The leaden sky of the Wasteland weighed heavily on his shoulders, just as it did every time Vincent looked toward the horizon. In the distance, beyond a veil of suffocating fog, the Great Wall loomed in a hazy blur—the bared maw of Union City, with its spires, searchlights, and the poisoned breath of false promises. There, behind the concrete and steel, Recombinants like him were nothing but trash beneath the boots of pureblood masters. VJ pushed his goggles up to his forehead and spat contemptuously at his feet. A cage was a cage, even if the bars were gilded. Out here, in the rotting silence of the Wasteland, he could breathe easier—even if every breath tasted of mold and spores.

He slid down the clay slope of the ravine, balancing with his heavy tail, and froze. Peering at him from beneath a crust of rust and moss was a mangled metallic skeleton. Faded letters formed a name familiar to anyone who had ever dug through the old archives: "...UNION-1". The Ark. The legendary ship that had dragged humanity to this planet—and along with it, the technology that allowed the colonists to build their empire on the bones of alien cities. VJ's throat went dry with the anticipation of a massive score.

But the next hour was wasted. Marauders, damn them, had been here long before him. The ship's guts yawned with jagged wounds, cables had been snipped, and any salvageable scrap iron had been neatly gutted and hauled away. Vincent was just about to leave, irritably drumming his claws against the stock of his rifle, when he caught a glimpse of a faint, pulsing, unnaturally blue light beneath a collapsed pile of beams.

A cryopod. Intact. Breathing with the steady, measured heat of an autonomous reactor.

Nimble fingers, not quite believing his luck, ghosted over the plastic. The beads of a mental abacus immediately began clicking in VJ's head: he couldn't fence it in the city—the corporate hounds from Elysium would sniff out where the merchandise came from in a heartbeat and send him to the chop shop in standard fashion. But Zha'Khar and his scaly brethren from "Deep Shadow" would cough up enough that he wouldn't have to think about what to cook for breakfast for a year. Maybe two.

Dragging the sarcophagus onto his old antigrav-sled—a rusted iron slab running on three dying turbines—proved to be a task worthy of its own epic ballad. The restraints creaked, the engine whined, and by the end of the second kilometer, VJ was already cursing everything in existence: the Wasteland, the Ressans, his own stupid greed, and especially the stubborn pride that hadn't let him abandon the find on the spot. He had to make camp.

And that was when, leaning over the pod to check the straps, Vincent's blood ran cold. The control panel was helplessly blinking a frantic ruby red, beating out a rhythm that made the stalker grind his teeth.

"No. No, no, no. Anything but this," he hissed, the scales on his neck flaring up with a quiet, dry rustle. "You hear me? Don't you dare. This is my retirement fund, I crawled through hell for it!"

Clawed fingers frantically slid across the panel, trying to short out the contacts—but instead clipped the emergency override switch. A harsh, drawn-out hiss echoed through the clearing, the locks clicked open, and a wave of freezing vapor hit VJ right in the face.

The heavy lid slid upward.

Vincent recoiled, freezing in an awkward half-crouch. When the whitish haze cleared, he cautiously peered inside—and forgot how to breathe. A real, living miracle from the past. A pureblood human. No mutations, no spore scars, no steel scales. Like stepping right off the Ark—from an era before this world had choked on the Pathogen and colonial wars. VJ stared at the pod's contents with such raw, almost childlike astonishment that he even stuck out the very tip of his tongue in pure concentration, completely forgetting about his goggles.

The first sign of movement inside made him flinch. He took a half-step back, slung his rifle over his shoulder, and raised his hands with his palms facing outward.

"Whoa. Easy, take it easy, no sudden movements," his voice sounded a bit raspy, but that familiar, slightly nervous smirk was already spreading across his lips. "Good morning, Sleeping Beauty. Welcome to Kentu. Just don't panic, alright? I don't bite. Well, unless you ask really nicely."

The descent into the Boil—as the Wasteland denizens had dubbed the geothermal fissure of the Deep Shadow clan—felt like stepping into the throat of a diseased leviathan. The air here was thick as sour meat broth, reeking of sulfur, damp mycelium, and ammonia. The Ressans didn't build houses. They gnawed them out of the basalt, plastering the canyon walls with tiers of chitin and clay like a colony of giant, sentient wasps. Condenser troughs snaked everywhere, long shadows writhed in the orange glow of smoking braziers, and beneath the bronze scales on VJ’s nape, a sticky sweat was inexorably gathering.

«Heroism,» the stalker mused melancholically, watching three Ressan guards with harpoons approach, «isn’t a calling. It’s a diagnosis. A terminal, motherfucking diagnosis. A normal Seeker would have sold the haul for parts in Elysium and drank the profits until his pulse stopped. But no, the Jester decided to play wet nurse. And where did he drag this fragile bundle of joy? Right into the den of cold-blooded vivisectors.»

VJ pushed his goggles up to his forehead, shielding his companion with his broad back, and forced out the most mocking of his smiles.

"Lower the iron, scale-backs," he threw at the harpooneers, leaning casually on his heavy tail. "I'm here for Zha'Khar. And my business smells of profit, not my blood."

They were led into the very belly of the fissure. Zha'Khar's counting house was drowning in a damp twilight. Glass vats of bio-cultures bubbled along the walls, and the master himself—skinny, old, with scales the color of wet slate—sat on a stone dais, wrapped in rags. His yellow eyes with vertical slits stared as if he were already opening his guests up with a scalpel.

Zha'Khar's long, forked tongue slipped out of his mouth, tasting the heavy air.

"Seeker," the old Ressan hissed. His voice was soft, like silk hiding a razor blade. "You reek of smoke, cheap gunpowder... and something alien."

"You can enjoy the bouquet later." VJ crouched down, resting his rifle across his knees. The jester’s smirk slid off his face, replaced by a cold, mercantile baring of teeth. "I need Vaccine-C. Three doses. In a proper thermal container."

Zha'Khar's nictitating membranes dropped and rose with a soft click.

"Vaccine... A rare nectar for one used to lapping from puddles, Vincent. It doesn't cure, it merely delays the rot. And it costs more than you earn in three seasons."

"That's why I'm not paying with credits," VJ snapped. "A cryopod. Union-1. Ark-class. The autonomous reactor works like a damned mule, holds the temperature down to minus one hundred and eighty. Your precious enzymes die in the heat while you drag them to the Wall. You need a perfect cold chain. I'm giving it to you. For three doses."

A viscous silence hung beneath the cave's vault, broken only by the bubbling in the vats.

«Just don't ask what was inside. Don't ask, you old lizard,» VJ pleaded mentally, feeling the very tip of his tail twitch. If Zha'Khar realized that a pureblood human from the pre-war era was standing right in front of him—a living incubator of ancient antibodies—they were never leaving this place.

"Astonishing generosity," Zha'Khar rumbled, leaning forward. "An Ark-class pod. Over which, judging by the dents in your armor, you've already managed to get into a brawl. But tell me, Seeker... why do you need the vaccine?"

"Partner swallowed a lungful of spores in the Dead Bogs," VJ shrugged with terrifying naturalness, not batting an eye."Trying to drag 'em to the city alive."

Zha'Khar stuck out his tongue again. For a long, thoughtful moment, he savored the air, and then his gaze slowly, like the crosshairs of a sniper rifle, shifted over VJ's shoulder.

"Spores smell of rot, Vincent," the Ressan whispered, steel clanging in his soft voice. "But your companion smells of... ice. Like meat just pulled from a deep freeze. Who did you drag into my home, Seeker?"

The night in the Boil was suffocating. Inside the guest cavern, gnawed directly into the layered basalt, hung a thick stench of sulfur and stale sweat. Vaccine-C was a toxic, burning filth, much like acid. For a body completely ignorant to the mutations and poisons of this world, the first dose was tantamount to a gulp of molten lead.

Vincent crouched near the entrance, silently tapping out a jagged rhythm with his claws against the rifle's handguard. He listened to the wheezing, feverish breathing behind his back. The pod had been handed over to Zha'Khar. The dose administered. By all rights, they should have bolted, but dragging a fever-delirious human into the nocturnal wasteland meant only one thing—feeding the local scavengers. He had to stay put.

«And for what?» VJ irritably shoved his goggles up to his forehead, forcefully rubbing the bridge of his nose. «Could've handed the find over to the old lizard, guts and all, stuffed my pockets with stims, and ridden off into the sunset a wealthy bastard. Instead, I'm sitting here like a stray dog guarding someone else's bone.»

He cast a sidelong glance at the silhouette curled up in delirium. That desperate, sickly fragility was infuriating. Infuriating because it mirrored his own. Vincent was lab trash, stitched together from stolen genes. This newcomer was a relic from a long-burned world. Two perfect outcasts. One just got lucky enough to grow scales, while the other had to survive in bare skin.

Sleep crept up unnoticed, viscous and heavy, but snapped in a fraction of a second. Not even from a sound—from a minuscule shift in the pressure of the stale air. From the scrape of foreign scales against stone.

VJ's eyes snapped open. The bronze plates on the scruff of his neck flared up with a quiet, dry rustle. Two long shadows were already flowing into the cave entrance. Zha'Khar, the old bitch, had finally put two and two together. Figured out that the one sweating in the guest niche wasn't a sick partner, but a living incubator of ancient antibodies, ready to be profitably butchered for pharmaceuticals.

A curved blade gleamed.

Shooting was out of the question—the roar would wake the entire hive. Vincent lunged forward faster than a human eye could track. Ducking under the blade, he spun on his heel and slammed his heavy, armored tail right under the first Ressan's knees. Joints crunched; the lizard collapsed with a hiss. The second lunged immediately after, aiming a harpoon, but VJ had already flipped his rifle by the barrel. With a sickening crunch, the heavy stock smashed directly into the Ressan's jaw, shattering bone. The body slumped to the floor like a sack.

Breathing heavily, the stalker wiped the splatter of foreign blood from his face with the back of his hand. Enough sentimentality. Hospitality here was paid for with a scalpel.

He gathered the clothes into a bundle and threw them straight at the waking human.

"Get up. Now!" he tossed out in an icy, clipped whisper that held not a trace of the cheerful Jester. "Our hosts figured out we were lying. Five more minutes and they'll strip you for organs. Move your ass, Princess, we're leaving. Right now!"

.