Lyra Nexus's Arc

Chapter 16 of 27

The hides lay stacked with the logs. Lyra had wood and leather now. But wood and leather could not shape a blade. The forge still had no walls of stone, no mortar to bind them, no metal to melt down. It sat half-built, a mouth of open blocks waiting to be fed. She turned from the pile and looked for the one program who could see a problem before it arrived. Protocol crouched at the edge of the cube, reading the packets no one else could. Lyra had learned that Protocol saw every path at once. When a scan came, Protocol knew before the pulse landed. That gift had kept the crew ahead more than once. Now Lyra needed it pointed downward, into the raw code beneath their feet. "You can see things before they happen," Lyra said. She held out the pickaxe. Its edges glowed, pink and blue running along the head. "I need you underground. Mine the metal ore for our weapon heads. Bring back stone for the foundation and the forge." Protocol took the pickaxe. She weighed it in one hand. "Down there. Alone." She looked at the dark seam in the cube floor. "Fine. Better than waiting for a scan to find us." She said nothing else. She dropped into the seam and was gone. Below, the code ran cold and gray. Protocol swung the pickaxe at the wall. Stone blocks broke free, etched with lines of cryptic script, cold and cryptic under her hand. She stacked them fast. She read the veins ahead the way she read packets, seeing where the metal ran before her eyes confirmed it. She struck a bright seam. Ore split open in a burst of light. Strain built in her body. Her runtime history flickered across her skin, old boot failures scrolling in the dark. The deeper she cut, the harder her code worked. But she did not stop. She swung until the ore came loose in gleaming ingots, metal etched with cascading code, ready for the melt. Protocol hauled the load up through the seam. She dropped stone blocks in one pile, ingots in another. "Stone for your walls," she said. She wiped the pickaxe clean. "Metal for your heads. Enough for eight blades, if your forge holds." Lyra knelt and lifted an ingot. It was heavy and true. She looked at the stone, the mortar lacking blocks, the wood, the leather. Every piece she had named was here. The forge was almost ready to be finished now. Then the crew could arm itself.