The shard's taste still burned his tongue when he recoiled.
He had expected pain.
He had not expected the way the room bent into order around it.
Like a small gravity forming in his chest.
Lyra laughed.
It was dry and sharp and somehow steadying.
"The first contact always feels like drowning," she said.
"Now you've got a spark. Different rules."
She didn't wait for gratitude.
She pressed a smaller sliver into his palm, impatient as a butcher.
Kael's hand closed on the stone.
The exhaustion that had sat in his bones for months loosened like a belt.
Sleep that would have taken him a day took him for seconds.
The tattoo along his arm calmed.
The lines sank deeper into skin as if someone had finished carving.
The sensation was less invasion this time and more absorption.
Heat threaded through his veins.
His breath came easier.
For the first time since the square, he could feel his body return from the cliff's edge.
Lyra watched him like someone watching a clock move toward an alarm.
"Sip," she said.
"Not gulp. Control. You want the power—don't let it eat you."
The amber in his veins answered.
A filament of warmth crept up from his wrist into his fingers and then into the knuckles.
His hand felt like someone else's for a second—stronger, broader, dangerous.
When he moved it dust fell away as if the air were made thin and obedient.
"You're a Contractor," Lyra said without ceremony.
"Not a sorcerer. Not a miracle. Will made matter. They call it heresy because it refuses the Dogmas. It predates their ledgers."
The word landed like a label stamped on a wound.
Kael tasted meaning in it—an old taxonomy of power that had been pushed underground.
Being a Contractor meant his will could harden into things.
It also meant the thing had a cost: vitality.
The more he used, the more he paid.
Lyra lit a small chemical lamp.
Its green edge threw the scar over her face in black and white.
She spoke like someone listing inventory.
"You can pull a blade from a tendon or stitch a seam in light," she said.
"But every summons eats a scrap of your life. That first glove you threw—nice, but it was fuel-heavy. Don't rely on fireworks."
Kael flexed his fingers.
He felt the aftertaste of force—hunger, yes, but also a new leverage.
He wanted to test it again.
He knew that wanting was already a debt.
Leo coughed and flinched awake.
His skin was pallid.
The silver smoke around his ribs had thinned but not vanished.
Lyra handed him a muddy vial.
He drank like someone learning to breathe under water.
The elixir steadied him.
It smelled of herbs and old metal.
His pulse found a less ragged rhythm.
"You were right to drag him here," Lyra said.
"Extraction teams don't bother the basements much at first. They want spectacle."
Her voice had a flat edge.
"But spectacle costs time. Time is the Ordo's currency. They'll convert it to violence if they need to."
Kael listened.
Each sentence was a small map.
Lyra's face did not soften when she said it.
Maps were how she made sense of the city's veins.
He could have taken Leo and run the tunnels now.
He had a map in his skull from the childhood thefts.
He had legs that remembered where the maintenance gates hid.
But the shard's pulse in his palm felt like a tether.
Running felt like abandoning a test he had just begun.
Instead he stayed.
He wanted to learn what the spark could do.
The taste of potential was its own kind of hunger.
Lyra watched him with frank calculation.
"Feed it small," she warned.
"Don't get greedy. The stone is a reservoir. It will smooth a night, but the mark will crave more. Feed from want and it gives you teeth. Feed from fear and it chews your bone."
He tried a small thing.
Not a glove this time—just a whisper of filament between thumb and forefinger.
He coaxed a hairline of light that cut the lamplight like a razor's afterimage.
The filament hummed.
Metal pipes near the lamp rattled.
The room's shadow shifted, obedient.
Where he had been hunted and reactive, an action—small, clumsy—made the air answer.
He could make the world disagree with itself.
Lyra nodded once.
"There's an anatomy to their ritual. The Ordo stitches authority into people. If you learn the seams, you can tug them."
Her tone was not hopeful.
It was tactical.
"Tug too hard and the seam tears and everything bleeds."
As he pushed his will to a small shape, his perception sharpened unnaturally.
The plank floorboards above their heads showed, faint and ghostlike, the vibration of steps.
A distant scanner's pulse drew a thin red thread across the map of the room.
A Knight's helmet light quivered like a bad thing.
Kael realized he could sense mechanical signatures.
The hum of servos beneath armor.
The cadence of drones overhead.
That was a power.
It was also a beacon.
Lyra opened a tin and took out a strip of cloth.
She handed him one end.
He wrapped it around his wrist and tied it clumsily, more ritual than function.
"You're not a priest," she said.
"You're a debtor. Dress like it for now."
Leo laughed weakly—a small ridiculous sound—and then coughed.
The sound of the square invaded through the vents.
Sirens, the ripple of the Ordo's public voice.
A recitation of order meant to steel the crowd.
"You have to go under," Lyra said.
"But not tonight. We teach you to walk in the dark first. The first feed buoyed you. The second will give you reach. The third will start to rewrite more than skin."
Kael wanted to ask what rewriting meant.
He swallowed the question.
Words were currency he could not afford to spend.
Lyra pulled a map from the crate and spread it.
She marked routes with a grease pencil.
Maintenance shafts, sewage sluices, abandoned transit lines.
She circled a place under the river where the currents hid heat signatures.
It was a dangerous exit, but it was an exit.
"You learn to be a shadow," she said, "or you learn to be prey."
He traced the lines with a fingertip that still trembled from the shard's aftertaste.
Each route looked like a promise written in exhaust.
Lyra reached into the crate again.
She took out a small tin of grey salve.
"This dulls the mark for a night," she said.
"It makes the amber fainter. Not invisible. Fainter. That's enough to buy time—if you don't feed the power while it's dulled."
He accepted the salve with hands that were no longer wholly his.
The tattoo pulsed beneath the cloth like a trapped animal testing the ropes.
While Lyra spoke quietly about tactics, the shard inside him kept whispering other things.
Names of tools.
The pattern of a Knight's breastplate.
Where authority pocketed its weaknesses.
It suggested verbs like a teacher pointing to nouns.
Kael felt his own thinking alter, as if vocabulary was being added to his skull.
Lyra's scar twitched.
"You'll be hunted," she said bluntly.
"They'll call you a heretic in the square and then summon more teeth. The Ordo doesn't like anomalies unless they can catalog them."
Kael understood that being hunted was now layered.
The city noticed him.
Protocols adjusted.
Some algorithm had started to learn his silhouette.
The more he learned, the more he left grooves.
Each small victory carved a notch on the map that the Ordo could follow.
The shard was both key and compass.
He looked at Leo sleeping under the blanket.
He felt the weight of a choice.
The Contractor's power made him stronger and simultaneously more visible.
The scale tipped in both directions.
Lyra crouched beside him.
She tapped his wrist where the tattoo ran.
"You get used to being hungry," she said.
"But you don't get used to being chased. Not in this city."
A distant thud vibrated through the floorboards.
Two beats, then another.
Someone above moved like a machine that had found a pattern.
Footsteps multiplied into a procession.
Boots crunched over wood.
A voice, amplified and flat as an executioner's ledger, called out through the floor.
"Sector sweep. Check all basements and hideouts. Non-marked presence confirmed nearby. Herege status: critical."
The hatch over their heads rattled.
As if something heavy had landed on it.
Lyra's hand went to a weapon at her belt.
With the casual speed of someone who had always known violence.
Kael pressed his palm to the floor.
He felt the pulse of distant scanners stitch the room's map.
The tattoo flared under his skin.
He had a spark inside him.
He had taken fuel.
He had learned where to tug.
Above him, the boots paused.
The sound of a latch opening creaked through the planks.
Like a decision.
There was no room for practice now.
The Ordo had marked him.
The city had remembered his face.
And the hatch above them thudded hard enough to send dust down into the lamp's green halo.