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The Reclaimer: Harvest of the Dead
Chapter 1 — Ash and Iron
The smell of rust, antiseptic, and old blood clung to everything inside the Plant.
Steam hissed from a cracked pipe above my bunk, painting the ceiling in a damp metallic sheen.
The klaxon started—flat, mechanical beep-beep—counting down fifteen minutes to shift.
I'd stopped hearing it years ago, but my body still reacted before my mind did.
I swung my legs over the cot and landed barefoot on cold steel.
The shock always woke me faster than caffeine ever could.
Across from me, Jax muttered something into his pillow and rolled over.
Late again. Always late.
I pulled my gray coveralls from the hook, stiff with salt and grime.
The Plant's emblem—a gear around a skull—was still stamped faintly over the chest.
It used to mean something.
Now it just marked us as property of the Reclamation Board.
The fabric clung to my skin, still damp from yesterday's shift.
I tightened the belt that held my ID chip and rebreather.
The filtered air tasted like metal and dust.
Every breath felt like inhaling a scrapyard.
The corridor lights flickered on, a dull red glow spilling through the narrow hall.
Dozens of other workers shuffled toward the lifts—quiet, tired, resigned.
The only real sound came from the ventilation system's endless hum.
The walls were lined with propaganda posters, half-rotted by humidity:
THE DEAD GIVE LIFE — HONOR THE RECLAMATION.
The slogan had been burned into us since childhood.
Every corpse was a resource; every death, a transaction.
That was the Board's doctrine—turn the fallen into fuel, keep Greybridge running.
We were called Reclaimers, but we knew what we really were: gravediggers with quotas.
The elevator groaned as it descended through layers of concrete, carrying us fifty meters down to where the city's heat bled into the earth.
When the doors opened, the smell hit—hot metal, char, and the faint sweetness of decay.
The Processing Yard stretched before us, a maze of conveyor lines and robotic arms feeding bodies into furnaces.
Flames licked the air with every release of pressure, painting everything in pulsing orange light.
The noise never stopped—grinding belts, hissing vents, pistons thumping ash into storage drums.
I'd been here since I was sixteen.
My mother lasted less than a month before the fumes took her lungs.
She used to say the dead were cleaner than the people who ran this place.
My ID scanner blinked green: Retrieval Bay C – Manual Loading.
The job nobody wanted.
The morgue chambers were quieter than the Yard, but the silence wasn't peaceful.
It was thick, the kind that made every drip of condensation sound like a heartbeat.
Steel trays lined the walls.
Some bodies were wrapped in polymer; others were half-burned, uniforms melted to skin.
Each of us was expected to load at least forty per shift.
Most were slum deaths—starvation, plague, work accidents.
The ones with branded numbers were convicts, "donated" by the tribunals for processing.
I'd learned not to think about it.
The bodies had weight, but the real burden was in their eyes.
Sometimes the sutures failed and the lids slipped open.
It felt like they were watching.
Mom's voice echoed in memory: Don't look back, Cole. The dead have already given enough.
Then I reached for the next tray.
> [Unprocessed remnant detected.]
The words weren't spoken; they were inside my skull—clear, cold, mechanical.
> [Reclamation available. Extract ?]
A magnetic pull gripped the back of my neck.
My hand slipped off the lever; the cart jerked forward with a screech.
"Carter!" the warden barked through the intercom. "Keep that line moving!"
"Yes, sir." I forced my hand back to the lever.
The message vanished, but the ringing in my head didn't.
By the time my cart was full, sweat soaked my shirt.
My mask fogged with every breath.
I wheeled the load to the incinerator tunnel—Slot Seven.
Closest to the core furnace.
Always the hottest, always the worst.
The walls shimmered with heat.
Flames licked from the vents like restless tongues.
I triggered the conveyor.
The bodies began to move.
That's when the voice came again.
> [Reclamation imminent.]
Light burst from the nearest shroud—blue-white and blinding.
It struck me square in the chest.
My body locked.
My heart stopped, then slammed once, hard enough to make my vision go black.
The world broke.
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I stood in a gray field that stretched into nowhere.
The air was weightless, silent.
Shapes drifted all around me—outlines of people, half-there, whispering.
> "He didn't deserve this."
"Please… close the door."
Their voices blended into one aching note.
Then a pulse of energy tore through the fog and shattered everything into white.
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I woke on the furnace deck, choking on heat.
"Carter!" The warden's voice barked again. "What the hell happened?"
"Heat spike," I croaked.
"Then move!"
My hands shook.
For a heartbeat, blue light crawled under my skin—bright veins threading my arms before fading.
The steel handle in my grip was warped where my fingers had been.
Fumes, I thought. Must've been the fumes.
My rebreather read normal. No leaks.
Something near my boot caught my eye—a fragment the size of a coin, blackened but pulsing faintly like a heartbeat.
A circle split by a line was etched into its surface.
I'd seen that mark before—on Directorate crates labeled Restricted Access.
Footsteps clanged on the catwalk.
"Carter!" Jax called, jogging toward me, his coverall half-unzipped and skin slick with sweat. "Warden's losing it again!"
"Slot jammed," I lied. "Fixed it."
"You look cooked."
"Yeah. Cooked."
We finished the shift without another word.
Every body I fed into the fire made that strange hum in my chest stronger—steady, alien, alive.
When the end-of-shift horn blared, I stripped off my gloves, washed in the chemical sting, and joined the outflow.
But I didn't head for the ration hall.
I climbed.
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The Roof
The roof was my escape.
Just a slab of reinforced metal, but open.
It had air.
Wind cut through the smog, carrying the stink of oil and rain.
The skyline glowed with industrial haze.
Greybridge sprawled beneath me—endless pipes, ducts, and stacked concrete.
Far above rose the Spire, a silver tower stabbing through the clouds.
The elites lived there—the Executors, who drank refined Residuum to stretch their lives beyond human limits.
Down here, we fed their fires.
I sat against a vent pipe and pulled the fragment from my sleeve.
It still pulsed faintly, tiny veins of light flickering across its surface.
When I pressed my thumb against it, text shimmered across the metal:
> [Stored Residuum: 1 Unit | Source: Unregistered]
Cold certainty crawled up my spine.
It wasn't a hallucination.
A mechanical whine rose from below—steady, precise.
A drone's light swept across the vents, climbing toward me.
My belt blinked red; my ID chip had been pinged.
The fragment vibrated once.
Pain tore through my chest, brighter than fire.
The last thing I saw was the Spire glinting through the haze.
Then the world went white.
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(End of Chapter 1 — Next: The Containment Ward)