Chapter Five – Raiders in the Wires

  The power died just before dawn.

  Cinderrest fell into a sudden hush, the familiar buzz of the outer grid stuttering to silence. A single red emergency flare blinked high above the settlement's main square, barely cutting through the thick morning fog that clung to the scorched ground. The silence wasn’t peace—it was the kind that comes before something bad.

  Kai sat up in his cot, instinct flaring. He felt it in the pit of his stomach before he even reached the window. The hair on his arms prickled. Static was in the air—thick and wrong.

  Then came the sound. A low-pitched hum, mechanical and menacing.

  Raiders.

  They struck fast. Always did.

  By the time Kai rushed outside, they were already there—three of them—dark shapes moving through the smoke and shadow, clad in rusted exo-suits from the old wars. One had a shoulder-mounted blade-arm; another carried a plasma pike that flickered blue with overcharge. They didn’t speak. Tech bandits never did. They came for energy, code drives, anything with value. But mostly, they came to take.

  A warehouse guard screamed. Then silence. Then flame.

  Kai ducked behind a collapsed comms post and pulled out the only working device he had—a hand-sized magnetic repulser built from an old motor coil and a broken data spool. Not a weapon, but he had an idea.

  Mira was already on the move.

  He spotted her sprinting through the back alleyways, pulling a child by the wrist toward cover. Her scavenged armor was half-buckled, boots kicking up dust as she moved. One of the raiders turned her way. The pike lit up.

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  Kai didn’t think. He ran.

  “Tarek!” he shouted.

  “I’m already on it!” came the reply, from the roof above.

  Tarek dropped a sack full of scrap down into Kai’s hands—scrap magnets, copper wire, half-melted circuit boards. Trash to most. But not to him.

  “Gimme ninety seconds,” Kai said, kneeling in the dirt. He worked fast, fingers dancing in rhythm, guided by instinct deeper than thought. Cael’s voice hadn’t come back since the dream, but something lingered. Something humming in the back of his mind.

  He twisted the coil, reversed the polarity, and rerouted the current through the copper filaments. The whole thing vibrated once. Then clicked.

  He smiled. “That’ll do.”

  ---

  The trap was simple. Brutal. Beautiful.

  Kai sprinted down the alley and hurled the makeshift bomb beneath a raider just as it stepped onto a collapsed metal scaffold. The magnetic field ignited in a sharp pop, pulling every loose shard of iron toward the raider’s lower limbs. Scrap screamed across the ground like a tidal wave.

  The exo-suit locked up mid-stride. The raider tried to turn—too slow. The scaffold shorted, sparked, and collapsed inward. A beam slammed down on the raider’s shoulder, cracking the armor like a tin can.

  Mira didn’t hesitate. She buried her dagger into the exposed joint of its neck servo.

  One down.

  But the other two kept moving. One breached the warehouse wall with a short-burst charge, torching the entrance and charging through. The air filled with smoke, and with it—screams.

  Kai burst in through the side with a wrench and a half-melted shock stick. Not to fight—he wasn't built for that. But to buy time.

  Tarek was already inside, crouched behind a stack of busted panels, hurling flash modules to distract the second raider. The air stank of ozone and burning plastic.

  In the chaos, a small figure darted out from behind the central generator rack. A child—no older than seven—ran straight into the raider’s path.

  “No!” Kai shouted.

  Time slowed.

  The pike hissed.

  The child screamed—and vanished in a white flash.

  When the smoke cleared, there was only a smear of heat and scorched floor tiles.

  ---

  The aftermath was worse than the fight.

  The raiders left as quickly as they came, taking many energy cores and an entire code bank from the old city records. They attacked multiple warehouses, not just this one. No one could stop them. No one ever did.

  The local security guild arrived twenty minutes late. They scanned, shrugged, and blamed the town for housing unauthorized tech signatures. Offered no help. No apology. No recompense.

  Kai watched as Mira knelt over a charred spot on the floor, her hands clenched, jaw trembling. Tarek stood silently by the broken generator, face pale.

  The townspeople gathered, heads bowed. Not a riot. Not a protest. Just numb acceptance.

  Kai stood at the edge of it all, heart pounding, fists shaking. The melted scraps of his magnetic trap lay cooling beside his foot—too little, too late.

  He looked up at the rising sun bleeding through the smoke.

  “I’m done,” he said quietly. “I’m done fixing broken things.”

  He turned to Mira and Tarek, eyes burning.

  “I’m going to build something better.”