The Scrapheap wasn't so much a place as a disaster in the making—mountains of dead tech and shattered dreams. Conduits lay piled like corpses after a massacre, their screens shattered into spiderweb patterns, their casings pried open by desperate fingers searching for one last functioning component. The air stank of sweet, metallic tang of leaking Aether batteries, undercut by something darker—the acrid bite of melted plastics and the faint burnt air that reeks of spells gone wrong.

Kai grimaced as his once-pristine boots sank into a patch of iridescent sludge that bubbled faintly beneath his weight. "This is where technology comes to die."

"Die?" Lucent crouched beside a gutted server rack, prying loose a Conduit that had fused to the interior framework during some long-ago power surge. The screen was a lost cause—shattered into a mosaic of broken glass—but the core housing looked intact. He tossed it to Kai without warning. "This is where it gets reborn, kid. Just... uglier."

Kai fumbled the catch, the device landing in his hands with a heavier thud than its size suggested. The edges were crusted with something dark that flaked away under his thumbs, it was impossible to tell. He wiped at the backside of the phone with the cleaner part of his sleeve, revealing a serial number etched into the metal. "This is... this is a Myriad Mark IV." His voice held something like awe. "These were top-of-the-line a year ago."

"And now it's scrap." Lucent yanked another Conduit from the pile—this one scorched along one side, its glyph-compiler visibly warped from whatever catastrophic failure had sent it here. "Corporate trash is the only trash we've got. Unless you'd rather try rawcasting?"

Kai's fingers twitched at the memory—the warehouse, the shadows moving wrong, the way his skin had crawled as something dark and creepy unfolded from his device. He swallowed hard and pried open the Mark IV's back panel with a screech of protesting metal. Inside, the Aether regulator hung at a drunken angle, its delicate filaments blackened and brittle. "The regulator's fried."

"So replace it." Lucent dug through a nearby crate overflowing with scavenged components, tossing aside broken capacitors and cracked housing units until he found a less-damaged regulator. The throw was deliberately careless, forcing Kai to lunge to catch it. "You said you coded utilities. Think you can slap together a basic interface from this garbage?"

Kai hesitated, the regulator clutched in his grease-streaked hand. Back in the Spire, he'd had clean rooms with filtered air and pre-approved development kits, tools calibrated to micrometer precision. Not this—corroded parts that might fail at any moment, the ever-present risk of a glyph backfiring so hard it took his fingers with it.

But the alternative was nothing. No defenses. No way to fight back when needed.

He exhaled sharply through his nose and got to work.

The Conduit sputtered to life nearly two hours later, its screen flickering like a dying neon sign in a rainstorm. Kai's hands were a mess—streaked with grease and old coolant, dotted with cuts from the sharp metal edges. A thin line of blood traced its way down his wrist from where the casing had bitten into the meat of his palm, but he barely seemed to notice.

Lucent watched as the kid traced a simple illumination glyph—the most basic of spells, the first thing any corporate-trained mage learned. The lines stuttered into existence, the glyph frayed and unstable, but the light held. Weak. Unsteady. But there.

"Congratulations," Lucent said, his voice dry as the dust that coated everything in the Junkyard. "You just turned trash into slightly better trash."

Kai ignored him, his eyes fixed on the glowing screen. For the first time since the warehouse, some determination flickered across his face, cutting through the exhaustion and the fear.

It wasn't much.

But in the Junkyard, where survival of the fittest is the rule, it was enough.

For now.

Lucent watched Kai fumble with the salvaged Conduit for another minute before turning away. The kid was slow, his uncalloused hands unaccustomed to the rough work of repairs, but he'd learn. Or he'd die. Either way, Lucent had his own problems.

His own Conduit—a smorgasbord of scavenged parts and black-market glyphware—hung heavy in his pocket. It had served him well enough in the Pit, but after the warehouse, after the shadows, he needed more. Faster casting. Stronger output. Something that wouldn't burn out the second he pushed it past corporate safety limits.

He kicked through a pile of broken drone husks, the metal screeching as it shifted. The Scrapheap stretched before him, a graveyard of dead tech and half-picked bones. Somewhere in this mess were the parts he needed.

Aether Batteries came first.

The standard-issue cells in his Conduit were drained to the dregs, barely holding a charge long enough to cast a decent Deflection Matrix. What he needed were the high-density cores ripped from security drones or—if he got lucky—a fried Reclamation Unit's backup power supply.

A glint of metal caught his eye beneath a collapsed server rack. Lucent dropped to one knee, shoving aside the wreckage with a grunt. There, nestled in a tangle of severed wiring, was a Nimbrix-branded battery pack, its casing cracked but the core still intact. The telltale blue shimmer of active Aether pulsed faintly through the fracture lines.

Jackpot.

He pried it free, ignoring the way the exposed filaments sparked against his calloused fingers. This would give him at least three, maybe four high-powered casts before burning out. Enough to matter.

The CPU was trickier.

Most Conduits used standardized glyph-compilers—corporate-approved and safety-locked. What Lucent needed was an unshackled processor, something ripped from a military-grade rig or a decommissioned rawcaster's kit. The kind of tech that didn't end up in the Scrapheap unless someone really fucked up.

A rusted shipping container loomed at the edge of the pile, its doors half-off the hinges. Inside, the carcass of an old combat drone lay sprawled across a workbench, its chest cavity pried open like a ribcage. Lucent's breath caught.

There, nestled in the drone's ruined core, was a Mark VII tactical compiler—scorched and missing half its heat sinks, but whole. The kind of processor that could handle overloaded glyphs without melting down. The kind that could kill a man just from the feedback if he didn't know what he was doing.

Lucent's fingers itched.

He was elbow-deep in the drone's guts when Kai's voice cut through the silence.

"You're going to get yourself killed."

Lucent didn't look up. "Not the first time someone's said that."

Kai hovered at the container's entrance, his newly repaired Conduit clutched in one hand. The screen flickered weakly, casting jagged shadows across his face. "That's a Nimbrix combat compiler. The failsafes alone—"

"Are the first thing I'm stripping out." Lucent yanked the processor free with a shower of sparks. The metal burned against his palm, but he didn't flinch. "You want to survive out here, you don't cast safe. You cast first."

Kai opened his mouth, then shut it. His gaze dropped to the battery in Lucent's other hand, then to the scorched glyph-burns that laddered up Lucent's forearms. A silent understanding passed between them—some lines, once crossed, couldn't be uncrossed.

Lucent shoved the parts into his pocket. The weight was comforting.

The flickering campfire cast long shadows across the rusted interior of their makeshift shelter, painting Kai's face in alternating strokes of amber and black. He hunched over his salvaged Conduit, fingers trembling slightly as they traced lines of corrupted code. Every few seconds the screen would sputter, sending distorted light dancing across the corrugated metal walls, illuminating the crude glyphs scratched into the steel by previous occupants.

Lucent watched the kid struggle with the device for another minute before reaching into his pocket. His fingers closed around the familiar shape of an old data chip, its edges worn smooth from years of use. He tossed it at Kai's feet where it skittered across the uneven floor with a sound like chattering teeth.

"Quit wasting time polishing corporate garbage," Lucent said, nodding toward the chip. "That's real survival code."

Kai picked it up gingerly, turning it over in hands that still looked too clean despite the grime under his nails. The chip was unmarked except for a single character scratched into its surface—an angular symbol that might have been a letter or a knife wound.

"What exactly am I looking at?" Kai asked as he slotted it into his Conduit's aging port.

The screen convulsed, the display fracturing into jagged lines before reassembling itself into a list of files rendered in the jagged, uncompiled glyph-script of the underground. The names alone told a story—Silent Step with its promise of muffled footsteps, Rust-Bite that ate through metal like acid, Flashburn that could sear retinas in half a heartbeat.

Kai's breath caught. "These are combat spells."

"Survival spells," Lucent corrected. He leaned forward, the firelight carving deep hollows beneath his eyes. "Difference is, these won't report your location to Myriad every time you cast them."

The Conduit whined as Kai attempted to load one of the files, the screen distorting as corrupted code fought against the device's strained processors. His brow furrowed in that particular look of frustration—the one that said he expected technology to obey simply because he commanded it.

"You're doing it wrong," Lucent said, snatching the device back. His own fingers moved with the brutal efficiency of someone who'd learned glyphwork in back alleys. He forced the compilation with a sharp twist of his wrist, ignoring the device's protesting whine. The screen flared crimson before settling into an ominous pulse.

Kai accepted the returned Conduit with wide eyes. "They're unstable."

"Everything's unstable when your life's on the line." Lucent leaned back, the shadows swallowing his face. "Spire Conduits learn perfect form in a classroom. Out here, you learn to cast with broken fingers and half-dead Conduits. You learn to make it work because the alternative is a Reclamation Unit putting a glyph between your eyes."

Outside, the Junkyard groaned its nightly chorus—the screech of clashing metal, the distant skitter of things with too many legs, the ever-present hum of distant Aethernet nodes bleeding through the cracks in reality. Something heavy dragged itself across the roof of their shelter, sending a shower of rust particles drifting down like metallic snow.

Kai's fingers tightened around the Conduit. For the first time since Lucent had met him, there was no disgust in his expression, no privileged disdain. Just a dawning understanding of the rules that governed life outside the Spires.

Lucent watched the realization take root behind the kid's eyes. That hunger to survive, to fight back, to stop being prey. It was raw and unpolished, but it was there.

He nodded to himself.

Maybe the kid wasn't completely useless after all.