The second Inquisitor didn't go quietly.
Darkness caught him like a hand.
He lunged, cursed, scraped concrete.
Something pulled him into the corner and the sound cut off—hard, small, wrong.
The basement held its breath.
Lyra stepped out of shadow with a knife wet at the tip.
She cleaned the blade on a scrap of cloth as if polishing a coin.
The room smelled of iron.
The one Inquisitor left staggered, eyes blown wide.
He clutched a wrist that did not seem to belong to him anymore.
From the deeper dark a shape uncoiled—thin, pale, like paper soaked in ink.
He moved without making the wrong noises.
Lyra named him Silas.
"You moved fast," Kael said, voice raw.
Silas smiled with the wrong teeth.
"Speed is a courtesy," he said.
His eyes were darkness pooled, reflecting nothing.
He knelt by the fallen man.
He spoke to the shadow like a master to a horse.
Silas was a Desgarrado—touched, but not blessed.
A mark had eaten its center and given him a different hunger.
He could make shadow obey.
Make it grip bone and shut mouths.
Lyra's mouth flattened.
"Get them gone," she ordered.
"Now."
They worked like people who knew what to do with bodies.
Silas moved the dead with shadows as if hauling sacks.
Lyra bundled uniforms into black cloth and burned name tags in an oil lamp.
The hiding place had been compromised.
The square above would send checks.
The Ordo's net would widen.
Lyra's shoulders were hard as wire.
"We move deeper," she said.
"Zone three under the canal—no Ordo grid runs there. You saved us and nearly torched everything. Training starts now."
Kael's hands still shook.
He should have felt triumph.
He felt raw hunger instead.
Lyra shoved a crate toward him and opened it.
Inside, more fragments—smaller than the one that had nearly unmade him—sat in black cotton like sleeping moths.
"You know what these do," she said bluntly.
He did.
He tasted the tooth of them in his mouth even now.
Lyra forced a shard into his palm.
This time it didn't tear.
It sat like a hot coal.
The motion of taking it in was less an invasion than a slow, terrible swallowing.
He let the shard touch the inside of his cheek.
The difference surprised him.
The first had been a near-drowning.
This was more like drinking thick soup when you were starving.
A clean warmth gathered in his chest.
The second heart—a thing that had been a joke in his bones—filled.
Exhaustion unknotted from his legs like a rope being cut.
He could think.
Tiny and sharp: he could feel the seam of the Ordo's instruments under the city.
Hear the faint motor thrums of armour in other blocks.
The shard was not magic in the way sermons used the word.
It was ledger and blood and account.
It fed the will.
You paid life, it paid reach.
This was the currency.
Silas worked in silence, stuffing the Inquisitors' devices into sacks.
He palmed a baton and let shadow curl around it, hiding the metal's clean lines.
Lyra watched Kael drink the shard like someone testing a furnace.
"You'll learn limits quick," she said.
"The first feed buys you lucidity. Don't think that means you're invincible."
Kael flexed, suddenly aware of small things.
He could make his fingers twitch and the dust on a beam vibrate.
He could close his eyes and map the pipework of the building like a living diagram.
The dim hum of a patrol drone two streets over sharpened into a thin line on the edge of his perception.
He sat straighter.
He could taste leverage.
Lyra spat into a tin and handed him a bitter salve.
"This will blunt the mark for a night," she said.
"Use it if they sweep. Use it if your pulse is loud in a crowd. But don't be soft. Fuel is finite."
He nodded.
The tattoo along his forearm burned quietly.
Lines sinking deeper like knife work finishing into a scar.
While they packed and wiped, Silas rifled the fallen Inquisitors' kit.
He found a communicator still blinking a red light.
He swore low, and then read.
Lyra leaned in.
"What?" Kael asked.
Silas's face didn't change, but his hands did.
He tapped the pad once and the message scrolled.
"Alert: Heretical anomaly Beta located in South District. Escalating to ALPHA. Blade Inquisitors dispatched. ETA: 12 hours."
The words sat on the ragged rectangle of screen and pulsed like a heart monitor.
The Ordo had not simply sent a mop team.
It was rolling a real response.
"Blades," Lyra said, full of a sound that was half curse.
"They don't mess. They bring tools for erasure."
Kael swallowed hard.
His new lucidity tasted like a warning.
"Eta—twelve hours," Silas repeated.
"We have half a day before they ground the whole block into a ledger."
Blades were not the simple plate-carrying Inquisitors.
They were surgical.
They carried instruments rerigged to unspool anything anomalous.
The Ordo's higher echelons did not like anomalies that sloughed them off.
The Blades answered with methodology, not zealotry.
Lyra's jaw tightened.
"Okay," she said.
"You learn tonight. We move at first dark. We can get you under the river and into old maintenance runs. You will learn to feed on purpose. You will learn to hide better than an old thief in a new city."
Kael's mouth felt empty.
Learnt seemed like a polite word for keeping alive.
Silas crouched and wrapped an Inquisitor's device in oil cloth.
"We take what they leave behind," he said.
"Weapons, tech, codes. Anything to trade for safe routes."
They were salvaging the bones of the men who came to kill them.
Kael couldn't stomach the irony.
He turned his face to the wall.
Lyra pressed a hand to his shoulder.
"You should know," she said quietly.
"Taking those shards—a little at a time—will make you useful. Useful gets you noticed. Noticed gets you hunted faster."
He understood.
He had already felt the world tilt toward him.
The Ordo had put a name on it in cold, blinking text.
He thought of Leo sleeping in the back of a cart they'd commandeered.
The boy's chest rose in shallow rhythm.
The memory of the altar of light had not left him.
Brass columns, chanting, silver smoke.
Lyra tied a strip of cloth around Kael's forearm over the tattoo.
"Dress like majority," she said.
"Blend. Don't be a spark they can see."
Silas stood and stretched like someone molding shadow around muscle.
He looked at Kael with an expression that might have been pity.
"You will have to choose what you are willing to spend," he said.
"Feed for reach, or don't and die slower. Both are costs."
Kael thought of the shard in his cheek.
How warmth had pooled into his ribs.
He thought of the Blades with their promised ETA.
He thought of the shadow in the basement.
The one that had snapped a man's wrist like a twig.
He was stronger.
The tattoo was deeper.
The city's ledger now carried his name in urgent red.
The Ordo had shifted from curiosity to procedure.
Lyra slung a pack over her shoulder.
"We move," she said.
"We take the river runs. We bury this place in smoke. You keep Leo quiet. You don't feed in public. You learn to be small."
He followed because he had no map that said otherwise.
Silas pocketed the communicator.
The red light blinked once more and then the device clicked.
A new message scrolled with no ceremony.
"Escalation update: Inquisitors of Blade now equipped with Null-Net arrays. Deployment window: 12 hours. All units advised: neutralize anomalous fuel sources prior to engagement."
Kael read the words twice.
Null-Nets.
The word did not need translation.
They shut down fuel.
They starved the thing that made him strong.
Twelve hours.
An army that didn't just hunt him.
They would render his shard into poison.
Lyra's eyes narrowed until they were slits.
"They'll make your fuel a curse," she said.
"You won't be able to feed when they come. You'll bleed trying."
Silas shrugged, pale and unreadable.
"Then you adapt. Or you burn."
Kael felt the second heart thud like a bell in a small chapel.
He had learned to drink the water without drowning.
Now the city was about to throw salt into it.
They set out into the night.
Three silhouettes moving with the slow, precise urgency of people who had made a bargain with danger.
Above them, in a command center that smelled of varnish and doctrine, an Ordo clerk tapped a screen.
He circled a dot on a map.
"Target: south block," he said, as if reading a grocery list.
"Prepare Null deployment. No collateral. Make it clean."
Below, Kael's fingers found the edge of his new scar.
He curled around the promise of power.
Twelve hours, the city had decided.
He could feel the tally being written against him.
And the Blades were not coming to hunt.
They were coming to unmake what he had chosen to become.