The Drop Piles

Nick saw the bomb before it became everyone else's problem. Behind the shield, the prisoner had been working with quick, desperate hands, assembling a little contraption that looked half modern, half old-fashioned: wires and mechanism married to fuse and wick. There was no time for a better answer. Nick burned her down before she could finish it. The warehouse held still for one awful beat after that. Then the party made its next choice. The addicted prisoner was allowed to leave. She stood, tried to run, was tripped by the man still sitting on the floor, then fled straight to a locked door and had to endure the humiliation of turning around and finding the real exit. It would have been funny if the room were not still full of blood, bombs, and missing people. That left the scavenger. He did not know the Tallyman. He did not pretend to be brave. He knew he was exactly disposable enough for Flesh to kill if he talked and exactly unimportant enough for everyone else to forget if he disappeared. Oskar and Jonah pressed anyway. The man finally gave them the shape of the local supply chain. Flesh wanted parts from forged and construct bodies. Not always for practical reasons. Some members treated the bodies as salvage, trophies, or worse. Low-level scavengers like him did not meet leaders in clean rooms or carry parts to formal depots. They made drop piles. Throw the parts somewhere like trash. Leave them in a corner. Let someone higher come retrieve them later. The earlier effigy suddenly looked less like decoration and more like a marker. The scavenger had met Prototype once. He did not like Prototype. Maybe, he admitted, he did not like anybody anymore. Then the interrogation became smaller and sadder. Jonah threatened the man's pipe, and the man's panic finally revealed why it mattered: his daughter had made it. She was not around anymore. The party let him search for it before he left. Stormcall's Flesh operation was not a single monster in a room. It was a city system: desperate hands, anonymous piles, stolen bodies, and enough shame that even the smallest piece of evidence could carry a ghost.