The Guild recruitment hall was a cathedral of suffering disguised as progress.
Elion Voss shuffled forward in the rustbone line, his magno-boots clicking against the polished hematite floor. The air reeked of sterilizing agents and the metallic tang of fear-sweat. Around him, the other recruits—hollow-cheeked scavengers and debt-bonded laborers from across the Martian slums—stood silent as corpses. No one spoke. No one even coughed. Not after what had happened to the last man who disrupted the sanctity of the Selection.
Ahead, the Qi-scanning altar loomed: a blackened mecha-core the size of a human torso, its surface etched with glowing green circuits, embedded directly into the obsidian wall. Before it stood the Jadeblood Examiner, his flowing abacus-robe whispering against the floor as he paced. The porcelain mask covering his face was a masterwork of cruel artistry—its eternally serene smile never wavering, its hollow eye-slits revealing nothing of the man beneath.
First Test: The Touch of Worth
One by one, the recruits stepped forward.
A grizzled woman with plasma burns across her knuckles placed her palm on the core. A faint flicker of jade light pulsed through the circuits.
"Rustbone Sector D," the Examiner declared without looking up from his floating data-slate. "Next."
A teenage boy, trembling so violently his teeth chattered, barely grazed the core with his fingertips. It remained dark.
The Examiner sighed. A guard stepped forward and slammed the boy's hand fully onto the surface. For three agonizing seconds, nothing happened. Then—
Ssssssssssssssk—
The smell of burning flesh filled the hall as the core rejected him, searing his palm black. The boy collapsed, whimpering.
"Worthless." The Examiner flicked his fingers. "Sell him to the vein harvesters."
Elion's gut twisted. He flexed his fingers, feeling the Celestial Key's outline through the leather of his boot. Selene's warning echoed in his skull: "They don't want janitors. They want batteries."
Second Test: The Harvest
Then came the Screamer.
A lanky drifter from the Ceres Belt, his eyes wild with withdrawal from some back-alley stim, stumbled forward. When his palm met the core—
WHUMP.
Jade fire erupted.
The energy crawled up the man's arm like living vines, burning his veins luminescent green beneath his skin. His back arched as his mouth stretched wide in a soundless scream—the Guild hall's acoustics dampening all noise to preserve the examiners' peace.
Elion watched, sickened, as the man's irises flooded with the same toxic green.
"Qi-sensitivity threshold exceeded," the Examiner mused, finally looking up. "Refinement vats."
Two guards in polished carbide armor seized the convulsing man. As they dragged him toward a reinforced door marked PROCESSING, Elion caught a glimpse of what lay beyond—
Rows of glass cylinders filled with green-tinged fluid.
Floating bodies, their veins glowing.
Then the door hissed shut.
Third Test: The Deception
Elion's turn.
He stepped forward, keeping his shoulders slumped in the perfect mimicry of broken spirit he'd practiced for years in Neo-Shanghai's fighting pits. The Examiner's mask tilted slightly—was that interesting?
Remember the grease. The static. The nothing.
Selene's training thrummed through him as he raised his hand. He didn't gently place his palm on the core—he slapped it like a laborer testing a crate's stability, calluses smacking against cold metal.
The core remained inert.
For five full seconds, Elion held his breath. He let his eyes glaze over, imagining the swirling patterns of engine oil in zero-G—the most boring visualization he knew.
The Examiner sighed. "Another dullard. Rustbone Sector J."
A guard shoved a bundle of dingy fabric into Elion's arms—the standard-issue janitor's jumpsuit, stinking of cheap detergent and the previous wearer's sweat. The left sleeve was crusted with something brown that flaked when he touched it.
Elion turned toward the loading docks with the others who'd passed—
The Interception
The hand that clamped his shoulder was colder than Mars' night side.
Elion knew that grip.
Executor Vorian stepped into view, his glaive humming faintly against his back. Up close, the Guild enforcer was both more and less than the stories suggested. His face was surprisingly young—early 30s at most—but his right eye had been replaced by a cybernetic implant that whirred softly as it focused. The pupil was an abacus, its beads sliding constantly as it calculated.
"Elion Voss." Vorian's voice was a velvet-wrapped scalpel. "We meet again."
Elion kept his face blank. "Don't know you, sir."
"Liar." Vorian's organic eye flicked to Elion's boots. "Your mother erased three surveillance drones' logs last night. Fascinating skill, for a woman halfway into Null Fever's grave."
The Key in Elion's boot pulsed—a single, searing throb against his ankle. Vorian's implant clicked, its abacus beads freezing mid-calculation.
"Report to Engine Pitt Seven," Vorian murmured, leaning close enough that Elion smelled the mint leaves on his breath—a luxury that cost more than a slum-dweller's yearly air tax. "We'll... reevaluate your suitability later."
As guards marched Elion away, he glanced back.
The scanning core where he'd placed his hand now bore a hairline crack—thin as a strand of silk, glowing faintly gold at the edges.
The Truth of Rustbones
Engine Pit Seven was a hell of grinding metal and screaming hydraulics.
Elion stood with twelve other "janitors" as a scarred overseer barked instructions over the din.
"Your shifts are eighteen hours. You sleep in the alcoves behind the coolant pumps. You touch nothing but what you're ordered to." The overseer's gaze lingered on Elion. "And if you see a conduit leaking green? Run."
A veteran janitor—missing two fingers and an ear—leaned toward Elion. "Qi-leaks," he rasped. "Eat through flesh like paper."
As the group dispersed, Elion spotted the first warning of what truly awaited.
Behind a half-dismantled thruster array, a janitor knelt before a flickering console. His hands moved with uncanny precision—too skilled for a supposed dullard. As Elion watched, the man's sleeves slipped back, revealing faint green traceries beneath his skin.
The mark of the harvest.
The man turned. His eyes were fully jade.
The Key's Whisper
That night, curled in a reeking alcove barely larger than a coffin, Elion pried the Key from his boot.
It pulsed once, casting golden light across the rusted walls. For a heartbeat, the entire engine pit hummed in response—every conduit, every circuit board vibrating in harmony.
Then the vision struck:
A vast Dyson sphere, shattered.
Mecha-corpses frozen in eternal combat.
A throne of living alloy, waiting.
The Key seared his palm—branding constellations into his flesh. Elion bit through his lip to stay silent.
When the vision faded, two truths burned brighter than the pain:
The Guild wasn't just harvesting Qi-sensitive workers.
They were building something inside the Magnus. Something that required human batteries.
And Vorian knew Elion could see it.