Chapter 69: Falsegate!
Renn felt the gate turn before he saw the marks move.
Fear had become familiar after enough days of being hunted. At first it had been everything: shaking hands, copper in the mouth, an apology lodged behind the teeth. Now it arrived with details. A floor board that flexed at the wrong time. A hook that moved before a captor did. A silence that had too much breath hidden inside it.
The Dead Song Gate gave him all three.
HAAAH!
Black marks along the ribs opened like narrow mouths. Their teeth clicked in a sequence that tried to settle behind Renn’s eyes.
Fourteen.
Thirteen.
Fourteen.
His stomach dropped.
He looked at the touch chain. Sella held Dorran’s sleeve. Old Noll had both twins pressed behind his knees. Tavin leaned against Kael’s side, one hand over the reopened hook scar. Everyone was there.
The marks clicked again.
Thirteen.
Renn’s hands began to shake.
The cruelty was not that someone had vanished. He could have screamed at a missing body. He could have pointed Kael toward a wall and begged him to tear it open. The bodies remained in front of him, but the gate was trying to loosen the certainty that they did.
The count was small work. It was worker work. It was what Renn had done when people came off press lines late, when a furnace shed a roof, when a chain gang staggered back from a cut with fewer feet than it had left with.
Small work kept people from being left behind.
Renn remembered old failures because his body never let him forget them. A furnace boy left under a collapsed trough because everyone thought someone else had dragged him clear. A woman with one working eye counted twice because her partner was still inside the smoke and nobody liked admitting it. A cart rolled out too early with one hand still gripping the underside until the wheels took the fingers. Counting did not make him powerful. It made him useful where uselessness killed quietly.
The gate reached for it.
A black cord shot from the ribs and wrapped around Renn’s swollen neck.
He jerked backward, mouth open, soundless.
Kael caught the cord across his forearm. It burned through skin and carried the false numbers into his head.
Eight.
None.
Sixteen.
The Sovereign Root answered the impact.
====================================================================
[ SOVEREIGN ROOT INTERFACE OVERLAY ]
--------------------------------------------------------------------
≫ HOSTILE DEAD MARK COUNT DISTORTION DETECTED
≫ EXISTENTIAL SHARDS EXTRACTED: +2
--------------------------------------------------------------------
≫ MANUAL ALLOCATION COMMAND RECEIVED
▶ SHARD ALLOCATION REGISTERED: +2 TOTAL
▶ ALLOCATION DISTRIBUTION:
- Metaphysical Resistance -> 22
- Mind Soul Anchor -> 15
[!] SYSTEM NOTICE: Mind pressure resisted.
====================================================================
The false numbers struck Kael’s mind and broke apart before they could settle. He still felt every one. That feeling showed him where the cord entered the gate and where it pulled on Renn’s breath.
Kael wrapped the cord around his forearm twice and hauled it away from Renn.
Renn fell to one knee, coughing blood into the ash.
COUGH! COUGH!
Vaela caught his jaw before he could stare at the moving marks.
Her fingers were cold from the pipe burn and too hard on his bruised skin. Renn welcomed the pain. Pain had edges. The false count had none. It slid everywhere, through breath, through memory, through the small part of him that still believed the world could erase a person if nobody named them fast enough.
"Look at me."
His eyes found her, lost her, then found her again.
"Which one?"
"The one about to slap you. Count something ugly."
"What?"
"Orrek’s face."
Orrek, still bleeding from side and shoulder, lifted his head.
"That is rude."
"Fear can work with it."
Renn stared at him while the marks clicked thirteen through his teeth.
Broken nose. One.
Split lip. Two.
Blood in beard. Three.
Swollen eye. Four.
A stupid grin that had survived everything. Five.
Renn laughed once, ragged and half strangled.
"Five ugly things."
Orrek looked offended. "Only five?"
The dead marks clicked faster.
Their lie needed Renn alone with numbers. Vaela had given him a face. Orrek had given him something to insult. The survivors leaned closer. Sella pressed Dorran’s hand into Old Noll’s. Tavin held the twins’ shoulders. The count stopped being a row of numbers in Renn’s head and became bodies touching bodies in the ash.
Renn lifted his trembling hand.
First cluster.
Second cluster.
Third.
Fourth.
He touched his own chest. Then Kael’s arm. Vaela’s sleeve. Orrek’s chain. Jaro’s shoulder.
The count came back as warmth and weight.
He did not count them as numbers first. He counted Noll’s bony hand, Sella’s torn sleeve, Dorran’s splint, the smaller furnace boy’s shaking breath, Tavin’s stubborn grip, Jaro’s bad ear pressed sideways, Orrek’s bloody beard, Vaela’s blade held low, Kael’s forearm wrapped in the cord, and the rest packed close enough to smell of ash, fear, soup, and old wounds.
Fourteen became a room full of bodies again.
"All alive," he whispered.
The gate clicked thirteen again.
This time the false number carried images with it: an empty sleeve where Sella had been, a bowl rolling without the boy’s hands, Orrek’s chain lying loose with no body behind it, Tavin’s strap dragged under the ribs. None of it had happened. Renn knew that, and still his body reacted. His heart tried to mourn before his eyes could correct it.
He dug his nails into his palm.
Pain. Present.
Vaela’s fingers on his jaw. Present.
Kael’s forearm straining against the cord. Present.
The gate could lie into fear, but it could not make blood vanish from a hand that was touching him.
Renn spat blood toward the ribs.
"Liar."
Every mark snapped toward him.
Jaro made a strangled sound. "Do not insult it."
Renn’s face tightened with pain and fear.
"It insulted me first."
Vaela’s smile flashed sharp and quick.
"Fine answer. Terrible way to survive."
Kael kept the cord stretched between his forearm and the ribs.
"Where does it begin?"
Renn listened through the pain. The false numbers scratched at him again, but he did not chase them. He followed breath instead.
Orrek breathed heavy and slow. Jaro took small sharp pulls. Tavin’s breath caught around the shoulder pain. The twins shared the same frightened rhythm.
Between them, one mark breathed late.
HAAAH!
Renn raised a shaking finger.
"There. It comes in after us."
Kael looked at Vaela. She had heard it too.
Her crescent flashed toward the rib. The mark snapped shut before she reached it.
"Fast," she muttered.
Orrek pushed himself upright with one arm. "Then hit where it opens."
Vaela pointed her blade at him. "You learned something. I am upset."
"Pain makes me wise for short periods."
Renn closed his eyes. He counted breaths.
In. Out. In. Out.
Fear. Pain. Lie.
His finger lifted again.
Kael moved.
The dead mark opened in a different rib, one beat ahead of Vaela’s last strike. Kael’s fist arrived first.
BANG!
The rib cracked. A dry wave of dead sound burst across the chamber.
Renn screamed as the false count tore loose from the back of his mind. The touch chain started to break apart. Orrek slammed the torn black strip across the floor in front of the survivors.
CLANG!
"Hold!"
Hands closed harder around cloth and skin.
The cracked rib leaked black dust. The gate shuddered. For one brief moment, its workings showed through the broken plates: a cord for names, a cord for old chain scars, a bellows tube for breath, and black threads leading to the ribs that could close together.
Renn saw enough to hate the craft of it. The gate did not know them as people. It knew habits. The hand that counted. The scar that pulled. The shoulder that braced. The child who flinched. Someone above or long before had built a mouth that could turn those habits into handles.
He forced his own fingers open and closed.
A count was not a handle if he kept choosing it.
Kael saw the next motion before it landed.
The gate had stopped testing one person at a time.
It was pulling every rib inward.
Renn wiped blood from his chin. He looked smaller than he had in the bowl, which should have been impossible. Hunger had already carved him thin. Pain had taken most of his voice. The gate had found the one thing he believed he could do and tried to break it in his hands.
He lifted his hand again.
One cluster.
His fingers shook.
Kael met his eyes.
"Keep the count."
Renn swallowed.
"I can."
His voice shook.
It still held.
The gate did not like that. The ribs answered with a low shiver, and every dead mark opened wider than before. Black dust poured down in thin curtains. The false count returned in a dozen small mouths at once, no longer patient, no longer clever.
Thirteen. Thirteen. Thirteen.
Renn lifted both hands until everyone could see them.
"Touch somebody," he rasped. "Now."
They did. Not neatly. Not bravely. A sleeve, a wrist, a belt, a shoulder, two fingers hooked into a wrap. The line became ugly and real under the marks’ lie.
Fourteen bodies answered with contact.
The dead marks clicked faster, angry now, and the floor under Renn’s knees trembled. He kept his palms open where the others could see them. The count did not live in his head alone anymore. It ran through sleeves, belts, wrists, shoulders, and the dirty ash prints of people refusing to vanish politely.
Kael tightened the cord around his forearm.
"Hold it," Renn rasped.
"I am."
"No. The line."
Kael looked back once. Every survivor was touching someone. Even Orrek, bleeding and furious, had hooked one finger in Jaro’s wrap.
"Holding," Kael said.
The gate heard the line.
Every dead mark stopped clicking. For one breath the chamber gave them nothing but ash falling from the ribs and the wet scrape of Renn’s torn throat.
Then all thirteen false mouths opened at once and pointed past Kael.
Renn was no longer the target.
The hands were.
The floor under the touch chain lifted.