The floodlights ran on the last juice in a set of scavenged corporate batteries, and they threw a hard, flat glare over the stripped armory — rack after rack of olive-drab crates, the kind of inventory a dying corporation had clearly meant to use on something other than its own employees.
The air tasted like gun oil and old dust. Underneath it, faint but permanent, the room still carried a ghost of the Red Room's copper stink, no matter how far they'd dragged the gear from that floor.
"Forty crates of tungsten-core bolts," Fen called down from the top of a stack, prying a lid loose with a rusted crowbar. He had the build of someone who'd survived by being quick rather than strong, and the inventory list scrawled on his forearm in grease pencil was already three lines longer than it had been an hour ago. "Ten crates of high-yield breaching charges. And somebody — I'm not naming names, Don — already cracked into the good MREs."
