They ran like they belonged to the noise.
Lyra hauled Kael by the collar and didn't look back.
Her voice was a blade: "Split. Secondary points. Now."
The tunnel answered with metallic echo.
Boots.
Shouts.
The city above rounding the corner into a hunt.
Kael let his chest open to the clamour.
He let the tattoo pulse loud enough to taste.
That was the point.
Silas flowed beside them, shadow pooling from his cloak like spilled ink.
He didn't sprint.
He slid—every movement calculated to throw sound where it would be useless.
Lyra's hand tightened. "You, me, Silas. Bait. We take them to the dead end. You be the door."
That was not a request.
They made deliberate mistakes—pipes banged, loose grating skittered down the passage, a trash can tipped over with convenient clatter.
Noise arranged like a trail of breadcrumbs.
Behind them, a metallic bark answered.
The light-hounds were hunting.
Their cries were thin and weird—too clean to be organic.
They cut the tunnel with a pitched staccato that mapped to the tattoo's beat in Kael's wrist.
Lyra didn't slow.
She led through a blind alley that funneled sound into a throat.
Silas peeled off and set a trap—he fanned shadows across a seam in the wall and whispered something that turned shadow into netting.
Kael felt the world sharpen.
He could sense the hounds' signatures now: pure energy cohorts folded into animal shape, collars humming Ordo calibration.
He heard the Blade Inquisitors a beat behind them—heavy, surgical footfalls.
They dove into the circular maintenance chamber Lyra had promised.
It was a perfect trap: one entrance, smooth concrete walls, a grated floor that hid service ducts.
Lyra pushed them to the center and leveled them like targets.
"You are the doorway," she said, not looking at him. "When they come, you are not a man. You are a Pact. Do not make it pretty."
Kael's hands were wet with effort.
He felt small and ridiculous and terrible all at once.
Silas melted into his shadow-station and made a screen along the side recesses.
The darkness behaved like muscle under his command—thickened, curled, waited.
Lyra and Silas took positions.
Kael stood where they put him.
The chamber smelled of old oil and short memories.
The grate at his feet sang faintly with running water below.
He breathed and tuned.
He imagined a door—not just a body between inside and outside, but a portal with teeth.
His palm brushed the leather glove in his pack as if to confirm it existed.
The first dog slammed into the chamber like a thrown spark.
Three beasts burst in, their coats a lattice of light.
The first landed and skidded silver on the concrete.
Light sprayed in tiny teeth.
The lead hound's collar pulsed and searched.
Behind them, the Blade Inquisitors filled the doorway—six of them, black-lacquered armor catching the bared light like knives.
They formed a semicycle.
The leader's crest flashed red.
He spoke with the official calm of someone reading a verdict.
"Anomalia Herética Alfa. Rendición para purificación," he intoned.
The words clapped in the air.
The Inquisitors' blades uncoiled—narrow strips of concentrated energy, practiced and savage.
They moved like a machine that could write death in straight lines.
The leader's eyes were masks.
He pointed with the flat end of his blade. "Surrender. Neutralize."
Something in the chamber answered—not Kael first, but the air itself.
He felt the second heart thrum like a beast's tail.
Kael did not raise his hands.
He let the will mold him.
A filament of amber eased from his skin like a breath.
It didn't roar.
It laid itself along the floor at his feet: a ring.
Not a shield, not yet.
A seam.
The light-hounds paused at the seam like animals smelling a fence.
Their collars jittered.
The leader hissed through teeth that weren't his.
Lyra risked a glance.
Her jaw drew tight. "Hold it," she whispered. "Don't flare."
He held like that—small, patient—feeling the flare as a hungry thing waiting to be fed.
Silas's shadows slid outward to meet the ring and began to braid with the amber, a collision of dark and gold that made the chamber's geometry uncertain.
An Inquisitor tested the air with a blade-tip.
It sparred the seam of amber and shivered.
The blade's reading stuttered on his gauntlet.
He frowned. "Anomalous interference," he muttered.
His pad blinked.
The leader snarled and lifted his voice. "Burn it. Purify it."
The first dog leapt.
Kael didn't think of killing.
He thought of patterns.
He thought of making a simple, precise contract: a door that would take their bite and not let the rest of the block see the smoke.
He curled his fingers and shaped the filament into a gaunt—an ember-guard across his fist.
Not the big glove that had once shattered a blade, but a tight kerf of light that could catch teeth and return pressure.
The amber coalesced, obeying the slimmest of his wills.
The gaunt hummed against his skin with a tone like a tuning fork.
His eyes did not change color; the glow was private.
The dog hit the gaunt.
There was a clean, struck note.
Light met light.
The hound's jaws snapped; for a fraction of a second the collar's registry spiked.
The animal recoiled, shaken—not dead but corrected.
The first dog staggered, and the leader's formation faltered.
The Inquisitors traded looks.
They had expected blood, not a tempering note.
Lyra moved with that fraction's gift.
She slashed, blade whispering through the air.
A light-curve cut a hound's flank; it howled and bright-sparked.
Kael felt small pleasure, enough to be guilty.
The ring he held had bought a beat.
One of the Inquisitors stepped forward with a device clasped to his belt—thin.
He jabbed it.
A net of crystalline noise burst outward, the Null-Net pulse the city had been whispering about.
The amber at Kael's fist didn't hold like rock.
It answered the Null with a shiver and thinned.
The net took purchases in a humming web that tested his control.
The leader barked. "Net deployed. Isolate and extract."
The blade units widened their semicircle.
The hounds' collars ramped into an obsessive frequency, and their noses twitched.
The closest one threw itself at the seam again, teeth finding light with an accuracy that made Kael's stomach hollow.
The net's touch bit into his control and the gaunt flickered.
Kael felt blood-warm fatigue bruise behind his eyes.
He'd been bait, yes—but bait that could not implode.
The net would force extraction protocols, and extractions were uglier than any blade-slice.
Lyra's teeth showed.
She barked a plan because breath and plans were all they had. "Silas—now."
Silas answered by making the shadows speak.
He twisted the darkness along the chamber walls into false corridors, illusions that bent sound and misrouted the Inquisitors' sight.
A shadow lunged like a hand and caught the second dog's flank; the animal staggered, blinking at its phantom.
Silas's shadows could slow technology by misdirection.
They didn't destroy drones or arrays; they made the world leak, and the Ordo's instruments peered at that leak like a man who'd lost his map.
But the Null-Net adjusted.
It pinned a reading: signature locked.
The net's lattice tightened.
The leader's visor projected a designate: CORE TARGET — KAEL VEXIS — PRIORITY: NEUTRALIZE.
That projection scalded the chamber like a blast.
It called his name and numbered him.
He felt something have his coordinates.
Lyra glanced at Kael and leaned so close he smelled stale tobacco.
"You can open a step," she said low. "Bearer's Steps—five meters. Take them through the maintenance crawl I prepped. Land, and then vanish. Do not hang. Do not flash."
Kael understood the risk.
Bearer's Steps would let him teleport a short span and maybe put distance between him and the net.
But every jump burned something—ten minutes of heavy use and hours of collapse.
He had already fed shards.
The ledger in his bones had been balanced with little coins.
He felt raw calculation: if he jumped and left?
The group would be safer.
If he stayed, they might cut him to pieces here and now, but they'd understand later what his power could really do.
Lyra's hand squeezed his shoulder. "You are the pivot now. If you go, go clean. If you stay, buy us time."
He took a breath and made the decision align with his will.
He gathered the second heart's tide and let it shape his feet.
The space behind his back shimmered like a seam catching light.
Kael stepped and folded.
The air snapped with a small, sharp sound like cloth on a line.
For half a second he was not where his feet had been.
He landed ten meters behind the circular chamber's side gutter—right where Lyra had told him the maintenance crawl's mouth hid.
He had moved clean.
For a moment, a taste of triumph.
He had out-stepped the net.
Then the chamber's floor spoke.
The Null-Net, designed to track signatures, had not only locked.
It had predicted the geometry of his escape and folded a secondary lattice into the maintenance run.
The leader's gauntlet flashed with new commands.
He barked into a wrist-link. "Contain. Secondary nets along the crawls. Seal maintenance lines. Deploy collar calibrations."
Lyra's face turned the color of a final ledger page.
His leap had bought distance—and walked him into a corridor that the Ordo had already venom-coated.
The maintenance run flashed with suppressed sensors, a net waiting for a pulse to trigger.
The collars on the hounds screamed their calibration and the net latched onto his last vector.
Kael's stomach dropped.
The Null-Net could not fry a man at a distance without making a mess.
It preferred to suffocate fuel sources—starve the shard, lock its channels.
But it could and would electrify a corridor with a binding field meant to immobilize and bleed.
He saw Lyra at the chamber mouth, blade ready—her choices narrow as a hinge.
Silas had unspooled shadows between the dogs and Lyra, trying to buy seconds.
The hounds bristled and lengthened like lightning drawn tight.
A wire of light wrapped the maintenance crawl.
It touched the air and the net's hum deepened.
Kael felt the first burn along his spine as the Net's contact sought his last anchor.
He had left space for his friends, but not for the city's bureaucracy.
They had learned his step.
The leader raised his blade high and the semicycle tightened into a closing ring.
He spoke, and his voice slid into the channel like an executioner's charm.
"Purge sequence engaged. Purification lance charge—ready."
The words had the clarity of someone scheduling an ending.
Lyra screamed across to him, raw and small: "Jump again. Now. Don't think."
There wasn't time to think.
Kael flexed his feet.
He felt the second heart answer: small, sharp, eager.
The Bearer's Steps were strained.
He could make one more leap before the cost would hammer him into collapse.
He tasted metal and the memory of shard feeding in his mouth.
He leapt.
The space folded and he tore through the maintenance crawl like a seam being cut.
He landed beyond an older service hatch.
The net rippled behind him, reaching, but he had made literal distance.
He collapsed to his knees and breathed the city's stale air like a thief stealing sleep.
Then the chamber boomed.
The purification lance fired.
A column of compressed light slammed into the maintenance run's mouth and detonated the hatch like a hand closing.
Concrete shredded.
Pressure folded his ribs with the force that wanted to flatten a man into anonymous dust.
Lyra's scream fractured through the din.
The hounds bayed in a new tone—hunger sharpened into ritual.
He had burned two steps of stamina.
The tattoo along his arm exploded outward a fraction, lines knitting quicker, ink sinking like a living map.
He felt different—tougher, more watched, an accounting he couldn't retract.
But the Purge had done something else.
It had made the Ordo's response industrial.
The blade leader's visor blinked with readouts that not only targeted him but cataloged his momentum, his jump vectors, his feeding cycles.
It would allow the Ordo to predict leaps next time.
Kael heard the cold phrase in his skull: PREDICTIVE ANOMALY PROFILE ESTABLISHED.
That meant they would not only chase him—they would rehearse him.
He had become a specimen on someone's ledger.
Lyra's shadowed voice came clipped: "Go. Find river node three. Don't feed in a corridor. Meet us at the sluice. If you live, you keep us alive."
Silas's shadows curled around a bundle at his feet—someone's body they couldn't carry.
He looked at Kael with an expression that wanted pity but had learned the cost of it.
Kael pushed himself to his feet.
He had run and flared and jumped and given them a path.
Now the city would close the choreography on him.
He had made himself visible.
He had traded their lives for movement.
The ledger had altered and his page was inked.
The Purge's aftershock ripped through the tunnel.
The sound made everything small.
Above, far off, a public siren began its long, clean alarm.
The Ordo's schedule had accelerated.
They would bring the Null-Net arrays, the Blades, the hounds, the drones, a bureaucracy that kills in margins.
Kael thought of Leo's face in the dark—trusting, sleeping, ignorant of how high a price hunger demanded.
He thought of Lyra and Silas and their ragged loyalty.
He thought of the shard in his cheek and the way it had tasted like a future.
He started to run again—down a ladder into older mud—because there was only that and nothing else.
As he slid, the leader's voice echoed behind him through the netted corridor, precise and final: "Contain and terminate. No mercy for heresy."
A bright, surgical hum gathered above the maintenance hatch, and the Purge's second charge began its slow, inevitable build.