The lamp died like a throat closing.
Silence swallowed the basement whole.
Darkness pooled behind crates and pipes.
Lyra's whisper cut it: "Don't fight. Don't use it. Empty your head."
Her hand clamped Leo's shoulder and vanished behind boxes.
They listened.
Footsteps thudded down the stairwell.
A white beam swept the hatch like a needle.
Two Inquisitors of Shield slid into the doorway.
Helmets low, mantles humming a low static.
Their flashlights were clinical — no mercy in the cone.
They moved with the slow economy of people trained to find sins.
The first swept the beam in a grid.
The light licked Kael's face.
He kept his eyes huge and stupid and smaller than the light wanted him to be.
He smelled the sharp ozone of their batons.
A faint beep answered the sweep.
The Inquisitor's wrist-pad blinked.
"Residual energy—minimal," the man said.
"Likely a frightened desalient."
The word sounded like a verdict.
The second Inquisitor did not move.
He was patient the way a net is patient.
His beam skirted the crates and caught the edge of Lyra's boot.
"Check there," he said.
Kael felt the second heart stumble like someone running into a wall.
The pulse in his forearm sang under the cloth.
He tried to breathe like an empty lung.
Lyra shoved Leo deeper and flopped a crate over his head.
Her fingers brushed Kael's wrist for a second—firm, a micro-command.
She mouthed: "Still."
Her eyes were ice.
The Inquisitor's beam hovered over the crates.
A scanner hissed on his baton.
A thin high note that made dust settle like bad petals.
Kael's body wanted to move.
He felt the glove ghost across his fingers.
Images of light and blade unfolded in the back of his skull like a remembered home.
He pictured the last time that glove had hit a blade.
The way light had fractured.
The second Inquisitor's baton quivered.
He stepped forward and tapped the crate.
Kael's lungs clenched.
The shard inside him hummed with impatient teeth.
He could feel the pull of it: small, bright, promising order.
Lyra's whisper scraped in his ear again, "Do not use it."
He did not listen.
A hairline filament crawled from beneath his sleeve.
A thread of amber so thin it might have been a reflection.
It whispered along his fingers and brushed a stray cobweb on the underside of the crate.
The web shivered and a single powder of dust fell.
The sound was tiny.
The room held for it like a mouth holding a last word.
The Inquisitor's head snapped.
His light sliced straight at the dust and found it.
He cursed low. "Movement."
The pad at his wrist flared.
The reading spiked from minimal to anomalous.
The first Inquisitor frowned, recalculating the label he'd already attached.
"You see that?" he said.
"Signal's tripping."
The second Inquisitor crouched and pried at the crate's seam.
Lyra's breath hitched like a trapped animal.
Kael's heart hammered a rhythm that was not his own.
The second heart answering the shard's applause.
Lyra hissed as the crate was shoved.
Her boot edge caught on the wood and exposed a shoulder.
The second Inquisitor's baton raised.
The hum climbing into a high keening.
"Out. Now."
His voice was soft to the point of threat.
Kael's small theft of power had not been a shield.
It had been a beacon.
The first Inquisitor's pad sent a ping into the ceiling.
Somewhere above the floorboards a relay chirped.
Protocol escalated.
It smelled like policy and old leather.
The second Inquisitor leveled his baton.
He pointed the light low, setting the cone to sweep the hiding place.
"One move—purge," he said.
Kael's fingers curled into his palms, bones protesting.
Leo whined and shifted.
Lyra's mouth opened, close to a command, then snapped shut.
She blinked hard.
One white eye catching the green of the lamp's chemical residue.
Through a slit in the crate Kael saw inscriptions on Lyra's boot.
Symbols not of the Ordo, older and filed down.
Things that marked collectors, not criminals.
She did not flinch when the baton hummed close.
She counted breaths like someone counting coffins.
The Inquisitor's light grazed Leo's shoulder.
The boy's breaths shallowed.
The air vibrated with an official hunger.
Kael felt the shard claw at his veins.
With the impatience of a thing starving.
He could rip the second heart wide.
Pull a blade of light through the Inquisitor's ribs.
He could make them all pay in a noise that would never end.
Lyra's whisper found him again, brittle and fleshwise.
"If you flare, they will not leave. They will escalate. You'll burn him."
His glove's ghost threaded his fingers.
He thought of Leo—of silver smoke and a mouth open like a ruined bell.
He thought of Lyra's scar.
The kind of life that bandages stitched together.
He thought of the square.
The speaker voice declaring him heresy.
He moved in a way that was not force but a trick.
Not a blade, but a breath.
He exhaled softly.
Whispered something foreign under his breath.
The filament tightened.
Pushed a thin warm current out from under the crate.
It smelled faint of ozone.
The Inquisitor's hair on the back of his neck lifted.
His wrist-pad hiccupped.
"Signal—" the first Inquisitor started.
The second's baton sparked.
It was supposed to sting, not fail.
The sound the baton made was wrong.
An uneven stutter that crackled like a cheap cable.
The second Inquisitor cursed and slapped the baton.
He fiddled with a dial and the hum stabilized.
Frustration hardened his face.
He had expected obedience.
The city did not offer riddles.
"Clear this corner," he snapped to his partner.
"Sweep the crawl."
The first moved, light cutting a jagged path.
The second jabbed the crate with his baton to force surrender.
Kael met the jab with a reflexive slide of his hand.
The filament burned his palm with a hot hunger.
The web-cobweb moved again.
This time slipping free and tumbling to the floor like an accusation.
The Inquisitor's light shuttered and locked onto the fall.
"There!" the first man barked.
"Found movement."
The protocol chain began to reel.
A high tone modulated into a recorded directive.
The pad transmitted: ANOMALOUS SIGNATURE. TARGET: UNMARKED. PRIORITY: IMMOBILIZE.
Somewhere above the boards, concrete stamped with official feet.
The hatch vibrated.
The Inquisitors' radios clicked.
The second Inquisitor's eyes slid to Kael and narrowed.
The way a trap narrows.
"You," he said.
"Come out. Hands where I can see them."
Kael's throat was a stone.
He could have crawled out.
Raised his arms and taken whatever they chose to give.
Marking, extraction, a quick death.
He imagined the square.
Leo's ribs hollowing out again.
Instead he pulled his sleeve down over the tattoo.
The amber under his skin flared as if ashamed.
Lyra whispered one word that had no softness.
"Run."
He moved not toward the hatch but toward the shadow of a maintenance plumbing shaft.
The Inquisitors hadn't checked it.
It was narrow and smelled of rats.
He grabbed Leo, who yelped and coughed, and slid.
The first Inquisitor noticed the motion.
As a breather notices a twitch in a net.
He lept forward and the baton swung.
Kael's palm found a pipe.
He channeled a scrap of will into the metal.
It rang.
A concussive note thrummed along the shaft.
The bolt holding the hatch loosened with an old, tired protest.
The second Inquisitor's baton slapped his shoulder.
Pain flared and he cursed.
But the hatch above them rattled and shifted.
Lyra lunged from the crates to shove them into the shaft mouth.
Her movement exposed her silhouette.
The first Inquisitor's light carved across her face.
Saw the white of her blind eye.
"Hold!" Lyra spat as she shoved.
Her fingers grazed Kael's arm.
He felt the shard pulse hard, like a beast waking.
The first Inquisitor barked orders that sounded like a tomb closing.
"Contain. Seal the exit. Do not allow breach."
A radio tone answered him.
Replied with a new verdict: ANOMALY CONFIRMED. DEPLOY EXTRACTION.
The hatch above shattered with the sound of a thrown bell.
A column of cold, synthetic light fell through the opening.
It struck Kael full in the face.
It was not a searchlight.
It was a lock.