Chapter 16: Hollow Mark!
The hollow mark waited with the patience of a wound that had already chosen its next owner.
CLANG!
The pit tried to make itself part of the room. Kael refused that trick; rooms had edges, and edges could be used.
DRIP!
The hollow mark made little warnings loud: a sleeve scrape, a held curse, a knife grip changing hands.
The mark on Kael’s hand did not bleed.
That made it worse.
Blood was honest. Blood came from skin, muscle, split vessels, torn places that could be wrapped or burned shut or ignored until the body chose collapse. The Hollow Court mark sat beneath the skin like a thought that had learned how to carve. A thin ring. Three small cuts under it. A hollow crown at the center.
It pulsed when the map bone pulsed.
It tightened when Kael looked away.
Vaela Korr crouched beside him under the dead cart and held the map bone with cloth wrapped around both hands. She had not put it down since they dragged themselves out of the marked shaft. The bone smoked through the rag in slow threads.
"That is not a map anymore," she said.
Orrek Sain sat with his back against the cart wheel, teeth clenched while Renn tied ration cloth around his ruined shoulder. The boy’s broken fingers made every knot ugly, but he did not stop trying.
"Looks like a map," Orrek said.
"Then eat it and tell me where it takes you."
"Bad mood."
"Court marks do that."
Kael flexed his hand.
The burned circle pulled against his palm lines. No pain. Just pressure. Ownership without permission. A brand would have claimed skin. This wanted route, door, and answer.
"Can it track us?"
Vaela looked at him as if he had asked whether fire could be warm.
"Yes. Maybe not like a hound. More like a debt. It will tell the right door when you stand near it."
Renn looked up.
"Doors can know people?"
"In the Hollow Court, doors know prices."
Orrek spat to the side.
"I hate clever doors."
Kael closed his fist until the mark vanished beneath blood and dirt. The group had taken shelter in an abandoned pressure washer bay, a low chamber with cracked stone basins and old chains hanging from the ceiling. Once, workers had been washed here before inspection, scrubbed until debt ash left their skin and bruises showed clean for buyers. Now the basins held gray water, dead beetles, and the reflected glow of the map bone.
Outside, old furnace roads groaned under pressure rain.
THUD!
Each drop landed like a warning.
Vaela cut away the back of Kael’s torn shirt and hissed despite herself.
"You have hooks in you."
"Had."
"No. Have. Two pieces broke under the skin."
Orrek leaned forward with interest.
"Can we pull them out?"
Vaela looked at his shoulder.
"You are not allowed to suggest medical things."
"I know pain."
"You know shouting at pain until it gets embarrassed."
Renn’s mouth twitched. Kael almost smiled, then Vaela dug the tip of a crescent into the skin near his shoulder blade.
His breath locked.
"Do not move."
"I was not."
"You considered it."
She worked the first metal shard free. It came out slick with dark blood and a small string of meat.
RIP!
Kael’s fingers crushed grit into powder. The Sovereign Root did not stir. Vaela’s blade was not hostile pressure. It was aid, rough as it was.
Good.
He was learning the edge of the engine.
Pain alone was not payment. Injury alone was not payment. The matrix demanded resistance against the world trying to end him, bind him, claim him, or crush him. It did not reward him for being foolish with his own flesh. Vaela dropped the hook piece into a basin.
TIK!
"One."
Orrek grunted.
"Only one?"
"There are two. Try counting with the fingers you have not ruined."
Kael looked at the Sovereign Root register without calling the full sheet. The numbers sat in his mind like stones. Core Mass Density: 6. Gravity Vector Impact: 4. Cellular Acceleration: 5. Primordial Marrow Layer: 4. Metaphysical Resistance: 4. Unallocated Existential Shards: 25. Twenty five ways to change his body. Twenty five chances to survive something worse. Twenty five temptations. He could put them all into density and become harder to break. He could push acceleration and move before nets closed. He could strengthen resistance against the Court mark.
The register was not a game sheet. It was a butcher’s inventory written inside his own nerves: mass, pull, repair speed, marrow depth, resistance against things that wanted to own what flesh should not sell. The Root had not told him where it came from. It had only made one rule clear through pain and proof. Nothing moved unless Kael commanded it. No hidden hand spent for him. No secret master corrected him from behind the numbers.
His hand tightened.
Vaela saw the shift.
"Do not spend because you are angry."
Kael looked at her.
"You know what spending looks like?"
"I know men. They find power, then spend it like drunk gamblers."
Orrek lifted one bloody finger.
"I have never spent power like a drunk gambler."
Vaela did not turn.
"You spent food tags as lies."
"That was politics."
Kael breathed through the second hook piece coming free.
CRACK!
Not bone. Metal bending as Vaela pried it loose. The shard fell into the basin beside the first.
TIK!
Renn finished Orrek’s shoulder wrap and sat back, sweat running down his face.
"It will not hold long."
Orrek looked at the cloth.
"It will hold until it stops."
"That is not useful."
"Most truths are not."
Then the map bone pulsed.
Everyone stopped.
The grooves burned violet. Lines crawled across the bone, shifting. What had been a route now bent into a warning shape. A circle closed behind them. Three marks opened ahead.
Vaela whispered, "Court intake is waking."
Kael stood.
His back screamed. His ribs followed. His marked hand went cold.
"How long?"
"Could be minutes. Could be one bell."
Orrek pushed himself up with a sound like a breaking door.
"Then we move before clever doors start thinking."
Renn grabbed the smallest food sack.
Kael looked at the workers hiding in the side basins. Fewer now. Some had fled after the corpse mouth. Some had stayed because hunger had hooks deeper than fear. One old woman touched the food piece he had given her and would not meet his eyes.
Vaela saw the look.
"She will sell us."
"Maybe."
"Not maybe."
Kael looked at the mark on his hand.
"Then Malrec and the Court will both know we moved."
Orrek grinned with too much blood on his teeth.
"Good. Let them chase in the same tunnel and bite each other."
Vaela paused.
"That is stupid."
"You always say that before liking my ideas."
"I never like your ideas. I survive near them."
The map bone pulsed again.
THUD!
The mark in Kael’s palm answered without sound.
He felt it through the mark, through the floor, through the old washer chains above them. The Court was not chasing like men chased. It was rearranging the pit so the road would become a hand.
Kael did not spend the shards.
Not yet.
He wrapped his burned hand in torn cloth and stepped toward the furnace road.
"Move."
Behind them, the old washer bay chains began to sway without wind.
The old woman did sell them.
Not with words at first. With a look. With the way her eyes slid toward the upper vent when a Black Ledger runner passed above the washer bay. With the way her hand tightened around the fungus strip Kael had given her, as if mercy had become evidence. Vaela saw it and said nothing until they were already moving.
Then she leaned close to Kael.
"You understand what you keep buying, yes?"
"Trouble."
"No. Witnesses. Trouble is honest. Witnesses grow mouths."
Kael looked back once. The old woman was still in the bay, half hidden behind a cracked basin, chewing slowly like every bite had guilt inside it.
He could have hated her.
It would have been easy.
Furnace Sink Nine made betrayal cheaper than bread. People did not sell roads because they were born rotten. They sold roads because the pit taught them that another person’s death might keep their own ribs from showing for one more bell.
That made the pit the enemy.
But it did not make the knife in his back imaginary.
The mark on his palm pulsed again.
Kael stopped under a leaning pressure arch. The map bone warmed in Vaela’s cloth. The line on it crawled, correcting itself, trying to pull them toward the same violet depth.
"It is learning us," Vaela said.
Renn hugged the food sack tighter.
"Can maps learn?"
Kael shifted into the archway until every eye had to pass through him first. That gave Vaela one breath to read the floor.
"Bad ones can."
Kael opened his marked hand. The hollow crown looked cracked where his skin folded over it. Not broken. Just interrupted. He pressed his thumb into the center until pain finally answered.
No system. No shard.
The old bolt by his boot trembled once. Not from wind. Something below the floor had answered the mark.
He did not want reward for poking a brand. He wanted a line between himself and the thing trying to call him property.
"The next time it pulls," he said, "we answer together. Not because you follow me. Because if it takes one of us, it sells the rest cheaper."
Vaela’s eyes narrowed.
"That is almost a plan."
"Almost?"
"A plan has exits. Yours has shoulders."
Orrek brightened.
"Shoulders work."
"Yours barely does."
"Still present. Still voting."
For one breath, the pressure around them eased. Not safety. A small human thing in a tunnel that wanted to become a contract.
Then the upper vent clicked.
Once.
Twice.
Three times.
A signal.
Vaela looked toward the sound.
"Sold."
Kael wrapped the marked hand again.
"Then we move before the buyers agree on a price."
Dust slid off the lower stones. Beneath it, something breathed once and tried to sound like old masonry. Kael had stopped granting mercy to things that pretended to be scenery.