Chapter 26: Retrieval Hooks!!
Retrieval had teeth.
The ash road narrowed around the retrieval bodies until the route felt like a throat. Road-bone clicked underfoot, and corpse dust lifted as if the dead were being called back to work.
Their name became clear when the first one bent over a corpse-mark and tried to pull purpose back into dead muscle. Road-bone twitched under hands that had stopped belonging to themselves.
CLINK!
The ash road had too many mouths for a quiet room. Pipes, cracks, grates, ledgers, hinges; each one could carry hunger if the wrong hand woke it.
Nothing about the passage was symbolic. If the road wanted payment, it found skin, breath, blood, or a handhold and took from there.
The first retrieval body did not rush.
That was how Kael knew it had been made by people who believed ownership was stronger than fear. It stepped into the violet lantern wash with chain hooks grown through both forearms, Court mask smooth and pale, chest carved open around a dark mouth symbol that pulsed in time with the mark in Kael’s hand. Its long fingers dragged against the pit wall, leaving black lines in the stone.
Behind it, two more shapes entered the tunnel throat. Same mask. Same chest mouth. Different arms.
One carried hooked ribs outside its skin like a cage. The other had its knees bent backward for lunging through low tunnels.
The freed workers froze.
Orrek stood at Kael’s left, chain fist shaking from pain and pressure residue. Vaela stood at his right, crescents low, eyes moving across joints, straps, hooks, exits, and weak points. Renn was halfway up the rope with the fever girl when the first retrieval body lifted its head.
A voice came out of the chest mouth.
"Marked asset. Returned cargo. Stolen cargo. Chain thief."
Orrek bared his teeth.
"It talks too much."
Vaela whispered, "It is counting charges."
Kael felt the mark in his palm open under the bandage.
Not bleed. Open.
Black pressure pushed between his fingers and stretched toward the retrieval body’s chest mouth. The two marks recognized each other. Not as friends. As two pieces of the same ugly law trying to decide which one had the right to command the body between them.
Kael closed his fist.
The retrieval body tilted its mask.
"Asset resists."
It moved.
Fast.
Not human fast. Court fast. Like the road had removed a few inches between them and charged interest on the missing distance.
Vaela cut at its wrist hook.
CLANG!
Her blade bit metal bone and bounced. She twisted away before the second hook tore through where her throat had been.
Kael stepped in.
His shoulder slammed into the retrieval body’s chest.
BOOM!
The impact should have thrown it back. It did not. The chest mouth opened wider and swallowed part of the force. Kael felt his own momentum drag into it, pulled down and inward as if the thing had a pit inside its ribs.
His boots skidded.
The retrieval body’s left hook punched toward his marked hand. Kael caught the forearm with both hands and drove his knee into the elbow joint.
CRACK!
The joint bent, but not enough. The hook grazed his bandage and ripped it open.
RIP!
Black pressure spilled from Kael’s palm. The retrieval body’s chest mouth answered with a wet click.
CLICK!
The second retrieval body lunged past them toward the rope. Renn shouted and kicked at its mask. His heel hit smooth bone.
THUD!
It did not care.
The fever girl screamed as the hook rib body reached for her ankle. Orrek threw himself into it from the side. His uninjured shoulder hit its ribs. His ruined shoulder screamed through his face, but he kept moving. Chain fist wrapped around one exposed hook rib and yanked down.
The hook rib sliced into his forearm.
SPLIT!
Blood ran hot over black metal.
"Up!" Orrek roared. "Get her up!"
Renn climbed with one arm and shoved the fever girl toward the shelf. The old woman grabbed her by the collar and hauled like she was dragging laundry. The third retrieval body sprang low at the freed workers still in the pit.
Vaela intercepted it.
Not with strength. With cruelty.
She dropped under its first hook, planted one crescent blade into the soft seam behind its backward knee, and used her whole weight to rip sideways.
SKRRT!
The seam opened. Black fluid sprayed. The body stumbled, but its other leg snapped forward and kicked Vaela in the ribs.
THUD!
She hit the chain rack and slid down with air punched from her lungs.
Kael saw three things at once.
Renn trying to lift the fever girl.
Orrek bleeding onto hook ribs while refusing to release the second retrieval body. Vaela on the floor as the low sprinter turned back toward her. The retrieval bodies were not soldiers. That became clear in the first thirty breaths.
Soldiers killed threats first. Collectors protected value. These things moved around Kael’s lethal angles whenever a worker got too close to a wall, a chain, or a tunnel bend. They did not care if Kael hit them. They cared if his strike created a path for cargo to escape. Their hooks always returned to wrists, ankles, throats, and marked flesh.
Vaela saw the pattern and hated it.
"They are herding us!"
The low sprinter snapped its backward knees and drove two workers toward the false side of the pit. The workers stumbled away from the hook and straight toward a cluster of rising chains. Renn abandoned the rope, slid down three feet, and kicked one worker in the chest hard enough to knock him away from the trap.
THUD!
"That was rescue," he barked before the man could curse.
The hook rib body answered by dragging one chain across the floor. The chain did not aim for Kael. It aimed for the boy Orrek had freed.
Orrek saw red.
He caught the chain with his uninjured hand and wrapped it around his forearm before it reached the boy. The Court mark stamped into the links bit through his skin at once. His ruined shoulder sagged, but his feet stayed planted.
"Not him," he growled.
The chain pulled.
Orrek slid half a step.
Kael moved to help, but the first retrieval body shifted with him, keeping itself between Kael and Orrek. Not random. Tactical. It knew Kael was the strongest body in the pit and still chose not to fight him honestly. That told Kael enough to be afraid in the correct direction.
The retrieval bodies did not bleed attention. A man in pain looked at the wound. A beast looked at the hand that hurt it. These things kept looking at the group inventory: injured bodies, loose tools, food bundles, the cart frame, the fever girl, Orrek’s chain, Vaela’s blades. They were not only retrieving flesh. They were rebuilding the ledger in their heads.
That meant killing one would not end the hunt. The dead road had already learned what the group carried.
Raw resistance would not be enough.
The first retrieval body proved it by driving its bent hook into Kael’s side.
CHUNK!
The hook did not go deep enough to gut him, but it caught muscle and tried to drag him toward the chest mouth. The Court mark on the hook crawled into the wound, cold and intelligent. Kael’s old strength could take hits. That did not mean it could protect everyone. He grabbed the hook embedded in his side and held it there instead of letting it tear free.
Pain burst white through his ribs and the mark in his hand pulsed.
The retrieval body said, "Return begins."
Kael looked past it at the workers.
The boy Orrek had freed was trying to pull a chained woman toward the rope. The old woman was on the shelf, screaming orders with blood on her teeth. Brak had woken enough to vomit over the cart rail. The fever girl was alive.
Alive meant slow.
Slow meant they would die if Kael only endured. Vaela pushed herself up, one arm around her ribs.
"Kael! It eats straight force!"
He had already felt it.
The chest mouth swallowed impact. The hook limbs applied ownership pressure. The masks ignored fear. The knees and ribs were specialized for tunnels and cargo retrieval. A known threat, now. Not mystery. Not rumor. Not a shadow in the road.
Known.
The Sovereign Root waited under his skin with twenty eight unallocated shards. Kael did not spend yet because the first rule of survival was not panic. He watched one more breath.
The retrieval body pulled.
His feet dragged a finger width.
Behind it, the second body tore free of Orrek’s grip and turned toward the cart.
The third lifted its hook over Vaela, and Kael’s fingers tightened around the hook in his side.
"Next opening," he said.
Orrek spat blood.
"Opening for what?"
Kael stared into the retrieval body’s blank mask.
"For me to stop saving strength like a fool."
The chest mouth clicked again.
CLICK!
Renn saw the links point and understood the next count before anyone said it. One marked man had become more valuable than fifteen weak bodies. That was not mercy. That was pricing. And if the road priced Kael high enough, every frightened worker near him became bait for a better transaction.
CLINK! CLINK! CLINK!
The pit chains rose from the floor, every link pointing toward Kael as if the road itself had decided he was the weight that would pay for everyone. Even the freed boy understood. His face changed from fear of dying to fear of being used to purchase someone else’s cage. Nobody laughed. The road had made the joke too real.