Max's basement reeked of rusted coins soaked in motor oil. Ayla kicked aside a hydraulic rod, her fingertips grazing verdigris on the shelves—the mechanical knee joint was clearly a support frame from last month's discarded Caged Moon, now polished into a prosthetic load-bearing axle, gypsum crumbs still lodged in its crevices.
"Hands off the third shelf." Max crunched licorice as he lifted a hidden panel, his cane's UV light sweeping over piles of mechanical hands. "Kid with a titanium alloy ass welded himself to the power grid charging here last week."
Ayla pried open a prosthetic eye's casing with her silver bookmark. The embedded chip projected a holographic menu—wolf sigils labeling modification services. When the bookmark neared the chip, Lucas' biometric code exploded midair, forming a 3D model of his nape's briar sigil.
"You're using my sculpture scraps for black market parts?" She grabbed a spinal connector, its surface carved with Lucas' signature chisel marks. "This still has Neumann's anti-counterfeit code!"
Max's cane pressed against her neck, a needle snicking out to draw blood. "Better question—" his licorice ground between molars, "why did Selene's ring tracker ping this location ten minutes ago?"
The vent shuddered. Ayla's elbow knocked over a jar containing a mechanical heart as she moved along the wall. The preserved organ's prosthetic eye suddenly opened, pupil fracturing into Selene's live surveillance feed. She yanked the power cord, viscous fluid pooling into bioluminescent arrows pointing to the vault.
"Combination's your birthday reversed." Max's voice mingled with metal scraping. "That vault held Lucas' painkillers, by the way."
The vault overflowed with neural interfaces, each engraved with miniature Wolf in the Thorns. Ayla activated a chip with her cerulean-tinged blood. Holographic logs showed Lucas modifying 127 discarded prosthetics over three years—the latest entry being the paralyzed boy's mechanical arm, coordinates matching the slum shack.
Something heavy thudded in the vents. Ayla rushed out with a chisel to find Max's cane jammed in a gear mechanism, its shaft carved with matching wolf sigils. Emergency lights bled crimson as Selene's synthesized voice boomed: "Illegal neural welding detected. Executing purge protocol A-7."
A rogue mechanical hand grabbed Ayla's bookmark, stabbing toward her crescent scar. Lucas' biometric code erupted from the bookmark, burning escape routes into the walls. Max spat out bloodied licorice, his cane's laser cutter melting ceiling pipes: "Sewer exit! Head to the waste plant!"
Before leaping into the drain, Ayla glimpsed Max wrenching off his mechanical arm to stuff into the vault. Its palm bore Odile's lab chip number—identical to the model implanted in teenage Lucas.