Server 9-Chapter 39: THE BUTCHER’S TABLE

I dreamed of sunshine.

Not the fake kind — not the yellow-tinted lights they pumped through the Sector ceilings to simulate daytime. Real sunshine. The kind that comes from a star. It was warm and heavy on my skin, like someone laying a blanket over me that was made of light.

I was lying in grass. Real grass. Green, and soft. It smelled like something I didn’t have a word for — something clean and alive and so far from recycled air and chemical runoff that my brain couldn’t process it.

A little girl was sitting next to me. Maybe seven or eight. She had dark hair, and big eyes. She was building something out of sticks and leaves — a tiny house, barely bigger than her hand.

She looked up at me and smiled.

"You’re not supposed to be here," she said.

"Where is here?"

"Outside."

"Outside what?"

She laughed. Like it was the funniest question anyone had ever asked. "Outside everything."

Then the sunshine turned red. The grass died under my fingers. The little girl’s face changed — her eyes went hollow, her skin cracked, and code started bleeding out of her like—

I woke up screaming.

Hands held me down. Strong ones. I thrashed against them, still half-trapped in the dream, still seeing the girl’s face crumble.

"Easy! Easy, kid. You’re safe."

The voice was deep. And familiar. It rumbled through a chest the size of a barrel and came out sounding like a truck engine, but low and smooth.

I blinked. The world came into focus.

A ceiling. Stone. Arched. And a stained glass windows — cracked and patched with sheet metal, but still holding shapes. Angels and saints with bolts through their halos.

The Butcher’s Chapel.

Father John’s face floated above me. Bald head. Kind eyes. The priest collar was still there, half-hidden under a blood-stained apron. His mechanical arm whirred softly as he adjusted something on my chest — a sensor pad connected to a boxy monitor that beeped with my heartbeat.

"Welcome back to the land of the living," he said. "Though from the look of you, the land of the living barely wants you."

I tried to sit up. My body voted no. Every muscle was locked. Both hands — left blistered from the gate, right still charred from the subway — pulsed with a deep, ugly heat that went all the way to the bone.

"Don’t move," Father John said. He pressed me back down with one massive hand. "You’ve been out for eleven hours. Your energy was at one percent when they carried you in. One percent. I’ve seen dead men with better numbers."

"The team," I croaked. My throat felt like sandpaper. "Sarah. Maya. Glitch."

"All here. All alive. And all in better shape than you, which isn’t saying much."

He held up a cup of water. I drank it with my teeth because I couldn’t grip the cup. He didn’t comment on that. He just held it steady and let me drink until it was gone. 𝑓𝘳𝑒𝑒𝓌𝘦𝘣𝘯ℴ𝑣𝘦𝑙.𝘤𝑜𝑚

"Your hands," he said, setting the cup down. He lifted my right arm — gently, with the care of a man who’d seen a thousand broken bodies. He studied the charred skin. Turned it over. Pressed a spot near the wrist.

I didn’t feel it.

"The nerve damage goes deep," he said. His voice had changed. Softer now. Professional. The mechanic examining the engine. "The skin is dead from wrist to elbow. The muscle underneath is damaged but recovering — barely. If you keep using this arm without treatment, the tissue will die completely. You’ll lose it."

"Can you fix it?"

"I can stabilize it. Wrap it. Slow the damage." He looked at me with those kind, terrible eyes. "But fixing it? That needs a medical pod. A real one. Corporate grade. The kind they have in Sector 1."

Sector 1. Malachi’s front door.

"And this one?" I held up my left hand. The blisters from the gate had burst while I slept. The skin underneath was raw, pink, shiny and wet.

"Burns. Second degree. That one heals on its own if you stop cooking yourself." He gave me a look. "Which you won’t."

"Probably not."

"Definitely not." He started wrapping my right arm in clean bandages — real cloth, not synthetic ones. Where he’d found clean cloth in the Undercity, I didn’t ask. Some things about Father John were better left as mysteries. "Jax brought the cloth. She raided a Corp supply truck two days ago. The kid’s been busy while you were playing hero upstairs."

"Jax is here?" I asked

"Somewhere. Probably teaching your friend Maya how to arm-wrestle. Or losing at it." He smiled. It looked strange on his face — like a bear trying to look friendly. It almost worked though.

I found Maya in the main hall of the chapel.

She was sitting on a pew, field-stripping her Enforcer Rifle. Each piece laid out on the wood in perfect order — barrel, stock, power cell, scope. Her metal arm moved with machine precision, clicking components apart and snapping them back together. She’d done this before. Many times. The kind of repetitive task that soldiers use to keep their hands busy when they can’t quiet Their thought.

She saw me coming and didn’t stop working.

"You look terrible," she said.

"Everyone keeps telling me that."

"Because it keeps being true," She said.

I sat down next to her. Slowly. Everything hurt. The pew creaked under me like it was thinking about collapsing.

"Thank you," I said. "For pulling me out of the water. For the door. And for... all of it."

Her hands paused on the rifle. Just for a second. Then she kept working.

"You don’t need to thank me."

"I want to."

She slid the power cell back into the rifle. It clicked and hummed — a clean, ready sound. She set it across her lap and looked at me for the first time.

Her eyes were hard. But underneath the hard — way down, buried deep — was something tired. Not sleepy tired. Soul tired. The kind of tired you get from twenty years in a cage, watching the world through glass.

"In the Sky-Prison," she said slowly, "they used to run tests on us. Put us in rooms with machines and see what we did. Fight or freeze. Attack or hide. They were looking for patterns. Trying to figure out which prisoners were useful."

She looked at her metal arm. Flexed the fingers. The crude joints whined softly.

"I fought every time. Every single time. Not because I was brave. Because I was angry. Because my mother left me and my father was dead and the only thing I had was this arm and my rage."

She looked at me.

"You fight different. You fight like you’re already dead and you’ve got nothing to lose. And then when it’s over, you thank people." She shook her head. "I don’t know what to do with that."

"You don’t have to do anything with it."

"I know." She picked the rifle back up. Started cleaning the scope. "Just don’t die. It would be annoying to find another person worth following."

It wasn’t a compliment. Not exactly. But it was the closest thing Maya had to one.

I’d take it.

I found Sarah in Father John’s back room — the one with the wall of screens. She was sitting in front of them, reading data streams that scrolled too fast for my eyes to follow. Her face was lit blue and white. The color made her look like a ghost.

"You should be resting," she said without turning around.

"So should you."

"I rest when the world does," she said.

I sat down in the chair next to her. The screens showed news feeds, security channels, energy reports. Sector 4 was on fire — not literally, but close. The Corp had locked down the entire district. Enforcer drones patrolled every street. Citizens were sealed in their apartments. And across the bottom of every news feed, the same headline scrolled on repeat:

TERRORIST ATTACK ON SECTOR 4 DATA HUB — SUSPECTS AT LARGE

"Terrorist," I said. "That’s new."

"They can’t say ’someone broke in and saved fifty thousand people from being murdered.’ So they call us terrorists." Sarah’s voice was flat. Tired. But there was something else underneath — something tight, like a wire pulled too hard. "The Harvest failure is all over the internal channels. Malachi is furious. He’s pulled three Legion battalions out of Sector 1 and moved them to Sector 4."

"He’s protecting the Hub," i said.

"He’s protecting himself. If we could get in once, we could get in again. He’s scared," Sarah said.

Good. Scared was good. Scared meant he was making mistakes.

"What about the Sleepers?" I asked. "The flags we set — are they holding?"

Sarah pulled up a display. Fifty thousand dots, all glowing blue. Stable. And protected.

"For now," she said. "The transfer flags are holding. But Malachi’s engineers are already working on a workaround. I give it two weeks before they find one."

Two weeks. Fourteen days to figure out how to get fifty thousand unconscious people out of a locked-down district controlled by a god who lived in the walls.

"And our people in Sector 0?" I asked. "The Ferals?"

Sarah pulled up another screen. Satellite view — or what passed for one through the smog. The Rust Sea stretched out in shades of brown and grey. And there, in the center of it, was a cluster of lights that hadn’t existed two weeks ago.

"Glitch’s bots have been busy," Sarah said. "While we were gone, the Ferals started building. Or... organizing. They’ve formed a perimeter around the Titan wreckage. Some of them have started repairing the outer hull."

I stared at the screen. Those lights. That cluster. It was small — barely a speck compared to the city. But it was there. Real. Growing.

My people. My junkyard. My army.

"We need to go back," I said.

"I know." Sarah closed the display. She turned to me. Her eyes were intense — that deep, calculating blue that made you feel like she was reading the code in your skull. "But there’s something I need to tell you first."

My chest tightened. "What?"

She opened her mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.

Then she shook her head.

"It can wait," she said. "You need to heal first."

"Sarah."

"It can wait, Elias."

She turned back to the screens. Conversation over.

But I saw her hands in her lap. Clenched. Knuckles white. Whatever she was holding back — it wasn’t small. It wasn’t simple.

And it scared her.

I let it go. Not because I trusted the silence. Because I was too broken to fight for the answer.

But I wouldn’t forget.

I found Glitch in the basement, hunched over a workbench surrounded by gutted electronics and empty pizza boxes. Same as always. His datapad was propped against a stack of circuit boards, running something I couldn’t read.

"Hey," I said from the doorway.

He jumped. Actually jumped — knocked a soldering iron off the bench. It clattered on the floor.

"Don’t do that!" he hissed, hand over his heart. "I almost had a heart attack. I’m too young for a heart attack."

"Who did you call?" I asked.

The words came out before I’d planned them. They just fell out — heavy, direct, landing on the floor between us like a dropped weapon.

Glitch froze. His hand was still on his chest. His eyes were wide.

"What?"

"In the tunnel. Before I passed out. You made a call. ’Code: Orphan-Seven. Requesting immediate pickup.’ That’s not street talk, Glitch. That’s military. Protocol. Who did you call?"

He stared at me. Three seconds. Four.

Then the mask came back. The grin. The shrug. The kid.

"Old contact," he said, waving his hand. "I’ve got people everywhere. You know me — connections. I called Father John’s network. They patched us through to Jax. Jax picked us up in the drainage tunnels with Tiny."

"With a military code?" I asked.

"I like to sound cool on the radio. Just to adds some drama." He picked up the soldering iron and went back to work. "You should rest. Your hands look like burnt toast."

I watched him for a long moment. His back was to me. His shoulders were tight.

He was lying.

I knew it. He knew I knew it. And we both knew that right now — broken, exhausted, trapped in the Undercity with the whole Corporation hunting us — I couldn’t afford to push.

Not yet.

"Glitch."

"Yeah?"

"Thank you. For getting us out."

His shoulders relaxed. Just a little. "That’s what I do, boss. I get people out safely."

I turned and walked away. My wrist-comp buzzed softly.

[ENERGY: 23%]

[STATUS: RECOVERING]

[LOCATION: SECTOR 7 — THE BUTCHER’S CHAPEL]

[QUEST: THE UPRISING — ACTIVE]

[OBJECTIVE: RETURN TO SECTOR 0]

Twenty-three percent. Recovering. Both hands wrecked. Fifty thousand Sleepers on borrowed time. A sister I couldn’t reach. A team built on secrets and duct tape. And somewhere out in the Rust Sea, an army of broken machines waiting for a king who could barely stand.

I leaned against the chapel wall and closed my eyes.

Tomorrow, we go home.