The Extra's Rise

The moon is honest. No air to carry noise, no weather to smear the lines. Just white stone, black shadow, and the work you bring with you.

I stood on Tycho's southern rim with a low, conjured map hovering between Elias and me. Lines of light showed what we'd already raised—our first bastion at Tycho Yard, the research dome, the bone-lanes for cargo—and what still needed to exist if the moon was going to be more than a mine and a prayer.

"Four new anchors today," Elias said, finger tracing arcs that crossed craters like measured brushstrokes. "Clavius Spur, Plato Basin, Serenitatis Rim, and the Tycho West saddle."

"Do Clavius first," I said. "If a demon throws a rock, that's the angle they'll choose."

He nodded once. Elias doesn't waste words when the plan is good. He lifted his wrist, pinged crews, and the warp pads below answered with a soft blue: ready.

We don't move heavy machines up here when we can move people and decide the stone ourselves. The bone-gates Erebus opened along Tycho's floor flexed like ribs breathing, and a column of skeletal porters marched out carrying alloy spars and crates of anchor crystals. Redeemers of Ash followed with their lanterns—a gentle gold that makes bad air remember it should be quiet—and a squad of Royal Guard in pressure harnesses took rear watch like a habit.

Reika appeared at my left, hair braided tight, eyes narrowed on the ridge lines. "Outer ring at two hundred meters," she said. "Anyone who crosses the scripto-mark in a hurry gets heavier blood than they like."

"Don't make it cute," I said.

"I'm not in a cute mood," she said, and peeled away to start carving wards into the regolith with a stylus that looked like a pen and wrote like a chisel.

Cecilia landed in a low-g lilt that made dust drift off the rim like smoke. "Chaos-poke on your mark," she said, sparks already playing lazy spirals around her fingers.

"You'll get your mark," Kade Opalus answered as he climbed up beside us, tablet tucked under his elbow, face set in the satisfied frown of a man whose lattice is almost the shape he drew. "We lay the weave clean, then the witch pokes. Not before."

"I love it when you talk to me like a cranky metronome," she teased.

He snorted and kept walking.

We stepped through the warp to Clavius, and the world fell away and came back different: the crater spreads like a continent, its floor so flat it tricks your eye, wall a cliff of ancient glass. Earth hung fat and blue above the rim—home watching us lay its shield.

"Positions," I said, and the crew moved like a story they already knew.

Kade marked the four corners of the new anchor with his heel, sure and stingy. Erebus opened a slit in space like a book page lifting, and bone went to work: porters stacked spars, jawless foremen tapped clamps into place with maces that weren't maces, and ossuary cranes—clean, quiet skeletons with cables instead of tendons—lifted the first monolith upright. When it settled into the socket Kade had cut with his mind, the ward crystal inside it pulsed once, twice, and went calm.

Rachel walked the perimeter without hurry, a cup of something hot fixed to the inside of her glove by a clever strap. She set Purelight in the lines the Redeemers would anchor to, little blessings you couldn't see unless you knew how to look. One of the younger techs approached her with a gauze box half-raised. She smiled at him and he forgot to ask his nervous question and remembered how to breathe instead. That's her Gift, too.

Seraphina paced out the distances between pillars with the same precision she uses in a duel, then set down a tripod that wasn't a machine so much as a clean piece of focus. She can hear drift in a field the way a musician hears a flat note. "Two measures short on the east," she said. "If we set the fourth pillar there, the line will pull."

"Another thumb to the right," Kade called, already moving the base with a hammer tap that didn't actually touch anything.

Rose came last to the new pedestal with a stack of papers that would turn this place into something a court couldn't steal later. She doesn't talk about law like law; she talks about edges and promises. "Title holds in Ouroboros, use rights shared to the Concord, emergency override reserved to Redeemers if someone tries to be clever," she murmured, signing and countersigning with her own paradox mark that made the ink sit exactly where it's supposed to sit and nowhere else.

I put my hands on the first anchor and let a narrow truth sit inside my fingers: when this edge draws a line, the line ends where I say it does. Sword Unity isn't for show. Up here it's for door frames that don't vibrate themselves loose after a thousand tiny moonquakes. I sliced a clean rectangle into the fused regolith shell for an airlock and felt the cut travel all the way through without leaving a whisper of chip. Valeria hummed—pleased with the workmanship, not the drama.

"Don't get attached," I told her under my breath.

"Make it straight and I won't complain," she answered from the weight at my hip, voice a cool ribbon in the back of my skull.

Cecilia clapped once, hungry for her turn. Kade lifted an eyebrow: go. She sent a small band of chaos through the new ward lines—just enough to lie to them about where north was and how time was breathing. The anchors shivered, then corrected, learning to say no to a trick. "Good boys," she cooed at the stone.

"Do not call my anchors boys," Kade said, scandalized but secretly proud.

The second and third pillars at Clavius rose easier; the fourth fought. A seam under the crust had remembered it wanted to be dust and started to slough as the ossuary crane swung the monolith. I felt it as a wrongness in my ankle before I saw it.