Inside the cramped canvas lab bay behind Titus’s rear shell, Dr. Morrigan Calder was conducting an act of reckless chemical heresy.
A brass Bunsen burner hissed with an intense, blue-green flame beneath a round-bottomed quartz flask. Inside the flask, a thick, purplish slurry was boiling wildly. It spat tiny droplets of rainbow-bright steam against the glass steam cooler coils. Morrigan didn’t wear safety goggles. She wore only her thick glasses with one cracked lens, her messy chestnut hair fully escaping its silver-steel pins. Her violet eyes were wide and bloodshot from seventy-two hours without sleep and twelve mugs of bitter chicory extract.
“More dark rock dust, Toby! Finer! It needs to pass through a two-hundred-mesh sieve!” Morrigan yelled over the roar of the burner, adjusting the gas valve with a scorched brass wrench.
Toby Mallow was sweating over a heavy iron mortar, grinding a chunk of dark, fiery stone harvested from Titus’s shed armor scales with wild, rhythmic thrusts of a five-pound pestle. His bandaged pinky was throbbing, but his strokes were steady. Beside him, Barnaby lay curled, his warm flank acting as a draft shield for the delicate analytical scale mounted on an ammunition box.
“This is the last piece of Titus’s shed plate from the Badlands campaign!” Toby shouted back, coughing as a puff of black stone dust rose from the mortar. “If we burn this, Barnaby and I have nothing left in the living reserve ledger! That scute was appraised at six hundred credits on the open…
