Featured in The Copper Press, 22 September, 2157 A.M.

If you’ve never tasted the air over Rusthollow, imagine sucking breath through a damp chimney flue while someone sprinkles powdered copper on your tongue. The dump squats in Atlantis’s western shadow like a rust-gutted leviathan, coughing fumes of charred clockwork and spoiled lard into skies that haven’t been truly blue since the Choir first sang among the clouds. Nobody ventures there after twilight—nobody but rag-pickers too desperate to fear Shard Blight, and muck-spies like me who make a living poking sticks into corporate graves.

I’m Beauregard Silverson, staff reporter for the Gibson Gazette—or I was, until my editor discovered my fondness for uncompensated lunches and reassigned me to the “regional color” desk. That meant printing puff pieces on fishmongers and flower festivals. So when a half-clocked gear-trader nicknamed Gearbox Juno slid onto my barstool whispering about corpses glowing green in Rusthollow, I smelled the kind of story that gets a man promoted—or buried.

“Bodies, Beau,” Juno rasped, wiping oil from her cheek with a gasket rag. “Dead, pricey, and humming like choirboys after vespers. Somebody’s stirring big Shard in the filth heaps.”

I paid our tab with my last silver drake and followed her into the night.

Rusthollow by lantern-light is a nightmare done in charcoal and jade. Mountains of twisted chassis and soot-slick glass cast black steeples against a jaundiced moon. Between them, strange veins of Shardisite tailings pulse faint mint green, like the heartbeat of a sick giant.

Juno led me to a ravine where city disposals dump the “wet trash”—meat scraps, corrupted homunculi, and anything too toxic for polite landfills. There, half submerged in congealed tallow, lay three cadavers. Human shape, but wrong: limbs distended asymmetrically, teeth fused into ceramic beaks, skin marbled with luminous liths of raw Shard.

I knelt, notebook shaking. The corpses weren’t scavenged; they’d exploded from within, ribcages peeled outward like iron flowers. No scav marks, no valuables missing—except the craniums, which had been opened pristinely and scooped hollow.

Juno muttered a prayer to Angel Caris and pointed. Nestled inside one corpse’s sternum cage sat a glass ampoule, stoppered with lead and etched in Draconic runes:

“A-606 ███ PROPERTY OF VIROC ATLANTIS DIVISION—BIO-ALCHEMY WING.”

Corporate evidence in a city dump—scripture for a journalist. I pocketed the vial, and that’s when the wind shifted. From deeper in the hollow came a keening—animal, but articulate, syllables stretched by agony.

“That ain’t wind,” Juno whispered. “That’s a man stuck halfway to demon.”

But I was already moving, lantern raised, tracking bootprints in the muck.

The prints dipped into a collapsed tram tunnel—pre-Conquest, brick-lined, and strung with antique spirit lamps that somebody had rekindled. Every twenty paces a portable sigil projector hummed, latticing the walls with ward-glyphs to corral Shard fallout. Whoever set this place up expected leakage—and believed they could tame it.

We crept until the tunnel widened into an underground foundry. Conveyors rattled overhead, feeding slag to crucibles that belched green flame. Crates bearing Viroc’s triple-gear insignia lined catwalks. And at the center, robed technicians in leaded aprons tended rows of glass coffins, each containing a patient—or a specimen. Tubes syphoned viridian solution from their spinal columns into distillers labeled *GLØW-SERUM*.

Someone had found a perfect pulp name for the newest street poison: Glow. Rumor said a drop of the stuff let you hear angelic hymns—or the Legion’s whispers—depending on your sins.

At a control dais loomed a tall woman of Atlantean descent, hair shaved to the scalp except a single braid threaded with copper wire. Dr. Velka Noor—exiled Viroc alchemist, if scuttlebutt was to be trusted. She oversaw an assistant prying the skullplate from a still-breathing subject, chanting numbers as crystalline probes measured soul-flux.

My lantern clinked against a pipe. Velka’s head snapped up. Her eyes, back-lit by Shard fluoresce, fixed on me with clinical detachment.

“Trespassers,” she called, voice amplified through a copper throat-horn. “Dispose of them. Harvest usable tissue.”

Steel shutters slammed behind us. Juno cursed and drew an electropick—good for scrap, less for combat. I grabbed a length of rebar and we braced, as two ward-puppets lurched from behind crates. They were men once, now marionettes of bone armor and Shard conduits, breath venting as emerald mist. Each puppet bore a branded rune *GOSTER*—demon of disgust—glowing beneath stretched flesh.

The fight was messy pulp: sparks, pulverized mandibles, the taste of coppery Shard dust when a puppet burst like overripe fruit. We won, but victory alarmed Velka more than delay. She triggered an evacuation protocol: vats hissed, vents cycled, and sirens painted everything strobe-green.

A recorded voice advised: “Containment failure in ninety seconds. All personnel abandon sector.”

Velka fled through a reinforced hatch clutching a valise of ampoules. Juno and I, half-concussed, scrambled after her into an elevator that groaned up endless meters, finally disgorging us into a cliffside maintenance office with panoramic windows on the Sea of Ghosts. Night stormed outside; lightning forked violet between black waves.

We’d ascended from rust to ivory—an abandoned Viroc cliff-lab still wired to central security. Velka sprinted for a dirigible tethered to a pad, but Saint Caris blessed me with luck: a derrick cable, snapped by wind, whipped across the deck and shredded the balloon’s silk. Hydrogen vented in a roar; the ship sagged.

Cornered, Velka dropped her valise, produced a polished Shard-blade, and spoke with the fervor of the damned.

“You cannot stop evolution, reporter. The Choir stagnates; the Legion hungers. Glow will bridge them, force heaven and hell to negotiate inside flesh. I will be their mediator.”

Some villains monologue like amateur theater. Velka preached like a prophet. While she ranted, Juno kicked the valise to me. Inside: dozens of Glow ampoules and a single white shard—a fragment so pure it refracted moonlight into halos. Wrapped around it was a parchment sigil: the Seal of Amandine, Archangel of Compassion.

Why would a demon-doped alchemist carry an angelic relic?

Velka saw the shard in my grip and screamed, charging. I parried with rebar; steel rang against crystal blade. Sparks sprayed. Each clash cracked ampoules underfoot, releasing emerald vapors that coiled like serpents craving lungs. My head swam with voices—angelic choirs in minor key.

She seized me by the lapels, eyes blazing. “The shard is the final reagent. Give it and you live.”

I picked a third option. I slammed the shard into the wound in my left palm—letting blood seal crystal to flesh—and pulled Velka into a headbutt.

White light detonated. Not blinding, but clarifying: as if every cell sang its distilled name. My pain vanished, replaced by calm so fierce it compelled action.

“You cannot reconcile corruption by force,” I heard myself say. “Compassion is corrective.”

Light chased Glow fumes, burning them to clear air. Velka shrieked as Goster’s sigil crawled across her skin. A crack of thunder split the sky and hurled a lightning lance through the torn dirigible envelope. Hydrogen met electricity.

The explosion painted the office in sun-bright oranges. Shockwave flung Velka across consoles; she landed amid shattered gauges, unconscious. Somewhere below, containment sirens still wailed.

We had minutes to decide Velka’s fate and secure evidence before the lab’s reactors purged every trace. I found the main console. Emergency override required a soul-key—usually the director’s aura signature. Velka’s still lay bleeding on the floor. I pressed her limp hand to the reader; runes cycled crimson, then green.

“Safeguard override accepted. Reactor purge aborted.”

Alarms cut off mid-howl. Silence rushed in, broken only by distant waves and Velka’s ragged breathing.

The shard in my palm cooled, its light fading to ember. I understood then that relics do not make saints—they only sharpen what already exists.

By dawn, I had enough evidence to sink careers. The Gazette ran my article beneath the lurid headline:

LAB OF GLOW: Viroc Rogue Alchemist Brews Soul-Drug in Rusthollow Death Pit!

Three thousand words of pulp righteousness, no names spared. Circulation tripled; corporate threats flooded in. Two Choir priests visited to verify my shard claim, left unsure whether to canonize or excommunicate me.

As for the relic, it sits in a lockbox beneath my boarding room floor, whispering softly whenever I stray toward cynicism. Some nights I swear I hear Amandine herself urging, “Write the next one.”

I will. Because Atlantis floats on secrets and sin, and the people deserve more than silence. They need pulp, ink, and stubborn fools wielding truth like a shard of blinding white.