Page 171

A few days later, in the middle of the night when only Emily remains active in the workshop as Earnie sleeps in his attached accommodation, the sound of three heavy fistbeats on the front entrance breaks Emily’s focus.

She looks up from the crackling Steam Source, remade and mounted on top of a workbench, pumping power into a row of small battery cells.

“Tsk, what now,” she mutters, dropping the wrench she was using to adjust one of the steam valves and standing up.

Her senses, which were focused on her work, spread out, sweeping through the building and flagging a familiar energy signature just outside. Emily’s brow raises, and she skips across the suspended walkways with a few light hops, landing before the front door.

“Odd time to pay a visit,” she says as the door swings out of the way, revealing Podrick standing in the dim moonlight under the cautious gazes of the surrounding soldiers.

“I guessed you wouldn’t be sleeping if you were here,” Pod responds with a smug grin, his voice half a tone deeper than the last time they spoke. “And I was right!”

Emily scoffs, noting he’s grown an inch and scanning her eyes over his outfit. He’s wearing a set of work dungarees with a thin plating of metal woven into the chest bib and soft padding down his knees and shins. There’s a holster sewn at each of his hips, holding a pair of sleek silver revolvers, and he has a large backpack almost the same size as him strapped to his back.

The young mechanic also scans her over, but his brow creases in confusion at her ill-fitted robes, and his eyes widen in surprise when the cold workshop light catches the metallic arm hanging at her side.

“What’s with the arm?” he asks, with a hint of concern and a lot of curiosity as she raises it in response and flexes her magical digits. “That’s magic, right?”

“Yes. It’s a temporary stopgap while I work on something a little more permanent,” Emily responds, turning on her heel and walking along a walkway back towards the working platform. “Come in, I’m busy.”

Podrick immediately steps into the workshop, closing the door behind himself before hurrying to fall in step on her left. He glances between her arm and her slight scowl, hesitating to push further.

“I got cocky,” Emily explains without turning her gaze, her scowl deepening. “I didn’t pay attention to my squad and missed that one of them was a traitor, then gave him a potion to help hide him from my senses.”

Podrick winces, shifting the straps on his shoulders.

“He attacked me in the middle of a trap. Blew himself up and took my arm off before they detonated the mana vein below the outpost we were sneaking into.”

“Wait, like that thing you did to the Mandragos?”

The moment the words leave Podrick’s mouth, the hairs on the back of his neck stand up and his machina buzzes in warning.

A blinding flash illuminates the room for a moment as lightning crackles across Emily’s skin.

She quickly calms her fleeting rage with a wave of machina, patting Podrick on the shoulder and feeling his tense muscles without breaking her stride.

“Sorry about that. Getting blown up a few times has made me a little unstable again.”

Podrick shakes his head, letting out a breath and restarting his halted steps to catch up to her.

“It’s fine, just a little unexpected. I kind of forgot how much physical pressure you can-”

His words fail him as they step up to the main working platform. His eyes quickly scan past the sleek machining tools lining the edges, and his focus lingers on the humming Steam Source for several seconds, admiring the spinning rotor and the crackle of energy within that he can almost feel drawing his machina in.

However, his focus is soon completely stolen by the half-formed skeleton of an arm suspended on a metal stand in the middle of another workbench.

His eyes trace the delicate curves of the dark metal rods running through the centre of the structure to hold it together, moving out across the mounted hydraulic pistons and empty wireframe forms of the forearm and bicep.

“It’s beautiful,” Podrick whispers in admiration, stepping forward to get a closer look.

“It’s incomplete,” Emily replies dismissively, returning to the Source as if he wasn’t there and confirming it’s reached maximum efficiency. “I hear you came asking after me before. I didn’t expect you’d be this eager to see me again. And don’t touch that yet.”

Podrick’s hand freezes a few centimetres from the arm, flinching back as he glances over at the back of Emily’s head.

“Sorry, I couldn’t help myself,” he says sheepishly, scratching the side of his head as he slips the bag from his shoulders and drops down onto an empty stool. “Also, I didn’t find you last time, so of course I had to try again. Calypso just got back from another run to the Woods.”

“Has business been good?”

“Yeah. Anton’s been on cloud nine since we parted. Thanks to your upgrades, Calypso’s one of the fastest cargo ships in the company and we’re in pretty high demand. We’ve been all over the country already.”

There’s excitement in Podrick’s voice as he speaks, but Emily catches a waiver in his tone and glances back to see the hesitation on his face, as he rolls something around his mouth that he can’t find the words to start.

“Have you been enjoying that?” she asks, standing up and turning to one of the lathes at the edge of the platform to start cutting a piece for the arm’s blade assembly.

“The travelling’s been great,” Podrick says with a nod, his gaze following her hands without missing a beat as she works. “This country feels so much more alive than Modo did! We saw this really cool street performance a few weeks ago when we stopped in a city in the south. They filled the streets with fire!”

He pauses, moving a hand to trace the grip of one of his revolvers.

“But it feels kind of… aimless?” he takes a deep breath, machina buzzing faintly across his skin. “I’ve been trying to learn from Ash while working on my own creations, and I’m happy with what I’ve made so far, but they stopped giving me inspiration months ago, and nothing I’ve seen since your work has even come close.”

“So what?” Emily asks, shutting off the steam flow to the lathe and finally turning her full attention to the boy, fixing him with her perpetual scowl. “You want inspiration?”

“I want you to teach me.”

Emily blinks in surprise at his words, but a moment later, the grimace that she’s worn since the initial excitement about her new project subsided vanishes. Her lips quirk into a taunting grin as her eyes narrow and her machina roils beneath her skin.

The dense, crackling energy rushes from her cortex, ionising the air around her with a buzzing static that makes the hairs on Podrick’s neck stand on end.

His breath catches in his throat again as Emily’s pressure crushes down on his shoulders, but he holds her intense gaze while tightening his grip on his weapon.

“You’ve asked for my tutelage before,” she replies in a deathly calm voice, not a trace of the pressure she’s exerting present in her tone.

“I did.” Podrick nods, swallowing down his fear and tensing his jaw. “You asked me why you should teach me.”

“And?”

“Three months.”

His grip relaxes, slipping from his revolver as he leans back in his seat and reaches for his bag. He pulls out a small notepad before tossing it towards Emily who catches its metal spine with her machina, levitating it over to skim through.

“That’s how long your blessing lasted.”

Her eyes scan over a detailed log tracking a slow reduction in his meditation speed.

The rest of the notepad contains dozens of blueprints sketched across the pages for several weapons, including the revolvers at his sides, and various vehicle parts. One page bears a particularly impressive design for an airship engine, a little worse than Calypso’s current heart, but better than it was before Emily’s touch.

“That’s my work. They’re obviously worse than anything you’d design, but I’ll get better.”

Emily floats the pad back to him, making eye contact again and watching the sweat drip from his brow.

“So?” she presses, urging him to fully voice the offer she thinks he’s making.

“I want you to teach me… in return for me.”

Sparks ripple along Emily’s magical limb as her emotions fluctuate, but Podrick doesn’t flinch.

“I realised I don’t have anything to offer in terms of skill or resources, so you can perform any tests you want to on me.”

The buzzing in her mind grows so loud she can barely hear his words.

“I’ll help you with any menial tasks you have, and give you copies of all my designs.”

Emily’s breath catches as loneliness, hope, comfort, and fear perform a chaotic dance in her heart, too closely entwined and too overwhelmingly powerful for her to try separating with her usual clinical precision. For once, she doesn’t push the feelings down, letting them run rampant as tears form and evaporate in her eyes before the boy watching her can even notice, too busy steeling his own resolve.

“I’ll do your shopping or cook your meals. I’ll follow you into battle. I just… I don’t want to end up stuck making airships my whole life when I feel like I could be so much better!” he finishes, panting slightly and clutching a hand to his chest as he fights to hold her gaze.

Emily stares deep into his emerald-green eyes, drinking in his curiosity and burning desire for self-improvement.

“If I agree to this,” she says, taking a step towards him. “There’s no turning back.”

He nods.

“You’ll follow my instructions without question.”

Her boot rings out on the metal below.

“You might die.”

Another step closer.

“You’ll have to fend for yourself and keep up: you’re useless to me if you slow me down.”

He swallows and tilts his head up to hold her gaze.

“You’ll have to leave your family behind. My plans go beyond just this planet and I’m not sure if I’ll return within their lifetime.”

He sucks in a sharp breath, a flicker of doubt crossing his face as he’s caught off guard by her bold declaration, but he nods nonetheless.

“Mum likes you, and she always tells me to follow my heart. They’ll understand.”

Emily reaches out, touching her crackling metal arm to his forehead gently. Her power seeps into his body and he relaxes, letting her in.

“Okay,” she says, releasing her pressure as Mother’s Blessing takes hold of the young mechanic again. “I accept you, Podrick Rockworth, as my first apprentice.”

Tears form in his eyes as his lips part in an ecstatic grin. He clenches the hand on his chest into a fist, tucking his free arm behind his back and lowering his head in a deep bow.

“Thank you!”

Emily smiles a warm, genuine smile at the boy so eager to follow her, letting out a soft laugh that makes him look up from his bow to confirm what he heard was real.

“I look forward to working with you,” she says, basking in the momentary euphoria that quickly fades into the background again, leaving room for her contorted negative emotions to rush back in at once.

She turns away as her expression falls back into a slight scowl, pushing machina back into her cortex and finding the wild crackling in her emotional centres has reduced by ten per cent.

The resistance to resealing my emotions is weaker! That burst of positive emotions helped. Do I just need to let them run their course and run out of energy?

Her eyes drift towards the half-finished arm as she ponders her theory.

A negative spike should work then…

“So… What would you like me to do?” Podrick asks, snapping her back to focus.

“Here,” she reaches out, pulling his notebook from his grasp again with a tug of machina and taking out the pen hooked into the spine to draw out the blueprint for a telescoping, arm-length blade. “Try making this for me.”

***

After a couple more days of sleepless work, with neither Emily nor Podrick leaving the workshop once, despite Earnie vanishing several times to rest, they add the finishing touches to her new arm.

Staring at the completed masterpiece in awe, both Podrick and Earnie turn to look at Emily, their eyes landing on the mangled stump that sits exposed after she disperses her magical limb.

“So,” Podrick says, glancing at the mass of needle-thin, metal alloy spikes protruding from the bicep end of the mechanical replacement. “How are you going to install it? Need help?”

“Actually,” Emily responds, reaching out to brush her fingers over the smooth metal plating that will soon replace what was once skin. “I’d like to do this alone, please.”

They both nod in agreement, noticing the intense look in her eyes, and quietly slip away to give her space.

Emily takes a seat on a stool beside the workbench, pulling out a few tools and placing them down on the surface, lining them up in parallel as she takes the time to follow a slow, rhythmic breathing pattern. She places the last tool into place before shutting her eyes and reaching for the first, a set of metal shears.

She cuts away the fabric around her shoulder, completely exposing her flesh for the coming surgery.

The shears slip to the floor when she’s done, but Emily doesn’t even notice the clatter of metal on metal as she slowly releases her hold on her emotions, letting a crushing wave of guilt, anger, and sadness flow through her as her fingers close around a thin metal handle.

Cocky.

She lifts the delicate tool to her arm, pressing the thin blade to her flesh and slipping it below the surface with unnerving ease. She doesn’t disable her pain receptors, letting the bite of the cold blade wash over her and keep her focused on the surgery despite the raging emotions threatening to drown her.

She draws the knife around the stump, creating a stark line of deep, dark red a centimetre above the roughly healed end.

Selfish.

Emily drops the small blade, picking up another slightly longer knife that she plunges into the red line. It chews through muscle and sinew without resistance as she pushes it around, brushing the edge with a flicker of metal mana to keep it from blunting against her reinforced flesh.

Overconfident.

The knife slips from her hand as well, clattering into the pool of blood below it as she picks up the last tool. It looks similar to a simple hand-held saw, with a serrated metal cable in place of a blade and a slightly bulkier handle. There’s a cable hanging from the base of the handle, slotted into one of the Steam Source’s plugs.

She squeezes a button on the handle and the cable hums to life with a steady vibration.

Careless.

The cable slides through the parted flesh and hits the bone at the centre of her stump. Emily grits her teeth as it slowly cuts through, buzzing in place and sending sickening shudders through her shoulder.

Weak.

The end of the stump falls to the floor with a squelch, and Emily drops the saw after it, panting with relief for a few moments before reaching for the new mechanical limb. She lifts it by the bicep, moving it into place and holding the mounting cuff just in front of the flat disc of flesh waiting for it, the metal spikes only millimetres away.

Mana pours from the stump, forcing out a squirt of blood before she cuts off the circulation to the limb with a crackle of machina, leaving the exposed flesh clean to help line up the spikes. Runes curl around the missing limb, and Forgemaster’s signature mana threads extend from the cut surface, stretching out to wrap the connection needles.

Broken.

The metal spikes soften, bending and twisting to line up as she closes the distance between the prosthetic and her flesh, driving the warm metal deep into the nerves of her arm. The pain spikes, filling her mind completely as mana and machina rush to the new limb, pouring through the connecting spikes and flowing into the delicate wiring filling it like veins.

Her entire body tenses and she curls around the alien limb as her senses extend into it, momentarily overwhelming her as she melds with the arm as if the metal were always a part of her.

A second later she relaxes, leaning back and letting out a long, shaky breath with a mixture of relief and bubbling euphoria as something clicks deep within her.

Emily flexes her metal digits, running her thumb over the others and noticing a muted lack of tactile feedback. Her emotions quickly equalise again, dropping her back into an intimately familiar state of numb calm.

“Finally,” she breaths with relief, checking her cortex and finding her emotions locked away back inside the structure buried at the bottom of the organ. “Whole again.”