The last man dropped like someone finally answering a summons he had been denying.
Silence stamped the room.
The bodies made a crooked map on the concrete, halves of uniforms, the little legal beads of the Ordo's devices glittering like bureaucratic proof.
Kael was on his knees before he understood how he had fallen.
The Contractor form dissolved as if someone had pulled the plug on a machine.
Amber sheets pulled back into skin.
The blade sputtered and went dark.
Exhaustion smashed into him like a slab falling on a chest.
He tasted metal.
The edges of his vision went soft and gray.
Lyra was on him before his knees hit the floor.
Her hands worked without poetry—one shoved a larger shard into his palm, another forced it against his palm like a plug.
It burned like winter water poured through nerves.
The weakness didn't retreat so much as it staggered.
He did not pass out.
He chewed a breath and kept the world upright.
The form cracked, but he survived.
"Count them," Lyra said, voice clipped.
She didn't watch his face.
She wanted numbers, a ledger, closure.
Kael looked at the men with helmets once pale, now gapped.
He tried to remember how many he'd fallen.
Three? Four?
The count blurred because the ground smelled of hot metal and old promises.
Silas moved like a knife with no flash.
He rifled pockets, ripped communicators, stuffed devices into a satchel.
He muttered to himself, half-counting spoils.
"Moedas de Graça," he said without emotion—the Ordo's currency of power.
He fished for the leader's comm and read a log that had already been broadcast, alarms and timestamps and a stamped request no one who mattered could ignore.
"An Arcanjo Purificador," Silas said at last, teeth scraping the words with a small, ugly laugh.
"They don't send teams anymore when a thing like this shows. They send an angel. One. Cleans the area. Makes a record. Then burns the witnesses."
That sat in the room like a verdict.
Kael felt the shard in his palm sink into muscle.
His tattoo—lines and runes—pulsed like a living map.
The shard hummed and fed, and the burn receded from the edges of his vision.
Lyra hauled him up by the shoulders.
Her grip was a rough kindness.
"You won," she said. "But you called a bell. They know you. The Arcanjo—it's not a patrol. It's a purge. Your training ends. Survival begins."
Silence had weight after that statement.
The group's small fires winked in the abandoned station like anxious eyes.
The people who lived here in the shadow zone had faces scrubbed of hope, eyes that learned to survey danger like an art.
The community now knew him, and that knowledge was a threat.
They moved in a line that felt like a funeral procession led by someone who did not know the songs.
Lyra took point, Silas covered flanks with shadowed fingers, Kael stayed hollowed and slow, half-ash and half-purpose.
Leo had been dragged on a blanket; his chest rose in a shallow theft of air.
He carried more light in him now than when the ritual started, but the light was brittle.
They left the chamber by a route Lyra knew—two turns, then a shadowed maintenance shaft.
The door scraped and opened like an eyelid on rotten tooth.
It breathed out into a narrower corridor that smelled of old water and iron.
They emerged into a space where someone had tried to make shelter of the city's broken bones.
There were sacks piled into a barricade, cracked glass theater lights propped like constellations.
People glanced up and down and then away, as if eyes here could kill.
A kid from the hideout ran toward them—out of breath, face freckled with dust.
He looked younger than Kael's memory allowed human men to be; he had the kind of stubborn nothing-to-lose tilt in his shoulders that got him into trouble.
He barreled forward like a small bullet, eyes desperate, mouth already forming a question.
Then he stopped.
His chest had a hole burned through it.
A spray of charred paper and sinew marked the air where he had been a fraction of a second before.
The kid's hand fell limp; his feet took a slow, confused step and folded like a puppet with a severed string.
Lyra's face did not move.
She saw the ash and the half-word and the rest of the world closed down into a narrow line.
They were being watched and hit from a distance.
Someone had fired from somewhere far enough and precise enough that it could make a kid cease in a heartbeat without anyone seeing an arrow.
The city had weapons now that wrote death as cleanly as the Ordo wrote sermons.
Silas swore under his breath.
On the wall, in the boy's blood, a hand had moved in a neat, angular script.
Kael stepped closer despite his fatigue.
The crimson on the wall read with the binary clarity of an edict: THE SIN WILL BE PURIFIED.
It wasn't graffiti.
It wasn't a threat scribbled by a drunk.
The letters were measured like a stamp meant for many eyes.
The boy's blood traced each curve as if the writer had practiced the font in a ledger of threats.
That stung a new note.
The message was official.
It had a voice that was not of the street.
They were not only hunted.
They were being announced.
Lyra's jaw tightened.
"They sent a scanner," she said. "Or they have eyes in the alleys."
Her hand went to her belt and came out with a small, ragged packet.
She unrolled it.
The edges of her mouth were a blade.
"We don't stay. We go deeper."
Decisions came fast in the shadow zone.
They packed what they could: the boy's body left where it lay; the cost of caring could not be paid.
Silas grabbed a comm and tore it open, his fingers moving like a machine surgeon.
He found a ping log—recent transmissions, traces of a triangular signature.
He hummed the data to himself.
"Purifiers have a cadence," he murmured.
"They ping the area once something like this gets flagged. The Arcanjo's routes lock up network traffic. Once it pings, micro-drones sweep for anomalies. Then the Purifier comes."
Kael slid a hand over Leo's forehead and felt the thin steam of life.
He had killed men for the slate of his brother's breath.
That was a metric that could not be uncounted.
Kael had become not only stronger but a beacon.
Lyra pulled him, limped from a freshly-grazed flank.
"We move to the sluice. It's slow, but it's deep. We close it. You buy us time."
Her eyes flicked to him.
"I don't trust the Arcanjo to be careless. They wipe anything. If they find you among us, they burn this place down."
He nodded.
Words would be small and light.
Time heavy.
He felt the second heart thudding; it was a metronome that never mellowed.
He had used too much.
The shard that Lyra had given his palm hours before was now a hollowing store.
They moved.
The shadow zone had a rhythm to it—a map of people who had learned how to live around the teeth of the city.
Old subway lines, sealed ducts used for crossing, maintenance shafts that smelled like rot and rain.
Lyra led them through a maze of half-constructed lies and half-sentences.
A soft vibration underfoot told Kael little things: drones overhead, the distant hum of the Ordo reorganizing.
He pulled the shard in his palm like a rosary.
The amber pulsed with the ghost of his form when he last shaped it.
They reached the sluice—a mechanical arch the size of a small gate, rusted and fitted with a manual lever meant for an older bureaucracy.
Lyra went straight for it, hands finding the rust like memory.
She pushed and cursed and heaved.
The gate ground and obdurate iron rasped.
It had not moved in years.
But locks could be bullied when no other options existed.
Kael made for the manual winch.
His limbs wanted to fold but he pushed.
He could feel the mirrored filaments on his arm like a thousand cold ants.
Every movement of the gate took a piece of his attention.
Silas stood sentry, shadowed and still.
Leo coughed and looked at Kael with eyes that pleaded.
The boy who had the message on the wall lay where he had fallen, an argument in red.
They worked as a small machine.
Lyra's hip to the gate and Kael's shoulder to a lever.
The sluice gave a small groan and moved an inch.
Heedless of the burn across his palm, Kael shoved until his shoulder screamed.
A sharp ping answered from the city's mesh—a confirmation ripple.
Kael felt it like a cold hand inside his brain: the network had logged their movement.
That ping labeled them.
It lit a trail.
The net had marked them and sent the tag outward.
The sluice scraped down another inch.
Then the distant, legal voice of the Ordo sliced through the underground: a broadcast in a protocol reserved for high-level incidents.
Kael felt it in his bones because he had been the origin.
AR C A N J O P U R I F I C A D O — DEPLOYMENT CONFIRMED.
The message painted itself across any netted device within the Ordo's grid like an announcement of judgement.
ETA: 00:45:12.
Kael's chest shrank under the weight of that time-stamp.
Forty-five minutes.
Less than that, if the Purifier took a different route.
Less, too, if the net slotted a quicker sweep.
He shoved the lever again and the sluice's mechanism granted him a small mercy: the gate closed another six inches.
The space narrowed; the city would have to work harder to find them now.
But the cost arrived as everything else did in this place—something small, precise, and inevitable.
A tiny mechanical whine answered from above like the clearing of a throat.
The Ordo had a habit of speaking in small noises first: micro-drones that tasted the air, scanners that walked along pipes.
They would sweep.
If they found an anomalous read, the path would not be a simple skirt.
The Arcanjo did not handle slips.
The city's response architecture had begun to spin a web.
Silas jammed a comm into a dead Inquisitor's pocket and read a log that made him frown.
It contained a timestamped snatch: a routing confirmation that matched the one that had gone out when the leader called for the Purifier earlier.
The data was precise.
The Ordo had not just been reactive; they had designed contingency for a Contractor.
It was a lesson.
They had already trod this ground on paper.
Kael thought about what he had done.
He had broken a thing the Ordo called a dogma.
He had killed their men.
He had become an unfiled exception, and the Ordo responded with all of the quiet, trained certainty of a bureaucracy that did not tolerate noise.
Lyra put her palm on his chest for a second.
"You did what had to be done," she said.
It was not comfort.
It was an accounting.
He felt something else then—not relief but a narrower fear.
A technical note thrummed under the sluice's lock: their closure of the gate had tripped a micro-flag in the Ordo's routing.
Somewhere, a scheduler recalculated.
The Arcanjo's ETA slid down like a falling ledger.
Kael looked at Leo.
"Tell me you can run if I make it a ruin," he said.
It sounded like a prayer with no god.
Leo's hands trembled.
"I'll try," he whispered.
Lyra whistled a code into her sleeve.
Silas melted shape into the shadow.
They held like bookends.
Then the boy from the hideout's body hit something in Kael's mind—an image too clean.
The blood-lettered script was not just a threat.
It was an instruction.
It had a voice: not only kill, but notify.
The Ordo wanted to announce the sin before it finished it.
A decision came with a grim edge.
They could ride the sluice closed and try to hide, or they could take the fight into the tunnel where oddities made the air thick with danger.
Lyra grunted and hauled the last inch.
The sluice locked.
The lock's final clunk vibrated through the corridor like the closing of a coffin.
They were shelter for a sliver.
But shelter was a lie when the Ordo had flagged an Arcanjo.
He felt the mirrored filaments on his arm.
They had grown warmer, like an incubus.
The shard in his palm had offered him a drink that preserved consciousness at the cost of later tetany.
The second heart pulsed with an exhaustion that was not memory but invoice.
Kael understood the ledger of his life then: every time he had used the Primordial it had left a debt line on his skin.
He had paid some this night.
He would pay the rest.
Silas pocketed the last comm and looked up.
"They'll sweep from two vectors," he said.
"From the main arteries, and from the old vents. The Arcanjo moves with a pattern like a scythe."
"Forty minutes," Lyra muttered.
"Maybe less."
Kael strapped something into the belt Silas handed him—an old stun pack pocketed from a fallen Inquisitor.
It would be like spitting at the sun, but small things could slow a Purifier's foot for seconds.
Seconds mattered.
He sat and pulled his knees up and looked at his hands.
The tattoo glow had receded but lines stayed like after-marks.
He felt…changed.
The Contractor form had taught him an efficiency.
It had also painted a target.
He was effective, lethal, flagged.
They moved deeper into the zone, toward a mapped hollow Lyra called the Belly.
It was a place where the city's heartbeat thinned—pipes and ducts and old utility rooms where lessons were learned by people who had no covenant with authority.
There, they could vanish…maybe.
As they crouched under a collapsed ticket turnstile, a small figure slipped from the shadow and sat across from Kael without a sound.
It was the petty-thief from the hideout, the one with the hopeful mouth.
He had not been the boy who had died in the open; he was someone else.
He looked at Kael with eyes older than his face.
He spat on the concrete, not at Kael, but at fate.
"They wrote the words," he said, voice small.
"They want us to read them. It's like they're telling us we're condemned."
Kael's hand closed into a fist.
He had expected tools.
He had not expected rhetoric.
Lyra breathed out a laugh with no humor.
"Then we decide what they mean by sin."
They sat in the dark and the city groaned like an animal with an abscess.
Above them, the Ordo's network had been set in motion.
The Arcanjo was a line on a clock.
The blood on the wall had done its work: it had let the System know what to hunt.
The sluice's final lock creaked and the distant scheduled voice of the Ordo sung with the inevitability of law.
AR C A N J O P U R I F I C A D O — DEPLOYMENT CONFIRMED — ETA 00:43:12.
On the wall, in the dead boy's blood, the three words read—THE SIN WILL BE PURIFIED.