Vex Luminar crouched in the reeds and watched the torches move through Froghollow's swamp. Forty villagers, maybe more. They carried nets, pikes, and a harpoon gun bolted to a flatboat. They were hunting the beast she had spent three weeks trying to tame. If they killed it tonight, she lost the only mount worth riding out of this mudhole. She checked her tablet. The imperial seal on the case had gone green with algae, but the screen still worked. The beast's last ping put it half a mile north, sleeping in the shallows where she had left it a bucket of eels. She had almost earned its trust. Almost. One more feeding and it would let her onto its back. She opened her satchel. The vines around the leather twitched and parted. She pulled out the rusted owl she had salvaged from a crashed scout drone and wound the key at its throat. One wing hung loose. The other beat twice before catching. "Fly north," she said. "Loud as you can. Draw them past the dead tree." The owl launched crookedly and vanished over the water. She counted to ten. A villager shouted. Torches swung east, toward the sound of clattering gears. Vex ran west. She reached the shallows ahead of the hunt. The beast lay half-submerged, its ridged back breaking the surface like a barge. Up close, she saw again what she had first seen through her scope: living muscle grafted to old alloy plating, ports along its flanks where a rider could hook in. Someone had built this thing once. The swamp had swallowed the builder and kept the weapon. She waded to its head. It opened one eye. Yellow, slit, tired. "They're coming for you," she said. "I can't fight forty men. You can." She reached into the satchel and pulled out the last thing she owned that mattered: a small glowing blob, soft as a lung, that she had traded her sidearm for in the market. The beast liked the blob. She had watched it stare at the light for an hour yesterday. She pressed the blob against the beast's snout. It huffed. Then it lowered its head to the mud and let her climb. Her boots found the ports. Vines from the satchel snaked down her legs and locked her in. Torches broke through the reeds behind her. Someone screamed her name, or a name close enough. The harpoon gun swung around. Vex leaned forward and touched the ridge behind the beast's skull. It rose. Water sheeted off armor. The flatboat tipped. Men fell backward into the mud, torches hissing out. The harpoon fired wide and stuck in a metal-barked tree that shuddered but did not fall. The beast ran north, and Vex rode it, and Froghollow's hunt broke apart behind her in the dark. By dawn the village would know. She had stolen their monster. Now she had to keep it.