The aqueduct ran like a silver vein beneath Lucent Reach, arched and narrow and carved with little gutters where rainwater once sang. Now the gutters were full of dust and glass and the slow, small bones of a city that had forgotten how to cry. Leo moved through the tunnel with the careful silence of someone who had learned to make his absence useful, who had learned, in the months since the cliff, that being seen was the beginning of an assault.
He kept his hand close to the ember scar on his forearm, fingers curled around the cloth binding Owen had fastened on the way out. The Stability Braces lay beneath the binding, a metal lattice at his ribs that pulsed faintly with the rhythm of his breath. The braces helped. They never stopped the voices, but they slowed the edges, turned sharp knives into blunt things he could hold between two palms.
