Chapter 6: Corpse Toll!!
The dry gallery did not stay dry for long.
Corpse toll arrived through a body close enough to human for the cruelty to count. Its eyes still knew fear; its hands had been taught to collect anyway.
GULP!
The room made itself smaller around corpse toll. Kael let it. Smaller meant closer. Closer meant reachable.
Blood found ways to follow.
Kael’s palms dripped onto the cracked stone as he ran after Vaela and Renn, each drop dark enough to shine under the furnace light bleeding through the wall gaps. His left arm throbbed inside Garron’s stolen red cloth. His ribs clicked in pairs. Every step sent a hot wire through his side and a colder question through his skull.
How long could a body keep refusing before refusal became another way to die? Behind them, finger bone whistles screamed through the drain roads.
BZZZZ!
Vaela did not look back.
"They have your scent now."
Kael kept pace by dragging one shoulder along the wall when his legs forgot their duty. "Blood trail?"
"Blood. Garron’s coat. Press mud. Predator fluid. A little pressure oil from the dead road. You smell like five different kinds of profit. Veyrath prices human shapes first because buyers understand how they scream."
Renn stumbled between them, pale and shaking. "What is a corpse price?" Vaela cut left into a service slit so narrow Kael had to turn sideways. "A polite announcement that your body is worth more if delivered soon."
"Alive?"
"Depends who asks."
Kael ducked under a hanging pipe. "And me?"
Vaela glanced at him. "Alive is worth more. Dead is safer. Pieces might start a bidding argument."
"You sound experienced."
"I am still alive. Experience is the ugly part that stayed."
The slit ended in a low chamber stacked with broken heat tiles and empty fungus crates. Someone had used it as a sleeping hole once. The blanket in the corner had been chewed through by rats or worse. A little shrine of bottle caps sat beside it, arranged around a tooth.
Vaela shoved Renn behind the crates and pointed at Kael.
"Sit before your legs make a decision for you."
Kael sat because falling would have been louder. Pain rose up and filled his mouth with copper. The Sovereign Root stirred when his back hit the wall.
No new shard came.
The pain had taught his body nothing worth taking.
That meant sitting hurt, but not enough to matter.
He hated that a part of him had checked.
Vaela crouched at the entrance and listened. Her crescent blades rested loose in her hands, tips down, ready to become motion without warning. Renn whispered, "Are you going to sell us?"
Vaela did not turn.
"You? No. Bad hand. Low weight. Too much crying."
Renn looked offended through fear.
Kael watched her shoulders. "And me?"
"I am considering it."
Renn stared at her.
Kael did not.
He had lived long enough around hungry people to know outrage was a luxury food. Vaela had not sworn to him. She had not promised Renn safety. She had protected her route, cut men who threatened her, and stayed near the strangest profit Furnace Sink Nine had produced in years.
That was not loyalty.
It was leverage.
Kael respected leverage more than lies.
At least she answered honestly.
"How much?" he asked.
"For dead? Enough to eat clean for ten days. For alive? Enough to leave Black Seven for a season if the buyer does not cut my throat at payment."
"And why not do it?"
Vaela finally looked back.
Her eyes moved over his torn hands, his bound arm, the way he kept breathing through broken ribs.
"Because I saw you get stronger while bleeding. That makes you either valuable or contagious. I have not decided which one kills me slower."
Kael leaned his head against the wall.
"Practical."
"Romance is for people with doors."
Renn frowned. "What does that mean?"
"It means quiet."
The chamber settled around them.
For the first time since the press, no one was actively trying to strike Kael.
That quiet exposed other sounds.
Water ticking through pipe cracks. Renn’s thin breathing. Vaela’s blade edge scraping once against stone as she cleaned black predator fluid from the curve. Farther away, the purge bells kept muttering through the bones of Furnace Sink Nine, not loud enough to guide a man, but loud enough to remind him there was no safe silence under the pit.
Kael watched the entrance and counted exits. One service slit behind them. One cracked vent overhead too narrow for his shoulders. One floor drain clogged with hair and old cloth.
If the scouts came from both sides, they would have to fight through. If smoke came, they would choke. If someone above poured acid wash into the pipes, they would become another stain no one priced properly.
He hated how quickly survival turned rooms into numbers. Renn’s stomach made a small sound.
The boy looked ashamed of it.
Kael looked at Vaela.
She shrugged. "Hunger is honest. That is why people hate it."
That should have felt like relief.
Instead, his body began reporting every injury it had delayed. His palms burned. His thigh leaked. The leech bite pulsed with a numb heat. His broken ribs made breathing a negotiation.
The eleven unspent shards waited.
He could push them into himself and become harder. Maybe faster.
Maybe alive for another hour.
He lifted one hand and focused on the black weights behind his sternum. Core Mass Density had saved him in the lift. Cellular Acceleration had helped his body accept the change. If he poured more into density, maybe the next rod would bend. If he poured into healing, maybe he could run without tasting blood.
The shards did not feel like mercy. They felt like hostile pressure compressed into black coin, earned only because something had tried to break, claim, crush, or swallow him and failed. Spending them would not heal him for free. It would force his damaged body to rewrite itself while the damage was still open, and a body could misread even a miracle if pain was loud enough.
He reached for Cellular Acceleration.
The Root answered before he committed.
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[ SOVEREIGN ROOT INTERFACE OVERLAY ]
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[!] SYSTEM NOTICE: Host Biological Matrix Is Structurally Compromised.
[!] WARNING: Rapid Allocation Under Severe Injury May Cause Internal Misalignment.
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▶ RECOMMENDED ACTION: STABILIZE THROUGH REST, FOOD, OR CONTROLLED PRESSURE.
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Kael opened his eyes.
Vaela was watching him again.
"Ghost talking?"
"It says not to be stupid."
"I like it already."
"It also says controlled pressure."
Vaela’s mouth flattened. "Do not ask me to hit you."
"I did not."
"Your face considered it."
Kael looked at his hands.
Controlled pressure.
The phrase tempted him more than it should. If pain made shards, if pressure made growth, then a man could farm himself into power. Bruise the flesh. Crack the bone. Heal. Repeat. Climb.
But the Root had not answered comfort, hunger, or chosen stupidity. It answered the world trying to take him and failing. That difference mattered more than pain.
The thought was ugly.
Worse, it was useful. Kael pressed his bleeding palm against the stone wall and leaned into it until his shoulder shook.
No shard.
He pushed harder.
Still nothing.
Vaela watched in silence.
Kael drew his hand back and slammed it into the wall.
BANG!
Pain burst through his palm.
No chime.
No Root response.
Only blood.
Renn whispered, "Why did you do that?"
Kael stared at the smear he had left on stone.
"To learn."
Vaela’s expression changed by a hair.
Not sympathy.
Interest.
"Learn what?"
"It does not pay for damage I choose when the world is not trying to kill me."
"Good. Otherwise you would become the dumbest strong man in the sink."
A sound came from the service slit.
Soft boot leather.
Vaela raised one finger.
Kael pulled Renn behind him, ignoring the boy’s flinch.
A voice drifted through the entrance.
"Vaela Korr."
Vaela’s face went colder than the stone.
"Corpse broker," she mouthed.
The voice continued, warm and oily. "I know you hear me. Black Ledger posts a fresh price. Press ghost alive. Boy optional. Route girl negotiable. Deliver before second bell and debt marks get wiped for one year."
Outside the slit, hooks touched stone in a patient little count.
TIK! TIK! TIK!
Renn stopped breathing.
Furnace Sink Nine carried the old stink of people treated as material. Kael had begun to hate that smell before he had words for it. The ceiling hook swung once above the toll lane and pointed at the next body the room wanted lifted.
She looked back.
For one long second, the only thing between them was math.
Then Vaela smiled toward the slit.
"One year?"
The broker chuckled. "You always had sense." Vaela lifted one crescent blade, angled it toward Kael as if measuring his throat, and said, "Come closer. I want to hear the terms properly."
The broker stepped into the slit.
Vaela’s blade moved.
RIP!
His ear hit the floor before his scream did.
Kael rose.
Vaela kicked the broker backward into the passage.
"Run," she said. "I did not refuse the price. I only started a better negotiation."
The broker screamed for scouts.
Other voices answered from the drain roads, not close yet, but eager. The offer had done what offers always did in Furnace Sink Nine. It had turned strangers into hunters before they even saw the prey. Kael heard movement above, below, behind the walls, all of it becoming one ugly market calculation.
Vaela heard it too, and for the first time her practical mask cracked into annoyance.
"Now everyone knows I damaged merchandise," she said.
"Sorry for reducing your business options."
"Do not apologize. Bleed less."
Hooks scraped stone outside.
Kael grabbed Renn and followed Vaela into the next dark turn. Behind them, the corpse price became personal. The route behind them filled with names Kael did not know and prices he did.
Alive.
Dead.
Whole bodies drew prices.
For the first time since Garron’s skull broke, Kael understood that the pit would not only try to kill him. It would try to appraise him first.
Vaela moved faster after that.
So did he.
The hunt had teeth now.
By then corpse toll was no label. It was the clink of counted dead, the workers’ breath held over another price, and Kael’s ruined hands refusing to let the toll decide who remained people.