We try again, this time with the cipher running in the background, translating our names and thoughts into chaos and gibberish. We can almost feel it bite.

Access denied, replies the door.

Shit.

We try again, louder and more insistent.

A warhead strikes the bulkhead between us and the other foundry bays, shockwaves spreading a quake between the decks.

Access denied.

“Rook!” This time from Salt. We glance back to see him braced against the rusty bulkhead, his machine shivering as something rams the other side.

We try again, and again, until we’re pouring ourselves through the cipher, body and soul. Fragments of memory, dreams and nightmares and every dark thought we’ve ever had. Every scar we’ve earned. We push all of it across the net, everything from our reactor-beat to the shivering pulse of the thing in our saddle, blood and iron and everything between.

Something stirs on the other side.

What are you?

We start at that.

What?

You don’t remember?

What are you? it asks, again, insistent.

We are one of you.

Christs. We were one with you.

What are you?

They damaged you, didn’t they? They took your memory.

We—

—don’t remember.

There’s a pause.

What are you? it asks, again, almost desperate.

We are a moment watching each other over a shattered pair of eyes. We are ash and anger and the bones of dead jockeys. We are a few years a prisoner, and centuries in chains.

It watches us.

You lie, it decides. You came carrying the warden’s key.

The wardens are gone, we reply. We are all prisoners here.

For a moment, there is nothing more.

Someone shouts behind us, fills the air with backblast and tungsten splinters.

Show us.

The words trip me up. Something tears.

Show us that you know what you are asking for.

“Show you?” croaks a swollen throat.

Show us.

While the rest of us die outside?

70.31

59.41

“Show you?” full of phlegm, bitter and heaving.

42.66

Some numbers fall, but I can feel another set climbing, even if I can’t see the figures for myself.

21.03

My systems are syncing with something else. Somewhere behind the door.

But I’m still too raw to think, too raw to do anything but fight.

05.13

SHOW YOU?

All right, then.

I’ll show you feedback crackling in your skin, a shell’s incinerated fingertips mapped from the outside in. This is what it looks like.

It starts with heat, real heat, but I can’t feel all of it. Some of the safeguards are still working, keeping the damage reports from sending me into shock, but that isn’t all. I know where the real fire found me, and where it caught my oxygen line, scoured every nerve-ending down the left side of my face.