Chapter 15: Mapbone!
The dead cart moved because Orrek pushed it, cursed at it, and threatened to eat one wheel if it squealed again.
Mapbone carried grime in its cuts and route pressure in the grooves. When Kael saw it, the name became weight: a guide carved from what the pit had already consumed.
HISS!
The air thickened, then thinned, then thickened again. Breathing became a task instead of a habit. The glass scratch narrowed the danger into a physical angle instead of leaving it as fear.
The wheel squealed anyway.
Orrek leaned close to it.
"Last warning."
Renn, pale and exhausted, whispered, "Can wheels be afraid?" Vaela walked beside the cart with one crescent in hand and the other tucked under her sleeve.
"Around him, maybe."
Kael should have laughed. The sound did not reach his mouth. His back burned where the corpse rack hooks had torn skin. The pressure puncher bruise near his ribs felt deep enough to have a voice. His body wanted rest with the ugly honesty of meat pushed beyond its limits.
But Furnace Sink Nine did not sell rest.
It sold delay.
They had bought a little with blood.
The cart lane ran under the corpse market and sloped toward older tunnels, places where the pit had abandoned its first mistakes. The ceiling lowered. Pipes ran overhead like black veins. Warm condensation dripped from them, each drop striking the cart tarp with a soft, rotten patter.
Inside the cart lay three bodies they had not chosen to move. One old man with pressure crushed legs. One worker with a throat tag reading UNKNOWN. One wrapped shape too small for anyone to discuss.
Renn did not look at that one.
Kael did.
He made himself.
The Sovereign Root could make him stronger. It could not make looking away into courage. Behind them, the corpse market noise faded. Ahead, the Hollow Court mark repeated on the walls every thirty steps: hollow crown, pressure circle, three small cuts beneath.
The mark showed only one local artery of a prison-court body old enough to make poor workers mistake a branch for the sky. Vaela grew quieter each time they passed one.
Orrek noticed.
"You know that mark."
"Everyone with sense knows that mark."
"I asked if you know it."
She kept walking.
"This branch of the Hollow Court buys people before they meet them. Contracts. Names. Debts. Secrets. Sometimes children. Sometimes entire work crews. They do not drag like Black Ledger. They make the pit decide you were theirs all along."
Renn hugged himself.
"Can they own someone who says no?"
Vaela did not answer fast enough.
Mapbone tightened Orrek’s mouth into the shape he wore before breaking furniture, men, or bad laws.
"No."
Vaela looked at him.
"You cannot punch every paper in Furnace Sink Nine."
"Then I will start with the hands holding them."
Orrek grinned.
"Answer holds. Still dumb though."
The cart wheel squealed again.
KREEE!
Orrek kicked it.
THUD!
The sound bounced down the tunnel and returned wrong.
Not echo. Answer.
Kael raised a fist.
Everyone stopped.
A low pressure hum moved through the passage. It came from ahead, then underfoot, then inside the teeth. The hollow crown marks on the walls warmed from dull gray to dark red.
Renn whimpered.
Vaela whispered, "Do not touch the marks again."
Kael looked at his fingers. The symbol from the side chute had left a faint circle burned into his skin. Not deep. Not painful. Yet.
The dead cart shifted.
The wrapped small body rolled against the side board.
A hollow click sounded beneath it.
Orrek stepped back.
"Dead cart has secrets. I dislike secret carts."
Vaela lifted the tarp with the tip of a crescent. Under the small wrapped body, fixed into a slot in the cart floor, was a pale strip of bone carved flat and thin. Not human thigh. Not rib. Too dense. Too clean. Lines ran across it in dark burned grooves.
A map.
Kael reached for it.
Vaela slapped his hand away.
"Did the burning circle teach you nothing?"
"It taught me it reacts."
"That is not the lesson I wanted you to learn."
Orrek leaned in.
"Looks like tunnels."
Renn squinted.
"No. Tunnels have rough turns. These lines are too clean."
Vaela’s eyes narrowed.
"Pressure routes. Ownership routes. Hollow Court uses old pump veins."
Kael studied the bone without touching it. The main line ran from Furnace Sink Nine through three small circles, then down to a shape like a chair without legs. Above it was the hollow crown.
"Where?"
Vaela breathed out.
"Lower Court intake. Maybe. Or a buying chamber. I have only seen fragments."
"Why was it under a child?" Renn asked.
The wrapped shape in the cart answered instead, shifting as if the question had weight. Cloth rasped over dead bone.
SSSHK!
Renn stepped back so fast his heel struck the wall. Kael did not tell him to be brave. Some questions deserved fear before answers.
The pressure hum deepened.
The corpse with UNKNOWN on its throat tag opened its eyes.
Renn screamed.
The body sat up in the cart with stiff, wrong motion. Its eyes were not alive. They were filled with black wet shine, like oil under lamp light. The throat tag split down the center and unfolded into a small pressure seal. A voice came from the corpse’s mouth, but the jaw barely moved.
"Unregistered asset detected. Kael Vorr. Flesh Bound Density. Basal irregularity. Capture value disputed. Ownership review initiated."
Vaela went pale under grime.
"Court mouth."
Orrek grabbed the corpse by the shoulders.
"Then it can shut."
The corpse moved faster than dead meat should. Its hand drove into Orrek’s ruined shoulder with two fingers stiff as rods. They sank into the wound Mara’s hook had opened.
Orrek bellowed.
RIP!
Kael struck before thought finished.
His palm hit the corpse’s chest.
It should have caved.
It did not.
A pressure seal under the skin flashed dark violet. Force rebounded up Kael’s arm, into shoulder, spine, teeth.
BANGG!
He staggered back, boots carving lines in muck.
====================================================================
[ SOVEREIGN ROOT INTERFACE OVERLAY ]
--------------------------------------------------------------------
≫ REALITY STRESS DETECTED: Hollow Court Corpse Mouth Seal
≫ EXISTENTIAL SHARDS EXTRACTED: +1
--------------------------------------------------------------------
[!] SYSTEM NOTICE: External Ownership Pressure Rejected By Biological Core.
====================================================================
The corpse turned its oil filled eyes toward him.
"Correction. Asset resists mark. Notify intake."
Vaela’s crescent took its wrist off. The hand remained inside Orrek’s shoulder for half a breath before dropping. Orrek screamed again and nearly crushed the cart handle in his good fist. Renn grabbed a furnace bone and struck the corpse’s knee. It buckled. Not from strength. From the knee already being dead and poorly controlled.
Kael moved in.
This time he did not hit the sealed chest. He hooked one arm behind the corpse’s neck, planted his foot against the cart wheel, and twisted the head sideways with his whole body. The pressure seal flashed once, trying to hold structure. Vaela stabbed both crescents into the seal lines under the ribs and pulled outward.
Orrek, still howling, drove his forehead into the corpse’s face.
CRACK!
The skull split across the brow where dead bone had dried thin under old pressure damage. Kael kept twisting.
SNAP!
The neck broke.
The corpse collapsed, oil light leaking from its eyes and mouth. Cause. Dead structure. Seal disrupted. Joint torque. Prior decay. Combined force.
The pressure hum stopped.
For one second, the tunnel gave them silence. Then every hollow crown mark along the walls flared dark red. Far ahead, something answered with three slow pulses.
THUD!
Not sound from a bell.
Sound from a place waking up.
Vaela pulled the map bone free with a strip of cloth wrapped around her hand. The bone was hot enough to smoke.
"We cannot stay in marked tunnels."
Kael looked at Orrek. The big man had dropped to one knee, face gray, blood pouring through his fingers from the shoulder wound.
"Can you move?"
Orrek glared up at him.
"Ask me something respectful."
"Can you fight?"
"Badly."
"Good enough, it will hold for the next mile.""
Renn pressed a ration cloth against Orrek’s shoulder. His broken fingers shook.
"You are leaking a lot."
Orrek looked at the boy.
"So are most useful things. Pipes. Men. Bad plans."
Vaela almost smiled, then caught herself. Kael took the front of the dead cart. His palms screamed around the handle. He pushed anyway.
The map bone in Vaela’s hand pointed down the tunnel without moving. Its burned grooves gave off faint heat, guiding or warning. Maybe both. Behind them, the corpse market would be selling fresh news by now.
Above them, Malrec wanted him alive. Ahead, the Hollow Court had spoken his name through a dead mouth and called him property.
Kael pushed harder.
The cart wheel squealed.
This time, no one joked. At the next bend, the tunnel wall opened into a vast dark shaft lined with pressure chains and old intake doors. At the bottom, so far below the lamps could not touch it, dark violet light pulsed like a buried heart.
The map bone burned brighter.
And the mark on Kael’s hand answered.
No one moved for a long breath.
Even Orrek stopped bleeding loudly, as if his body understood that noise had become expensive.
Then the dark shaft breathed upward.
Cold pressure rolled over them and pressed the old corpse cart backward by a finger’s width. The map bone in Vaela’s cloth wrap pulsed once, twice, then settled into a dull violet glow that painted her knuckles like bruises.
Renn stared into the shaft and whispered, "Something is down there."
Vaela answered without looking away.
"Many things are down there. That is the problem."
Kael felt the mark on his hand tighten, not like a chain, but like a hand trying to learn the shape of his skin. He closed his fist until the burned circle vanished under blood and torn palm lines.
"Then we do not go down as property."
The shaft pulsed again.
Old intake chains far below pulled tight without hands.
KRRRNNG!
The dead cart rolled backward another inch. Orrek planted his boot against the wheel and held it there, face tight with shoulder pain. Vaela’s cloth wrap smoked around the map bone. Renn whispered the number of people still breathing near him, as if a count could keep the shaft from deciding they were cargo.
Far below, a door opened.