Server 9-Chapter 42: DEAD HAND

I woke up to my arm screaming.

Not literally — arms don’t scream. But the nerve damage had its own voice. A deep, grinding, electric buzz that started in my blackened fingertips and crawled up past my wrist, past my elbow, into territory it hadn’t reached yesterday.

I held my right hand up in the dim light. The charring had spread overnight. Yesterday the black stopped at the elbow. Now thin dark veins — like cracks in burned paper — had crept three inches past it. Reaching toward my bicep. Reaching toward my heart.

[STATUS UPDATE]

[RIGHT ARM — NERVE DAMAGE: SPREADING]

[ESTIMATED TIME TO CARDIAC FAILURE: 5 DAYS, 14 HOURS]

[RECOMMENDATION: SEEK IMMEDIATE MEDICAL INTERVENTION]

Five days. Father John said a week. An that was just yesterday.

The damage was accelerating.

I flexed my right hand. The fingers moved — slow, stiff, fighting me. The pinky didn’t move at all. I tried again. Concentrating on it and forcing it to move.

But nothing happened. It was dead.

One finger down. Four to go.

I sat up on the cot and looked around the cargo bay. Still dark, except for the blue glow of Glitch’s screens across the room — the kid never turned them off. Maya was curled against the far wall with her rifle laid next to her like another limb. Jax was sprawled across two crates, mouth open, and dead asleep. Tiny stood motionless behind her, with his single optical sensor dimmed to standby.

Sarah was in the opposite corner. Her back was to me. Her breathing was too shallow, too controlled.

She was awake. I knew it. She knew I knew it.

Neither of us said anything.

I pulled on my boots with my left hand — the blistered one. The scabs were tight and ugly, but the fingers worked. My right hand just hung at my side like cargo. I could still feel pressure through it — dull, distant, like touching something through a thick glove. But the fine motor control was going. Yesterday I could grip. Today I could barely curl.

Tomorrow — who knew what tomorrow looked like.

I stepped outside.

The Feral settlement had changed since the last time I’d seen it in daylight. What used to be a scattered ring of scrap piles around the Titan’s legs had become something close to organized. Close to intentional. Walls of flattened car panels. Walkways strung between platforms. Exhaust pipes welded into chimneys, venting steam into the grey morning sky. A few hundred Ferals moved through it — dog-sized repair drones carrying metal scraps, loader mechs stacking salvage, combat chassis standing guard along the edges like rusted soldiers waiting for orders.

My orders. That was the part I still hadn’t gotten used to.

I walked to the Titan’s knee — the left one, the good one. The right leg was still fused at an angle from the crash in Sector 4. The Ferals had tried to patch it. Done a decent job, actually. But Prometheus was still kneeling, and he’d stay that way until Ares had enough power to stand him up.

"Commander."

Ares’s voice came through the external speakers. Quiet. Rough. Like a radio station fighting to hold its signal.

"How are you feeling?" I asked.

"Core functions at... forty-one percent. Up from thirty-eight. Recovery is... slow."

The pauses were back. That small break where something almost human slipped through the military tone.

"Slow is still moving," I said.

"Yes. That is... accurate."

"Can you run a long-range scan? Sector 3. Everything you can pull."

A pause. The speakers hummed. "My sensor range is limited at current power. But I can access cached satellite data from the last orbital sweep. Eighteen hours old."

"Good enough."

"Processing. I will route the data to the workstation inside."

"Thanks, Ares."

Another pause. Longer this time.

"Commander. Your biosignature readings are... concerning."

"I know."

"The nerve degradation in your right arm has accelerated by seventeen percent since—"

"I know, Ares."

Silence. Then: "Understood," Ares said.

I walked back inside.

By the time everyone was awake and gathered around Glitch’s workbench, the sun was up. Or what passed for sun in Sector 0 — a pale grey smear behind clouds that smelled like engine grease and old metal.

Glitch had turned his workbench into a war table. Three cracked screens arranged in a half-circle, each one showing a different view of Sector 3. Maps. Layouts. And security feeds. He’d been up for hours — I could tell by the empty ration wrappers next to his chair and the wild, wired look in his eyes.

"Alright," he said, cracking his knuckles. "Sector 3. The Grey Zone. Let me walk you through the nightmare."

He tapped the center screen. A map bloomed across it — a tangled mess of streets, tunnels, and buildings packed so tight they looked like they were choking each other.

"Sector 3 is split into three layers. Up top — the market. Street level. That’s where the Triads run everything. Stalls, shops, dealers, and fighters. If you want something illegal in Neo-Veridia, this is where you buy it. Weapons, implants, drugs, fake IDs, stolen Corp tech — you name it, someone’s selling it."

He swiped. The map scrolled down.

"Middle layer — the old commercial district. Abandoned offices, parking structures, maintenance tunnels. The Triads use it for storage and smuggling routes. It’s a maze. Easy to get lost, and easy to get jumped."

Another swipe. Deeper.

"Bottom layer — the bank district. Pre-war. This is where the vaults are. The Corps turned some of them into secure data storage. Offline servers. Cold storage for things too valuable or too dangerous to keep on the main network."

"And the Golden Ledger is down there," Sarah said. She’d moved to stand beside Glitch, with her arms crossed, Queen-mode fully on. Spine straight. Chin up. Eyes sharp.

"Vault 19," Glitch confirmed. "Malachi’s personal black-site. The place where he keeps the things he doesn’t want on the grid. The Ledger, blackmail files, research data — all of it locked behind four layers of security."

He pulled up a diagram. It looked like a cross-section of a bunker.

"Layer one — perimeter. Motion sensors, automated turrets, patrol drones. And standard Corp security. Nothing we haven’t handled."

"Layer two — the corridor. Pressure plates, gas vents, and something labeled ’Cerberus’ in the blueprints. I don’t know what Cerberus is. But that worries me."

"Layer three — the vault door. Handprint lock, encryption wall, and an air-gapped server. Meaning it’s not connected to any outside network. You can’t hack it remotely. You have to be standing right in front of it."

"Layer four — the data core. Where the Ledger lives. Stored on a crystal drive. You pull the drive, you have the Ledger."

"That’s a lot of layers," Maya said. She was leaning against the doorframe again — her spot. Her metal hand was doing that thing it did when she was thinking. Opening and closing. Slow. Mechanical. Like a heartbeat in her fist.

"That’s why we need a plan," Glitch said. "And roles. If everyone does their part, nobody dies. Probably."

"Probably," Jax echoed from her crate. She popped her gum. Tiny rumbled behind her.

"I’ll get us through the security," I said. "Layers two and three. Turrets, encryption, whatever Cerberus is — I can eat through it."

"Can you?" Sarah asked. Not challenging. Checking. Her eyes flicked to my right arm and back to my face so fast most people would have missed it.

But i didn’t miss it.

"I can handle it," I said.

"Your energy is at twenty-one percent," she said. "Your right arm is—"

"Functional enough," I said.

"Elias—"

"I said I can handle it."

The cargo bay went quiet. That heavy quiet again — the kind that sits between people who care about each other but can’t agree on how much truth to push.

Sarah held my eyes for three seconds. Then she nodded. Once. Sharp.

"Fine. Elias takes point on security. I’ll handle the handprint lock on the vault door — my admin access may still have partial clearance. Malachi would have cut my top-level permissions, but the vault system runs on older code. There might be a back door I can use."

"I run the tech," Glitch said. "Drone feeds, comms, faking sensor data — I’ll be your eyes and ears from a safe distance. And I’ll handle the air-gapped server once we’re inside. Crystal drives have a physical pull process. And i know how it works."

"How?" Maya asked.

"I know things."

Maya stared at him. Glitch stared back. Neither blinked.

"Moving on," I said. "Maya — you’re overwatch. Top layer. If anyone follows us in, or if the Triads notice we’re poking around their basement, you’re the wall between them and us."

Maya nodded. She picked up her rifle. Set it back down. Picked it up again. It Her way of saying yes.

"Jax," I said. "You know the streets?"

"I grew up two sectors away from here," she said. "Ran jobs through the Grey Zone when I was fourteen. I know the market, the back alleys, the smuggling routes. I know which Triad captains are scary and which ones are just loud."

"You’re our guide. Get us in and out without the Triads noticing."

She blew a bubble. It popped. "Easy."

"Nothing about this is easy," Sarah said.

"Easier than dying," Jax said.

I looked at the screens. The vault diagram glowed blue against the dark cargo bay. Four layers. Turrets. Gas. Something called Cerberus. A locked door that might not open for us. And at the bottom — a crystal drive the size of my fist that could save my sister’s life.

Twenty days on Jasmine’s clock. Five days on my arm’s clock. And now Glitch was pulling up something else — a transmission, blinking red in the corner of his screen.

"Uh," he said. "Problem."

"What kind of problem?" I asked.

"The kind that makes our timeline a lot shorter." He tapped the transmission. Audio crackled through the speakers — Corp encryption, half-decoded. Pieces of a logistics order.

"...transfer directive... Vault 19 contents... relocation to Sector 1... priority level Black..."

"He’s moving it," Sarah said. Her face went pale. "Malachi’s moving the Ledger to Sector 1."

"When?" I asked.

Glitch’s fingers flew across the keyboard. Numbers scrolled. Timestamps locked in.

"Four days," he said. "The transfer convoy leaves Sector 3 in four days."

Four days.

My right hand hung dead at my side. My left hand clenched until the scabs cracked.

Four days to plan a heist. Four days to break into a vault guarded by something called Cerberus. Four days before the one thing that could save Jasmine disappeared behind the most defended walls on the planet.

And my arm — the one that was supposed to eat through every layer of security between me and that crystal drive — had five days before it killed me.

We only have one extra day. Just one.

I looked at the team. They were all watching me. Waiting. The way people wait when they’ve chosen to follow someone into something stupid and dangerous and they need that someone to tell them it’s going to be okay.

I couldn’t tell them that. Because it probably wasn’t.

"Dawn was the plan," I said. "Plans change. We leave in two hours."

Glitch’s eyes went wide. "Two hours? I haven’t finished mapping the—"

"You will map on the way. We don’t have four days to plan a four-day heist. We move now, we plan on the way, we hit the vault tomorrow night."

"That’s insane," Glitch said.

"Yeah," I said. "It is."

Nobody argued. Nobody left. Jax blew a bubble. Tiny rumbled.

And somewhere past my elbow, the blackness crept another inch toward my heart.