The boots pounding toward them belonged to three guards in full brass, steam hissing from their armor joints as they moved. Eneji grabbed Marcus by the shoulder, hauling the confused young man to his feet.
"Tell them you slipped," he hissed. "Tell them you heard something in the marsh but it was nothing. Can you do that?"
Marcus stared at his perfectly healed leg, then at Eneji's face. Whatever he saw there must have convinced him, because he nodded slowly.
"Why?" he whispered.
"Because you're not the enemy." Eneji hoped he was right about that. "And because everyone deserves a second chance."
The approaching guards were shouting orders, their voices distorted by helmet speakers. Eneji melted back into the shadows between two chunks of rusted machinery, his heart hammering against his ribs. The compound's alarm horns were still wailing, searchlights sweeping back and forth across the muddy ground.
"Marcus!" one of the guards called out. "Report!"
"I'm here, Sergeant," Marcus replied, his voice only slightly shaky. "Thought I heard something in the marsh. Movement near the north wall."
"Starweave readings came from your position."
"Must have been an echo. You know how the Rift plays tricks with energy signatures."
A pause. Then: "You're bleeding through your bandages again, son. Get to the medical tent."
"Yes, Sergeant."
Eneji watched from his hiding spot as the guards moved away, Marcus limping after them with perfectly performed fake pain. Smart kid. Maybe there was hope for him yet.
But Lira and Mira were still out in the marsh, and the Covenant patrol was getting closer. He could hear them now, the mechanical screaming of their pursuit vehicles cutting through the night air.
Time to move.
The outpost's main gate was heavily guarded, but the east wall had a drainage grate that looked promising. Eneji made his way through the scattered debris, keeping low, until he reached the rusted metal barrier. The bars were corroded enough that he could squeeze through, though it meant crawling on his belly through what smelled like a century's worth of accumulated filth.
On the other side, he found himself in a narrow corridor that reeked of oil and desperation. Flickering Starweave lamps cast dancing shadows on walls lined with iron bars. The cell block.
His boots squelched on the condensation-slick floor as he moved deeper into the maze of corridors. Most of the cells were empty, but a few held huddled figures that pressed themselves against the far walls when they saw him coming. Political prisoners, probably. Or just people who'd been in the wrong place when the Covenant decided to flex its authority.
"Lira?" he called softly. "Lira, are you here?"
A familiar voice answered from the darkness ahead. "Eneji? What the fuck are you doing here?"
He found her in a cell near the end of the corridor, manacled to the wall with chains that looked like they'd been forged from the same brass as Covenant armor. Her wrists were raw and bleeding where the metal had rubbed against her skin, and there was a fresh bruise on her left cheek that made Eneji's vision go red around the edges.
But her eyes still held that defiant glare he knew so well. Pain hadn't broken her. Nothing ever did.
"Getting you out of here," he said, examining the lock on her cell door. "How long have you been..."
"Since about ten minutes after you left." Lira's voice was hoarse, like she'd been shouting. "They grabbed me and Mira when that patrol reached the marsh. Brought us here for questioning."
"Mira." Eneji's blood went cold. "Where is she?"
"Medical wing. She's fine, just sleeping off whatever they gave her to keep her quiet." Lira's expression softened slightly. "She's safe, brother. But they've got bigger problems than one sick kid."
"What do you mean?"
"There's something happening. The guards have been talking about it all night. Anomaly sightings all over the region. Starweave readings off the charts. And something about a rebel cell operating out of the old mining town near Greyhold."
The locket at Lira's throat caught the lamplight and threw it back in strange patterns. For just a moment, Eneji could swear he saw golden threads woven through the tarnished silver, pulsing in rhythm with her heartbeat.
"Your locket," he said. "It's glowing."
"I know." She looked down at it with an expression somewhere between wonder and fear. "Started when they brought me here. Like it's responding to something in this place."
Eneji reached out with his expanded senses, trying to feel what his sister's locket was reacting to. There. A faint resonance coming from deeper in the compound, familiar but wrong somehow. Like hearing a song you knew played in a different key.
"Thane," he breathed. "He's here. Third floor of the keep, just like Marcus said."
"Marcus?"
"Long story." Eneji pressed his hands against the cell door's lock, letting Starweave flow through his fingers. The mechanism was more complex than it looked, inscribed with runes that made his scar itch just looking at them. But locks were just another kind of broken thing, and he was getting good at fixing broken things.
Golden light seeped into the metal, finding the stress points where the mechanism could be convinced to open. It took more effort than healing Marcus had, but after a few seconds the lock clicked open.
"Show off," Lira muttered, but she was smiling.
"Can you walk?"
"I can run if I have to." She held out her manacled wrists. "But these things are warded. They're suppressing something, I can feel it."
Eneji took her hands in his, feeling the raw skin where the chains had bitten deep. His power responded immediately, golden threads weaving through the damaged tissue, taking away the pain and the bleeding. But the chains themselves resisted his touch, their brass surfaces inscribed with symbols that seemed to writhe when he looked at them directly.
"Suppression manacles," he said. "They're designed to contain Starweavers."
"Starweavers. Plural." Lira's eyes narrowed. "They think I'm like you."
"Are you?"
Before she could answer, the temperature in the corridor dropped twenty degrees. The Starweave lamps flickered, their light taking on a sickly green tinge that made everything look diseased. And from the shadows at the far end of the hallway came a sound like silk being torn.
The Bladewraith materialized out of darkness itself, its scythe already raised to strike. But this wasn't the same creature that had hunted him in Duskholme's streets. This one was different. Smaller. More human-looking, if you ignored the way its body seemed to exist in three dimensions and also somehow not quite.
And its eyes. Mechanical lenses that whirred and clicked as they focused on him, but behind the artificial glow was something that might have been recognition.
"Star-touched," it said, its voice like grinding gears wrapped in velvet. "The one who burns with stolen light."
It moved faster than thought, scythe cutting through the air where Eneji's head had been a split second before. He threw himself sideways, feeling the blade's edge whisper past his ear, and rolled to his feet with his hands already glowing with defensive power.
The Bladewraith's next strike opened a gash along his forearm, brass-bright pain that made him gasp. But even as the wound bled, golden light was already sealing it closed. Absolute restoration, working faster than the damage could accumulate.
"Fascinating," the creature hissed, circling him with predatory grace. "You heal as quickly as you're hurt. But healing requires energy, little star. How long before you burn yourself out?"
It was right. Each use of his power drained him a little more, and he was already running on fumes from the night's earlier exertions. But Lira was still chained to the wall, still helpless, and he'd be damned if he was going to let another Covenant weapon hurt his family.
The Bladewraith struck again, a flurry of cuts that forced Eneji to give ground. His scar blazed with each wound, golden fire knitting flesh back together almost as fast as the scythe could open it. Almost.
"Stop!" he said, dodging another strike. "You don't have to do this!"
"Don't I?" The creature's mechanical eyes clicked and whirred. "I am what they made me. Purpose incarnate. Beauty in service to order."
But there was something else in its voice now. Uncertainty. Pain, maybe. Behind the artificial perfection of its features, Eneji caught a glimpse of what it had been before the Covenant's surgeons and thaumaturgists had gotten their hands on it.
Human. It had been human once.
"What's your name?" he asked, still backing away from its attacks.
The question seemed to hit the Bladewraith like a physical blow. Its scythe wavered, and for a moment those mechanical lenses flickered with something that looked almost like confusion.
"I..." it began, then stopped. "I don't... I am Unit Seven-Seven-Seven. Designation Shadowblade. Purpose: elimination of Starweave anomalies."
"That's not a name. That's a serial number." Eneji pressed his advantage, letting compassion bleed into his voice. "What did they call you before? Before they did this to you?"
"I don't remember." But the creature's voice was smaller now, more uncertain. "They said remembering would make me weak."
"Remembering makes you human."
The Bladewraith's scythe dropped to its side. "Human." It said the word like it was testing the taste of something half-forgotten. "Yes. I think... I think I was human once."
"You still are." Eneji took a step forward, his hands glowing with gentle healing light. "Whatever they did to you, whatever they made you into, there's still something real underneath all that machinery. Something worth saving."
For a moment, he thought he'd gotten through to it. The creature's artificial features softened, and its mechanical eyes stopped their constant clicking. It looked almost peaceful.
Then the moment shattered.
"No." The Bladewraith's voice was cold again, empty of everything that had made it sound human. "Purpose is clarity. Memory is weakness. The Covenant made me perfect."
It raised its scythe again, but instead of attacking, it began to back away toward the shadows.
"This is not over, star-touched," it said, dragging the blade along the cell block's wall with a sound like screaming metal. "I will find you again. And next time, your stolen light will not be enough."
The creature melted back into darkness, leaving only gouges in the stone and the lingering smell of ozone.
Eneji sagged against the nearest wall, exhaustion hitting him like a physical weight. His scar was still burning, and he could feel the Starweave in his system flickering like a candle in a strong wind.
"Well," Lira said from her cell. "That was fucking terrifying."
"It remembered," Eneji said quietly. "Just for a second, it remembered being human."
"And then it chose to forget again." His sister's voice was gentle but firm. "You can't save everyone, brother. Sometimes the best you can do is survive long enough to save the people who still want to be saved."
Maybe she was right. But the look in the Bladewraith's eyes when it had remembered, that moment of confused humanity breaking through artificial purpose, was going to haunt him for a long time.
He turned his attention back to the suppression manacles, pouring what remained of his power into breaking the warded locks. Golden light met brass resistance, and for a moment he wasn't sure which would win.
Then the chains fell away, clattering to the floor with a sound like broken dreams.
Lira rubbed her freed wrists, and her locket blazed with sudden light. Not the warm gold of Eneji's Starweave, but something cooler. Silver-white, like moonlight on deep water.
"Okay," she said, her voice carrying a note of power that made the air itself seem to listen. "Now let's go get our healer back."