The wind at the top of the pillar didn’t just blow — it had mass. It slammed into the chest, knocking the air from the lungs, and carried the scent of frozen emptiness where nothing living could survive. At three hundred meters above the ground, the world stopped being earth and stone.
It became geometry. And grinding steel.
“Pull it tighter, Ephrem!” I shouted, but the wind devoured my voice, leaving only a ragged rasp.
The old man’s face had turned into a gray mask wrapped in a torn scarf. With shaking hands he cinched the straps, binding me to Zeno’s back so tightly I could feel every gear shifting inside the Golem. My right prosthetic, wedged between my ribs and Zeno’s armor, felt like a foreign spike hammered straight through my chest.
Ephrem secured the last loop around his own waist, clipping himself to the machine’s belt hooks.
We became one body — an old man, a boy, and dead steel that had chosen to live.
“Zeno?” I pressed my cheek against the cold plating at the back of his head.
“Cable number three. Condition: acceptable. Ice accumulation: four centimeters. Magnetic grips operating at maximum threshold.” His voice vibrated directly through my skull. “Iron, if I lose my hold, I will initiate emergency release of the harnesses. You must—”
“Shut up and move,” I cut him off.
Zeno took the first step.
The cable, thick as a grown man’s torso, shuddered.
It wasn’t solid ground. It was a living string, stretched between titans. The moment we left the concrete platform, the abyss opened beneath us. The darkness below — where the hounds howled — dissolved into gray storm haze.
We were floating into nothing.
Every step was torture. Zeno drove his steel claws into the frozen crust; ice cracked and splintered, shards spiraling down into the mist. The cable began to sway. At first barely noticeable. Then stronger, syncing with the rhythm of the wind.
I shut my eyes.
Worse.
My inner ear revolted. It felt as if the world had flipped upside down and we were hanging over the sky instead of the earth.
“Don’t look down, malek! Not down!” Ephrem’s hoarse scream rose from behind me, raw with primitive terror.
Then the wind shifted.
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A brutal gust slammed into our right side. My prosthetic, broad and flat, caught it like a sail. I was yanked sideways so violently the straps groaned.
“Zeno!” I cried as one of his magnetic grips skidded across ice-slick steel.
We lurched right.
The cable twisted.
The world looped into madness.
And something inside my brain snapped.
[Critical overload of sensory systems…]
[Activating protocol: The Will to Live…]
The world froze.
Not silence.
Perception died.
Color drained into corpse-gray. The wind stopped being sound and became vectors — thousands of directional forces pressing with measurable intensity. The Precursor cable ceased to be metal; it turned transparent. I saw its structure — thousands of woven filaments, each with its own fatigue coefficient.
Ten meters ahead, one filament pulsed bright red.
Fracture. Internal cavity. Steel will fail under resonance.
It wasn’t knowledge.
It was sight — the naked truth of matter.
My eyes burned as if acid had been poured into them. The back of my skull throbbed like a nail was being driven through bone.
“Zeno! Jump two meters forward!” I shouted. My voice sounded wrong — dry, mechanical, like splitting ice. “The cable’s hollow! It’ll snap in three seconds!”
“Iron, my systems do not detect—”
“JUMP!”
He obeyed before his logic circuits finished processing.
All four limbs drove into the cable beyond the weak point.
Behind us, the sound exploded like cannon fire.
The cable where we had stood ruptured, spitting steel splinters as it snapped and coiled. The entire bridge convulsed. We were thrown upward, suspended only by the straps binding us to Zeno.
Something warm and sticky ran from my nose.
Too much… turn it off…
The digital lattice flickered and vanished in a white flash of agony.
I buried my face against Zeno’s neck, choking on blood and salt. My body trembled uncontrollably. My right arm — that cursed piece of iron — suddenly felt impossibly heavy, as if it were absorbing the entire weight of the bridge.
“Malek! Malek, are you alive?!” Ephrem’s voice sounded distant, submerged in water.
“We have reached an intermediate platform,” Zeno’s voice cut through the haze.
The swaying stopped.
Solid steel lay beneath us, buried in snow.
Zeno dropped to his knees, steam venting from his joints. His core labored, pushing heat into frozen servos.
Ephrem cut the straps with shaking hands. I slid from Zeno’s back onto the cold deck of the maintenance span and lay there, staring at the sky.
The storm was retreating.
Clouds tore apart, exposing indifferent, frozen stars.
Ephrem knelt over me, wiping my face with the edge of his cloak. His eyes were wide — not with concern.
With fear.
“How did you do that?” he whispered. “You weren’t even looking. How did you know it would break?”
I wanted to answer.
To say I calculated it.
That I saw force lines and stress vectors.
That the world was nothing but equations I had suddenly learned to solve.
Instead, I coughed up a clot of blood.
“Your eyes…” the old man recoiled a fraction. “They’re still… glowing.”
I covered them with my palm.
Residual data trails drifted inside my skull. I could feel The Will to Live burning something out of me — layer by layer — turning living nerves into copper wiring.
“We need to move,” I forced out, pushing myself upright. “We’re only halfway.”
Zeno lifted his head. His ocular lens flickered dim orange.
“Iron, your pulse exceeds baseline by two hundred percent. Brain activity shows anomalous spikes. You require rest.”
“There is no rest, Zeno.” I looked at my blood-stained fingers. “Why else did you save me? So I could die halfway across, staring at stars?”
I stood, swaying.
My shoulder no longer hurt.
It simply wasn’t there anymore — dissolved into the greater hum of exhaustion.
“Lead,” I ordered. “The City of Bridges won’t wait for me to recover.”
