Chapter 55: Sluice Three!!
Ash Sluice Three was not a tunnel.
It was a mouth pretending to be one.
The tooth door opened into a round chamber where hot water ran in six narrow lanes, each lane divided by bone colored ridges polished smooth by years of bodies, salvage, blood, and the leavings of bodies dragged through it. Iron hooks hung from the ceiling on short chains. Three troughs sat beneath a cracked stone face carved into the far wall.
The face had no eyes.
Only a wide slot for swallowing.
A boy stood beside the left trough.
He had one ear.
He laughed when he saw them, exactly once, sharp and terrified.
"Ha."
Then he clamped both hands over his mouth.
Renn pointed weakly.
"Jaro. Left ear gone. Laughs when scared."
The boy’s eyes widened.
"Who told you?"
"Your sister."
"She talks too much."
"She saved your life before we met you," Vaela said. "Try gratitude. It is ugly but useful."
Jaro looked at Kael’s burned arms, Orrek’s size, Renn’s bruised throat, the fourteen survivors behind them, and the broken black intake thread still smoking under Kael’s palm.
GULP!
"Third Bell says I pull the left lever."
Vaela’s crescents came up. "And what does left do?"
"Takes family blood. Remembers it. Helps it find them later. Please don’t make me pull left."
Orrek growled. "Then don’t."
Jaro laughed again, smaller.
"Ha. They cut hands off for not pulling. Sometimes both. Depends who’s watching."
Above them, pipes and grates carried Lower Ash Bowl into the sluice chamber. Kael could feel the reach of it through hook men, bell pipes, and Pell’s clean robe sunk in Third Bell water. The black intake scar still burned under Kael’s skin. A bowl floor did not need to be in the room to make a child shake.
The stone face in the wall breathed.
HUUUHHH!
A voice crawled out of the swallowing slot.
"Ash Sluice Three wants blood, salvage, or someone left behind."
Tavin whispered, "Body?"
Old Noll put a hand over his shoulder.
"Means us, boy. It always means us."
Kael stepped into the chamber.
The floor shifted.
CLICK! CLICK! CLICK!
The six water lanes lifted their ridges. Bone teeth rose between them, angling toward ankles and calves. The hooks above began to sway. No wind touched them. Chain gears inside the ceiling were choosing ankles and calves.
Jaro gripped the lever board.
"I have to choose a trough."
"No," Kael said.
The boy blinked.
"No?"
"You move away."
"That is not a lever."
"It is now."
Vaela slid beside Jaro and put one crescent against the lever board, not his throat. Practical mercy. Clear threat to the mechanism, not the child.
"Step back," she said.
Jaro stepped back.
Above, metal clanged inside the wall.
CLANG!
The voice hardened.
"Left lever dry. Teeth wake."
The chamber bit.
A hook dropped for Renn.
Kael crossed the first lane and caught the chain with his bare hand. The hook dragged him sideways with enough force to rip an ordinary arm out of socket.
SCRAPE!
His boots carved through wet grit. His shoulder screamed. No shards waited. Zero still. He planted his heel against a bone ridge and stopped the hook one handspan from Renn’s face.
Renn stared up at the curved iron.
"Count says I dislike this route."
"Count later," Kael said.
"Counting now helps fear behave."
"Then count hooks."
Renn’s swollen throat bobbed.
"One trying to take me. Two near Della. Three above Orrek. Four stuck. Five, six, seven moving wrong."
"Wrong how?" Vaela asked.
"They are not aiming at closest people. They are aiming at people Kael looked at first."
Vaela’s eyes sharpened.
"It read protection priority."
Kael pulled the hook chain down.
The ceiling mechanism fought back.
Real pressure. Direct. Hostile. Built to take protected bodies because he had shown the bowl hands what mattered.
The Sovereign Root answered.
Kael drove the command inward, forcing the shards into VELOCITY MOVEMENT AUTHORITY, REGENERATIVE DOMINION, CORE MASS DENSITY, and GRAVITY VECTOR IMPACT.
ALLOCATE!
====================================================================
[ SOVEREIGN ROOT INTERFACE OVERLAY ]
--------------------------------------------------------------------
≫ KINETIC FRICTION DETECTED: ASH SLUICE PROTECTION PRIORITY PRESSURE
≫ EXISTENTIAL SHARDS EXTRACTED: +4
--------------------------------------------------------------------
≫ MANUAL ALLOCATION COMMAND RECEIVED
▶ SHARD ALLOCATION REGISTERED: +4 TOTAL
▶ ALLOCATION DISTRIBUTION:
- Core Mass Density -> 19
- Gravity Vector Impact -> 17
- Velocity Movement Authority -> 15
- Regenerative Dominion -> 14
[!] SYSTEM NOTICE: Immediate allocation completed. Unallocated Existential Shards: 0.
====================================================================
The chamber slowed.
Only in the shallowest sense.
Kael did.
His movement found sharper lanes between hook paths. Regeneration tightened torn muscle around his shoulder. Density settled into his bones. Gravity gathered under his feet like weight finding a nail. He yanked the first chain out of the ceiling.
CRACK!
The hook tore free trailing wet gears and black wire.
Oil sprayed.
DRIP! DRIP!
Orrek roared and lifted both arms as the third hook came for him.
"Finally. Mine."
Vaela snapped, "Do not pull down the roof."
"You ruin every happy moment."
"Live first. Celebrate after."
Orrek caught the hook with his chain wrapped fist and twisted his body instead of ripping upward. The hook slammed into the side ridge.
THUD!
Bone teeth shattered.
CRACK! CRACK!
He grinned through pain.
"See? I listened. Horrible feeling."
Vaela cut two hanging ration straps loose and threw them to Della and Sella.
"Tie the small ones. Keep them off the water lanes. Move when Kael breaks center. Not before."
Della nodded fast.
Sella’s hands shook, but she tied clean.
Jaro stood frozen near the lever board.
The left lever twitched by itself.
Vaela saw it.
"Kael! The board can pull without him."
The left lever dropped halfway.
The left trough opened.
A red suction sound filled the room.
SLURP!
Tavin cried out as something under the floor tugged at the cut on his shoulder. Blood lifted from the bandage in thin strings.
Kael launched forward.
A hook slashed across his back.
RIP!
He did not turn. Velocity carried him over the first ridge. Gravity hit the floor beneath his landing foot and cracked the water lane open.
BOOM!
He drove his knee into the lever board.
The child was wrong.
The wall was wrong.
The hinge point.
CRACK!
The left lever snapped upward and tore out of its socket. Water and metal screamed together inside the trough.
SCREECH!
Blood strings dropped from the air.
Tavin collapsed into Della’s arms.
"Still alive," Renn rasped. "Tavin still alive."
"Keep him that way," Kael said.
The voice from the swallowing slot changed.
"Break another tooth and I take a body. Leave one behind and the water opens."
Nobody moved.
New.
They were not brave enough to feel nothing. The offer was clear enough that frightened people still heard the insult inside it.
Kael looked at the swallowing slot.
"You keep asking for one."
He stepped over the broken trough.
The chamber sent every remaining hook at him.
CLATTER! CLATTER! CLATTER!
Kael moved through them.
One hook cut his forearm. Another kissed his ribs. A third wrapped his ankle. He let the ankle hook bite, then used its pull to accelerate his turn. His elbow smashed the chain joint. His shoulder drove into the central gear drum. His heel stomped the water ridge beneath it.
THUD!
The gear drum buckled.
The stone face in the wall opened its swallowing slot wider.
Inside was a wet bone cavity.
Flat slates sat pinned under black tendon, each holding a strip of hair, a clipped nail, or a scrap of wrist cloth. The red bone tabs in the left trough pulsed.
Kael reached in.
The bone memory tried to bite his wrist with closing slates.
CHOMP!
His bones held.
He grabbed the red bone tab and tore it out.
RIP!
The chamber convulsed.
Water lanes reversed. Hooks swung wild. The ceiling spat rust and soot oil. Jaro fell backward and laughed in terror.
"Ha! Ha! I am dead. I am very dead."
Vaela hauled him by the collar.
"Not if you run."
"With you?"
"Unless you prefer explaining this to Pell."
Jaro looked at the ruined board.
"Running is smart."
"First clever thing you said."
Kael crushed the red bone tab in his fist.
CRACK!
Names broke.
Some of them held. This was one sluice, one route, one ugly mouth in a bowl full of teeth. But the left trough forgot what it had been about to take from Tavin. It forgot Jaro’s family line. It forgot enough.
Hot water burst from the rear gate.
FOOOOSH!
A passage opened under the chamber, sloping down into a pipe lined with black furnace bone.
Renn counted through blood and smoke.
"Fourteen survivors. Jaro added. Fifteen protected?"
Kael looked at the one eared boy.
Jaro looked ready to run from the number.
"If he comes," Kael said.
Jaro laughed once, then swallowed it.
"I know a lower pipe. It avoids Third Bell for maybe ten breaths. Maybe twenty if the bowl pipes lose our scent."
Orrek nodded. "I like him. Terrified, useful, ugly laugh. He can travel with us."
"I did not apply," Jaro said.
"Decent people do not."
Vaela shoved the boy toward the pipe. "Move."
Above them, bells, pipes, callers, and hook boards finally screamed for Lower Ash Bowl.
A single person would have been too few.
The whole bowl floor. Bells, pipes, callers, hook boards, all reacting at once to a route gate being wounded from the inside.
CLANG! CLANG! CLANG!
Kael stood in the wreckage of Ash Sluice Three with zero shards again and fresh blood running down his back.
The Sovereign Root was silent.
This time, the silence felt different: full and ready.
He looked at the survivors entering the black bone pipe. Power spent down to nothing had opened a way. The way carried living bodies forward. Those living bodies made the next fight real. A man who guarded people only to hide would turn them into a wall. Kael needed them alive, moving, and able to choose.
Kael stepped into the pipe last.
Behind him, the broken sluice face whispered through cracked stone.
"Protected body anomaly... route theft... priority rising..."
The pipe swallowed the words.
Ahead, Jaro called back, voice shaking.
"If you hear singing, don’t answer. The lower pipe has old mouths."
Orrek groaned.
"I hate roads with opinions."
Vaela said, "Then stop talking to them." Renn’s ruined voice followed, stubborn as a scraped blade.
"Fifteen moving. Kael rear. Sluice broken. Bowl hunters awake."
Kael walked behind them all.
The black bone pipe curved downward.
From somewhere deep below, something sang without a tongue.