The bone dust never settled.
It hung in the air like powdered glass, catching what little light filtered down from the upper layers—a sickly, jaundiced glow that turned everything the color of old bruises. Kaelen's lungs had long since stopped fighting it. The cough that wracked the other scavengers, the wet hacking that painted the rubble with blood, had burned itself out of him years ago. Now he breathed the ash as easily as air, felt it coat his throat, settle in his chest like sediment at the bottom of a polluted sea.
He moved through the Bone Graveyard with the efficiency of a carrion bird.
The field stretched for kilometers in every direction—a vast plain of skeletal architecture where the divine remains of some long-dead god had been dumped and forgotten. Ribs the size of buildings jutted from the ground at impossible angles. Vertebrae formed tunnels that the desperate used for shelter until the marrow dust inside them stopped their hearts. Finger bones—some as tall as houses, others small enough to palm—littered the landscape like discarded tools.
Kaelen's eyes tracked the terrain with the cold assessment of a predator evaluating prey. Not the bones themselves. Those were worthless, too large to move, too contaminated to process. What he wanted were the fragments—the chips and shards that broke free when the upper city's industrial hammers pounded new foundation pilings into the corpse of god. Those fragments, small enough to carry, dense enough to hold value, glowed faintly with residual divine energy.
The glow was what got people killed.
A scavenger to his left—a woman whose face had been eroded by the dust until her features were as smooth as river stone—bent to retrieve a shard no larger than a tooth. The fragment pulsed with a pale green luminescence. Pretty. Valuable.
Stupid.
Kaelen didn't break stride as the earth beneath her gave way. The bone field was honeycomb-fragile, riddled with cavities and voids where the marrow had been extracted centuries ago. She dropped into darkness with barely a sound—just the brief scrape of fingernails on bone, a wet impact far below, then nothing.
No one stopped. No one looked. The rhythm of the harvest continued unbroken.
He found his own prize three hours before dawn—dawn being a relative term in a place where the sun had never been seen. The fragment was lodged in the eye socket of a skull half-buried in the dust, its surface smooth as polished obsidian, shot through with veins of gold that pulsed in time with something that might have been a heartbeat.
Kaelen's hand closed around it.
Heat.
The fragment burned against his palm—not the heat of fire, but something deeper, more fundamental. It felt like touching the moment before a scream. He held it anyway, watching the golden threads writhe beneath its surface, and felt nothing at all.
A shadow fell across him.
He didn't need to turn. The smell gave them away—three men, unwashed bodies overlaid with the copper tang of old violence. Scavengers like him, but hungrier. Desperate enough to kill for a fragment that might buy them a week of synthetic protein paste in the lower market.
"That's ours," one of them said. The voice was ruined, vocal cords scarred by dust inhalation. "Put it down."
Kaelen stood slowly, the fragment still clutched in his fist. He turned.
The speaker was taller than him, corded with the kind of lean muscle that came from a lifetime of climbing through wreckage. His companions flanked him—one carrying a length of rebar, sharpened to a point, the other empty-handed but wearing brass knuckles made from melted-down bone fragments.
Kaelen looked at them the way someone might look at a stain on the floor. Something to note. Something to step over.
"Walk away," he said.
The tall one smiled. What teeth he had left were filed to points. "Make us."
The mathematics of violence were simple. Three against one. They had reach, numbers, weapons. He had the high ground—barely—and the fragment, which they wanted intact.
He pocketed the fragment.
The tall one lunged first, telegraphing the attack with a shift of his shoulders that might as well have been a written invitation. Kaelen swayed left, let the man's momentum carry him forward, and drove his knee into the descending face. Cartilage crunched. Blood sprayed across the bone dust, turning it into crimson mud.
Hot blood splashed across Kaelen's hand.
The fragment in his pocket pulsed.
Not heat this time. Something else. A sensation like hooks sinking into his sternum, pulling inward, dragging something awake that had been sleeping in the marrow of his bones.
The one with the rebar came next, thrusting the makeshift spear at Kaelen's midsection. Too slow. Kaelen caught the weapon mid-thrust, stepped inside the arc of attack, and drove his forehead into the bridge of the man's nose. The impact rang through his skull like a bell. The scavenger dropped, hands clutching his face, blood pouring between his fingers.
More blood.
The fragment pulsed again, harder. Hungry.
Kaelen's vision flickered.
For a fraction of a second, the world inverted—the bone dust turning black, the blood on his hands glowing brilliant crimson-gold. Then it snapped back to normal, leaving him with a splitting headache and the taste of copper in his mouth.
The third man hesitated.
Kaelen didn't.
He kicked the fallen rebar into the air, caught it, and drove the sharpened end through the hesitant man's foot, pinning him to the bone beneath. The scream was brief—cut off when Kaelen's fist connected with his temple. The impact split skin. Blood welled up, ran down the man's face, dripped onto Kaelen's knuckles.
The fragment in his pocket went from pulsing to burning.
Kaelen staggered back, hand clutching his chest where the hooks felt like they were burrowing through his ribcage. The pain was white-hot, surgical, precise. And underneath it, something else—a hunger so profound it felt like his skeleton was hollow and needed to be filled.
The tall one, still on his knees and choking on his own blood, tried to stand.
Kaelen pushed him backward.
The man's weight did the rest. The thin crust of bone beneath him, already weakened by countless footsteps, shattered like ice. He fell through, arms windmilling, and then there was only darkness and the wet sound of a body striking stone far below.
Kaelen wiped his hands on his coat.
The blood didn't come off. It soaked into the fabric, into his skin, and where it touched, the fragment in his pocket sang.
Behind him, the other two scavengers groaned in the dust. One would die from his wounds. The other might survive if infection didn't set in. Kaelen gave it no thought. The bone field was a sieve. It filtered out weakness with the mechanical indifference of water separating from sand.
He had the fragment. That was all that mattered.
But as he walked toward the lower market, his hand kept returning to the wet patch on his coat where the blood had soaked through.
And the fragment kept pulsing.
Hungry.