Kael moved before thought could catch him.
He didn't raise a hand.
He didn't shape a glove.
He only wanted the light to stop.
Something like a pulse — thin, amber and almost polite — slid out of him.
It breathed into the air and tried to quit.
The Inquisitor's baton hiccupped.
The white cone winked.
The hum stuttered into a soft, rotten click.
Sparks danced across its casing.
The device died like a throat cut.
The first Inquisitor frowned and tapped his wrist-pad.
Numbers jumped and then stuttered back.
"Malfunction?" he said, incredulous.
"Dogma failure—here?"
The second man's hand tightened on his baton.
He was built for obedience.
Confusion annoyed him like sand in a hinge.
Lyra didn't wait for consequences to be courteous.
She moved like a cut in the dark — quick, efficient, and wrong in the polite way only murder can be wrong.
Her blade was bone and old.
It flashed behind the Inquisitor's ribs in one fluid motion.
A throat opened and closed.
Flesh and light made a small, ugly sound.
The man dropped like a puppet whose string had been snipped.
Chaos pinballed between the basement walls.
The surviving Inquisitor barked.
His radio sang.
The pad pinged priority.
He swore, low and accurate.
Kael's pulse thudded in his ears.
He had not intended the baton to fail.
He had never wanted a throat unstitched.
The pulse had been a whisper.
The thing inside him could disrupt the machines that read magic.
It did not take much — a breath, a tiny exhalation of will.
The amber thread in his wrist answered the trapped sound and the world faltered.
The second Inquisitor pulled a gun.
It unfolded like a promise — compact, clinical.
The kind of weapon the Ordo reserved for quick endings.
Its barrel hissed with cold light.
Kael's mouth went dry.
He reached for the second heart and found it hollow.
He had no fuel.
The gun aligned with his temple.
A tiny blue mote pulsed in its sight like a heartbeat.
He tried to pull again.
The shard inside him answered, but this time it clicked like an empty well.
Pain stabbed behind his eyes.
The world pinched.
Lyra dove forward with swift, blunt force.
She wanted to close distance, to make noise, to bargain with steel.
But the Inquisitor's reflex beat hers.
He slammed a palm to Kael's chest.
The gun's weight made the world a thin wire.
Kael tasted static and the after-spark of something he almost had.
He staggered.
The ground caught him like an indifferent hand.
He had burned too bright before he learned to feed the burn.
The glove had been a theft.
The theft had made a ledger.
A new sound — not human — shivered the air.
From the deeper shadow at the far end of the basement, darkness peeled.
It moved as if pulled by a hand.
The shadow wasn't absence of light.
It had an edge, an intent.
It thickened, folded, and a shape shrugged itself free.
A hand the color of a closed door.
Everyone in the room registered the motion in the same animal way.
A collective slow blink.
The Inquisitor's jaw clenched.
"Who—" he started.
Then the shadow's fingers closed.
Bone snapped.
The sound was dry and precise.
It echoed off concrete like a judge striking a gavel.
The gun fell limp.
The Inquisitor went from readiness to ruin in a single, obscene click.
He dropped to his knees, clutching a wrist that no longer seemed to be his.
Blood bloomed like protest under the armor.
The Ordo's bravado thinned into numbers and protocol.
The basement smelled of oil, fear, and something older.
Kael's breath came in ragged pulls.
He had not made the shadow.
He had not called it.
It had answered some other draft in the room.
Like a predatory fisherman sensing ripples on water.
Lyra's blade was wet.
Her expression had that same predator's economy.
No triumph, only necessary business.
"You okay?" she asked, flat.
He should have said no.
He should have thanked her.
He said, "Who—?"
She didn't answer his question with a name.
She answered with a plan.
"Move," she said.
"Now. While that thing shows teeth, we move."
Kael wanted to stand and watch the shadow work miracles.
He wanted to learn whether it would obey if he asked.
He wanted to trace it back to whatever limb of the city it had been cut from.
Instead he dragged Leo.
He stuffed the boy under a coat.
He shoved him toward the maintenance hatch Lyra had shown him the first night.
The shadow slid along the floor like an oil stain with purpose.
It circled the fallen Inquisitor.
Fingers probing wounds like a surgeon checking a pulse that might be fake.
The shadow paused.
For the barest second, its edge matched Kael's tattoo glow.
An answering rhythm pulsed back, faint and synchronous.
The shard had not only sung to machines.
It had started a conversation with something in the dark.
Kael heard, not with ears but with the new, raw sense that had come since the feed.
A register of alignments.
The Ordo's instruments were crude.
The city's old things were older, subtler.
The hand was not wholly friend.
It was interest.
A distant horn bellowed above ground.
The city had alerted.
Lyra shoved them toward the shaft.
She moved like a person who had seen too many doors close.
She decided to keep one open at the price of noise.
The wounded Inquisitor coughed and tried to crawl.
His glance snagged on Kael's wrist.
"You—" he rasped.
Recognition like acid.
His radio found a channel and screamed, crisp protocol.
"Anomalous signature. Basement breach. Extraction teams to coordinates—"
He didn't finish.
The shadow's fingers tightened.
Bone broke again with the same dry economy.
The air filled with that small, surgical sound and then silence.
A silence that smelled like the end of a story.
The hallway above them thundered with feet.
Heavy boots stamped the floorboards into vibration.
A mechanical voice snapped through a speaker somewhere near the stairwell.
"Sector sweep engaged. All units, converge Basement F-9. Target: unmarked heretic. Authorization: lethal."
Kael tasted the word lethal like winter.
Lyra grabbed his shoulder.
Her fingers were cold and steady.
"Floor plans," she said, breathless.
"You know the maintenance runs. Head left at the valve, down three, out by the river sluice. No lights."
He wanted to ask what had grabbed the Inquisitor.
He wanted to know whether the shadow had taken a debt or only devoured a billing.
He said nothing.
He ran.
Two knocks of something heavy hit the hatch above.
The air changed.
Protocol finished convincing the city.
The city moved.
Kael slithered into the maintenance crawl.
Leo made a small noise — not a cry, not yet.
A scent of blood and oil followed them into the dark.
The shadow stayed in the basement.
It watched the hatch with the concentration of a thing that knew scales and balance.
Overhead, metal grated as a new team arrived.
The radio's voice sharpened.
"Seal exits. Kill any resistance."
Kael's muscles burned.
His hands smelled like wire and damp.
The tattoo at his wrist pulsed like a trapped heart.
He felt the shard in his mouth, gritty and wrong.
The memory of feeding it the first time rose like warmth.
How it had smoothed exhaustion into action.
He had one scrap of fuel left.
A shard in his coat, a gamble that would buy distance or death.
Lyra hissed, "You can't feed in the crawl. Not there. Not with their sensors."
He thought of Leo's pale face.
The way silver smoke had unspooled from his ribs.
He thought of the Inquisitors now in pieces.
The shadow that had broken a man's life with an antic crack.
Choice sat like a hot stone in his chest.
He could feed and run faster.
He could let the glove form and carve a hole through the squad that would come down with orders and angels behind them.
Or he could crawl quiet.
Chew his hunger into long survival.
Risk the Ordo tracing small footprints back to the basement — back to Lyra.
The hatch slammed down somewhere behind them.
The city announced, in crystalline voice over the city's net, a new protocol.
"ANOMALOUS ENTITY ENGAGED. TARGET: KAEL. STATUS: HOSTILE. ALL UNITS, AUTHORIZE EXECUTION."
The broadcast ended on a tone like a bell striking the edge of the world.
Kael tasted iron, felt the shard like a tooth in his jaw.
He slid into the dark.
Above, the shadow's fingers closed once more.
The sound of bone snapping carried like a verdict into the stairwell.