Chapter 11: Breathprice
The order reached the lower pit before the blood dried on the Chain Yard gate. It came down through iron bell pipes, through debt runners with split lips, through old women who sold boiled fungus from cracked cups, through children who learned news by hiding under carts and breathing through their sleeves. Kael Vorr heard it from a boy with one eye and no shoes.
Alive price showed itself in how the survivors breathed smaller near the counter. The cost was not coin; it was the pit deciding survival had become another commodity. Renn counted under his breath as if names could keep flesh from becoming a fee.
HISS!
Alive price made the quiet lean, and Kael looked where the lean became pressure.
"Alive," the boy whispered.
The word passed through the drain mouth and changed shape in every body it touched. One worker clutched her infant closer. A hauler with one split ear looked at Kael’s knees before he looked at Kael’s face. Someone in the back made a hungry sound and hated himself for it.
HNNH!
Vaela Korr stopped walking.
Orrek Sain laughed once, too loud for a man whose shoulder hung wrong from the socket. Renn made a small sound and pressed his broken fingers against his chest. Kael stood in the mouth of a furnace drain with blood drying down his ribs, both palms torn open, and the weight of the broken gate still grinding through his bones.
Behind him, twenty three workers breathed like thieves. Some had chains still hanging from their wrists. Some carried nothing but hunger. One woman carried a sleeping infant wrapped in heat cloth so thin it showed the child’s ribs.
The one eyed boy swallowed.
"Sink Warden Malrec says the press freak belongs to him. Black Ledger says dead price is canceled. Capture price is triple. Anyone who hides him loses tongue, hands, and living ration. Anyone who brings him breathing gets debt ash wiped clean. One full year. Maybe two if he still talks."
Vaela looked at Kael.
"That is a better price than yesterday."
Orrek turned his head toward her.
"You always talk like that?"
"Only when people become portable money."
"Bad habit."
"Useful habit."
Kael said nothing. His throat tasted of old iron. The Sovereign Root lay quiet in the back of his skull, not asleep, not speaking, just waiting like a dark stone under water. The workers behind him heard the price. Fear moved through them faster than breath.
Kael heard the price too, but not as numbers. He heard it as the scrape of empty bowls, the cough of children sleeping through hunger because waking cost strength, the old little lies people told themselves before selling someone else to survive one more week.
A woman stepped back.
A chain boy stared at Kael’s legs as if measuring how hard it would be to trip him. Renn noticed. His face went pale under the grime.
"Kael."
"I see it."
He did. That was the ugly part. He saw the hunger in them. The math.
The broken hands and ruined backs and empty bellies. He had broken a gate for them, and still, if the price could feed their children, some of them would sell him before the next bell. Vaela leaned close enough that only he heard her.
"Do not make the heroic face. It makes people think you are stupid."
"What face?"
"The one where you pretend betrayal is surprising."
Orrek barked a laugh, then hissed because the motion dragged pain through his shoulder.
"Knife girl has teeth. I like her."
"Do not."
"Too late."
The lower pit shook under three bell strikes.
BANG!
Not alarm bells this time. Warden bells. The sound had more weight. It seemed to press dust flat against the ground.
From the upper tunnels, boots answered. Kael turned. Far along the black artery of the passage, yellow pressure lamps bobbed in a line. Black Ledger catchers. Not ordinary debt hands. These wore jaw guards and wrist hooks, carrying weighted nets woven from furnace gut and chain thread. Capture gear. Alive meant more work.
Vaela saw them and cursed under her breath.
"Net crew. They will not stab first. They will ruin knees, bind elbows, then drag."
Orrek spat red.
"Let them try."
"They are trying with twelve men and hooks. Your shoulder is hanging like old meat."
"Still got teeth."
"Those are not weapons."
"Depends where I bite."
Renn almost laughed. It came out shaky, but it was a laugh. One small crack in the fear.
Kael looked at the workers.
"Move through the ash sluice. Quiet. No one runs until I say."
A thin man with burned cheeks shook his head.
"We go with you, we die."
Kael stepped toward him.
The man flinched so hard his chain clicked. Kael stopped. That mattered. It mattered more than crushing the fear out of him.
"You stay, they take your hands for the broken gate. You sell me, Malrec still asks who helped me breathe after. There is no clean corner left."
The man stared back with wet eyes.
"Then what do we do?"
Kael did not have a kingdom. He did not have a banner. He did not have a plan big enough for terrified people and hungry children.
He had a body that refused to fold.
"You move."
The lamps came closer.
A voice rolled down the passage.
"Kael Vorr! Knees down, hands out, mouth open! Warden wants words from you! Give yourself up and the workers keep their tongues!"
Orrek leaned toward Kael.
"They always start with tongues. Means they are nervous."
Vaela drew both crescent knives.
"Means they brought tongue pliers."
The first net shot forward.
It unfolded in the air with a wet metallic snap, heavy enough to break a normal man’s spine if it landed clean.
Kael moved under it.
Not fast enough to look pretty. Fast enough to survive. The net scraped across his torn shoulder and ripped skin loose. It hit the wall behind him and stuck with six hooks buried in stone.
Pain flashed white.
No shard.
He had not taken it. He had dodged most of it.
Good.
He lunged.
A catcher swung a knee maul toward his thigh. Kael dropped his weight, caught the haft with both ruined palms, and drove his forehead into the man’s jaw.
CRACK!
Teeth burst from the catcher’s mouth and skittered across the drain floor. Kael twisted, used the maul as a lever, and slammed the man shoulder first into a wall bolt. The bolt punched through the jaw guard and came out behind the ear. The catcher hung there, legs kicking twice before going limp.
Cause. Iron bolt. Body weight. Bad angle.
The other catchers hesitated for half a breath.
Vaela used it.
She passed under a hook line, opened the strap behind a man’s knee, and cut across his wrist before he could scream. Not deep enough to kill. Deep enough to make the hook fall. She kicked it up, caught the chain, and whipped it around another catcher’s throat. Orrek stepped into a net because he had no patience for elegance.
It wrapped his torso. Three men pulled.
He went one knee down.
The catchers shouted in triumph.
Orrek grinned through blood.
"Pull harder."
They did.
His ruined shoulder stretched. The sound that came out of it was thick and wrong.
RIP!
Orrek roared, planted both feet, and yanked back with his uninjured arm and his whole back. Two catchers flew forward. Kael met the first with an elbow to the chest. Ribs folded inward under the sudden stop. The man hit the ground choking red foam.
The second struck Orrek’s forehead.
Orrek bit his nose off.
Vaela stared.
"I withdraw my earlier comment. Teeth are weapons."
Renn gagged.
The workers moved.
Not all of them. Enough.
They slipped into the ash sluice while Kael, Vaela, and Orrek held the passage. Fear did not become loyalty. Not yet. But movement mattered. A pressure rod struck Kael across the back.
THUD!
His knees hit stone.
The Sovereign Root stirred.
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[ SOVEREIGN ROOT INTERFACE OVERLAY ]
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≫ KINETIC FRICTION DETECTED: Black Ledger Pressure Rod Impact
≫ EXISTENTIAL SHARDS EXTRACTED: +1
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[!] SYSTEM NOTICE: Hostile Capture Force Recognized.
====================================================================
Kael breathed once.
Then he rose.
The catcher who had struck him stepped back.
"Press freak."
Kael’s hand closed around the rod.
"No."
He dragged the man forward and drove a knee into his gut. The pressure rod amplified badly in the man’s own harness. The stomach caved. The man folded around the impact and dropped, vomiting black blood.
"Alive," Kael said, voice low, "does not mean safe."
The remaining catchers broke formation.
One ran.
Vaela let him.
Kael looked at her.
"Why?"
"Because someone needs to tell Malrec you are hard to price."
Orrek wiped blood from his mouth and spat something that might have been cartilage.
"Also because I was tired of chasing."
Kael almost smiled while the ash sluice swallowed the last worker. Renn waited at the edge with shaking knees.
"Come on," the boy whispered.
Kael looked back once at the bodies, the broken nets, the jaw guard nailed to stone.
The pit had changed its price.
That meant the pit had admitted he was not just a dead man walking. He stepped into the ash dark after the others. Above them, Warden bells kept ringing. And somewhere far above Furnace Sink Nine, Sink Warden Malrec would hear that the first capture crew had failed.
The runner who escaped did not stop until his lungs burned raw. He carried no trophy, no captured worker, no clean explanation. Only a cracked jaw guard, one strip of net gut, and a report that would make every Black Ledger captain blame the man beside him first.
By the time he reached the upper lift bell, his hands shook too hard to pull the cord.
A Warden clerk pulled it for him and watched his bloody face without pity.
"Speak before you faint."
The runner swallowed broken spit.
"He rose after the rod. The girl cut through hooks. The big one bit a man. Workers moved."
The clerk wrote each word down.
His stylus pressed so hard it tore the paper margin. The runner stared at the rip like it might become his sentence. Above them, another Warden bell answered, slower than the first, and every clerk in the upper station looked toward the lower pit as if the dark had just learned to climb.
Then he added one more line on his own.
First capture crew failed.