Late Summer, 2189

  Approach to Beltmoire, Eastern Continental Authority

  The old highway leading into Beltmoire looked like a spine picked clean—cracked pavement, abandoned vehicles half-reclaimed by vegetation, and the distant silhouette of a city slowly folding in on itself. Mist clung to the ground in patches, as if the earth itself was exhaling ghosts.

  Snips Calder waited beside the rusted guardrail, flanked by two men whose stillness mirrored her own. Both wore the subtle markers of Andori affiliation—not ostentatious enough to draw Union attention, but clear to anyone who knew what to look for. The taller one, Daven, carried a shotgun modified for close work. The other, whose name Snips had never bothered to learn, kept his hand near a blade sheathed at his hip.

  They weren't there to protect her. They were insurance against her decisions.

  Snips was the kind of woman you noticed twice—once to clock her as trouble, and once because you weren't sure what you'd just seen. Short. Sharp. Frail in the way of someone who burned more fuel than she ever took in. One eye was a sickly green-hazel, alert and cagey. The other... clouded, like smoke trapped under glass. Nobody knew if it still worked. Nobody asked.

  Her hair was scorched pale-orange and mottled yellow at the roots—a home-job undercut that reeked faintly of wire smoke and regret. Her skin had the sickly cast of someone who didn't see the sun often, or didn't want to. Pale, bordering on ghostly. A face more angles than curves. Not ugly—not really—just worn past charm and halfway to caution sign.

  She carried herself like a secret with sharp elbows.

  The transport appeared as a distant speck, gradually resolving into a battered truck moving at cautious speed along the fractured highway. Its engine coughed and sputtered, the sound carrying across the empty landscape like something dying.

  "That's them," Daven muttered, shifting his grip on the shotgun.

  Snips didn't respond. She stood motionless, hands tucked into the pockets of her worn canvas coat, watching the approaching vehicle with her good eye.

  The truck groaned to a halt twenty paces away. Two figures emerged—one familiar, one not.

  Bren was exactly as she remembered from their previous interactions: wiry, nervous, his fingers constantly twitching as if counting invisible coins. A fence with delusions of importance. The kind of man who believed himself cleverer than he was.

  The other was younger—maybe a few years shy of her—but carried himself like someone still settling into his own skin. Tall, with the awkward grace of a man not yet used to his height, and a mop of sandy curls that looked like they’d been cut by wind and time more than scissors. His features hadn’t hardened into the mask most people wore in this world. And his eyes—blue, clear, and quietly defiant—suggested he hadn’t been on this side of legitimate work for very long.

  "Snips," Bren called, his voice carrying a false warmth that fooled no one. "Right on time, as always."

  She didn't answer. Just waited.

  Bren’s smile faltered slightly. He gestured to his companion. “Seth. You haven’t met, but he’s been around. Solid guy.”

  Seth McCarey stood a half-step behind Bren, taking in the scene with careful appraisal. His gaze flickered from Daven's shotgun to the other guard's blade before settling briefly on Snips. When he reached her damaged eye, he looked away quickly—not in disgust, but with the uncomfortable recognition of someone seeing too many possible futures in one broken feature.

  Something in Snips’s chest tightened unexpectedly. Not hope—she’d burned that out long ago. Just a flicker of something softer. He was cute, in a way that caught her off guard. Not young—just… not ruined. There was a steadiness in his eyes, the kind that made her want to believe he hadn’t seen how ugly the world could get. For a breath, she wondered what it might be like to talk to someone like that, to feel his strength.

  No!

  Just as quick, she shoved the thoughts back into the void. Nobody wanted Snips. Not even Snips.

  She crushed the feeling before it could take root.

  "The package," she said, her voice flat and cold as the highway beneath them.

  Bren nodded too eagerly. "Of course, of course." He turned to Seth, who produced a hard-shell case from the truck's cabin. "Finest quality, as promised. Three kilos, unprocessed."

  Seth approached carefully, holding the case with unexpected reverence. As if he understood what it contained was more than just valuable—it was dangerous.

  Snips made no move to take it. Daven stepped forward, took the case, and set it on the hood of the truck. The latches clicked as he opened it, revealing the bar of Ro'Daerim steel nestled in foam padding.

  Even in the gray morning light, it seemed to glow. Not reflecting the sun—capturing it, holding it, making it somehow more potent. The blue-silver surface was mirror-smooth, broken only by a small stamp near one edge: OS-7 // Vault-9.

  Daven nodded. Snips reached into her coat and withdrew a cloth bag heavy with currency.

  "Payment as agreed," she said, tossing it to Bren.

  He caught it with practiced ease, immediately weighing it in his palm. "Always a pleasure doing business with the Andori, Snips. I've been thinking, actually—with my connections, I could be more valuable to your organization than just the occasional—"

  Snips raised her hand, palm out. A gesture that simply said: Don't.

  Bren's words died in his throat.

  "You don't want what we have," she said quietly. Not a threat. A kindness, in its way.

  Bren forced another smile, tucking the payment into his jacket. "Right, right. Just thought I'd mention it."

  Seth was watching her, she realized. Not staring at her eye like most did, but studying her face. Looking for something. She met his gaze briefly, found herself wondering what his story was. How he'd ended up here, on this dead highway, moving contraband that could get him executed if the wrong people stopped their truck.

  His eyes didn't hold fear. Or greed. Just a kind of determined clarity she hadn't seen in a long time.

  He looked away first, a slight flush coloring his cheeks.

  "Safe travels," Seth called suddenly.

  She paused but didn't look back.

  "Watch yourself, kid," she said, her voice carrying just enough to reach him. "This isn't a road you want to stay on."

  Then she was moving again, approaching the modified bike that waited beyond the guardrail. It looked like something salvaged from six different decades—thick-framed, exhaust-blackened, with welded-on saddlebags and a jury-rigged fuel stabilizer clamped to the side. The seat was patched leather, the grips worn nearly smooth. But the engine? It purred like something alive.

  Bikes were rare now. Fuel rarer. Most people moved on foot, with scavenged scooters, or cobbled-together electric rigs powered by salvaged capacitors and jury-rigged solar banks. The lucky ones had old industrial carts that still held a charge. Combustion engines, though? They were relics. Revered. Feared. Built for a world that didn’t exist anymore.

  But the Andori? They didn’t mind burning what others couldn’t afford. When they wanted a courier noticed, they sent her on something loud. Something fast.

  Something that said: this matters.

  The engine growled to life beneath her—a sound out of place in the quiet devastation of the landscape. She adjusted her goggles, covering both eyes without distinction, and accelerated toward the city's broken skyline.

  Behind her, the guards climbed into a separate vehicle, following at a respectful distance. Ahead, Beltmoire waited—a city of rust and shadows, groaning in its endless collapse.

  As she rode, the wind tore at her clothes, her hair, stripped away everything but momentum. In these moments, engine thrumming beneath her, distance unspooling at her command, Snips almost felt something like alive.

  Almost.

  The feeling never lasted. Nothing did.

  Beltmoire, Eastern Continental Authority

  Beltmoire groaned in its sleep.

  Not wind through empty halls. Not settling foundations. Something else entirely—the sound of a city slowly collapsing under its own dead weight, metal contracting in the pre-dawn chill. It echoed between buildings like whale song through a frozen lake—haunting, distant, inevitable. Most residents had long since tuned it out, the way people once ignored smoke detector chirps in the old world. A warning no one heeded anymore.

  Snips Calder listened. Not because she cared. But because the noise was company.

  Once, Beltmoire had been the backbone of fuel distribution for the eastern corridor: rail hub, trucking capital, refinery stronghold. Now it was something else entirely.

  The refineries had collapsed inward like old lungs. Tankers lay abandoned across cracked pavement, rusted axles snapped like bones. The port was a skeletal dock of rotted timber and silent cranes, half-sunk in black water that stank of algae and fuel ash.

  Nature had returned first—moss in gutters, vines curled through truck cabs, saplings sprouting from the cracks in loading platforms. The rest came later: squatters, scavengers, ghosts. And Bren.

  He called it a "market," what they'd built in the shadow of the old Belt Tower. A dozen stalls clustered beneath the crumbling loop of the Beltway overpass. From above, the broken highway looked like a noose.

  Snips parked her bike in a half-collapsed maintenance garage—one of dozens of hidden spots she maintained throughout the city. Places where things could be secured, retrieved, forgotten. The kind of knowledge that kept couriers alive.

  The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  She touched her clouded eye absently. The scar tissue had long since stopped hurting, but the memory remained fresh—Thermecine, just a drop or two to her eye, the pain unbearable, the world hazy and distorted, and the words that fill her waking hours, the Andori lieutenant's calm voice: "You won’t forget your place, this time."

  Ren had put her there. Charming, beautiful Ren. All smiles and promises and careful lies that led her step by step into debt that could only be paid one way. By the time Snips realized who Ren really worked for, it was far too late.

  That had been seven years ago. Ren was long gone. But the Mob still owned whatever remained of Snips Calder.

  Below, the Continental Authority's quarterly extraction team was setting up at the base of an old fuel repository. Six workers in Union gray, methodically stripping copper wiring and titanium components from the husk of the building. Two soldiers stood guard, rifles slung casually, more focused on their morning rations than potential threats. They'd been coming for years—mining Beltmoire like a quarry, taking what was valuable, leaving the decay to fester.

  The Council chambers in Hamilton were built with salvage from a dozen dead cities like this one. The irony wasn't lost on Snips. The Authority abandoned these places, then harvested their bones.

  She straightened, adjusting the case's weight before navigating down the rusted maintenance ladder. The market would be stirring soon—not that "market" was the right word for the desperate exchange of salvage that happened in the shadow of Belt Tower. But names didn't matter much in places like this. Nothing did.

  Survival was simple. Wake up. Move. Deliver. Sleep if you could. Repeat until you didn't.

  Sometimes she wondered why she bothered. It wasn't fear of death—death seemed like a distant acquaintance who'd forgotten her address. It wasn't hope—that had dried up years ago, a well run empty.

  Maybe it was just momentum. The body continuing long after the spirit had surrendered.

  The streets below were a maze of corroded infrastructure and improvised pathways. Abandoned vehicles had been repurposed as makeshift shelters, their hollowed-out chassis now home to those with nowhere else to go. Vines wrapped around streetlight poles like hungry serpents, squeezing what remained of the city's skeleton.

  As she passed the old transit hub, a burst of steam erupted from a fractured pipe underfoot—hot, sulfurous, carrying the chemical ghosts of what once flowed beneath the city. Beltmoire didn't just look dead; it smelled dead. Like rust and mold and fuel ash. Like things that had fermented beyond recognition.

  Snips navigated the familiar route with mechanical precision. Three blocks east. Two north. Past the collapsed theater where half-dissolved posters still advertised shows from another era. Through the makeshift bazaar where the desperate traded scraps for medicine or food or oblivion.

  No one looked at her directly. In Beltmoire, eye contact was a luxury few could afford.

  The designated delivery point was Substation 17C—a squat concrete maintenance wing attached to the base of Belt Tower like a parasite. Its steel door, painted over countless times, still bore the faint impressions of numbers long since obscured. Industrial braille.

  She knocked three times. Pause. Two more.

  The door opened a crack. One pale eye studied her through the gap.

  "Delivery," she said, her voice flat as abandoned pavement.

  "From where?" The voice was a gravel rasp.

  "Bren sends regards from the Hills."

  The door widened. The man behind it filled the frame—all shoulders and scars and faded ink. His most prominent feature was the jagged line that ran from jaw to collar, puckered and white against his weathered skin.

  "Tomas," he said. Not an introduction. A statement. "Come in."

  The room beyond was utilitarian, sparse. A heavy table dominated the center, its surface scarred with burns and blade marks. One wall displayed maps—not city grids, but system layouts. Pipelines. Substations. Distribution networks. The opposite wall held weapons, arranged with unsettling precision. Not displayed. Ready.

  Three locks engaged behind her. Two manual. One electric—its faint hum the only living sound in the room.

  "Let's see it," Tomas said, gesturing to the table.

  Snips unstrapped the case and placed it on the scarred surface. The latches clicked as she released them, opening to reveal the bar of Ro'Daerim steel nestled in dense foam padding. Even in the dim light, it carried a faint blue-silver sheen, capturing what little illumination reached it and somehow making it more.

  Tomas's posture shifted—just barely. A predator scenting something rare.

  "Genuine," he said. Not a question.

  "According to the fence," Snips replied. "Three kilos. Ossuary origin, if the stamp means anything."

  Tomas didn't touch the metal. Just hovered his fingers above it, as if feeling heat that wasn't there. "And the source?"

  Snips didn't answer. Didn't shrug. Just waited.

  "Smart," Tomas said, with the faintest approval. "Most carriers can't help themselves. They poke around. Get curious."

  "Curiosity doesn't pay well," Snips replied.

  Tomas studied her—the clouded eye, the stillness, the total absence of fear. Or interest. Like she’d already paid the price. He recognized what he was seeing. A ghost. Someone already dead who just hadn't stopped moving yet.

  He closed the case and moved to a reinforced cabinet against the far wall. When he returned, he carried a cloth bag that clinked with the unmistakable sound of metal currency.

  "Payment as agreed. Thirty-five steel holdings. Authenticated by the Guild." He set the bag on the table, then added another, smaller pouch. "Plus a bonus for reliability."

  Snips didn't move.

  "Problem?" Tomas asked.

  "Wasn't the arrangement," she said, voice unchanged.

  "You want less?" Tomas asked, a hint of amusement curling at the edge of his words.

  "I want predictable," she replied. "Changes make me uncomfortable."

  Tomas nodded slowly, as if confirming something he'd already suspected. "The bonus isn't generosity. It's insulation. Makes you less likely to talk about what you delivered — or who you delivered it for."

  "No one asks. I don't tell."

  "A lesson well learned," he said dryly, his eyes flicking to the clouded one. Then, without pause: "Truth is, that’s what they all say. Right up until the Union increases the bounty. Or until someone more persuasive starts asking questions."

  Snips took the payment without comment, tucking it into an inside pocket of her worn coat. The weight felt wrong — too heavy, like stones in her pockets pulling her toward the bottom of a river.

  “One more thing,” Tomas said, his voice low now, almost idle. “Keep tabs on Bren. Let him know we’re open to... communication. For now.”

  Snips didn’t flinch. “I don’t relay messages.”

  “Then consider it a forecast,” Tomas said, voice flat as iron. “We don’t quite know what this is yet. But I suspect it’s more than just a chunk of metal. That crew of his? They pulled off something clean in a part of town that doesn’t do clean. That doesn’t go unnoticed.”

  He paused. Then, almost to himself:

  “If they’re smart, they’ll vanish. But smart crews don’t stay bored for long.”

  Snips turned toward the door, one hand on the frame. She wasn’t paid to be curious — but curiosity was hard to shake.

  “Courier,” Tomas said as she paused. “You’re wondering why. Why steel like this. Why now.”

  “I’m wondering what kind of fool stirs ghosts,” she said. “And why I should care.”

  “Because the ground’s already shaking,” Tomas replied, tapping the case. “The Union. The Freeholds. Even the Maelstrom itself. Everyone feels it. War doesn’t need a name — just the right materials in the wrong hands.”

  Snips glanced back. Not enough to commit. Just enough to remember.

  “Maybe this crew was lucky,” she said. “Maybe they’re something else.”

  Tomas’s smile didn’t touch his eyes. “Keep your eye… on them.

  She left without responding, stepping back into Beltmoire's perpetual half-light. The city's constant groans had intensified with the morning temperature shift—metal expanding, concrete settling, the sound of a dying thing trying to find comfort. Like ice on a frozen lake, beautiful and ominous.

  The market was awakening. Early traders arranged salvage on makeshift tables. A woman with radiation scarring across half her face haggled over canned goods with a Union patrol member who was clearly operating outside official channels. Children darted between stalls, thin and quick as shadows, snatching what wasn't watched closely enough.

  Nobody noticed Snips. Nobody ever did.

  She found a quiet corner in what had once been a fuel distribution office, its walls still bearing the faded remnants of routes that no longer existed to places that might no longer stand. There, she emptied the payment bag and counted—methodically, expressionlessly.

  Thirty-five steel holdings. Plus a "bonus" that nearly doubled the amount. The kind of payment that bought silence. Or marked someone who knew too much.

  Snips divided the currency into three separate bundles, distributing them throughout her clothing with practiced efficiency. One portion went into a hidden pocket sewn into her vest lining. Another into a compartment in her boot heel. The third into a hollowed-out section of her belt.

  As she worked, her mind turned over the implications. The Andori Mob didn’t throw money at mysteries — not unless they smelled something worth the risk. They didn’t know what Ro’Daerim steel really was, not yet. But they knew it wasn’t ordinary. And if they were asking questions, it meant they were planning to find answers — the kind that could shift power in ways nobody was ready for.

  And somehow, that jittery bastard Bren had wound up connected to something that made the Mob sit up and listen — and he was too dumb to realize just how dangerous that was for him.

  Or the real source — copper hair, quick hands, sharper eyes. The Mob would come for her eventually. They always did.

  Snips finished securing the payment and stood, stretching with casual indifference to mask her survey of the surroundings. No obvious tails. No suspicious observers. But that meant little in Beltmoire, where information flowed like tainted water through the city's broken veins.

  She had three options. Walk away now — job complete, no questions, no complications. That was the professional choice. The safe one.

  Or she could warn Bren — a courtesy between operators, maybe earn herself a little goodwill. But that kind of favor had a way of turning sideways.

  Or she could track down the copper-haired thief herself. Not for Tomas. Not for the Mob. Just to see if what Bren stumbled into was dumb luck... or the start of something far bigger.

  Snips started walking, decision already made—because there was never really a choice. She would relay the message. Complete the job exactly as required.

  And then she would forget everything she'd seen and heard today. Forget the Ro'Daerim steel with its strange blue sheen. Forget Tomas's cryptic warnings about war and change. Forget the copper-haired thief who'd soon have the Andori Mob looking for her with very specific questions.

  Because in a world where loyalty faded faster than rust, and silence was the only thing that kept you breathing… sometimes the smart move was to stop pretending you didn’t care.

  Sometimes you followed the thread —

  just to see where it unraveled.

  She stepped into the crumbling lanes of Beltmoire without breaking stride.

  The crowd absorbed her like water through cracked pavement — not seeing her, not acknowledging her, only parting just enough to let her pass.

  Nobody stopped her.

  Nobody asked.

  Nobody wanted Snips.

  Not even Snips.

  Two Years Later - Late Autumn, 2191

  Kiron Hills Locks, Continental Authority

  Snips Calder stood on a rise just outside the outer fence of Kiron Hills Locks, leaning against the twisted remains of an old wire fence. The morning fog clung to the ground like it hadn’t made up its mind to stay or go.

  Below, the Locks simmered with motion — too busy to be forgotten, too small to matter. But not today. Today, it mattered.

  Everyone was looking for more of that blueish steel now. The Mob. The Union. Half a dozen private buyers with deep vaults and shallow morals. They didn’t fully understand it — not yet — but they were close. Close enough to remember who’d first brought it to their table.

  And they’d sent her.

  Snips drew a slow drag from a bent cigarette, the end burning unevenly. She held the smoke for a breath, then let it slip past her lips like steam from a pressure valve. Her coat flapped in the chill wind, pockets deep, gait steady. That old weight between her shoulder blades — not fear, not quite purpose — had returned.

  Below, the Locks crouched against the horizon like a secret. Somewhere inside, a woman with copper hair and too many tricks had made the world take notice.

  Introductions, Snips figured, were long overdue.

  She flicked the cigarette to the dirt and crushed it under her heel. Then she pulled her collar up against the wind, slid her hands into her pockets, and walked toward the gates — calm, quiet, and uninvited.

  The Weight of Steel. A follow up story to Confidence, posted right here on Royal Road.

  It means the world to me that you took the time to step into this story—even for just a few pages.

  The book is published! Look to Amazon for "Forged in Blood & Steel" Volume I. Support if you can, I promise the adventure is worth it. Also, as a note: This story you are reading is not in the book, but exclusively here on Royal Road!

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