Chapter 62: Hidden Cut
Jaro did not point at the watcher mark.
HUM!
Kael kept his body between survivors moving by touch while Jaro tried not to be recognized and the nearest open space. Open space was never empty for long; it was where hooks, teeth, orders, and mistakes learned to travel.
CLINK!
The survivors found the route by fingertip while Jaro kept his shoulder away from each bone plate-scratch in the stone. Kael waited until the line stopped shivering apart. The glass scratch brightened under the next handhold, sharp enough to show where the cut would cut.
DRIP!
Wet conduits, chain teeth, tag cords, pipe mouths, and stone nerves made the place feel recently used. Not ancient. Recent. Worse, because recent cruelty still remembered its hand shape.
That made Kael trust the warning more.
Fear made people waste motion. A liar pointed too quickly. A fool explained too much. Jaro stood under the bend with his shoulders hunched, eyes fixed on a patch of black wall that looked no different from the others, and refused to give the mark what it wanted.
Vaela noticed too.
Her blade lowered a finger’s width.
"How do we pass it?"
Jaro licked cracked lips.
"Don’t be the loudest fear."
Orrek looked back at the fourteen survivors, then at Renn, then at his own ruined shoulder.
"Wonderful. We just need everyone to stop being terrified in a crawlway full of dead mouths. Easy work."
"Not stop," Jaro whispered. "Share it."
Renn blinked.
"Share fear?"
"Touch chain. Breath chain. Nobody carries fear alone. If one fear rises too high, watcher takes that one out of the route’s memory. Then feet keep walking, but the person isn’t with you anymore."
One of the women at the rear made a small choking sound.
CHOKE!
The wall flexed.
Kael moved.
He did not rush at the mark. He moved into the line itself, inserting his bulk into the touch chain until his left hand gripped Orrek’s forearm and his right caught the strap across Tavin’s chest. His body became a weight in the middle of their fear.
"Hands on each other," he said. "Now."
The order passed in whispers.
Palm to shoulder.
Fingers to sleeve.
Knuckles to strap.
Renn stood near the center, jaw tight, broken wrist held against his ribs. He wanted to count. Kael saw it in his eyes. The need scratched at him like an itch under skin.
"Not aloud," Kael said.
Renn nodded once.
His lips moved anyway.
Vaela saw and leaned close. "Inside your head, counter boy. If the wall steals it, bite it back." Renn gave a thin, ugly smile. "That’s terrible advice."
"Still advice."
Jaro took the first step under the bend.
The watcher mark opened.
It did not move like a mouth. Like a lid peeled from an old wound. A line of black pressure slid across the corridor and touched every throat at once.
GASP!
The survivors jerked.
Kael felt it land last.
The pressure was not heavy in the way Malrec’s rods had been heavy, or sharp like bowl pipe pulse, or grabbing like the black intake threads had been. It was thin. Patient. It searched for the one fear that stood alone.
It found a boy near the rear.
The child with shaking legs.
His fingers slipped from his mother’s sleeve.
The route forgot him in an instant.
His outline blurred, not gone, not dead, but wrong. The eye slid over him. The line of bodies began to shift as if there had never been a child between the two women.
His mother opened her mouth.
Kael’s stare caught her first.
No names.
No scream.
Her face crumpled, but she slammed both hands over her lips.
Kael stepped out of the chain.
The watcher mark tightened.
The route tried to make his foot forget the floor. For a breath, down became sideways. The wall became road. The child became shadow. Kael drove his heel into the ribbed pipe floor.
THUD!
Pain shot up his calf from the old bite wound. His thigh trembled. His back opened along a scab and warm blood slid under his shirt.
The pressure became direct.
The Sovereign Root stirred.
Kael gave the order inward, cold and exact, sending the shards into Threat Perception Instinct while the threat still pressed for a place to break him.
ALLOCATE!
====================================================================
[ SOVEREIGN ROOT INTERFACE OVERLAY ]
--------------------------------------------------------------------
≫ HOSTILE ROUTE PRESSURE DETECTED: Dead Singing Mark Memory Exclusion
≫ EXISTENTIAL SHARDS EXTRACTED: +1
--------------------------------------------------------------------
≫ MANUAL ALLOCATION COMMAND RECEIVED
▶ SHARD ALLOCATION REGISTERED: +1 TOTAL
▶ ALLOCATION DISTRIBUTION:
- Threat Perception Instinct -> 12
[!] SYSTEM NOTICE: Route Hostility Recognition Sharpened.
====================================================================
The watcher mark flickered.
Kael saw the trick.
The child was wrong.
The missing space around the child.
He reached into the wrongness and caught a small wrist. The boy’s skin felt cold as pipe bone.
Kael pulled.
CRACK!
The sound did not come from the boy.
It came from the wall as the watcher mark lost a tooth. The child snapped back into the chain between the two women. His mother shook around a silent sob, but she did not scream. She gripped him so hard he whimpered. Jaro stared at Kael like he had watched a man punch a shadow and make it bleed.
"You saw the gap."
"Now I see it faster."
"That’s not a normal sentence."
Vaela snorted under her breath. "You’re traveling with the wrong man for normal."
Orrek leaned against the wall, breathing hard but grinning.
"There. I was starting to miss simple things. Like collectors. And clubs. And people with faces."
The watcher mark withdrew its black line.
It did not die.
It remembered Kael.
Kael did not look away.
Kael remembered it too.
The group moved again, slower now, but tighter. Fear still lived in them. It still stank through sweat and blood and old hunger. But it no longer rose in separate spikes. They shared it through fingers, sleeves, bruised shoulders, and the simple stubborn fact that nobody wanted to be the missing space.
Jaro led them past the bend and into a wider lower channel. The dead marks thinned for twenty steps, then returned in clusters around old pipe joints. Some had been burned closed. Some had been packed with bone paste. One had a child’s bead necklace tied across it, brittle with age.
Renn saw the necklace and looked away.
"Don’t," Vaela said.
"I wasn’t."
"Your face was."
"My face counts things too."
"Then tell it to count walls."
Jaro stopped near the necklace mark and crouched.
Kael watched his hands.
The boy did not touch the bead string. He scraped ash from the floor and drew three short lines beside the mark, then spat once to the left.
SPIT!
The mark did not move.
Vaela narrowed her eyes.
"Route slang?"
"An apology, almost."
"For what?"
Jaro’s voice dropped. "For not being the one it kept."
Nobody spoke for a while.
Some truths in the pit did not need grand words. Hunger taught one kind. hook taught another. A dead child’s beads taught the kind that stayed under the tongue. Kael looked at the necklace mark once, then ahead.
"Can it follow?"
"This one? No. It’s old old. Dead dead."
Orrek rubbed his face with his uninjured hand. "I hate that I understood that."
Jaro pointed with his chin, careful not to use a finger. "But marks talk through damage. You broke a watcher tooth. Something deeper may ask why."
"Let it ask," Orrek said.
Jaro gave him a look. "You really want every mouth below to know your shape?"
Orrek opened his mouth.
Vaela slapped his chest with the back of her blade hand.
"Don’t answer that."
Orrek closed his mouth.
Renn almost laughed, and then the passage ahead gave one soft scrape.
SCRAPE!
The sound did not echo.
It stopped in the air, cut short, as if swallowed by a larger silence. Jaro’s shoulders rose to his ears.
"That’s a dead mark waking."
Kael flexed his fingers.
No spare shard waited in him again.
The fresh instinct sat behind his eyes like a blade in the dark, showing him tiny wrong gaps in the route, places where memory had frayed and teeth might bloom.
"How many?" Vaela asked.
Jaro shook his head.
Renn touched the wall with two fingers, then pulled back fast.
"Not many," he whispered. "But one of them is counting us back."
The words changed the group.
Quietly. Loud changes were for mobs and markets. This was smaller and more dangerous. People tightened their grip on each other.
One man shifted his foot away from a crack in the floor. Tavin adjusted the strap on his wounded shoulder without being told. The mother of the almost forgotten child pulled the boy closer, then forced herself to loosen her grip when he winced.
Renn saw that too.
"Don’t crush him," he whispered.
She looked at him, startled.
"If you hurt him trying to keep him, the route still wins."
The woman swallowed and nodded.
Vaela glanced at Renn from the corner of her eye. "Careful, counter boy. Useful words make people expect more."
"I hate that," Renn said.
"Hate keeps better than hope."
Orrek snorted. "You should sell comfort bowls."
"I’d poison the first customer who asked for credit."
A few mouths twitched. Fear did not leave. It made room for something rougher beside it. Kael let the exchange breathe for one moment, then cut it with a look toward the passage ahead.
There would be time later to know whether these people became anything more than bodies he refused to abandon. For the moment, they were moving. They were listening. They were learning not to hand fear over to the walls.
This was the shape he was starting to understand: protection did not mean carrying weak people like sacks. It meant making enough pressure around them that their own small pieces of courage could stand up without being bought, eaten, or named by someone else. Ahead, a sealed mark opened a black slit.
This one smiled.