By the end of the week, The Nest had four new surveillance cameras, two drone sweepers, and a turret made from old exosuit parts.
Riven had barely slept.
Ash's drone was fixed—actually, improved.
"You added a cloaking bypass," she said when she picked it up."Your client's gonna push it harder than the specs allow," Riven replied."Smart." She paused. "You could be rich."
"I'm not building for money," he said."Then what?""Control."
Ash smirked. "Careful. That's how wars start."
That night, someone torched a rival garage two blocks away.
The owner barely made it out. No one saw who did it.But Riven found a calling card stuck to the gate:
🜏 — a sigil from the Smoke Circle, a rogue tech cartel.
They'd heard about TOOLHAND. And the drone.And the repairs. And the lab explosion.
Now they wanted in—or wanted him gone.
Two days later, Riven got his first real message:
"Build for us. Or stop building entirely."
He didn't reply.
He welded the note to the wall behind his workbench, torched it with a microflame, and carved a single word underneath:
"No."
Then he got to work on TOOLHAND v2.