The Scavenger power core sat on his workbench.
Jorin's hands hovered over it. Not quite touching. Not quite pulling away. The device was compact—no larger than his fist. Elegant curves. Seamless construction. No visible welds or joints. Still functioning after centuries, maybe millennia. Progenitor design maintained perfectly by people who understood what they were maintaining.
Everything he'd spent three years trying to replicate. Right there. Working. Humming with barely audible power. A faint warmth radiating from the casing—not heat from inefficiency, but controlled energy in perfect balance. And beneath the warmth, a faint pulse—rhythmic, almost imperceptible. As if the device was responding to some distant signal, synchronizing with something beyond this workshop.
He leaned closer. The surface had a grain to it—not metal, not ceramic, something between. Under his magnifying loupe, he could see microscopic channels etched into the casing. Cooling pathways, maybe. Or data conduits. The Progenitors hadn't distinguished between power systems and information networks. Everything connected. Everything communicated. A philosophy so far beyond Confederation engineering that studying it felt like an ant examining a cathedral.
The Confederation's best power cores lasted six months before needing repair. This one had lasted longer than recorded history.
"Don't even think about it," Mira said from the doorway.
Jorin looked up. The Military Commander leaned against the frame, arms crossed. She had the same exhausted look everyone from the underground years carried. Battle-scarred. Hard. Alive through stubbornness more than luck. Gray streaked her dark hair now. Lines etched deep around her eyes. A new scar on her left forearm—ragged, poorly healed. Field medicine. The Confederation's surgeons did their best with what they had, which was never enough.
Three years of war did that. Three years of watching friends die. Three years of impossible decisions.
"I'm just examining it," Jorin said.
"You're drooling." Mira moved closer. Her boots scraped on the workshop floor—rough concrete poured from salvaged materials. Everything in the Confederation was salvaged. "Theron brought that as demonstration. Not as gift. He expects it back."
"I know." Jorin's hands hovered over the core. His fingers ached to touch it. To trace the seams. To understand the coupling mechanisms hidden beneath that seamless surface. "But if I could just understand the coupling mechanism. The energy regulation. We could finally build stable power systems instead of jerry-rigged salvage."
"Which is exactly why he showed you. Temptation. See what you're missing. See what integration with the Collective offers."
The workshop smelled of solder and oil. Metal filings dusted the benches. Half-disassembled Progenitor artifacts littered every surface—Jorin's desperate attempts to understand systems designed by minds more advanced than humanity had ever achieved. A guidance array from a Progenitor transport, its crystalline matrix cracked and dark. A water purification membrane he'd extracted from the ruins of what might have been a Progenitor bathhouse. Three deactivated sensor nodes arranged by size, each one a puzzle he'd solved only to discover it was a single piece of a much larger puzzle he couldn't comprehend.
He'd made progress. Learned principles. Discovered patterns. But every answer revealed ten new questions. Every system he cracked proved to be dependent on ten others he didn't understand.
The Scavengers understood. Maintained. Preserved. They'd built their entire civilization around it—the Keeper Caste tending machines like priests tending sacred flames. Their children learned maintenance protocols before they learned to read. Every Scavenger community had its Recitation Hall, where the old songs preserved technical specifications in verse form, passed down through generations who'd lost the written manuals but kept the knowledge alive in music and muscle memory.
While the Confederation improvised and prayed their repairs would hold.
Jorin knew Mira was right. But knowing didn't make the temptation less. He was twenty-eight. Had spent his entire adult life studying Progenitor technology. Making broken things work through desperate improvisation. Cobbling together systems that barely functioned. Watching people die because their equipment failed. Because the Confederation couldn't maintain what they scavenged.
Last month, the eastern hospital's power system had collapsed. The coupling he'd designed—reinforced copper wrapped around a Progenitor regulator he'd adapted from a climate control unit—had held for four months. He'd tested it under load. Run simulations with the crude measurement tools he'd built. Checked and rechecked his calculations.
It failed at three in the morning. A harmonic resonance he hadn't predicted, couldn't have predicted with Confederation instruments. The regulator overloaded. The coupling melted. Backup systems—such as they were—kicked in for eleven seconds before they failed too.
Three patients died during surgery. Two adults with compound fractures from a construction accident. One child. A girl. Seven years old. Appendectomy. The simplest procedure imaginable. Routine. Safe. As long as the lights stayed on and the sterilization field held.
The lights went out. The sterilization field collapsed. Infection set in before the surgeons could finish by torchlight. Sepsis took her in nineteen hours.
Jorin had built that coupling. Had thought it would hold. Had been wrong.
He'd gone to the funeral. Stood at the back. Watched the girl's mother weep over a small grave dug in rocky soil outside the walls. Hadn't spoken to anyone. Hadn't explained that it was his coupling that failed. His design. His miscalculation.
He didn't need to explain. Everyone knew. In a city of thirty thousand, everyone knew who built what and whose equipment killed whom.
The Scavengers' systems didn't fail. Ever. They maintained everything. Perfectly. Continuously. No failures. No breakdowns. No watching friends die because a power core gave out at the wrong moment. Their Keeper Caste spent years—decades—in apprenticeships, learning the exact resonance frequencies, the precise calibration sequences, the maintenance rituals that kept Progenitor technology running. They didn't improvise. They followed protocols refined over centuries of careful observation.
"We need this technology." Jorin's hands curled on the workbench edge, his voice hollow even to himself. "Not for conquest. For survival. Our medical facilities fail. Our weapons malfunction. Our power grids collapse. People die, Mira. Because we can't maintain what we find."
"And if we submit to Scavenger integration to get it?"
"Then people live. Children grow up with heat. Light. Medicine that works." Jorin forced himself to look away from the power core. Met Mira's eyes. "Is freedom worth dying for? Or is survival worth compromising for?"
"That's the question, isn't it." Mira sat on a stool. The wood creaked—another improvised repair, the leg shimmed with a folded piece of tin. "Cael fought demons. Tomas died activating the Unmaking Engine. Damien sacrificed himself sealing the Wurm Lords. All so we could be free. Free to choose. Free to govern ourselves. Free to build something different."
Her throat tightened. She thought of Lys—the girl she'd pulled from a raider camp during the underground years. Fourteen, starved to bone, eyes like smashed glass. Lys hadn't spoken for three months after the rescue. Had flinched from every touch, every raised voice, every sudden movement. It had taken a year of patience—Mira sitting with her in silence, bringing meals, never pushing, never demanding. Lys worked in the hospital now. Had learned to stitch wounds, set bones, comfort the frightened. She smiled sometimes. Had chosen her own path, her own pace. Under Scavenger optimization, Lys would be assessed. Classified. Assigned a role based on utility. No patience for healing. No room for a girl who needed a year of silence before she could speak again.
"Free to watch children die because we don't have functioning medical technology."
"It's not that simple."
"It's exactly that simple." Jorin gestured at the workshop. Salvaged equipment. Improvised systems. A power drill with Progenitor components wired to Confederation batteries. A diagnostic scanner built from four different artifacts he'd hoped were compatible. Everything held together by wire, hope, and prayers. "We're one generation from forgetting how any of this works. The Scavengers preserved knowledge. We lost it. They maintained systems. We broke them. They optimized civilization. We barely survived."
"They hid while we fought."
"They survived while we died." Jorin stood. Paced. The workshop was small—converted from what had been a storage room beneath the Council building. The walls were bare concrete, stained with water damage from the leaking pipes two floors up. The ceiling was low enough that he had to duck near the doorway. A single window, narrow and high, let in thin afternoon light that barely reached the workbenches. But it was his. His space. His tools. His desperate attempts to understand technology humanity no longer deserved. "Look. I don't want war. Don't want conquest. Don't want to become the Scavengers. But I also don't want to stay primitive. Don't want to keep watching people die from preventable causes. There's a middle path. Between submission and pride. Between integration and isolation."
"What path is that?"
"Learning. Trading. Cooperating without surrendering." Jorin gestured at New Haven through the window. Buildings rising. Streets expanding. A civilization clawing its way back from the edge of extinction. "We built this from nothing. From survivors who'd lost everything. We have resilience. Desperation. Ability to make broken things work. The Scavengers have knowledge. Technology. Infrastructure. Together? We'd be unstoppable."
"They won't see it that way."
"Then we make them see it that way." Jorin turned from the window. The workshop felt smaller suddenly. Cramped. A symbol of everything the Confederation lacked. "I'm going to volunteer for Cael's expeditions. Find what we can use. Learn what we can learn. Become valuable instead of inconvenient."
"Be careful," Mira said. She stood. Moved toward the door. Paused with one hand on the frame—scarred wood, like everything else. "The Scavengers won't appreciate us searching for Progenitor sites in disputed territory."
"Then we'll be careful about that too." Jorin paused. "Three years ago, we were in the Ironworks tunnels—twelve of us crammed into a shaft beneath Millfield’s ruins. Starving. Dying. Told we'd never see the surface. We survived anyway. Built this anyway. The Scavengers think we're primitive. Let's show them what primitives can do when they're desperate enough."
He left. Stepped into the corridor. The stone walls were cool. Damp. The Confederation built fast—quantity over quality. Survival over perfection. Water stains traced dark lines down the concrete. Somewhere overhead, a pipe groaned. Another repair needed. Another system failing by inches.
But they built. Endured. Refused to quit.
That had to count for something.
In the corridor, Jorin passed the guard station near the Council building's east entrance. Two sentries sat behind a bank of instruments he'd built from salvaged sensor arrays—crude, bulky, wired together with copper scavenged from Progenitor conduits. The setup could detect large movements within a five-mile radius. On good days. When the power held and the calibration didn't drift.
The leftmost screen flickered. A blip—fast, high altitude, crossing from east to west. Then gone.
Jorin stopped. "See that?"
The guard blinked. Glanced at the screen. "Sensor ghost. Gets those sometimes. Power fluctuations in the array."
"Run it back."
The guard shrugged but complied. The replay showed the trace: a single contact, moving in a straight line at impossible speed. Five miles in under three seconds. Clean trajectory. No deviation. No tumble. Nothing like weather debris or a sensor artifact.
"Huh." The guard scratched his jaw. "Bird, maybe?"
"No bird moves that fast." Jorin leaned closer. The trace had already faded from the screen's crude memory. But he'd seen it. A deliberate path. Scanning altitude. The kind of straight-line transit that spoke of guidance systems, not wind currents. "Log it. Note the time, altitude, and vector. And recalibrate the array tomorrow—I want to make sure this wasn't a ghost."
"Sure thing." The guard scribbled in his logbook. Halfhearted. The notation of a man who'd logged a thousand sensor glitches and never seen one matter.
Jorin walked on. Filed it away in the part of his mind that catalogued unexplained things. Probably nothing. A sensor artifact. Atmospheric distortion. Some Scavenger drone on a maintenance flyover.
But the Scavengers flew their maintenance drones at low altitude. Slow. Visible. Announced. This had been high and fast and silent. And it had come from the east—from the wastes, not from Scavenger territory.
He thought of the power core on his workbench. Its faint pulse. Its rhythmic synchronization with something beyond his workshop.
Probably nothing.
He kept walking.
Mira stayed in the workshop. Looked at the covered power core. At the salvaged equipment. At the improvised systems that kept New Haven alive. Barely. Inadequately. But alive.
Jorin was right. The Confederation couldn't keep pretending improvisation was enough. They needed real technology. Real knowledge. Real infrastructure. Systems that didn't fail at critical moments. Medicine that worked. Power that lasted.
But submission to the Scavengers meant abandoning everything they'd fought for. Everything Tomas and Damien and thousands more had died building. Democracy. Choice. Self-determination. The right to govern themselves. To make their own mistakes instead of following someone else's optimization.
She'd seen what the Scavengers called optimization. Their delegation had arrived with polished equipment, clean uniforms, well-fed bodies—and a rigid hierarchy that made the Confederation's military structure look anarchic by comparison. Every Scavenger knew their caste. Their role. Their place in the maintenance chain. No deviation. No improvisation. No individual decisions that might disrupt the careful balance of systems they tended.
Efficient. Stable. Dead inside, as far as Mira could tell.
She thought of Lys again. Of what the Scavengers would see when they assessed her: a young woman with no formal education, useful manual skills, no technical certifications. They wouldn't see the courage it took to walk into a room full of strangers after what the raiders had done. Wouldn't see the way she'd taught herself to read by candlelight, sounding out words in medical texts until the syllables made sense. Wouldn't see a survivor who'd rebuilt herself from nothing into someone who could hold a dying man's hand and tell him it would be all right. They'd see an inefficiency to be corrected. A resource to be optimally allocated. And Lys—who had only just learned that she was allowed to choose—would have that choice stripped away by people who'd never known what it meant to lose it.
She picked up the cloth covering the power core. Looked at that perfect, impossible device.
It would be so easy. So simple. Submit to integration. Accept Scavenger hierarchy. Let them optimize. Let them maintain. Let them lead.
And lose everything that made the Confederation worth preserving.
Somewhere between pride and survival, there had to be a path. A way to gain knowledge without surrendering freedom. To access technology without accepting hierarchy. To learn without submitting.
Finding it before the Confederation collapsed—or before the Scavengers forced integration—that was the challenge.
Mira covered the power core again. Left the workshop. Locked the door behind her. The lock was crude—scavenged metal, hand-forged key. It would barely slow a determined thief.
But it was theirs. Made by Confederation hands. Imperfect. Functional. Free.
She headed to brief Cael. The corridors were busy—evening shift change, workers heading home from the foundries, the night watch assembling in the courtyard below. The sounds of a living city. Imperfect. Vulnerable. Alive.
Another crisis. Another impossible choice. Another test of whether the Confederation could survive without losing what made it worth surviving.
The Ashen Kingdoms kept grinding. Kept testing. Kept demanding impossible decisions from people who'd already given everything.
And the Confederation kept finding ways to survive. Keep building. Keep refusing to quit even when quitting was the rational choice.
One more time.
Because that's what they did. What they'd always done. Survive the impossible through desperate cleverness and stubborn refusal to accept defeat.
If they could.
If desperation and cleverness were enough.
Again.
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