1999 Mercury Cougar Speedometer

My speedometer stopped working the other day so I lifted my var up on the hoist and checked my VSS sensor I found that the outer coating of the wires were cracked and the copper wire on all three wires was showing and were also touching each other. I ordered a new VSS sensor and installed it go to test the car out and still no speedometer I used a snap on solus scanner and found that the pcm was reading the VSS but still no speedometer I was wondering is there any sort of circuit protection inside the gauge cluster? Or maybe something fried inside the cluster itself trying to figure this out not sure what is wrong and what steps to tak from here