The hooded figure's hand moved once.
It was a small motion—index finger flicked toward a rusted service door—and the alley inhaled.
Kael tensed to run.
To fight.
To do anything that wasn't waiting for the world to decide his fate.
The door opened as if someone had been expecting him all along.
He shoved Leo through and followed.
The hooded shadow slipped inside like water swallowed by a grate.
The service door sighed shut behind them.
The stair down smelled of oil and old rain.
Each step took him away from the square's noise.
Closer to a thickness he could taste in his teeth.
When the light came it was a lamplight chemical—green at the edges, honest in the center.
The figure set it on a crate.
The flare cut the dark with surgical patience.
A woman stood in the circle of light.
She looked older than the map in Kael's head allowed.
Thirty, maybe.
A scar ran from forehead to chin.
It sliced a blind white eye into her face like an accusation.
She did not smile.
She did not waste words either.
"Show me the mark," she said.
Her voice scraped gravel.
Kael hesitated because revelation is its own danger.
But Leo's breath was a fragile machine.
Exhaustion won the argument.
He pulled up his sleeve.
The woman's hand hovered.
Reverence is a small thing you notice only in desperate people.
She touched the lines like a priest touching a relic.
Her fingers moved along the tattoo as if reading Braille in a foreign language.
"It moves," she breathed.
The tattoo pulsed beneath her thumb.
Its knots rearranged like a constellation learning a new orbit.
She half-smiled, then shook her head as if tasting a bitter memory.
"Pact signs," she muttered.
"Almost a myth. Almost murder."
"Who are you?" Kael asked, throat dry.
"Lyra," she said.
"A Catadora. I pick what they throw away."
Lyra spelled out an industry of salvage—of data, of bodies, of ghosts.
She lived in the cracks.
She set the lamplight closer and opened a battered crate.
Inside, wrapped in black cloth, sat fragments that looked like tiny nightfalls.
Slabs of the black stone, dull and patient.
Kael's hand moved unbidden.
The shards pulsed in rhythm with his tattoo, a muted answer.
They hummed like a throat clearing before a sermon.
Lyra watched him with the sort of interest beasts reserve for a possible mate or prey.
"You felt the pulse," she said.
"At the square. I followed the smoke to the source."
"Why help me?" Kael asked.
Suspicion is a town he'd learned to live in.
She turned that question aside like a coin.
"Because I collect things the Ordo labels waste," she said.
"Because a thing like that sings a long way off."
"Because they'll burn this city to ashes to keep the ledger clean."
Kael could have left.
He could have fled into the tunnels.
Let Lyra keep the secret.
Let Leo die among the living.
He'd had chances to divide his life into smaller losses.
Instead he asked, "How do I stop them taking him?"
Lyra's fingers closed on a shard.
Her hand trembled, not in fear, but in an eagerness that made Kael uneasy.
"You don't stop them," she said.
"You make them pay too high."
She unwrapped a small piece and held it out.
Kael felt the lamplight catch on amber veins in the stone.
The vibration of the shard matched the beat in his chest.
He could not tell which was answering which.
Lyra's mouth was a line.
"Feed yourself," she said.
"A fraction. If you let the mark flare without fuel it eats you. If you feed it, it will give back in teeth."
The warning came with a look that promised both salvation and a funeral.
He thought of Leo, choking on silver smoke in the square.
He thought of the Ordo's nets rearranging themselves on his name.
He thought of the glove—how it had existed and then vanished like a promise.
He thought of what it would mean if he could make that glove permanent.
He took the shard.
It was colder than ice but heavier than metal.
In his palm it felt like the shape of a future.
Lyra watched him put it to his mouth like a sacrament.
"You can spit it out," she said.
The words were useless.
"But know this—the first bite rewrites you."
It was a pressure, a history pressed into his molars.
He chewed a fraction, and the world bent.
Kael did not scream.
His knees wanted to, but the noise froze in his jaw.
Instead, a sound like distant thunder folded through him.
The second heart answered with a pulse so quick it made him dizzy.
The tattoo burned like a brand.
Amber light crawled from the lines into his veins and up into his face.
For a moment the lamplight seemed dim.
No, the room had swollen.
New anatomy revealed itself to his sight.
Threads of agency and seamlines in the spaces between machinery and bones.
He saw where the Ordo's rituals hooked into people like levers.
Lyra's hand steadied on his shoulder.
Her fingers were not gentle.
There was hunger in them that mirrored something inside him.
"You will be hungrier after this," she said.
"It will demand more."
Kael swallowed.
The shard's flavor had edges—acid and metal and an old language.
His muscles twitched.
As if some muscle memory he had never learned was being taught.
Where he had been prey, a small cleft of predator opened.
He could feel things now that had previously been polite suggestions.
The resonance of an Ordo seal down a block.
The subtle frequency of a Knight's armor as a machine.
The way a marked man's heartbeat matched the cadence of the Ordo's hymn.
He pushed his palm against the tattoo and felt it throb under skin like a trapped animal.
Lyra closed the crate and set a small vial beside it.
"This will dull the feed for a night," she said.
"Enough to move. Not enough to make you safe."
The offer came with a price.
She fed him a rough salve—ashy, bitter—and wrapped the leftover shard in linen to carry.
"You're neither theirs nor free," she said.
"You're a debt."
"This makes me a target," Kael said.
He wasn't asking.
The words were an observation that tasted like dread.
"It already was," Lyra replied.
"The Ordo will reclassify what you are now. They call it heresy. I call it a lever."
Through the thin mortar, something in the city shifted.
Not sound, but the soft vibration of gears adjusting.
Like a clock realizing it had missed a beat.
Lyra's face tightened.
She moved to a shadowed wall and tapped a sequence.
Only someone filthy with the city's underworks would know it.
A hidden panel eased open.
It revealed a narrow crawlspace lined with pipes.
"You can go under," she said.
"Take the maintenance runs to the river. They don't like to send the Knights there unless they have suspension orders."
Kael's eyes were bright with something like panic-hope.
"And Leo?"
"You leave him with me," she said flatly.
"I can patch the extraction. I can keep him quiet. You leave with a scrap of what you need to survive. You come back when the Ordo forgets to hunt."
He saw her mouth set like metal.
The trade was simple.
Kael had nothing but ragged goods to bargain with.
Kael could have hidden and returned.
He could have accepted the humiliation of being hunted quietly.
He could have given up the shard and walked away.
Instead he chose to crawl.
Lyra pushed him toward the hatch.
She shoved a length of rope into his hands.
"When you come up, don't make noise."
"Don't look at the sky more than once."
"And if they ever point a light at you—run without thinking."
He threaded the crawlspace.
The world closed around him: damp, tight, mechanical.
Pipes sang.
He moved like an animal trained by fear.
Above, distant, a public broadcast stuttered as the Ordo upgraded its bulletins.
Somewhere a drill began.
The search intensified.
He let the crawl take him.
He felt the tattoo like a second mouth in his wrist.
As the dark hugged him, Lyra's voice followed.
"One rule, boy. Feed it until it eats a direction. Never feed from fear."
Kael thought of Leo's hollow chest.
He thought of the hive of light that had called him heresy.
He imagined the Ordo's ledger with a new entry.
His name underlined, a trigger on the margin.
He breathed in the crawl.
He closed his jaw against the shard's ache, and moved.
The shard's pulse in his palm matched his heartbeat.
Then outpaced it.
He tasted another voice in his skull—older, patient, hungry for accounts.
Above, unseen, a bell chimed at the cathedral-square.
It was not a church bell.
It was the Ordo's alarm system shifting status.
In the crawl's cramped black, with the city's teeth showing through the mortar, Kael felt the shard sink.
He understood.
The first feed had not cured him.
It had signed him.
He bit harder on the shard to steady the light.
The sound of his teeth on stone echoed like a verdict.
Three blocks away, a scanner's display lit with a signal it had never been taught to name.