By the time Mike reached the edge of the swamp, his legs were shaking with more than just fear. Each step had been an argument with his own body, with his lungs burning and his throat raw. Sweat had carved clean tracks through the rust-dust on his face, and he found himself pausing, ignoring the fluttering exhaustion in his muscles that had been a companion for the last hour.

  The Dead Zone swamp wasn't water. It had probably been water once, before centuries of runoff and chemical spills turned it into something thicker and meaner. Now it was a shallow basin filled with viscous, sludge-like muck that burped toxic bubbles and exhaled pale gases. Black, half-submerged shapes jutted from it at random, old vehicles, broken loading cranes, and the occasional unmoving limb of something that had tried to crawl free. It was a collection of the discarded and forgotten.

  The meteor had created a crater near the center, punching deep enough to expose the darker, older layers beneath. Around the impact site, the swamp had recoiled, and the sludge had burned away to form a ring of glassy, overturned earth. Jagged shards of fused metal and stone jutted from the lip of the crater like teeth.

  The vapor rising from the impact was different from the swamp’s usual exhalations. It shimmered in the air and twisted in slow-motion spirals, with its colors sliding between pearl, sapphire, and an unsettling internal black. The hair on Mike's arms lifted.

  Suppressing the urge to cough, he pulled his scarf higher over his nose, even though he knew it wouldn’t help much. The fabric was already damp with his own breath. "Stupid," he whispered to himself again, but the word had lost its strength.

  He scanned the perimeter. There were no gang markers yet, and no spray-painted sigils or hung corpses. There were no other scavengers that he could see, though shapes moved at the far edges of his vision and kept low, vultures waiting to see who went in first. That someone was him.

  Gritting his teeth, Mike picked his path carefully along protruding scrap and started down toward the crater. The air grew hotter with each step, like he was descending toward a furnace. His palms slicked with sweat, and his boots stuck slightly each time he lifted them as the muck seemed resentful of losing its grip. Twice he had to leap small gaps where the ground had cracked open, leaving edges as sharp as knives.

  Sludge splashed onto his pants and soaked through, the cold bite of it turned to a tingling burn. He hissed and kept moving. If it was bad enough to kill him quickly, then he’d know soon enough.

  At the lip of the crater, he stopped and stared down.

  The impact pit was roughly circular and maybe twenty yards across, with its edges lined with blackened and half-melted debris. At its center, half-embedded in still-steaming soil and molten slag, lay a body. Not a meteor. Not a hauler. A person.

  No. Not a person. Not like any Mike had ever seen.

  For a long moment, he forgot to breathe. The figure at the heart of the crater was humanoid, but that was where the familiarity ended. It lay on its back with arms slightly outstretched and body half-curled, as if it had tried in its last instant to shield itself from impact. A seared trail marked its descent path, cutting through layers of compacted trash and stone.

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  Its skin, if it could be called that, glowed faintly. It wasn't with heat but with its own pearlescent luminescence, like polished bone-beneath-ice. Where it wasn’t stained with soot or ash, it shone in shades of moon-pale silver and opal, with colors shifting delicately as though responding to an unseen tide. Long hair fanned around its head and defied gravity in languid, weightless strands. Each filament caught the toxic light above and fractured it into soft prismatic halos. Not a speck of dirt clung to it despite lying in a caustic pit. The filth of the swamp had recoiled from that body the way it had from the heat of the meteor.

  Armor, or something like armor, hugged its torso and limbs. But unlike the bolted-together plates of the Heap’s gangs, this was seamless and grown rather than forged. Curved bands of iridescent material wrapped its ribs and flowed into jointed segments at the shoulders and hips. The lines were organic and more like shell than metal. Every surface was unmarred, without a spot of rust or scratch.

  The face was wrong.

  It was beautiful in a way that made Mike's chest feel tight, but it was wrong for this world. Features were fine and symmetrical, with lips the color of dawn clouds and eyes closed with a serenity that felt obscene amidst all this ruin. No scars. No pockmarks from chemical burns. No hollows from hunger. It was perfection dropped into a place that had forgotten what that word meant.

  Mike's first reaction was awe, and his mind went blank, absorbing the sight like a thirsty filter. His second was a spike of fear that bordered on superstition. The word came from Old Kirra’s mutterings and from gang tattoos of stars and wings and eyes. A being from above. Sky-meat.

  His third reaction was more familiar. It was pragmatic. Greedy.

  Everything on that body was worth more than Sector 4. The armor alone, if he could pry it free in pieces, would trade for enough food to feed half his alley for a month. The luminous hair might be some kind of fiber-filament more conductive than copper. And if any of the internal tech had survived the fall, then that was the kind of score that got a person out.

  His legs moved before he finished the thought, sliding him down the inner slope of the crater with boots skidding in the loosened dirt. Heat licked at his shins, and the air here was thick with that strange vapor, so that each inhale was a shiver through his lungs.

  Up close, the Celestial was even more unreal. The surface patterns of the armor shifted gently like oil on water, chasing light structures that made his head ache if he looked at them too long. The body itself showed damage, with cracks in the shell-like plating and fine fractures webbing across ribs and arms, but no blood seeped from them. Whatever fluid it bled must be as refined as the rest of it. It smelled faintly of ozone and something crisp, like the air right before an ion storm.

  He crouched beside the outstretched right hand.

  The fingers were long and jointed, with subtle knuckles and nails like translucent glass. In its palm sat a crystal. At first, he thought it was simply held, some kind of artifact the Celestial had been carrying. But as he leaned closer, he saw that the crystal wasn’t just resting there. It was growing from the flesh, its base fused seamlessly with the center of the palm.

  It jutted up like a small five-sided spire no longer than his thumb, with faceted sides catching what little light seeped down here and turning it into an inner glow. Colors churned in its depths, indigo and sea-green and star-white, but they didn’t behave like reflections. They pulsed slow and heartbeat-steady.

  Heat stained Mike's cheeks. His own fingers ached with phantom echoes of calluses and cuts acquired over years of scraping in the rust. The crystal looked hard. Valuable. Untouched by corrosion. He could already imagine the faces of the tech-dealers in Sector 2 and the way their eyes would widen at the sight of something so clean.

  He also imagined Rigg’s meaty hand closing around his throat and those eyes narrowing when Rigg learned he had gone to the meteor without permission. Better to trade far from home.

  Mike licked lips that had gone dry again. The air tasted faintly sweet here and was undercut with a metallic tang that was almost pleasant compared to the usual chemical soup.

  "If you’re a god," he murmured to the silent Celestial. "You died in the wrong place."