The ceiling had not been meant to split.
It did.
A fist-size chunk of concrete punched through the air and slapped into a brazier three yards from Kael.
Sparks flew like small, obscene stars.
Fire hissed.
People ducked.
Silence slammed down after the boom, heavy and immediate.
The station held its breath.
Murmurs fanned out—sharp, hot.
Fear smelled like old wool and cheap tobacco.
Mara stepped forward before anyone else could decide.
Her angelic mark was ugly, a sickly bloom of light that made people instinctively back away.
Her voice cut the hollow.
"You will kill us all," she spat at Kael.
"You blaze like a beacon; you stand in the open and we die. We should have left you at the square."
Lyra moved like a blade between them.
"He is our only chance," she said, low and flat.
"Blades are coming. A Contractor in the ranks is better than none."
The sentence was not an argument.
It was arithmetic.
Kael felt each eye like a tally.
He had been a secret; the explosion made him an account.
He was both resource and threat.
Rourke shuffled forward.
Metal hands clicked on his knees.
Scars mapped his throat.
He smelled like oil and old wars.
"Will made matter," he said.
"I've seen fragments in an old schematic. Brute force. Needs a channel."
He tossed a rusted scrap at Kael's feet like a test.
First tangible task: cut the scrap—not with a roar, but with a knife.
Kael swallowed.
Training didn't come with thunder.
Training came with precise cruelty.
He took the leather gloves Lyra handed him.
They were soft from use and smelled of sweat and coal.
He tugged them on with hands that remembered the square's violence too well.
Rourke's voice was patient-metal.
"Think blade. Not blast. Think edge."
Kael stared at the rusted metal as if it had a face.
He pictured a knife.
No more than that.
A thin outline whispered into existence above his palm.
It trembled like a hesitant sketch.
For one breath it held the image of a blade—no weight, no sound—and then ghosted.
"Again," Rourke said.
"Not the want. The will."
He tried again.
This time the outline sharpened.
The leather on his knuckles warmed.
The metal in his palm rang like a tuning fork when his imagined edge passed through it—a tiny, honest note.
Some of it could be taught to be useful.
A few heads leaned in.
Even Mara's sneer paused into a thin line.
Kael's success was small and dangerous.
People in the Zone traded small successes like bank notes.
They knew value.
Then the young runner burst in.
He came through the tunnel with the look of running teeth—hair plastered, lungs burning.
"Ordo patrol!" he panted.
"Two squads—sweeping main tunnels. They've got—"
His voice hitched into a strangled gasp.
"They've got light-hounds. Radiant dogs. They scent strange energy."
The name landed like a stone.
The patrols were not simple sweep teams.
They had animals of light.
They had sensors that smelled the crackling of Cael's life.
Everyone's faces hardened into maps of calculation.
Lyra's jaw went tight.
Her hand found Kael's wrist and squeezed, a signal and a command.
"You'll train more," she said.
"Now. But smaller. Contain. Control."
She didn't say it like a suggestion.
She said it like a law.
Kael's chest tightened.
The second heart in him—an old metronome and a new thing—skipped like a nervous kid.
He wanted to ask about the dogs.
He wanted to ask whether the Null-Nets would be deployed early.
He wanted to ask whether feeding even a small shard would make the hounds keel toward them like hounds to blood.
Instead he bowed his head and began.
Rourke held the rusted scrap steady.
"Cut it as if you mean it," he said.
"Not for show. For cut. For economy."
Kael thought of hands at Leo's ribs.
He thought of the square.
He thought of the first glove and how it had vanished into exhaustion.
He thought of Lyra's warning: feed from want, not fear.
He pictured a knife again.
But this time he pictured a precise pressure, a seam rather than a roar.
He would not call a sword.
He would be craft.
The blade formed under his glove as an ember forms under coal.
It was narrow and mean.
It did not sing.
It hummed like a low animal.
He drove the silhouette through the scrap.
Metal failed in a private way.
A small, clean split opened down the length of the rust like someone had slit rotten skin.
The tone the metal made was quiet, perfectly ordinary.
Rourke grunted in a way that almost sounded like approval.
But the victory left a residue.
It wasn't exhaustion as before.
It was as if someone had borrowed a fraction of his breath and not returned it.
Lyra noticed the tilt.
She forced a smile that was all business.
"You did well," she said.
"Now practice containment."
She slapped a palm to the glove's back and the filament retracted.
The leather lay warm and still.
Mara spat on the concrete.
"One lucky cut does not feed the city," she said.
"One lucky cut does not keep the Blades away."
Her anger was not entirely malicious.
It was survival shaped into scorn.
Silas moved in his shadow-silent way and stacked the bodies—what remained of the Inquisitors—in a shadow-sack.
He hummed something under his breath that sounded like counting.
Kael wanted to be small.
He wanted to be a tool that did not sing.
But the Zone was not polite about new talent.
Words spread like cheap light.
People clustered after the training.
The mechanical-armed man—Rourke's old companion name, Joss—took his promise and weighed it against utility.
"Useful things attract attention," Joss said.
"You're useful now. Useful is currency. Currency is a ledger."
A woman at the edge, face twisted by her angelic mark, stepped forward with a kind of brutal math.
"If the Blades come," she said, "and they cut you down, what do we gain? Ordo's interest will be a funeral, not a war."
Lyra answered like a person who'd already paid a bill in blood.
"We take risk. We survive. That's the only plan we have."
The runner's breath came in ragged.
He shifted from foot to foot like an animal waiting to be ordered.
"Reports said hounds can sniff the shard's signature," he whispered.
"They will tear flesh to the bone to find the beat."
A child in the corner shivered.
Kael's hands curled.
He could feel the tattoo thickening: ink under skin, lines broadening with the pressure of repeated calls.
He could have taken Leo and run the deeper runs now.
He could have pushed into the river maintenance and hoped the Null-Nets bypassed that circuit.
Instead he stayed.
Part of him liked the old truth: strength was a thing learned, not given.
Part of him was a greedy animal wanting to test.
Lyra watched him with a calculation that might have been pity.
"We move tonight," she said.
"But we'll do a staggered exit. The sick and women first. You will come after them. You will be shield, not signal."
Her plan made sense the way a trap is sensible.
It was cold and efficient.
Silas wove a shadow-screen around the entrances.
It was crude—no Null-Net would be fooled for long—but it muffled light signatures enough to stall a cheap scanner.
"That will only hold for minutes," Silas said.
"Enough to get to the river runs. Not enough to win a fight."
They prepared.
They strapped on packs that smelled like soot.
They wrapped Leo in a blanket that had been boiled and dried a dozen times.
Kael practiced holding the filament small.
He closed his eyes and felt the glove like a sleeping animal.
He learned to breathe with it.
Step, breathe, let it go.
Small, surgical tests.
He walked the perimeter with Joss, testing seams in the wall where a light could penetrate.
When he placed his hand on the old tile, he felt not only the Ordo's hum but a fracture of memory—an echo of the city's first building.
It was faint, like a child's drawing under a new sketch, but it told him that beneath the Ordo's ledger there were older rules.
He listened and learned a small geography of omission.
That knowledge made him dangerous in a way that made his throat close.
A high, electronic trill feathered through the tunnels.
Not close, but bad enough to make people freeze.
A drone was sweeping the perimeter for signatures.
Lyra hissed under her breath.
"Move. Now."
They filed like ghosts.
Silas led, shadow-slick.
Lyra took point.
Kael held Leo and moved like a thing carrying a bone.
The river runs smelled of iron and old water.
They crawled on pipes, balanced on girders, moved like spiders across the belly of the city.
Kael could feel his reach extending.
The second heart did not just drum; it started to listen.
He was learning to make the world answer.
He was also leaving a trail.
Halfway under the river, a distant clatter echoed—boots on the riverbank.
A search-beacon swung above, painting the ripples.
Up on the bank, something moved with purposeful light—two figures with leaded eyes and collars that pulsed in tight chimes.
The light-hounds.
They were not a myth.
Their bodies were long and clean lines of prismatic fur.
Their collars thrummed with Ordo tech.
They snuffled the air and their noses found the frequencies Kael was broadcasting with a clarity that made his stomach turn.
Silas swore low.
"They'll cross the water if they have to," he said.
"They'll scent the pulse."
Lyra's hand tightened into a muscle around the pipe.
She looked at Kael.
"You can't feed on the run," she said.
"They'll pin you in seconds."
The group could have rerouted.
They could have tried descent into old sewers.
But the route Lyra chose was the quickest to the south pump—a place with a maintenance node that led to a deeper shadow.
Time was a factor.
The Blades' ETA was tightening in their ears.
Kael's boots slid on moss.
The leather gloves felt damp.
He felt the filament like a humming thing in the glove's seams.
He wanted to pull a blade and cleave a path.
He wanted to test whether a hand of gold could cut dogs of light.
But the Null-Nets—those precise, bureaucratic instruments—were out there.
To flare would be to sign.
They moved faster.
A sound climbed: above, an amplified bark.
The hounds had found a scent and were closing the circumference.
A dog's light landed on a downstream pillar.
It sniffed.
Its nose twitched.
Its collar blinked the exact same tone Kael had heard in the Null-Net: cold, procedural.
The animal's handler shouted.
"Hold! Don't spook!"
But the hound had interest, the kind that becomes obsession.
Kael could feel its attention as a pinprick through the pipe.
He tightened his grip on Leo.
His arm trembled.
The gloves warmed.
The tattoo under his sleeve pulsed like a second heartbeat that was not his own.
The hound's nose had not learned the shard's taste from theory.
It smelled the feeding—the small fragment he had taken.
It could distinguish shards and echoes and the hum of someone who had eaten them.
Lyra saw the dog's focus and swore.
She looked at Kael the way someone looks at an exposed wire.
"We don't stop," she said.
"Move. Don't make light."
They crept out of the river run and into a maintenance mouth that smelled of sewage and metal.
Above, the Blades' team rearranged.
They were not hunting with clumsy nets.
They were patient, surgical.
A man's voice on a speaker orchestrated the approach like a conductor.
Kael felt the city's attention fold in a pattern around him.
It felt like a net tightening on a small animal.
He thought of Leo, weak and trusting.
He thought of the shard in his mouth and the taste of warm metal.
He thought of Lyra's orders.
He could feed, and perhaps carve a hole through the approaching web.
He could risk Null activation, the Blades' arrays, the dogs finding his pulse and pinning them like a trophy.
Or he could crawl, hold the filament, starve the glove into an obedient ember.
His choice made itself in a thin, honest decision: he would not be the spark that burned them.
Not now.
He squeezed the leather.
He called nothing into being but a small, patient warmth.
He placed one hand on the back of Leo's head and moved forward.
A sudden, crystalline tone stabbed through the phone-lines of the tunnel.
Above them, a probe's optics snapped onto a signature.
The Null-Net had found a node.
Red lights flared distant and surgical.
A single command from above cut the night like a blade:
"ENGAGE."
The light-hounds turned as one and began to descend the river bank with mechanical precision, their collars blinking in a merciless count.
They moved like an execution with paws.
Their handler's voice tightened: "Find the pulse. No mercy."
Kael felt the Net's focus as a hand closing around his throat; he felt the city name him and schedule his last breath.
He tucked Leo's head under his chin and ran into the narrowing tunnel, and above the river the first hound hit the water—its light burning through the dark like a seeking star—and its jaws snapped shut on the maintenance grate, metal shrieking as the collar's sensor read Kael's signature at the exact moment the array locked to his pulse.