Chapter 4: Black Seven!
The first marrow leech landed on Renn’s shoulder. He screamed and slapped at it with his broken hand.
Black Seven arrived as seven moving corrections, each one dark-coated, iron-breathed, and certain the pit would forgive anything done in its name.
THUD!
Furnace Sink Nine had too many mouths for a quiet room. Pipes, cracks, grates, ledgers, hinges; each one could carry hunger if the wrong hand woke it.
DRIP!
Black seven bent the silence to one side, making the room feel heavier where the danger waited.
Bad choice.
The thing fastened to the splinted fingers and swelled around them like a wet white knot. Its body pulsed. Thin red lines spread through its belly as it drank through the torn skin. Renn’s scream changed.
AAAAH!
The sound thinned instead of rising, the kind a body made when pain found the place where panic had been hiding and put teeth there too. The nearest pipe answered with a wet tremor, and three more leeches turned their blind mouths toward the boy.
Kael caught the leech behind its head and pulled.
It did not come loose.
The mouth had hooks.
Vaela’s crescent blade flashed past Kael’s wrist and cut the leech in half without touching the boy.
SPLAT!
White meat and black blood slapped the floor. The mouth half kept biting until Vaela pinned it with her heel and twisted.
"Do not pull them straight," she said.
Renn sobbed. "You could have said that first."
"You could have not worn one."
More dropped from the ceiling.
They were the length of Kael’s forearm, pale and blind, with rings of hook teeth underneath. Some landed in the water and vanished. Others stuck to stone and launched themselves again with disgusting little pops.
PLOP!
Behind them, boots and rods hammered down the chute. Ahead of them, the leeches thickened.
Vaela looked at Kael. "You made any friends today?"
"No."
"That’s okay. Less guilt when they die behind us."
Vaela did not move like a pit fighter or a worker. She belonged to tight spaces. Her feet found dry stone where Kael saw only slime. She cut low, then high, never wasting a full swing. Crescents opened leech bodies in clean arcs. Black blood sprayed across her forearms.
Kael shoved Renn behind him and followed with less grace.
A leech struck his ribs.
Hooks dug into broken meat.
Pain blanked his vision.
He grabbed the thing and remembered too late not to pull straight. It tore skin as it stretched. He snarled, pinned its mouth against his own side with his palm, and crushed down.
SPLAT!
The leech burst under his hand. Its teeth stayed in him. The Sovereign Root woke like it had smelled food.
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[ SOVEREIGN ROOT INTERFACE OVERLAY ]
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≫ KINETIC FRICTION DETECTED: MARROW LEECH VENOM PRESSURE
≫ EXISTENTIAL SHARDS EXTRACTED: 1
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▶ MANUAL ALLOCATION COMMAND: NONE GIVEN
▶ UPDATE COMPLETE: UNALLOCATED EXISTENTIAL SHARDS → 14
====================================================================
Vaela saw his eyes flicker toward nothing.
"You seeing ghosts?"
"Counting pain."
"That is the stupidest thing I have heard this week."
"Long week?"
"It is Black Seven. Every week is long."
The tunnel opened into a drain chamber with a broken wheel pit in the center. Old water turned slowly below, thick as oil. Pipe bones crossed overhead. Some had human names scratched into them. Kael saw at least three sets of recent boot marks near the far wall.
The names mattered. Someone had scratched them high, where a dragged corpse could not reach. Someone alive had climbed, cut skin on rust, and written proof before the drain swallowed the rest. Black Seven was not a route; it was a place the pit used when it wanted people to vanish with paperwork still clean.
Vaela saw him seeing.
"Corpse routes," she said. "People get dragged through here when families cannot pay burial tax."
Renn hugged his wounded hand. "You sell them?"
"Sometimes."
The boy stared.
Vaela did not soften. "Dead bodies feed living ones. Hate me after you survive."
Enforcers reached the chamber entrance.
There were four this time, with lamp rods and hook nets. The front man stopped when he saw the leeches moving across the ceiling.
"Back," he ordered.
Too late.
Vaela flicked a crescent blade upward and cut a swollen leech from the pipe above them. It dropped onto the lead enforcer’s helmet and slid under the back rim before he could curse.
The man convulsed.
His rod fired into the ceiling.
BANG!
A rain of leeches fell over the enforcement crew.
Screaming filled the chamber.
Kael moved through it.
He did not think. Thought slowed things. His body was pain, hunger, and one black root drinking every collision. He slammed into the second enforcer before the man cleared his net.
Shoulder to chest.
THUD!
The enforcer hit the wall. Kael grabbed the helmet and drove it backward into stone.
BANG!
The man stayed up.
Kael drove his knee into the man’s thigh.
CRACK!
The leg bent sideways. The man fell, and Kael stomped the wrist holding the rod.
CRUNCH!
Alive, but no longer chasing.
The rod had stopped moving.
Another net flew over Kael’s shoulders and tightened around his chest. Hooks bit his back. The enforcer behind him hauled, trying to pull him off balance.
Kael let the pull turn him.
He stepped with it, then threw himself backward. His spine and shoulders crashed into the enforcer and drove both of them into the broken wheel pit.
BOOM!
The edge cracked. The enforcer’s lower back struck stone first. Something in him gave with a wet snap. Kael rolled away before the man slid into the oil water. The man did not scream until the leeches in the pit found him.
Renn vomited.
Vaela grabbed his collar and dragged him across the chamber.
"You can be sick while moving. It is a skill."
Kael staggered after them.
His body wanted to fold. The system waited behind his eyes. Twelve parts of him asked for shards, whatever those truly were. He could feel the strange points like black stones in his chest.
Kael drove the command inward, forcing the shards toward the attributes demanded by the immediate pressure.
The word almost formed with no sound.
He almost did it.
Then he remembered the warning: structurally compromised. A starving worker did not pour furnace heat into a cracked pot unless he wanted shards of pot in his face.
Not yet.
He kept the points unused.
That choice hurt like refusing water.
They reached the far passage. Vaela cut a hanging cable and pulled it across the entrance. It sparked weakly, then caught against an old pipe latch. Not a wall. A delay.
"Why did you stop?" Kael asked.
"Because living people close doors. Dead people leave polite openings."
"That will not hold."
"Neither will you, but here we are."
Kael almost smiled before he heard it.
The sound was neither boots nor rods.
A clicking from the deeper dark. Slow. Patient. Too heavy for leeches.
Vaela heard it too.
Her face went flat.
Renn whispered, "What is that?"
Vaela stopped smiling.
The passage ahead narrowed into a throat of wet stone. Something had scratched the walls there, long parallel grooves, deeper than a blade could cut. The fungus stopped at the entrance as if it knew better.
Vaela stepped back.
For the first time, she looked unsure. Kael noticed the motion and did not like it.
"That route?"
"No."
"Then which?"
She pointed toward a shaft half hidden behind hanging pipe roots. "Up. Corpse lift. It jams, it stinks, and if the old chain breaks we fall into grinder water."
Renn wiped his mouth. "That sounds better?"
"Than what is clicking? Yes."
The cable at the chamber entrance snapped. Enforcers shouted through pain and leech panic. One of them fired blind. The bolt struck the wheel pit and sent oily water jumping.
A leech burst against the wall. Another landed on the shooter’s face and made him forget command, rank, and language all at once. Kael did not waste pity. The men behind him would drag children out of sleeping holes by dawn if they thought it bought favor.
The purge had already become bigger than Garron.
The clicking in the deep route grew louder.
Kael shoved Renn toward the corpse lift.
Vaela moved beside him, both blades ready, eyes flicking once to his ruined arm.
"Press ghost," she said.
"Kael."
"Fine. Kael. If you fall, try to fall quietly."
"Why?"
She looked into the black throat where the clicking stopped all at once.
"Because some things in Black Seven listen better than men."
The corpse lift chain groaned when Renn climbed in. Kael followed. The cage floor bowed under his weight. Vaela stepped in last and hooked one blade through the chain wheel. For one second, the old lift did nothing.
Then the shaft above answered with a tired clank that sounded too much like a bone being set wrong. Kael looked up and saw dried handprints on the cage bars, layered over each other in brown stains. Some were small. Some had only three fingers. The lift had carried more dead than living, and the metal seemed confused by the difference.
Renn noticed the handprints and shut his eyes.
"Do not pray," Vaela said.
"I was not."
"Better, as prayer echoes."
Kael braced one bleeding hand against the rail and listened to the purge behind them, the leech bodies popping under boots, the enforcers cursing, the distant whistles waking up in other drain roads. The pit was learning their direction. Every breath they spent in this cage made their trail warmer. Below them, a shape moved at the mouth of the dark route.
Thin.
Tall.
Too many joints.
It sniffed the air without a nose.
Then it turned its blank head toward Kael.
Vaela yanked the chain.
The lift lurched upward.
CRACKLE!
The thing below opened like a folded knife and climbed after them. Its joints knocked the wall in a rhythm too careful to be animal.
KLIK! KLIK! KLIK!
Renn heard it and stopped crying. That was worse than the tears. Kael tightened his bleeding hand around the rail and understood, with a cold little certainty, that Furnace Sink Nine had deeper laws than overseers. Garron had only been the first mouth.
The lift climbed into darkness, not safety.
A wet line slid into the crack beside the wall, and the stone held the shine a breath too long. The ash-dark crack showed where the room wanted bodies to fail next.