Jack studied the two of them—the pilot and the medic—and a deep, heavy despair washed over him.

  They were beautiful in that specific, cruel way that cuts deeper when you’re already bleeding inside.

  Nya Griffin’s face looked sculpted, all sharp angles catching the faint light. Her skin was sun-kissed bronze; her dark hair was pulled back into a clean, efficient ponytail. Her eyes were all edges—cold, assessing, like a blade hunting for a gap in armor. She didn’t just look alive—she looked dangerous.

  The medic beside her was the opposite in every way. Pale skin, almost delicate; a softness that even battlefield grime hadn’t managed to erase. Strands of black hair fell loose around her face, brushing lips that trembled from exertion but never complaint. Her eyes were wide, attentive, studying him with an intensity that felt almost too intimate. She looked like she didn’t belong anywhere near a war zone—and that was exactly why her beauty hurt to look at.

  Standing between them, Jack felt a wave of nausea. Because he knew exactly what would happen if he left them behind. He could picture it with appalling clarity, and the image turned his stomach.

  “So,” he said at last, voice still rough, “what got you two captured?”

  Nya answered first. She sat down, pulling a pink elastic band from her tangled hair, her movements lean and efficient, stripped of any wasted motion.

  “I was escorting Meadow to a frontline field hospital,” she said. “We got shot down on the way. Been in a cell ever since.”

  She stopped there. Didn’t elaborate. Jack saw something flicker in her eyes—fear, hatred, and something cold and murderous all tangled together.

  He also noticed the dark bruises circling her wrists where the ropes had bitten into her skin.

  “Anything else you heard?” he asked, turning away just enough to scan the tree line out of habit.

  Nya re-tied her hair and continued, “Not much. But on the road I heard that officer you just took care of answering a call. The mech regiments of the Federation have mostly pulled back across the Titan River. The strip between the old defensive line and the river…”

  She glanced toward the forest.

  “…all theirs now.”

  Fuck.

  The thin thread of hope he’d been hanging onto died quietly. He was stuck behind enemy lines—with two very conspicuous liabilities in tow.

  He looked at STARK-2. Survival probability: less than 1%.

  Underneath, fresh lines blinked into existence:

  Fatty takes them with you?

  Or leave them and go alone.

  Your choice.

  The message flickered away before he’d made up his mind. He felt a faint touch on his arm.

  He looked down.

  The medic—Meadow—had somehow found a small medkit. “You’re bleeding,” she said softly, pointing to his forearm, where he’d torn the skin dragging the officer’s body without even noticing.

  Before he could protest, she’d already taken his wrist with surprising firmness. Tweezers glinted in her hand as she carefully picked wood splinters and dirt out of the wound. When she focused, the tip of her tongue slipped out to rest lightly against her lower lip. There was something almost childlike in that expression of total concentration.

  A healer, he thought. Gentle hands, quiet presence—and a stubborn strength that belonged only to her.

  “Thanks,” he muttered when she finished, yanking his arm back a little too quickly.

  He glanced over at Nya. She was staring at his TSR-9 lying in the dirt.

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  “That yours?” she asked, eyes bright with a pure, almost academic curiosity. “We trained with that model at the base. Energy rifle, TSR-series.”

  Her fingertips brushed the rifle’s scarred casing, tracing the wear that years of Jack’s abuse had carved into it.

  This one’s a gearhead, he realized. A pilot who didn’t just fly machines, but liked them. He watched her gaze slide from the rifle to the pile of ruined mechs nearby, something hungry flaring behind her eyes. She wasn’t just a survivor; she was a scavenger designed for junkyards.

  And right then, looking at this quiet healer and this sharp-eyed technician, Jack surrendered to his fate.

  Fuck it, he thought. Die today, die tomorrow—dead is dead. Might as well die with interesting company.

  “We’re south of the line,” he said suddenly. “We cut a loop first…” He pointed east. “Then we go that way. To Garipan City.”

  He jabbed a thumb toward the nearby mech graveyard.

  “And that is our ride.”

  What followed was a blur—feverish and tunnel-dark, like working in some buried underworld.

  At night, Jack was a carrion ghost, stripping dead mechs for anything worth stealing. By day, the three of them worked in a cramped, suffocating underground workshop. The air was thick with sweat, hot metal, and the faint musk of soldiers who had worn the same clothes far too long.

  Jack worked with a kind of manic brilliance. Nya watched, fascinated.

  He strapped STARK-2 back onto his wrist and got to it, yanking out the mech’s circuit boards and checking each one in turn.

  That was when STARK-2 showed what it could really do. It looked like an antique, but the moment it came close to exposed electronics, two slender mechanical arms unfolded from its casing and began probing the circuits—testing, resetting, repairing.

  Nya stared at the cascading strings of numbers and diagnostic codes racing across the screen.

  “You’re a mechanic?”

  “Something like that,” Jack said. “Used to study mechs. Prefer working alone.”

  With practised ease, he slid the repaired board back into the Paladin’s control deck beneath the cockpit, then powered the system up for testing.

  The Paladin ran a D–T / p–B11 hybrid fusion core (rated at 10? watts output, aneutronic ratio 30%, ~5 MeV per reaction).

  Jack carefully locked the power core into the recessed slot on the left side of the engine bay.

  Fully assembled, a Paladin could use its auxiliary thrusters to jump a maximum of ten meters.

  Not nearly enough.

  Especially not when the damn thing weighed forty-two tons.

  Jack fell silent, thinking.

  Nya watched him from the side for a moment, then asked, “What’s on your mind?”

  “I’m trying to figure out how to make this heap jump higher without any extra power source,” Jack said, eyes never leaving the mech’s stripped-down frame.

  Nya tilted her head, thinking. Her eyes flashed, and she smiled.

  “I saw an old movie once,” she said. “Someone wanted to launch a cockpit into orbit, so they stripped off everything that wasn’t absolutely necessary.”

  Jack looked at her for a long second, then gave her a thumbs-up.

  “Didn’t think you were a mech nerd,” he said.

  In the days that followed, Jack tore the Paladin apart piece by piece—armor plating, shield projectors, sensor arrays—everything that could be removed was removed.

  In the end, all that remained was the cockpit and a skeletal frame—a mech stripped down to bare bone.

  At night, when Jack finally passed out, snoring softly, Meadow would quietly sit beside him, tending his cuts and bruises, chewing on her lower lip as she worked.

  Nya would sit a little further off, watching. Her sharp eyes traced every weld, every rerouted cable and repurposed conduit. Sometimes she’d hand him a tool before he even realized he needed it.

  A few nights later, the thing was done.

  A Paladin skeleton. A mech monster, half-born in shadow. A bastard child of two empires that hated each other, beautiful and ugly all at once.

  “There are Imperial patrols in this sector,” Jack said. “The moment this skeleton shows itself, we’re going to have company.”

  “Then let’s give them something worth looking at,” Nya replied. “Light up the sky. I want it to be beautiful.”

  Jack glanced at her, at that hard face in the half-light.

  “It’s time those bastards paid a little interest back,” he said quietly. “Call it… my apology to you both.”

  In that moment, Nya and Meadow’s eyes shone in the dark, bright and fierce.

  Jack squeezed himself into the cockpit. With his bulk, the cramped space became almost microscopic. Nya and Meadow were pressed tight against him on either side, their body heat a shocking, electric presence. He could feel the soft curve of Meadow’s hip against him on one side, and the firm muscle of Nya’s thigh on the other.

  He drew in a long breath and set his fingers dancing across the holo-controls. The mech lurched into motion, a skeletal giant running with an eerie, unbalanced gait.

  Thirty minutes later, they reached a position about one kilometer from the place where Nya and Meadow had been held.

  Jack hit the trigger.

  The skeleton spat all eight of its warheads toward the marked coordinates.

  The world detonated.

  Even underground, they felt the shock roll past. On the cracked, jury-rigged monitor Jack had slapped together, they watched a jagged line of explosions rip the fragile walls of the Imperial camp to pieces.

  The audio feed stuttered, hissed, then came back in a riot of noise.

  Screams.

  Sirens howling across the camp.

  Fireworks of annihilation blooming in the night.

  A wild, blasphemous grin split Jack’s face—pure, uncut exultation.

  His monster.

  His ark.

  His salvation.

  It tore itself free of the earth and hurled them up into the night sky.

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