Iron Drumbeat Chapter 1 (Patreon)

CW: Body Horror

This story honestly has so much potential. I've been going absolutely nuts with the worldbuilding.

“Humanity dreamed of colonising other worlds in glittering ships that rode the space between stars, but instead we have claimed them with hulking machines made of iron, piloted by mechanomancers, and defended by the dead.”

— Before the Eld-fog; A history of Pre-Cataclysm Humanity, by Lorena Millington.

I struggled to keep my mask on while we rushed through the under-streets of Cascarton, coppers hot on our heels. Fuckin’ grease stains were out “recruiting” again, which was their way of saying they were gonna throw us all into the factories, or worse, out onto the front lines. I’d rather walk into the Eld-fog and come out in another world with no legs and five arms or some shit.

“Oi, Skitters!” Coke called, looking back at me. “Get your scrawny little ass in gear, mate! If you ain’t right behind us when we gets to the dip, I’m lockin’ you out.”

I scowled ahead at the older boy’s back, which was already turned so he could keep using is stupid long legs to run faster than me. His shaggy brown hair was messed up even more by the mask strap around his head, and I imagined running up behind him and yanking on some of the tufts.

Not only was his stride longer than mine, but his mask was better too. He didn’t have to keep holding it to his face so he wouldn’t inhale some of the Sludgeworks fumes. Gods, if they caught me, I’d rather die than work down here.

A crack from behind scattered my thoughts out of my head as surely as if it’d been a proper gun the coppers fired. Instead, I ducked and a bolo whirred over my head to catch around one of the thousands of metal pipes that carried terrifyingly toxic chemicals from one chemshop floor to the next.

Metal pipes stained black with soot and corrosion were everywhere down here. They wormed their way over the stone bricks of the chemshops and factories that made up the Cascarton Industrial District. That was the official name, obviously, which nobody used ‘cos they didn’t want to sound like an asshole from one of the upper districts of the city.

A stunner shot zipped past my ear like a wasp gone looney and splashed across a metal pipe, instantly scouring all the rust from the surface around where it hit. The palm sized net of energy fizzled there for a moment, then flickered and died.

Damn nasty things they were. They combined mechanomancy and science to create a gun that fired little nets of pure energy that could drop a grown man in body armour. For kids like me, it’d mean a week on my back in a ward until I was healed enough to be sent wherever the Upper who bought me wanted me to go.

“Skitters!” Coke yelled again. “Stop fuckin’ sleepwalking and get a move on! You ain’t no neon who’ll just come back to life!”

“Not unless you drag him back up from the underworld ‘cos you need a good Slip,” Pix, our best Breaker said while she dodged around a twisted chunk of metal. “Face it, Coke, you’d be lost without Skit’s pickpocket skills.”

“Oh, shut up,” Coke grumbled loudly. “We’re almost to the canal. We’ll be fine after we get there and can trip the bridge.”

Coke was right, in more than one sense. I was actually the fastest kid in our gang, but what he didn’t know was that I was hanging back so the coppers would shoot at me instead of them. I was smaller, harder to hit, and I could sprint across the bridge over the canal faster than any of them could. It just made sense, especially considering the bridge was less of a bridge and more of a single twenty metre length of rusted girder across the Eld-Fog.

A minute later, and the canal came into view. I’d heard that in the past, before the cataclysm that fucked the whole world, there used to be canals filled with water. Nowadays, all cities had canals so that any fog that formed would flow down into them and away towards the sea instead of hanging around. It was also why all the rich folks lived up where the fog couldn’t get them in their big skyscrapers with their aircars and vending machines and shit.

“Go, go!” Coke urged, stopping to make sure Pix got across even as he checked back on me. I was only like a few metres back, and I waved him forward with a hand signal.

He nodded and jumped onto the bridge, feet pounding on the old iron like it was a bell. He’d pull the pins holding it in place the moment I was safe on the other side.

Soon, my feet were joining the others in making the canalside sound like Sunday church. Glancing down past the girder, I watched the Eld-fog slowly dance its way down the cracked concrete channel. You could always tell if it was proper fog or not, because it made the hair on your arms stand up and the little animal part of your brain shudder.

One wrong step and I’d fall, disappearing into the greylands to die in one of a million different ways, or even worse, I’d come back out different. Like Coke’s parents, whoever they’d been. He was second generation eldtouched, so only his skin was grey as the fog, hence the street name Coke. His parents’d probably had three legs or a tail or something.

“Skit! Watch out!” Pix’s panicked voice jerked me back out of my own head, and I looked up at her in confusion.

Before she could give me any more warning, a horrible, bone-deep cold settled into my left foot, and I tripped. Hands scrabbling for purchase and heart pounding, I stopped myself before I fell down into the fog, but at the cost of all the skin on my palms.

Fighting tears of pain, I began to push myself back to my feet. A stunner fired behind me, and I stopped my ascent cold. The energy blast flew harmlessly overhead and the other two ducked it easily. A second set of ringing bells had me scrambling back to my feet in a rush. Looking back confirmed what I already knew. The coppers were on the damn bridge, and I was here in the middle of it with an eldtouched foot and nothing to defend myself. I made to run again, but the hiss-crack of a stunner firing heralded a blindingly white pain in my other foot, and I collapsed again.

Somehow, my fall kept me on the narrow bridge, and so rather than dying or whatever, I heard the coppers reach me.

“Fuck, he’s blocking the way,” a gruff, angry voice said.

A second voice that also sounded like it chewed gravel for fun said, “Mate, I told you to wait til they were across. I need the commissions from these canal rats.”

“Stop being such a sad sack,” the first copper said. “We got one, that’s better’n some nights.”

Gritting my teeth, I carefully rolled over to face them. First thing I noticed, though, was the way my eldtouched foot was bent off at an awkward angle, and I had— I threw up, hurling what little food was in my stomach down into the fog. The foot the stunner hit was charred and burning, while the leg with the eldtouched foot was busy growing an extra calf and foot out of my knee, but without the meat.

“F-fuck,” I said, my voice cracking with horror. “No, no, no…”

There was no way I’d be working as Coke’s slip ever again. Best I could do was beg an iron surgeon to cut the extra bones off me and fix me up with a pair of bolted on prosthetic feet on credit. Even then, I’d be… I’d be workin’ off the debt for years.

“Boy is going to need a doc,” one of the coppers commented without any sympathy whatsoever. “Look at that skeleton foot he’s got now. Fuck that’s ugly.”

“Yeah, that’s an augmentation job for sure.”

For a brief second, I wondered if going with the coppers would be okay. Real augs would be… amazing. I’d be able to run even faster, kick down doors, or— or none of those things, because they’d stick basic iron in me that did nothin’ more than move when my nerves told it to. Then, of course, they’d chip me so I could never run away without my neck exploding and I’d be put to work in some hellhole.

I turned and looked over at my friends where they crouched, taking cover behind the burned out husk of an old car. Pix had tears running down her cheeks, and Coke’s expression was as grim as I’d ever seen it. All three of us knew I was fucked.

Meeting Coke’s eyes, I held them for several seconds, and it was like we had a whole-ass conversation. I nodded, and he walked around the car and back to the bridge.

“Oi, rat!” one of the coppers shouted, lifting his stunner again. “The fuck do you think you’re doing?”

Baring his teeth in rage and pain, Coke kicked the pin out of the girder, and it fell out from under the coppers and me both.