The heavy iron doors of the castle slammed shut behind them, sealing away the humid pressure of the Cradle.
"Aaaaaaghhh!"
Adam groaned loudly, stretching his arms over his head until his spine cracked. He slumped forward, hands on his knees.
"Royal meetings never get less stressful, do they?" He looked up at Noah, his face pale. "That was the most stressful hour of my life, man. I thought the bug-guy was going to decapitate me."
"Well, she is practically one of the strongest and most dominant creatures on earth," Noah replied, leaning against a stone pillar, his legs visibly shaking now that the adrenaline was fading. "My knees almost gave out. I’m just glad she gave us those chairs. If I had to stand, I would have collapsed."
"Heh."
A sound, sharp and light like snapping dry wood, came from beside them.
They both froze. They turned their heads slowly.
Lian Mei was standing there, her hand hovering near her mouth. The neutral, assassin-like mask she wore had cracked. Her eyes were crinkled at the corners.
She had laughed.
Lian Mei realized they were staring. She cleared her throat, her face instantly resetting to its default setting of cold indifference. She smoothed her robes, looking pointedly at the horizon.
Adam and Noah looked at her, then at each other.
A beat of silence passed.
Then, Adam snorted. Noah chuckled.
Within seconds, the two of them were laughing, a genuine, hysterical release of tension. It wasn't just the laughter of joy, but also one of relief.
The next Day.
The room was dim, illuminated only by the soft, amber glow of bioluminescent moss cultivated in glass spheres hanging from the ceiling.
The house was distinctly Sutra in design, no sharp angles, only curves. The walls were made of a polished, hardened resin that felt warm to the touch, and the furniture seemed to grow out of the floor rather than sit upon it.
Thump.
"Wake up."
Thump.
"I said, wake up, dumbass. It’s 11 AM."
Noah stood by the bed, fully dressed in fresh clothes provided by the servants, a high-collared grey shirt and dark trousers. He held a pillow in his hand, ready to strike again.
On the bed, which was essentially a massive, suspended hammock of multi-layered silk, Adam was buried under a mountain of blankets. Only a tuft of black hair was visible.
"Go away," a muffled groan emerged from the pile. "Let me rot."
"We slept for fourteen hours, Adam," Noah said, exasperated. He walked over to the window.
Noah pulled the lever on the wall. The membrane retracted with a wet shlick sound, and blinding white daylight flooded the room.
"ARGH! MY EYES!" Adam hissed, curling into a ball like a vampire exposed to the sun. "Noah, you traitor! Close it!"
"No," Noah said, ignoring the dramatics. "Get up. Aren't you excited to explore the city? We barely saw anything yesterday."
Adam clung to the mattress; his eyes squeezed shut. "I have seen enough. I want to stay in the silk bed. It molds to my spine, Noah. It loves me."
"It's a bed, it doesn't love you." Noah turned back to the copper basin on the wall to rinse his hands. "Get up. I made coffee. Or... whatever the black sludge in the kitchen is. It smells like caffeine."
Adam cracked one eye open. "Caffeine?"
"I don’t know if its abundant in this continent, contrary to our home, or if its Queen Selena’s generosity giving us a rare resource, but yeah, I’m pretty sure its caffeine"
Adam groaned, defeated. He rolled out of the hammock, hitting the resin floor with a dull thud.
He finally stood up, wobbling slightly. He grabbed the pillow Noah had assaulted him with earlier and threw it hard at Noah’s head.
Noah didn't even look; he leaned to the left with casual precision, and the pillow sailed harmlessly past him, hitting the copper basin with a dull thud.
"Missed," Noah said, drying his face with a towel.
Adam stared at him, rubbing his face. "You are a demon," he mumbled. "Worse than Evelyn."
"Saying I am more of a demon than Evelyn must be more stupid than you challenging that dragonfly guy." Noah retorted, walking toward the door. "Five minutes, Adam. If you aren't out, I'm leaving you here to be eaten by the furniture."
Eleven minutes later, washed and dressed, Adam kicked open the front door, stepping out into the street.
Noah was waiting for him, leaning against the doorframe. He looked his friend up and down.
"Try not to pick a fight with a Royal Guard today. I'd like to reach lunch alive."
"Alright," Adam said, squinting into the bustling street. "Show me the capital."
As Adam and Noah ventured deeper into the city, the "streets" revealed themselves to be massive. The architecture was a dizzying vertical tapestry, buildings weren't stacked bricks, but hollowed-out nodes of ironwood and hardened resin, connected by suspension bridges made of braided cables that hummed in the wind.
It was a city of controlled chaos.
Steam hissed from brass vents emerging from the ground like metallic mushrooms. Auto-Rickshaws, three-wheeled vehicles with bulbous glass canopies, zipped past them, leaving cushions of white vapor.
"Don't touch that," Noah warned, grabbing Adam’s wrist just as he reached for a glowing lantern hanging from a shop stall.
"It looks warm," Adam argued.
"It’s metal that has electricity flowing through it, the one Lian Mei told us about yesterday, I think read these things conduct the electricity into the human body and it might be letal."
Adam retracted his hand. "Right, killer bulb. Got it."
They navigated the crowded market district. The people of Sutra were distinct; many wore clothes they now started to grow familiar with in Sutra, and quite a few had mechanical augmentations, clockwork fingers, or copper patches on their skin.
They turned a corner into a district that smelled heavily of grease, sawdust, and hot metal. The rhythmic clang of hammers on anvils replaced the chatter of the market.
"Look at that," Adam pointed with his bun.
Fifty meters ahead, in front of a sprawling workshop built into the base of a massive purple ironwood tree, a child was working.
The boy couldn't have been older than ten. He was small, scrawny, with soot smudged across his nose. Yet, he was currently lifting a crate of raw ore that must have weighed two times his weight.
The boy wasn't lifting it with his flesh. His right arm was encased in a bulky, rusted mechanical gauntlet. Pistons hissed and groaned as the boy casually tossed the crate onto a stack of others, wiping sweat from his forehead with his normal left hand.
They approached the shop. A wooden sign hung above the entrance, carved with the image of a flower made of gears: The Brass Lotus.
The boy noticed them. He didn't look impressed by their staring. He just pointed a thumb over his shoulder toward the dark interior.
"If you're selling scrap, go to the back. If you're buying, Boss is inside. Don't touch the unfinished prototypes, or they'll explode."
"Explode?" Adam smiled.
They stepped inside.
The interior was a cavernous space cluttered with a magnificent mess of wires and gears.
"Boss! Customers!" the kid yelled from outside.
"Busy!" a voice shouted back from the ceiling.
Adam looked up. "Uh, Noah?"
Hanging upside down from a thick iron rafter, looking like a mechanical spider, was a young man.
He looked to be in his early twenties, with messy long hair tied back in a grease-stained bandana. He wore a heavy leather apron over a stained white shirt, and goggles were pushed up onto his forehead.
But what drew the eye wasn't the man. It was the rig strapped to his back.
It was a masterpiece of madness.
A chassis of brass and iron hugged his spine. Extending from it were four additional mechanical limbs. They weren't blocky or robotic; they were skeletal, segmented like the legs of a mantis.
Combined with his human arms and legs, he had eight limbs.
Two of the lower mechanical legs were clamped onto the rafter, holding his entire body weight upside down. One of the upper mechanical arms held a welding torch, while the second mechanical arm held a magnifying glass.
Meanwhile, his real human hands were hovering in the empty air, performing a strange, rhythmic movement.
Filament-thin threads looped around his gloved fingers, disappearing into the brass bracers on his wrists. With every subtle twitch, curl, and extension of his human fingers, the massive mechanical limbs mirrored the command.
"Just... one... second..." the man muttered, his pinky finger twitching sharply to the left.
The welding arm above him mimicked the movement instantly. It finished the weld, retracted with a click, and swapped its tool head. The nozzle rotated, replaced instantly by a delicate, three-pronged claw. The claw grabbed a loose pipe, tested the seal, and released.
"Done."
The man splayed his hands open.
The mechanical legs released the rafter.
For a second, he fell. Then, he clenched his fists. The four mechanical limbs snapped out, catching the floor with a heavy, metallic thud, absorbing the impact perfectly. He rose to his full height, the four extra arms looming over his shoulders like a halo of brass and bone.
He pulled his goggles down around his neck and grinned. He looked exhausted, manic, and brilliant.
"Welcome to the Brass Lotus," he said, extending a human hand. "I'm Jin. Sorry about the mess."
Noah ignored the hand. He was staring at the rig, his eyes wide.
"That..." Noah pointed. "That is a multi-limb rig. But the mechanics... where are the hydraulics? Where are the pistons?"
Jin’s eyes lit up. He realized he wasn't talking to a tourist.
"Hydraulics are too slow," Jin said, patting the metal leg. "And pistons are too heavy. This is the 'Asura' Rig. Pure mechanical linkage."
"That's impossible," Noah argued, stepping closer. "To get that kind of torque, to crush stone or lift your own body weight, you need a massive engine of some kind, those things didn’t exist in my home town, I doubt they exist even here."
Noah walked around to the side of the rig, inspecting the joints.
"And these cables," Noah touched one of the white cords running along the brass limb. "This isn't copper wire. It isn't rubber."
Noah froze. He recognized the texture.
It was pearl-white. It was incredibly tensile. And it seemed to hum with a faint, biological rhythm.
"This is silk," Noah whispered, looking at Adam. "Adam, look at the cables."
Adam leaned in. "It looks like the stuff the Queen was using."
Jin paused, surprised by what Adam just said.
"The Queen, you said?"
"Yes".
Before Jin could talk again, Noah asked, "What is the silk doing here, that material isn't something you buy at a market."
"No, it isn't," Jin admitted. He turned around, showing them his back.
"You asked where the power comes from?"
Jin tapped the center of his backplate.
There, encased in a reinforced glass housing where a battery should have been, was a small, pulsing cocoon.
It was the size of a human heart, made white silk. It wasn't static; it was throbbing, expanding and contracting with a slow beat. Threads of light extended from this cocoon, feeding into the mechanical arms, powering the rig with pure, condensed biological energy.
He looked over his shoulder at them, his eyes gleaming.
"You need a donation from the Queen herself."
"She funds you," Adam realized. "This isn't just a shop. It's a research lab."
"She provides the silk," Jin corrected, the mechanical arms flexing above him like a spider. "I provide the genius." He let a proud grin show on his face.
.
Jin wiped his grease-stained hands on a rag that had once been white silk.
"This," Jin said, patting a squat, cylindrical device made of dull copper and stretched translucent fabric. "Is the Silent Lung."
Adam leaned in. He kept his hands behind his back. The machine wheezed softly. Inside the copper cage, layers of tightly woven silk expanded and contracted like gills.
"It breathes?" Adam asked.
"It filters," Jin corrected, grinning to reveal a gold tooth. "The silk is treated with chemically binded salts. It pulls moisture from the air, but more importantly, it catches the heavy smog of the Lower District. You strap this to your chest, and you can sprint through a sulfur mine without coughing once."
Noah crouched, inspecting the intake valve. "But, how does it cycle the air?"
"Diaphragm tension," Jin said, tapping his own chest.
"What’s that?", they both asked at the same time.
"It uses the wearer's own movement to pump the bellows. The harder you run, the cleaner air it feeds you. Efficient, yes?"
"It’s brilliant," Noah admitted, his eyes tracing the mechanism. "And that?"
He pointed to a delicate contraption on the workbench. It looked like a spiderweb trapped in a brass frame, connected to a small hammer and a listening horn.
"Ah. The Tremor-Scribe, you place the frame against a wall. The silk strands are tuned to different frequencies. When people talk on the other side, the vibration travels down the thread."
"It transmits sound?" Adam asked.
"It turns sound into texture," Jin corrected. He ran a fingernail along a spool of thread at the machine's base. The thread was bumpy, uneven. "A blind man could run his fingers over this string and feel the conversation. It’s... sensitive. It picks up heartbeats, too, if the wall is thin enough."
"Why show us this?" Noah stood up, brushing dust from his knees. "These should be secrets."
Jin stopped wiping his hands. He looked at them, really looked at them, his eyes crinkling at the corners. The energy settled into something warmer.
"The Queen... she doesn't bring strays here," Jin said. He leaned back against his workbench, crossing his arms. "She only brings people who are not right in the head, and I like those kinds of people."
He walked around the counter, stepping into their personal space.
"I rarely find people who understand me."
Jin extended a hand. It was scarred, the fingernails permanently black with soot.
"Friends of the Queen are friends of the Lotus. You need tools? The door is unlocked."
He extended his hand.
The handshake was firm.
"Thank you, Jin,"
They stepped out into the street. The transition was jarring, from the lavender-scented warmth of the shop to the humid, roaring noise of the crowd. Adam glanced back once. Through the dusty window, Jin was already back at his bench, tinkering with the Silent Lung.
The crowd surged, and within seconds, the Brass Lotus was lost from view.