THE ENGINE THAT DREAMS

Dust fell from the ceiling like slow rain.

Rhea didn’t look up. She’d learned a long time ago that the Reach shed a little of itself every day — flakes of rusted plating, fine metal grit, sometimes a curl of something that might have been wire and might have been bone. You stopped noticing after a while. You had to, or you’d spend your whole life staring at the sky wondering if today was the day the god above your head finally came down on top of you.

She adjusted the strap of her salvage bag and kept climbing.

The tunnel narrowed here, pinched between two curved ribs of dark metal that arced overhead like the inside of something that had once, a very long time ago, been alive. Scavengers called this stretch the Throat. Below it, the Hollow Reach spread out in uneven terraces of scrap-wood housing and cook-fire smoke, all of it built into — around — inside — the collapsed shell of something the old stories called a god and everyone alive now just called dead.

Rhea didn’t think about what it used to be. Thinking about it too hard was how you ended up like the corner-shrine keepers, murmuring to rusted plating like it could hear you.

Her fingers found the scar on her collarbone without meaning to. Thin, silver-white, shaped almost like a lightning bolt if you squinted. She pulled her collar higher and kept moving.

“You’re late,” Nyle said, the second she dropped down into the kitchen.

He was twelve and treated lateness like a moral failing, which she found both irritating and — quietly, privately — kind of sweet. He’d set two bowls on the table. Cold root stew, but food.

“I’m not late. You’re early.” She dropped the salvage bag by the door and rolled her shoulder, wincing before she could stop herself.

Nyle’s eyes went straight to it. “You’re doing the thing again.”

“What thing.”

“The wincing thing. Like your arm’s asleep.” He narrowed his eyes at her with the particular suspicion only a little brother could manage. “You’ve been doing it for weeks.”

“Slept wrong.” She sat down before he could look any closer, and pulled her sleeve down over her wrist on the way. “Eat your stew.”

He didn’t, not right away. He watched her instead, in that quiet, careful way he had — like he already knew there was a door in the house he wasn’t allowed to open, and had decided, for now, not to try the handle.

She hated that he’d learned to do that. She hated that she’d taught him to.

“I found a whole intact junction box today,” she said, mostly to change the subject. “Near the Throat. Copper coil still good. That’s dinner for a week, easy.”

That worked. Nyle’s face lit up in the way it only did for two things: good salvage news, and the stories their grandmother used to tell before she died, about the Architects and the sleeping gods and the world before the silence.

Rhea ate her stew and let him talk about copper prices, and didn’t mention that the reason she’d found the junction box at all was that something in her chest had gone very still and very warm the moment she got near it, like a held breath finally let out — and that she still didn’t understand why.

That night, when Nyle was asleep, she went up onto the roof.

The Reach looked almost pretty from up here, if you didn’t know better. Cook-fires scattered gold across the terraces below, and far above, through the enormous crack in the shell that let in sky, a smear of stars.

She pulled her sleeve up.

In the moonlight, the marks along her forearm looked less like scars and more like something written — a spiral of raised silver lines, faintly warm to the touch, faintly wrong in a way she’d never been able to name to anyone. Not even her grandmother, who had known. Who had made her promise, with her last clear breath, never let them see it, never let them near you, it isn’t a curse, but they will treat it like one.

Rhea had kept that promise for eleven years.

She didn’t know what she’d done to break it tonight, except be tired, and alone, and careless enough to press her palm flat against the cold curve of the Reach’s inner wall, the way she used to when she was small and couldn’t sleep and needed something bigger than her fear to lean against.

The wall was silent. It was always silent. Dead things didn’t talk back.

Except tonight, under her palm, something did.

It wasn’t a sound. It was more like a pressure behind her eyes, a weight dropped somewhere below her ribs — and then, unmistakably, a single word that wasn’t in any language she knew and that she understood anyway, the way you understand your own name spoken in the next room.

Awake.

Rhea yanked her hand back like she’d been burned.

Her heart slammed once, hard, against her ribs. The scars on her arm had gone from faint silver to a low, pulsing gold, the light seeping out from under her skin like something had been switched on that she had no idea how to switch back off.

She sat frozen on the roof of a dead god’s shell, staring at her own glowing arm, and understood — with a certainty that settled into her stomach like a stone — that whatever she’d just heard, whatever had just heard her back, was not going to stay quiet again.

Somewhere far below, deep in the dark heart of the Hollow Reach, something enormous shifted in its sleep.