off the chair—mustard canvas soft at the elbows, oiled against the weather, smelling like every job she'd ever worked.

The stopwatch slid into her pocket, thumb lingering on its worn edge.

The door eased open, quiet against its hinges. The warehouse spread beneath her. Three stories of open dark, the kind that settled into concrete and stayed. Tarps over vehicles in the gloom, the bulk of the forge, tool racks along the far wall, every peg loaded, everything in its place. Windows blacked out on the lower floors, the glass painted over so long ago the paint had started to peel.

Overhead, the fluorescent tubes clicked on in sequence, humming to life one bank at a time. Cold light stuttering across steel.

Machine oil and concrete. Home.

The stairs rang beneath her, each step a quiet percussion that carried through the open space. Three flights down, her hand on the railing not because she needed it but because the metal was so cold it kept her sharp.

Light from the far corner. Kitt's workbench. A small sun in all that darkness.

Peri crossed the floor, weaving between tool chests and parts bins. Ahead, the workbench light pooled in a circle on the floor. Kitt sat inside it. Hunched forward, hands working.

She'd been there all night. Peri knew it from the set of her shoulders before she was close enough for anything else.

Kitt. The dark circles were worse—Peri clocked that first. The hair shoved into its usual chaos, the hoodie pulled against a chill she hadn't thought to fix. Seventeen, and running on nothing again. Her fingers moved between the iron and the wire strippers like they didn't know the rest of her was exhausted. Maybe they didn't. Smoke curled from the iron's tip, the sharp bite of hot solder cutting through all that oil and concrete.

Months of this.

“Frequency drift.” Kitt's eyes stayed on the components. “The crystal oscillator keeps shifting.” She exhaled through her nose. “Fucking tolerances.”

Peri watched her work. The way her fingers moved, even now, even like this—still certain. Kitt touched the multimeter probes to the open guts of a field radio, Authority surplus, modified well past recognition, and watched the needle swing across the dial. Tapped the case with one knuckle. The needle drifted. Settled.

Peri stopped at the edge of the light.

“Three months.” Kitt didn't look up. “Three months of chasing this. Sixteen relay stations across the territory. Every time I think it's stable, the drift compounds and the whole network drops.” Her fingers made tiny adjustments with a pair of pliers. “The old crystal stocks are depleted. Nobody manufactures to these tolerances anymore. Everything we've built. Gone.”

“Kataero have any ideas?”

“Dad taught me engines, not this.” Kitt's mouth twitched. “He'd have put it through the wall by now.”

Peri's gaze traveled across the workbench. Wire clippings. Handwritten notes. Schematics that looked more like maps than circuits, numbers crowding the margins in Kitt's cramped hand. A pencil sketch half-pinned under a coffee mug—something structural, concrete and water, lines too deliberate to be absent-minded. Her eyes moved past it. Tools laid out in cases with foam cutouts for each piece. The kind you couldn't buy, only inherit or trade favors for.

“Morning,” Peri said.

Kitt glanced at her, then back to the oscillator. A nod. “You're early.”

“Same time as always.”

“Sun's not up yet.” She touched the probes to another point, checked the dial. “That makes it early.”

Peri stepped closer. The only warm spot in the whole place, heat coming off the lamp, the iron, Kitt herself. The radio pulled apart, wires spilling out of it. The iron still trailing smoke. Half-empty coffee cup balanced near the edge.

Her thumb found the stopwatch through the fabric of her pocket. She shifted her weight. Then again.

“You've been at this all night.”

“Couldn't sleep.” Kitt set the iron down. Her eyes found the copper tangle framing Peri's face. Her mouth twitched. “What's happening with your hair?”

“You're one to talk.”

Kitt raked her fingers through her own cropped mess. “I've been working for hours.”

Peri touched the side of her head. “Yeah. I just woke up.”

“Sit.” Kitt gestured to the stool.

“I need to—”

“Sit down. You can't run like that. You'll waste time stopping halfway through to fix it when it drives you insane.”

Peri sat. The stool cold through her pants. She turned her back to Kitt, and her leg started bouncing before she'd settled. The warehouse door right there. Twenty steps. Less.

Kitt's hands slid into her hair. Fingers separating the tangled mess, working through knots with small, sure pulls. Peri's head tilted before Kitt asked it to—her neck already knowing the angle, the way it had since she was small enough for someone else's hands to do this. She couldn't remember whose.

For a moment, Peri stopped wanting to move.

Her eyes closed. The pull and weave, Kitt's callused fingertips brushing her neck. She could hear the soldering iron ticking as it cooled, metal settling in the roof beams, the low murmur of water cycling through the lock gates.

Her leg had stopped bouncing. She didn't know when.

Kitt wove the final section and secured it with the elastic from her wrist. One last tug drew the braid snug against Peri's spine.

“There. Done.”

Before Peri could stand, Kitt's arms came around her from behind. Peri went still—and then her weight settled back against Kitt's chest. Kitt's chin on her shoulder, the hold sudden and tight despite the cold. Close enough to feel her breath, the coffee and solder smoke that clung to her.

“You okay?” Kitt asked.

Peri looked down at Kitt's forearm where it crossed her chest. Caught it. Held it. The difference in their coloring so plain up close—Kitt's darker skin against her own.

She squeezed once.

“Yeah. Just need to run.”

Kitt stayed a moment longer, breath warm on Peri's neck. Then let go.

Peri stood. Scalp tingling from the tight braid. Already wanting the door.

Kitt picked up the soldering iron.

“Say hi to Emma for me.”

Peri headed for the warehouse door. Cold morning air hit her face when she pushed through, carrying the smell of canal water and spring growth.

Behind her, the workbench still glowed. Kitt's small sun against the warehouse dark.

Peri pulled the stopwatch from her pocket.

⚙

The service road stretched east. Behind her the lock towers rose against the gray sky, rust bleeding down their faces in long orange streaks, the spillway dark and dripping.

Peri stopped at the edge. Rolled her right ankle, then her left. Swung each leg forward and back, feeling the hip flexors wake up. A lunge on each side, quads loading, the pull in her left shoulder when she reached—she rolled it once, twice, let it settle. Slapped both thighs hard enough to feel it.

She straightened. Shook out her arms.

Drew a slow breath in. Let it out.

A red curl dropped across her face. She blew it aside.

Let's do this.

Click.

Her legs slipped into rhythm at once. Not fast. Not yet. Just steady.

Ten miles. Five out, five back. Downhill on the way out, uphill coming home.

Each exhale ghosted white, heat building as her body found the gear it knew—the one between effort and ease where nothing hurt. Boots on wet pavement, the canal sliding past on her left, black water catching the first light. Her breath and her footfalls and nothing else.

The road unwound ahead of her, empty, the world not awake yet. Stride lengthening as the muscles warmed, the tightness in her calves loosening, her arms settling into their swing. She passed the first mile marker without checking the stopwatch.

Just this. Just the body in motion.

Mile three. The canal bending south. The road rising slightly, her legs adjusting without being told. Trees thinned along the bank and the hills opened up around her, wide and green and still holding the last of the morning fog in their hollows. Smoke from Belfast Mills hung low in the still air ahead.

Kitt's voice, bleeding through. Three months. Nobody manufactures to these tolerances anymore.

Nobody builds anything, anymore. Peri pushed harder.

Sky brightening. Streetlamps clicking off along the canal, photocells registering dawn.

Braid whipping against her back.

Mile four. Belfast Mills. Brick and timber houses climbing the hillside, chimneys trailing coal smoke into the pale sky. Doors opening. A dog tied outside the general store, watching her pass. The smell of bread from somewhere. The Chen bakery, ovens already going.

The lights were wrong.

Kitchen windows flickering. Brightening, dimming, clawing back. The grid straining under morning load, worse than last week, worse than the week before that. The whole settlement blinking.

Movement ahead.

A kid burst from one of the houses. Yellow coat stark against the gray. Emma Chen, dark hair streaming, legs pumping as she tried to cut Peri off.

Peri shortened her stride.

“Peri!” Emma windmilled both arms, managed a few stumbling strides alongside. All elbows, knees, more enthusiasm than coordination. “Mama says thank you for the medicine! My brother's fever broke!”

“That's good, Emma.”

Emma was already falling back, legs too short to hold the pace. Still waving. “Thank you!”

“Say hi to your mama.” Peri lifted a hand as the gap widened. The yellow coat getting smaller behind her. Three weeks ago they'd lifted those antibiotics, the job that almost got them caught. Emma's brother had come back from the edge.

She faced forward. Let the rhythm take her back.

Sixteen relay stations.

Mile five.

The road ended where pavement became dirt track. Kyjorh Dam rose against the brightening sky, two hundred feet of concrete climbing out of the valley. Even from here the rust-orange stains bled down its face where the rebar had gone through. Water pooling at the base where it shouldn't be. The western spillway casting a shadow that sat wrong against the valley floor.

Peri slowed, letting her heart rate come down in stages. Sweat dripping from her temples despite the morning chill.

The sun broke the horizon. Warmth on her flushed face. The dam's shadow pulling back from the valley floor.

Peri turned. Faced uphill.

Five miles. The grade she'd been saving.

She started running.

Gravity hit at once. Legs protesting. She drove harder.

Each breath scorched. Thighs screaming, calves knotting.

Sweat in her eyes. Salt sting.

Seven miles. Eight.

Legs shaking. Speed bleeding off.

She didn't stop.

Nine.

Breathing ragged. Gasps that never filled her lungs.

The last mile burned worse. Every stride an argument. Everything begging to stop.

She held the pace.

Gate 31 ahead.

Click.

Peri stepped off the road into wet grass. Her legs quit. Just refused. She went over backward. The impact soft. Cold seeping through cloth, shocking on overheated skin.

She lay there. Staring up at a sky gone bright and endless.

Her lungs heaved, each breath dragging back toward normal. Her heart hammered, pulse so strong she felt it in her temples, her wrists, her throat. Sweat ran from her hairline into the grass, the heat bleeding out of her in stages. Muscles twitching, calves, quads, the long muscles along her spine, firing at nothing, still running when the rest of her had stopped.

The clouds moved. Slow and enormous, pulling west. She felt herself go with them, the ground tilting under her back, the sky and the earth trading places. The wind pushed through the grass and she felt it on wet skin and she stopped knowing which direction was up. The world enormous and indifferent and real.

Then the stillness found her. The run was over and there was nothing between her and herself.

Her fingers found the stopwatch in her jacket pocket. Closed around chrome still warm from her body, pulling it free.

Her arm dropped to the grass. She wasn't ready to look. Not yet. The sky above her, bright and empty, the kind of sky that didn't care what the number said.

Her breathing slowed. She lifted the stopwatch. Held it above her, arm trembling from the run or from something else. The sun behind the watch, blue sky framed in the gap between her fingers.

Eighty-six minutes.

Three minutes slower than yesterday.

The number settled into her chest like something swallowed wrong. She kept her arm up, the watch trembling against the sky, as if holding it there long enough might change what it said. Eighty-six. Not the eighty-two she'd been chasing for weeks. Not the number that meant she was worth the space she took up.

She closed her eyes. Let the stopwatch rest on her thigh. Chrome going cold against her leg.

“Peri!” Kitt's voice, from down the hill. “I got a job!”

She didn't move. The number still there behind her closed eyes, white against dark, the way numbers stayed when she'd stared at them too long.

“Peri?” Closer now. More insistent.

The sky came back. The wet grass beneath her. Kitt's voice pulling her up from wherever she'd gone.

She let out a slow breath. A copper curl had worked free, brushing her cheek. She pushed it back.

She slipped the stopwatch inside her jacket pocket.

She stood. Muscles protesting. Legs shaking.

“Coming!” she called back. Brighter than she felt.

She started walking toward Kitt's voice.