The angel's beam hit the cobbles like a verdict.
Stone steamed.
A shallow crater opened where a vendor's cart had been.
A smell of burnt meat and singed cloth filled the square.
People turned to mist and shrieked.
Kael threw himself sideways because the world had learned to move without asking him.
The light carved a swath where his head had just been.
It vaporized a Knight's knee like a lantern blown out.
Flesh and light exploded together.
The beam didn't discriminate.
It cut a path through ritual and worship the same way a blade slices bread.
He rolled and saw bodies topple.
Silhouettes rag-dolled as columns of gold hammered the crowd.
The glove pulsed at his hand, still hot with the shard's aftermath.
It had been solid a moment ago—solid, stupid, angry—then gone like someone snatching a glove from the air.
When the glove vanished exhaustion hit him like a wall.
His legs felt leaden.
It was as if he'd sprinted for a day without breath.
The world blurred at the edges.
The power had a price.
Kael's knees buckled on the cobbles.
For a second the sky tilted.
He spotted Leo face-down a few paces away.
Silver smoke curled from the boy's mouth like a knot of thread being pulled.
Kael dragged himself over.
He did not feel heroic.
He felt necessary and ugly.
With a last, ragged effort he hauled Leo into a narrow service alley behind a collapsed stall.
The alley smelled of grease and old paper.
It smelled of everything a city keeps to itself.
He wedged Leo under a rusted awning.
He half-buried his brother with loose tarps and boxes.
The movement was clumsy but it bought them cover.
Sirens began like distant teeth scraping.
Shouts layered over one another.
Orders barked in clipped syllables.
The Ordo's search pattern unfolded by sound alone.
Drones, boots, protocol.
Kael pressed his back to the cold brick and stared at his hand.
The tattoo had changed.
Where once a single tribal line had crept along his forearm, ink now knitted across his skin like a map gone mad.
Lines multiplied, spiraled, hooked into knots.
The amber glow had settled into the grooves.
It threaded veins that reached toward his elbow and up his wrist.
It was a network.
He whispered, because someone had taught him that asking the wrong thing aloud invited trouble.
"What did I do?" he breathed.
His voice sounded small in the alley.
The sound of boots grew louder.
A clock's hands sweeping toward them.
Drones hummed like angry wasps.
Lenses flicked where light demanded they search.
Kael's chest ached where the second heart had thudded.
There was no more pretending that this was reversible.
The shard had fed.
Something had been born inside him and it left its signature like a sin.
He could have left Leo and vanished into the city seam.
He could have run until the Ordo's net thinned.
He couldn't.
He dragged a torn blanket over Leo's shoulders.
He pressed his fingers against the boy's ribs until shallow breath returned.
The effort was half prayer, half theft.
A drone's searchlight swept the alley mouth.
It paused like a knife finding a place to bite.
A scanner blinked.
The red dot of attention trembled at the threshold of the alley.
Kael held his breath.
The world had taught people to be transparent.
Hiding had become a craft he'd never learned properly.
Somewhere above, the podium's megaphone barked the Ordo's decree again.
The voice was ceremonial, but the edge was judicial.
"All citizens to the Central Square. Delays will be punished with immediate marking."
The words were a decree and a lock.
They had a way of making the crowd part obediently.
Revealing sinners and saints alike.
People screamed as the net tightened.
A vendor's stall collapsed under trampling feet.
A child's cry pierced through the chaos and stayed there.
A small, sharp thing.
Kael felt the city adjusting to him.
Maps rerouted.
Eyes sharpened.
He was a target now.
Not a curiosity.
Not a rumor.
The Ordo had anchored its protocol on him.
Each time the shard's energy flared, it pulled something vital out of him.
Strength, lucidity, balance.
He tasted blood on his tongue and spat it into the gutter.
The sound of someone calling his name drifted past the alley.
No, not his name.
A radio crackle.
Coordinates.
A clipped description of an anomaly in sector five.
He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
He watched the tattoo as if it were a living thing breathing.
The pattern pulsed.
A thin filament of amber spilled off the lines like a thread.
Kael pressed his palm into the cold.
He tried to imagine himself before the shard—before the hunger.
The memory was a rumor.
A childhood with holes.
He moved because not moving felt like surrender.
He crawled to the alley mouth and peeked.
The square was a churn of bodies, smoke, and light.
Knights moved with clinical rage.
Drones dotted the sky.
Lenses flashed like locust eyes.
The Ordo's banners fluttered.
Strangers' faces were lit by the sickly glow of victory pretended.
There were nets, binding rods, extraction teams.
They had contingency for anomalies.
Their protocols smelled like old paper and expensive leather.
A Knight's voice called into a device.
"Sector cleared. Sweep for residues."
Kael swallowed.
He dragged Leo further into a side passage.
Deeper into ruin.
Away from the sightlines.
As he moved, two civilians slumped in front of them, trampled in the rush.
No one slowed.
The city's mercy had been rationed away a long time ago.
He knelt and checked Leo's pulse.
It was a whisper.
Not gone, but fragile.
He tried to steady his hands.
He wrapped what he could of the torn blanket around the boy's chest.
Somewhere far off a detonation cracked—less than a block away.
The sound made pigeons take flight like a sudden remembering.
Smoke curled upward from a vendor's cart.
It had been too close to an angel's sweep.
Kael felt a cold line run down his spine.
Angels could vaporize.
Knights could be splintered.
The Ordo had instruments that could unmake people in tidy strikes.
He made a plan that was not a clever one.
Sneak to the river tunnels.
Trade whatever he could find for safe passage.
The city had unlisted paths.
Old sewer routes.
A maintenance corridor under the tram lines.
He knew one from a childhood thieving trick.
He pulled Leo and staggered toward the routes his feet remembered.
The net reoriented.
More drones.
A wider sweep.
The Ordo had shifted from crowd control to targeted extraction.
A scanner pinged in the distance—closer now.
Boots echoed in the alley labyrinth.
Kael kept his head low.
His heart was like a drum inside a bell.
The tattoo's glow warmed his sleeve.
It made his shirt seam tight.
He could feel eyes against his shoulder that weren't there.
He ducked under a rusted gate.
He dropped into a maintenance hatch.
The smell was worse here—oil, rot, metal.
It was also a kindness.
The hum of machinery swallowed human voices.
He lowered Leo onto an old wooden crate.
He checked his brother's face.
Leo's lips were grey.
He moved but didn't open his eyes.
Kael thought of the shard.
Of the glove.
Of the beam that had sent light through bone.
He thought of the weight of survival.
He whispered an apology that held no currency.
Footsteps thudded across the hatch above.
A voice barked in a tongue he didn't know.
Someone was searching the immediate area.
He held still.
He let the ship of the city pass overhead.
When the noise faded, he allowed his hands to tremble.
Then to work.
He tore a strip of cloth and bound Leo's arm.
He fumbled with a stolen med-salve he'd kept hidden in a pocket since the last raid.
It smelled of copper and antiseptic.
He smeared it on Leo's skin.
Half-hope, half-scrap.
He was not a healer.
He was an ad-hoc butcher of survival.
Exhaustion crept back like a tide.
His legs threatened to surrender.
He closed his eyes.
He let a minute of sleep take him, sitting upright against the crate like a wounded sentinel.
When he woke, it was to the soft step of someone entering the hatch.
He tensed.
A figure stood in the doorway.
Hood pulled low.
Shoulders wrapped in shadow.
No Ordo armor.
No emblem.
No drone lit the figure's face.
The stranger moved with the economy of someone who was not surprised by ruin.
A faint glint caught the figure's eye.
Amber, like a reflection of Kael's tattoo.
The stranger's head tilted.
Where a human pupil should have been, a thin sliver of gold winked in the dark.
They did not speak.
They only lifted a hand.
The gesture was small, almost polite.
The hand flashed with the same muted amber as Kael's skin.
The light in the maintenance hatch swallowed them both.
The stranger's finger pointed directly at Kael.
The hunt had grown teeth.