Chapter 1: The Scavenger’s Oath

POV: Neoma

The stench of rot coated the back of my throat. I pressed the rubber seal of my respirator tighter against my face, digging the plastic into my skin, but the chemical-sweet reek of decaying Barzil still seeped through.

Three years scavenging the Scrap Fields, and my lungs still seized—a sharp, burning rejection—every time I stepped outside the Warrens. I kept my head down. Eyes burned from the sulfur. I scanned the grey shifting dunes of industrial slag.

Above, the sky was a bruised purple, choked by clouds that tasted like copper. And higher still, the fragments of the Shattered Moon hung like broken teeth, glowing with that faint, mocking silver light.

"Hope is for the dead," I whispered into my mask. My voice sounded tinny. Wrong. "The living just need batteries."

I adjusted the strap of my canvas satchel. It was light. The lack of weight sat like a stone in my stomach. If I returned to the gang boss with an empty bag, the thirst would start in two days.

My mouth went dry at the thought. Dehydration in the Dregs wasn't just dying; it was desiccation. A slow, cramping end while radiation cooked you from the inside.

I scrambled up a mound of rusted rebar. Muscles burned. Steel-toed boots found purchase where a lesser scavenger would have slipped. My gloves were worn thin at the fingertips, but I could feel it. A vibration. A low, hungry hum. Barzil.

I dropped to my knees, digging frantically through the ash. Dust coated my goggles, turning the world into a smear of grey. My fingers brushed something smooth. Warm. I pulled it free. It was a capacitor coil from a pre-Fracture engine.

Cracked, but the core... the Barzil core pulsed against my palm. Blue light beat in a rhythm. It hummed. Wanted to be fed. A Tier 1 shard. It would buy me a week of food. Maybe even a fresh filter to stop the burning in my chest.

"Beautiful," I breathed. I wiped the ash from the glass casing.

Then the ground pulsed.

Not earthquake. Mechanical. Rhythmic.

Metal ground against metal—heavy enough to rattle my teeth. Steam vented between each grinding cycle, hissing sharp and cutting through the dead air. The vibration traveled through the slag, settling deep in my bones.

Citadel Crawlers.

Brain shut down. Body moved. Instinct, honed by a decade of being the smallest thing in a world of monsters, snapped my limbs into action. I shoved the coil into my satchel and threw myself off the mound, sliding down the slope of trash into the shadow of a colossal, rusted turbine engine.

The turbine was a corpse from the Before, half-buried in the earth like the skeleton of a metal whale. I squeezed through a gap in the fan blades. Jagged metal bit into my jacket.

I pulled my knees to my chest. Made myself small. Stopped breathing.

Through the gaps in the rusted casing, I saw them. Two armored personnel carriers, painted the stark, terrifying white of the Obsidian Citadel, crushed the debris piles I had just been standing on. They ground to a halt fifty yards away. The back ramps hissed open—a release of pressurized air that smelled of ozone.

Soldiers poured out. Uruks. The Soldier Caste.

They were massive. Arms thick with muscle and encased in standard-issue iron-weave armor. I saw the bronze armbands glinting in the twilight. They didn't move like men; they moved like predators. Heavy. Too fast. Wrong.

"Scan the sector," one of them barked. His voice was amplified by a helm vocoder—deep, scratching against my eardrums. "The signature dropped here."

"He is bleeding out," another Uruk grunted, kicking a pile of scrap. "He cannot have gone far. The Commander wants him alive."

"Vanguard targets are never easy, you idiot. Keep your distance if you spot him. Call it in."

Vanguard?

My breath hitched. Air trapped in my lungs. I forced myself to take shallow sips of oxygen. The Unit Vanguard was the Lugal’s personal death squad. They didn't hunt scavengers. They hunted high-value targets. Traitors. Rogue Ensi. Why were they in the Dregs?

The soldiers fanned out. Rifles raised. Barzil-tipped bayonets glowed with a dull, threatening heat. One of them passed within five feet of my hiding spot. I smelled him—oiled steel and synthesized meat. The scent of the Citadel. It made bile rise in my throat.

I stopped breathing entirely. Muscles locked. If they found a Null out here during a military sweep, they wouldn't arrest me. They would just shoot me for sport.

Minutes stretched. Time distorted. My legs cramped—knots of pain tightening in my calves. The acid dust tickled my throat, begging me to cough. I swallowed the urge. Tasted iron.

"Sector clear," the first voice crackled over the radio. "Signal lost. He must have gone into the tunnels."

"Let the rats have him," the second soldier spat. "If the Rot doesn't finish him, the Nulls will."

Engines roared to life—a deep, chest-compressing thrum. The ground shook again as the Crawlers turned, their treads grinding the history of the world into dust. They retreated back toward the gleaming dome of the Citadel on the horizon.

I waited a full ten minutes after the vibration faded from my molars before I moved. My limbs protested—stiff, numb—as I shimmied out of the turbine. I checked my satchel immediately—the coil was safe. Warm. I needed to move. The sun was setting, and the darkness in the Dregs belonged to things far worse than soldiers.

I turned to head toward the Warrens, picking my path through the debris.

Then I saw it.

It was faint, barely visible against the grey slag, but to a scavenger’s eye, it burned like a beacon. A droplet. It wasn't red. Human blood was red. Null blood was red.

This was liquid gold.

Luminous, thick, and steaming slightly where it touched the toxic ground. Lycan blood. Highblood, by the look of it.

I froze. My heart hammered against my ribs—pounding, painful. The soldier said the target was bleeding out. He said to let the rats have him.

I should walk away. Survival screamed it. I had my shard. I had my life. Curiosity was a luxury I could not afford. The Iron Law was clear: do not interfere with the affairs of the Wolf.

I took a step toward home.

But my eyes tracked the trail. One drop. Then another. A smear of gold on a piece of rebar. It led away from the open field, winding toward a dead-end alley formed by two collapsed skyscrapers.

A trap. Whoever was down there had nowhere left to run.

"Stupid," I hissed at myself.

I gripped the jagged shiv in my belt. Knuckles white. Skin tight. I followed the gold.