The Last Oracle of Rust She reads trash prophecies—and four lords may burn her city alive. #6
Silas removed the wires with careful fingers. Blue sparks jumped between his rings. “Only a little is how fools become corpses.”
The boy smiled weakly. “You always say that.”
“And you always ignore me. An abusive arrangement, really.”
Mara watched Silas lift the child and pass him to a waiting woman, who clutched the boy like he was made of glass. The woman’s eyes flicked to Mara’s burned arm. Hope flared there before she could hide it.
Mara looked away.
There it was.
The cost.
Everywhere she turned, someone needed her.
A baby coughing under a blanket. A technomancer with trembling hands cooling her own smoking fingertips in a bucket of rainwater. An old man sleeping beside a wall of scavenged batteries because his failing lungs needed the fan above him to keep moving.
Silas had lied.
And he had lied because everyone here was already running out of air.
Mara wrapped her arms around herself. “I don’t know how to fix this.”
“No,” Silas said. “But you may know how to listen for what’s coming.”
“Prophecies don’t fix machines.”
“No,” he agreed. “But trash remembers what machines forget.”
He led her to the center of the Wiremarket.
It had once been a subway ticket hall. Now it was a cathedral of circuitry.
Radios hung from chains. Receipts were pinned to copper mesh.
Battery labels had been sewn together into banners.
Broken phones were embedded in the walls like black mirrors.
A fountain made from old pipes burbled weakly in the center, its water silver with filtered rain.
When Mara stepped inside, every screen brightened.
Ronan entered behind her, face dark with distrust. His wound had been sealed by a strip of magnetic bandage, but she could still feel the ache of it under her own ribs.
Dacre took the doorway without being asked. He did not lean. Did not pace. He simply became part of the dark there, watching every possible threat at once.
Julian went to the nearest table and laid out the prophecy fragments: the coffee cup, the torn love letter, scraps from the Treaty Pit drain. His ink-stained thumb brushed Mara’s wrist as he checked how far the rust had spread. The touch was brief. Clinical.
It still sent a tremor through the bond.
Julian’s restraint cracked for half a second.
His thumb stilled against her pulse.
“Mara,” he said quietly.
“What?”
“The mark is warmer.”
“I noticed.”
“It reacts when you’re frightened.”
“I am always frightened lately.”
His gaze lifted to hers. “Not only frightened.”
The words landed too close to truth.
Mara pulled her hand back.
Silas clapped once, too bright. “Before Rook turns this into a tragic poem, shall we?”
Julian’s expression cooled. “I know several tragic poems with cleaner motives than yours.”
“How lucky for us all.”
Silas swept a hand over the table.
Objects waited there in neat rows: a receipt faded to ghostly gray, a cracked metro card, strips of battery labels, a broken phone screen, the foil seal from a medicine bottle, and a child’s sticker shaped like a star.
“Choose one,” he said.
Mara stared at the trash. “And then?”
“Then I teach you to hear the current that once lived in it.”
“I’m an oracle, not a technomancer.”
“Today, you’re both.”
“No.”
He smiled faintly. “There she is.”
Ronan stepped closer. “If this hurts her—”
“It will,” Silas said.
The honesty cut through the room.
Ronan’s rustblood flared. Dacre’s fingers curled against the doorframe. Julian looked up sharply.
Silas held Mara’s gaze. “Not because I want it to. Because old magic hurts when it learns a new language.”
Mara could refuse.
She could walk out.
She could let the Wiremarket children sleep beside dying heaters and tell herself she owed them nothing because Hollowgrave had never been gentle with her.
But the bond pulsed under her skin.
And somewhere deep below, the Heart Engine dragged out another uneven beat.
Three.
Pause.
One.
Mara picked up the broken phone screen.
It was cold at first. Then it warmed in her palm.
Silas’s expression shifted. “Interesting choice.”
“Don’t sound pleased.”
“I’m trying not to.”
“Try harder.”
He came around behind her.
Ronan made a sound.
Silas stopped with both hands raised. “Technomancy requires contact.”
“So does strangling,” Ronan said.
Mara shot him a look over her shoulder. “I can say no myself.”
His jaw tightened. “Then say it.”
She looked at Silas.
He was very still, his charm held back by effort. Black blood still stained the corner of his mouth. Sparks trembled between his rings, but his hands remained open, waiting.
Not taking.
Waiting.
That mattered.
She wished it didn’t.
“Fine,” she said.
Silas stepped close behind her.
Not touching yet.
His breath skimmed the back of her neck. Warm. Careful. Ozone prickled over her tongue before his fingers slid along her forearm, stopping just above the rust mark. His other hand covered hers around the broken phone screen.
Ronan stood in front of her, close enough that if she reached out, she could brace herself against his chest. His eyes stayed on her face, not Silas. Dacre watched from the door, low growl swallowed by the machine hum. Julian began to speak softly from the table.
At first, Mara thought he was reciting a spell.
Then she recognized the cadence.
Poetry.
“From discarded things, the lost road gleams,” Julian murmured, voice low and steady. “From broken bells, the buried city dreams.”
Mara swallowed.
“What is that?”
“Old surface verse,” Julian said. “Or what remains of it.”
“It’s awful.”
His mouth almost curved. “Most things that survive are.”
Silas’s fingers tightened around hers. “Listen beneath the glass.”
“I don’t hear anything.”
“You’re listening with your ears.”
“What should I listen with?”
“Regret,” Silas said. “Trash is full of it.”
The phone screen heated.
Mara inhaled sharply.
Silas’s chest brushed her back for one brief, electric second. Ronan’s hand came up, not touching her, but ready. Dacre stepped half out of the doorway. Julian’s voice continued, velvet over steel, anchoring the room.
The screen in Mara’s hand flickered.
A dead battery icon appeared.
Then a message thread.
Then a face.
Mara’s own face.
She tried to drop the phone, but Silas held her hand closed.
“Stay,” he said. “Stay with me.”
“I see myself.”
“That’s only the surface.”
The glass softened under her fingers.
The Wiremarket vanished.
Mara fell.
Not through space.
Through memory.
Through every hand that had touched the phone before it shattered.
A girl laughing under surface rain. A man whispering goodbye into a voicemail that never sent.
A child using the black screen as a mirror.
A scavenger prying it from a storm drain.
A technomancer testing it for charge. Silas turning it over in his hands yesterday, thinking, This might be enough to open her.
Mara gasped.
“You planned this.”
Silas’s breath hitched behind her. “Yes.”
Black blood welled again at the corner of his mouth.
Ronan’s voice went deadly. “Venn.”
But the vision pulled harder.
The phone screen cracked open inside Mara’s mind, and beneath its dead glass she saw the Heart Engine.
Not as pipes.
Not as gears.
Not as the sacred machine everyone prayed toward when the air thinned.
It was a god.
A chained god made of rust, teeth, and memory.
It hung beneath Hollowgrave in a furnace chamber vast as a buried cathedral, its spine fused to pistons, its ribs wired into pumps, its mouth sewn shut with iron cable.
It had too many eyes, all closed. Its skin was layered with scraps—receipts, love letters, ration cards, prayer flags, funeral notices, children’s drawings—every forgotten thing the city had thrown away and then needed again.
The Heart Engine was not failing.
It was starving.
For centuries, Hollowgrave had fed it trash, memory, grief, the small discarded pieces of human life. But now the scraps were not enough. The god beneath the city wanted heat. Want. Devotion. Terror.
Love.
Love was fuel.
Mara tried to scream.
No sound came out.
The god’s stitched mouth curved.
The phone screen fused to her palm.
Letters burned across the glass.
OPEN.
Mara’s throat closed.
A machine-spell coiled around her voice, thin and electric, trying to pull the sound from her body and feed it downward through the wires. She clawed at her neck with her free hand.
Ronan grabbed her shoulders. “Mara.”
Silas swore. “It’s taking her voice.”
Dacre lunged from the doorway, but the cables above whipped down, snapping between him and Mara in a curtain of sparks. Julian’s poem broke off as papers flew from the table, prophecy fragments circling Mara like frightened birds.
Silas spun her toward him.
His eyes were no longer charming.
They were afraid.
“I need your breath,” he said.
She couldn’t answer.
The spell tightened.
Her lungs seized.
Silas caught her face between his hands and kissed her.
It was not gentle.
It was not soft.
It was breath and copper and black blood, ozone and panic, his mouth sealing over hers before the machine could steal what remained inside her. Mara’s body went rigid. Then the bond detonated.
Blue-white sparks jumped from Silas’s rings into her hair.
Ronan’s hand clamped around her waist from behind, grounding her as the floor bucked.
Dacre roared at the cables until the sound became something older than human and the wires recoiled.
Julian seized Mara’s burned wrist, his thumb pressed to her pulse, and began reciting again in a voice that shook but did not break.
Silas breathed into her.
Mara breathed back.
The machine-spell tore loose from her throat with a snap of pain that made her bite his lower lip. Copper flooded her tongue. His blood. Hers. The kiss deepened for one impossible second, not romance, not surrender, but survival so intimate it felt obscene.
And underneath it, something answered.
The chained god opened one eye.
Every screen in the Wiremarket exploded into light.
Silas broke the kiss, breathing hard, his forehead almost touching hers.
“Mara,” he whispered.
The sound of her name went through every speaker in Hollowgrave.