Keeping Warm With The Orc

Chapter One

Vivian

The generator groans like something dying, and I lean into the wrench like I can argue it back to life.

“Come on,” I mutter, easing the bolt a quarter-turn. “You’ve got more in you than this.”

Cold seeps up through the concrete floor and into my boots, into my knees, into the small of my back from crouching too long. Cragstone Hold’s workshop was once some kind of maintenance bay beneath the old stadium — I still don’t know what for, exactly, not that it matters now. What matters is the ancient diesel unit hunched in the corner like a beast that’s forgotten how to breathe, and the fact that if it stops breathing, so does half the hold.

The wrench slips. My knuckles crack against the housing, and I hiss a word my grandfather would’ve smacked me for.

“You okay?”

Owen Holt hovers by the forge, arms wrapped around himself, breath pluming white even this close to the coals. Twenty-six years old and he still looks like a kid some mornings, all elbows and worry.

“Fine.” I flex my fingers, check for blood, find none. “Bring the light closer.”

He does, the battery lantern swinging shadows across the generator’s guts. Something glistens where it shouldn’t.

“That coolant?” Owen asks, already crouching to look.

“Yeah.” I follow the thin trail of it down to a hairline crack in the housing, dark and slick against the rust. “New leak. Small. I can patch it, but it’s not going to hold forever.”

“Nothing here holds forever.”

“No,” I agree, and there’s no bitterness in it, just fact, the way you’d note the sun is cold or the sky is white. Ten years of this life has scoured most of the bitterness out of me. What’s left is practical.

I reach past him for the sealant, find the tin nearly empty, and swear again, quieter this time.

The final bolt gives way to pressure and stubbornness in equal parts, and the generator shudders, catches, and settles into a rough, uneven chug — not healthy, not by a long stretch, but alive. Light flickers back into the overhead bulbs strung along the ceiling, weak and yellow, but there.

“There.” I sit back on my heels, wiping grease from my palms onto a rag that’s more grease than rag at this point. “That’ll buy us a few hours.”

“A few hours,” Owen repeats, like he’s doing the math on how many few-hours are left in the winter.

I don’t answer that. There isn’t a good answer.

Through the grime-caked window over the workbench, movement catches my eye — the kind of movement that fills a space just by existing in it. I straighten, rag still in hand, and watch Drong of the Ironmaw cross the square outside, directing the morning watch with the economy of a man who’s given the same orders a thousand times and expects them followed the first.

He doesn’t look toward the workshop. He never does, not directly. But I’ve learned to read the angle of his shoulders, the deliberate way his gaze sweeps the human sector and moves on, cataloging without lingering. Assessing threat, maybe. Assessing weakness. I’ve never been sure which, and I’m not sure it matters — the effect is the same either way. A weight, constant and unspoken, hangs over the humans whenever he’s near, whether he means it to or not.

I turn back to the generator before I can decide what I feel about that.

I crouch again, running my fingers along the coil housing, feeling for heat where there shouldn’t be any, vibration where there should be less. My hand stills on a slim copper coil near the base, half-hidden behind a tangle of wire I spliced together myself two winters back.

It’s warm. Warmer than it should be.

I press two fingers to it and feel the faint, wrong hum underneath — not the steady thrum of a healthy part but something thinner, more strained. A pulse going arrhythmic.

“What is it?” Owen asks, seeing my face change.

“Nothing yet.” I withdraw my hand, wipe it clean, though there’s nothing on it to wipe. “It’s just old.”

That isn’t the whole truth, and Owen — bless him — doesn’t push. He’s learned, same as I have, that some problems you don’t poke at until they’re ready to be poked.

But I know this coil. I know it the way you know a person’s cough is going to turn into something worse, the small sound under the surface that tells you the end of something is coming whether you look at it directly or not. There’s no replacing it — not here, not with what we have. I’ve rerouted around failing parts before, rigged workarounds out of scavenged wire and stubbornness, kept machines alive on nothing but patience and prayer. But a coil like this, buried deep in the unit's core, feeding current to everything downstream — if it goes, it won’t go quietly. It’ll take the whole generator with it. Maybe worse.

“Vivian?”

“I’m fine,” I say again, and make myself smile at him, because he’s twenty-six and scared enough of the world without me adding to it. “Go check the water pump. I want eyes on the secondary line before midday.”

He goes, glancing back once at the doorway before he ducks into the cold. I watch him go, then let my smile drop the moment the door swings shut behind him.

I turn back to the coil, crouch low, close enough to see the faint discoloration creeping along its length like a bruise spreading under skin. Not today. Maybe not this week. But soon — I can feel it in the way the machine breathes, uneven and effortful, buying time it doesn’t have.

Outside, the wind picks up, rattling loose sheet metal somewhere overhead in the ruined dome, a sound like something enormous shifting in its sleep. I press my palm flat against the generator’s casing, feeling the tremor of it under my hand, and think — not for the first time, and I suspect not for the last — that everything in this world is held together by exactly this: grease-stained hands, stubbornness, and the refusal to let the cold win before it has to.

I just hope, when the coil finally fails, I’ll have somewhere else to look besides my own two empty hands.