Jessica was able to fix my injured left arm.

  The cut was deep. It had gouged bone and severed arteries and veins. But it was fixable, and as my bicep stitched itself together and pain burned through me from shoulder to wrist, a tiny bit of tension disappeared. I wasn’t going to die. I was in good hands. Tori had gotten me to her stepmom in time.

  But my right arm was a lost cause. All she could do was patch it to stop me from bleeding out. “The problem is that healers can’t do anything about missing limbs. Breaks, tears, cuts, anything like that…that wouldn’t be a problem. It’d hurt, but I could fix it. But you’d need someone better than me to fix it once it’s completely detached.”

  I stared at her. Part of me…no, almost all of me…wanted to panic—or to give up. I needed my arm. My hands were who I was. I made my living fixing things, and I couldn’t fix anything without fingers to hold it and strength to work at it. More than that, it was violating. Sure, I’d suffered some pretty bad injuries, but this? This was an attack on who I was. “What about Body points?” I asked.

  Jessica looked at me, her eyes sad. “I don’t know, Hal. I’ll ask around, but…”

  The silence hung awkwardly in her hospital below the storage container house she called home. It reeked of blood and cleaning supplies. Too much of that blood was my own. “I mean, Jessica, dammit.” I took a deep breath and tried again. “Sorry. No. I haven’t seen anyone missing a limb anywhere. That has to mean—“

  “Hal.” Calvin stood in the doorway, leaning against it. He looked terrible, but his eyes locked on mine, and I couldn’t look away. “Hal, maybe the reason you don’t see people with one arm or one leg is that they usually die. Injuries like that…they’re not recoverable. People don’t survive a monster that’s pulled a leg off of them.”

  I stared at him for a moment. Then I shook my head. “I can’t believe that.”

  “You don’t have to believe it, son. I’m not askin’ you to. But you should be ready for if that arm doesn’t grow back. Figure out a plan. A solution. That’s what you do, right?” Calvin sighed and leaned against the doorframe. “Won’t matter much if we can’t get a Beacon, though. What happened in there?”

  I swallowed. The motion hurt. Jessica’s work on my…stump…didn’t hurt any less. “How’s Zane?”

  "He’s…” Jessica trailed off.

  “You can tell me.”

  “I think Carol needs to tell you,” Calvin said. He looked at the floor.

  “That bad?” I asked.

  “Well, it ain’t good, but it’s the best damn result we coulda gotten. Why’d the Crusader leave him behind, anyway?”

  “I have no idea,” I said. It was something that had been bugging me, too. Whatever Taven Liu was up to, it either didn’t require another fire mage or he was better off with Zane in our care. Either way, it felt like a trap—and worse, it was one we had to walk into. We had no choice; it was Zane. He’d been with us for…since the Twilight Menagerie.

  I’d hurt him. But it had been the only solution. He’d understand. But would Carol?

  Jessica’s healing hurt. But it was miraculous how much she could accomplish with it—even if she couldn’t fix my arm. By the time we got back to Museumtown, I felt like myself.

  Or, well, mostly myself. I was still missing an arm, after all.

  Carol and Zane were nowhere to be found, and after a few minutes of searching for both them and Tori, I gave up and headed for Cindy’s Garage and the Voltsmith’s Laboratory. The burned-out husk of the Charge Converter sat in my inventory, and it was the only usable thing I’d recovered from the beacon. I wanted to take a look at it, and then I wanted to get to work on the Voltsmith’s Grasp. Someone would have to help me with it, but I felt a little better about my chances after I could finally think.

  Tori had picked it up from the Urban Sprawl’s floor and shoved it into her inventory, then given it back to me, and it was the only thing that gave me hope for my arm. If Calvin really was right, and Body points couldn’t fix this, I’d need to upgrade what I had. It’d take every bit of my understanding of the Principles of Voltsmithing, but I had to try.

  So, the moment I got back to the Voltsmith’s Laboratory, I started pulling off the Autoplate Pauldron and Voltsmith’s Grasp.

  Rube’s Principle had served me well in my Tier One trial, where I’d built the upgraded Voltsmith’s Grasp, but as I stared at the gauntlet—and the massive gash in the side that had missed the Heart by a fraction of an inch—I made the decision to abandon it. Dad had been right: simple, effective tools were better. The best tool in my toolbox was the set of crescent wrenches I’d had since I turned ten. They were perfect in every way…but only for their specific job.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  The Autoplate Pauldron and the Voltsmith’s Grasp had been adequate for what they did, but they weren’t enough anymore.

  I stretched out my arms—or I tried to. My left strained against the bandage and scarred tissue Jessica had left behind; she hadn’t finished the job, instead getting it stable and then moving on to someone else who needed her. And my right…

  I could feel my hand closing on something. It wanted to stretch out. The muscles all moved like they should. Or, more accurately, they felt like they were moving like they should, but it was all wrong. There wasn’t anything there, and when I reached for a ball-peen hammer, my fingers didn’t close on it.

  “Dammit,” I muttered into the empty lab.

  No one responded, and after a moment, I switched hands and wrapped my left around the hammer’s handle. That felt wrong, too. I closed my eyes, then opened them after a moment. And then I got to work.

  The Voltsmith’s Grasp—the upgraded one I imagined—existed on the Laboratory’s workbench, and I got to work stripping down the one I’d been wearing. If worst came to worst…or if best came to best…I could rebuild it and slide it over a healed hand the next time I leveled up. Right now, though, I needed to push my limits.

  I got to work. My hammer rang out, and in a half-hour, both of my creations were just so many gears, cogs, and Emitters on the work floor.

  And that’s when things got tricky.

  “He’s fine,” Tori said as she walked in. “Physically, I mean. Carol’s with him. Thanks for checking, by the way.”

  I swallowed. Tori’s eyes were locked on the pile of Voltsmithing components. Then I raised my right arm. “Hi, Tori. I’d wave, but…”

  “Har, har. You’re going to have to see them eventually.”

  “I tried. I looked for them both—and for you—after we got to Museumtown.” I let my arm fall back to my side and pointed at the gears and cogs with my hammer. “Calvin’s right, though. I have to keep pushing. If we want to—“

  “Want to what? Save Zane? He’s fine. I mean, he’s a Crusader cultist now, but he’s not going to die. You don’t have to worry about him. It’s not like he’s going to die, or like Carol had to all but kill him in there.”

  That hit me hard. The hammer dropped to the floor, and I stared at the gauntlet’s plan. Then I sighed. “I’m sorry, Tori. I’ll talk to them both as soon as I can, and I will fix this. I promise.”

  Tori went quiet. Her eyes looked watery as she looked away, toward the open garage door. Then she looked back at me. “I believe you.”

  I shrugged. Then I turned back to the model of the Voltsmith’s Grasp that existed on the work table. The pattern was there, suspended in orange wires of Charge, but…

  “Tori, can you give me a hand?” I asked.

  She stared at me. I stared back. Then I raised an eyebrow, and she snorted. “Fine, Hal. Fine. Let’s get to work on this.

  The new Voltsmith’s Grasp wasn’t a gauntlet.

  It started at my shoulder, a lattice of thin steel I’d cut from the chassis of an overgrown car and melted down in a makeshift crucible, then cast into the shape of my arm. Over that almost-delicate lattice ran dozens of wires and tiny conduits in a matrix that, in itself, was armor. The Heart beat over my shoulder blade, temporarily exposed for anyone to see.

  Further down, below my elbow, that steel lattice turned into a three-dimensional grid of triangles in the rough shape of an arm, and the matrix of Charge-carrying wires and tubes disappeared inside of that grid. So did the gears—dozens of gears, the smallest I could find, fit inside of it. Two massive fingers sat on the ‘hand,’ with no wrist articulation but with a thumb opposing them. The Voltsmith’s Grasp seemed more like a claw than a glove.

  “Okay, Test number thirty-one,” I said quietly. Tori rolled her eyes, and I kept going. “Current test is for full worn functionality. Success is sixty percent of my left arm’s movement, with refinements from there.”

  Then I bent my fingers.

  Not my fingers, precisely. It was the Voltsmith’s Grasp’s hand. I couldn’t feel it; there was no feedback except for some strain on the lattice frame where it overlapped my arm. They almost twitched. Almost.

  “Test number thirty-one, failure.”

  The tricky part wasn’t figuring out how to engineer a gauntlet that bent at the elbow, fingers, and—eventually—wrist. I could do all of that just fine. In fact, the Voltsmith’s Grasp I’d built worked flawlessly in every test until the moment I put it on, but as soon as I tried to use it the way I expected a hand and arm to work, it seized up.

  “Tough draw, Hal,” Tori said. She stepped out from behind the workbench she’d been hiding behind. “Any ideas?”

  I stared at the device, then slowly unbuckled it and let it slide off my arm. It dropped a few inches to the floor, and I sat down next to it. Then I fired it up. It bent at every joint as I moved Charge into the system from the six different tubes I’d added to the Heart. When I cut off a joint’s conduit, it stopped moving, and orange Charge poured back into the Heart through the wires. The problem wasn’t the gauntlet at all.

  The problem was me.

  I couldn’t communicate with the Voltsmith’s Grasp while I was wearing it.

  “Yeah, I know what’s wrong,” I said. Then I started tearing into the device, removing everything between my shoulder and where my arm stopped except for the steel lattice. I needed space to work, because the issue was something that’d be incredibly difficult to adjust for. In fact, the whole gauntlet would need to be rebuilt.

  Again.

  Then I turned to what was left of the Corpse of Iron I’d gotten from the Stronghold’s final boss. I’d dug into it before, but I’d mostly been focusing on how Charge moved through it, not on how the orc who’d turned himself into a massive body of steel and Charge controlled that body. I couldn’t help but feel a little sick. The Ironmonger had creeped me out; he’d bled, but he’d bled Charge. I’d wanted to learn from him up until the moment his true nature was revealed. After that, I’d just wanted him out of the way.

  Now, I had no choice. I needed a functional set of arms if I wanted to help get my people through Integration, and I needed them as soon as possible. I couldn’t wait to find a more elegant solution.

  How had the Ironmonger powered his body with Charge?

  With Tori’s help, I started poking around inside the massive iron body’s arm, trying to find the answer.