I listen to the city the way other men count coins.
Velith is a machine that believes in itself; every tick is a promise. When a promise trembles, you don't curse it — you take note. You find the rhythm beneath the tremble and step there. That's what tonight is for.
The corridor smells of metal and old promises: hot relic oil leaking through seams, the sharp tang of warmed brass, the soft undernote of Mirra dust caught in the joints. We move through it like a hand through a harp. My finger taps the floor twice — slow, careful — and whoever watches me finds the same point to breathe on. Tap. Tap. Pause. They know to move.
They shouldn't. They should be terrified. The Guild is quick with its fear; that is its virtue. But terror is noise. Noise can be used.
We are seven in the passage: Lirra in her feather cloak, Raal with his tattoos sulking red beneath his skin, the twins for balance, the boy with his broken grin and a box of humming spheres, the silver-haired woman who smells like static, and me. I let them take the angles. I let them argue while we walk; two sentences clipped back and forth on the left, a faster one on the right. Arguments entertain the mind but do not slow the hands.
"Shorting the relays still works?" Lirra murmurs without looking at me. She chews a small scrap of metal between her teeth; a nervous habit she pretends is style.
"It will distract them long enough," Raal replies. His voice is a file on broken glass. He moves like someone who thinks before he breathes. He always does. I like that.
"Keep your hands clean," I say. Simple. Final. The arguments fall like dropped instruments.
The first sound that tells me something has shifted is wrong by a fraction. Not the alarm — that's expected — but the delay in the alarm's echo. It announces itself, like a cough after a tune. The corridor answers late. A second later, the distant bells double up. I smile without humor. The Kernel is reaching.
We step into the preparatory chamber — a carved spiral room where the air tastes of old memory. My hand hovers over the relic dial under my sleeve; a thing worth its silence. I do not look at it. I feel it, like a second pulse under the wrist. It half-ticks.
Raal kneels by the wall and runs his fingers along the runes painted there. He mutters, a guttural word that warms the air. The glyphs respond by flaring blue and then settling into a jitter. The boy places a sphere down and it hums below where his fingers left it — off-key, deliberately. "Good," I tell him. "Bad perfection hides too cleanly."
The plan is tight. We move like a blade and hope the Guild is slow with the whetstone.
They are not. They are faster than we expected.
The first line breaks in with the wrong sound — hard boots, the clank-slap of reinforced armor, voices clipped by orders. A squad of Guild Seekers pushes into the mouth of the corridor, faceless and bright-eyed in their polished suits. Their lights sweep and miss, then sweep again. They are well-trained. They think the city will tell them where to strike. It has not yet learned to do otherwise.
Raal smiles like a man offered a scalpel.
"Two left," he says. He weaves a thin line of thread between his fingers and the air sings as if cut. Mirra-threads — thin as hair, sharp as grief. He laces the corridor with them: a web invisible until it finds something soft.
The twins split, two mirrored shadows slicing through the light like synchronized blades. One steps between the threads and cats forward, fingers a blur. The first Seeker collapses mid-speech when a thread finds the seam of his collar and pulls his throat open like paper. There is no scream that fits the place. The corridor swallows sound.
They expected an ambush. They got a carving.
The silver-haired woman moves like lightning that remembers where it came from. She catches a relic blast on the palm of her gauntlet and throws it back with a motion that shivers the armor of two men. Their suits fail inward like old clocks. Oil and organs and gears are the same once the shell gives. I watch her hands; they do not tremble. I watch how she rigs a collapsed beam to fall into an archway and turn the corridor into teeth. Her math is ruthless — gravity, when curved with intent, is a better murderer than any blade.
We do not take prisoners. There is no poetry in catching men who serve a machine that will forget them. They are clean work: remove the pivot, keep the skeleton intact enough to learn the rhythm and be disposed of later. Efficiency is kindness in war.
A Seeker fires too close to me — a compressed beam that sings off the wall. The sound repeats behind the note, and for a moment the air tastes of old frequencies. The Kernel is awake enough to touch the periphery. I feel it pulling at the edges of the dial, greedy hands wanting to take a measure.
Raal's threads catch the next man's armor at the hip and pull. He reels him into a wall with a sound like cloth tearing. The twin that dances near him slides under a drifting bolt and slices a hand from the gauntlet — the fingers curl, alive and useless. We move without cruelty. People lose what they are for reasons that have nothing to do with guilt.
One of the Seekers angled his wrist to throw a frag; it leaves his hand and hits the beam we set. The beam falls with the wrong timing. It hangs a breath too long, a suspended block of wood and iron that the mind expects to fall but cannot predict. The man under it twists, and the bone snaps in a way language has no word for. He dies twice, once when the beam should have crushed him and again when the world decides to remember. These are not comfortable calculations.
I hear the boy cry out — not from fear but from that small, sharp sick feeling when your invention begins to behave like a living thing. One of his spheres, nudged wrong by a ghost of timing, detonates in a stuttering bite and throws a man's face back into the wall in an obscene spray. The boy's hands shake; he looks up at me for the first time with eyes that knew something monstrous had happened and liked it anyway because the price bought survival.
There is a rhythm in deaths. You learn it. It is not pretty. It does not ask permission.
Halfway down the hall a Seeker charges, heavy gauntlet snapping. He believes in force. He believes in a solid, linear world that obeys fists. He plants his boot, breathes, and the world folds — but not in the way he expects. Raal's threads wrap his knee, bind his movement to a note below his hearing; the man loses balance like a person hearing music in the wrong key and falls face-first. The twin behind him makes a clean incision at the base of the skull — surgical, elegant. The head twists; the body keeps moving for a second, a marionette in a song we are not singing.
A voice in the corridor — a shouting officer — claws for order. His words hit nothing. The boy's second sphere flutters and emits a low, harmonic wave that takes the order apart and leaves breathless corpses clawing for air that will not come on time. We kill elegantly. We do not mince.
Someone asks, in a tone that is trying to be brave, "Mael — should we pull out?" It is a stupid question. Everything is a question and then a number.
I taste the edge of the dial under my skin. It wants. The Kernel's reach stutters like a hand wanting the metronome. I can feel the fraction of a second threading the corridor, the way sound is late by the tiniest measure. My thumb finds a notch in the relic's rim and I turn it almost imperceptibly — merely a twitch, a tap on the rim.
Five seconds. The instrument sings a little higher. The corridor pauses, like a breath held a hair too long. A Seeker fires; his beam sails and hits a man who had been behind him a heartbeat earlier. The geometry of suffering folds inward and answers itself. The man collapses as if someone else decided the end of his sentence.
Raal's eyes flick to me. He does not speak. He does not have to. He knows what the measure costs. I know what it costs. It will fray the dial. It will leave fissures. It will blanch my hand like a storm that passes through bone. It is worth the note.
We were never meant to be comfortable. Comfort is the anthem of those who can wait.
We move as one, a blade that does not sing to itself. The Guild sends more, a second squad with heavier gear, a banner that says the city will not be taught to fail by thieves. I watch the second line form at the mouth of the corridor and count their heartbeats against mine. They are fast, the Guild — but the Kernel's pulse is faster. There is a lag now between their bootfalls and the sound.
Raal's hands begin to smoke. The threads burn back into him. He gives and takes at the same time; his runes flare like fever and then dim. He does not collapse. He is craftsmanship given flesh.
A man with a heavy kinetic gauntlet swings at the silver-haired woman. The armor is designed to bite; it devours shell and man in the same motion. She takes the blow and her shoulder explodes red-hot from a ruptured conduit; she answers by plunging a relic shard through his face and twisting on the axis of betrayal. He dies in three different memories. The corridor remembers him differently every time, and that memory hits the others like shards.
We should be ashamed, by all rights. We are not.
The second squad presses. Their commander is a bigger man, barred and bright. He knows how to hold a room; he has been trained to wait out noise. He does a small, almost courteous thing: he snaps his fingers, and the corridor fills with the thin mechanical whine of guard drones sweeping up the flanks.
I consider the dial. The notch under my thumb is small; the choice is smaller.
"Hold the line," I tell them. Not an order; a beat. They obey, because they always do. Even the boy nods, because the smallest among us knows the smallest acts are the ones that keep the song alive.
A drone sweeps low and takes Raal's threads mid-flight; the filaments catch like spider-silk on a machine and sing. Raal curses under his breath — a private, brief sound — and the twin nearest him answers without voice, slicing the drone's sensor open. Sparks rain like a guilty confession.
We are not a unit that pities. We are surgeons with knives.
And then the corridor changes again. The dial in my wrist clicks the way a metronome jerks when tapped. The second squad's commander moves — a simple forward step, confident, a motion practiced past repetition — and in the space between inhale and exhale, his foot touches a fragment of world that has not caught up. The step repeats in the air like a ghost and lands twice: once as intent, once as memory. He finds his own hand there a second time and watches his arm fold in two incompatible ways.
For a second he has no death that fits. He begins to howl, but the howl comes late, and the corridor swallows it like a bad echo. The twins close in and make the sound final.
We are middle of it. The chamber folds, the Kernel tugs, our knife-work becomes choreography in a room that will not remember timing the same. Men disappear between beats — caught between the world's memory and its present.
A pause like a held breath. I stand in that silence and let the dial cool. It has done what it will do; the fissure runs like a hairline break across the face of my instrument. I feel it in the bone: a shiver that is not pain yet, but warning.
There will be a cost.
A voice far down the corridor — not one of ours — screams in a way that is last and first at once. The boy vomits into the groove of the floor. Raal staggers and presses his palm to his chest where the threads have taken toll. The silver-haired woman, shoulder smoking, wipes blood with flat, efficient gestures and swears like a machine that has found a jam.
We are in the middle of the music. The rest of the city will be the audience.
The corridor's mouth lights up again; more armor, more teeth. The Guild does not pause. They think in formations and doctrine. They are poor musicians.
I breathe, and the hum in the bones of the stone answers. My thumb finds the dial and rubs it once, not to turn but to feel. It is warm. It is small. It is honest.
We were never promised gentleness. We promised results. Tap. Tap. Pause.
The corridor floods with movement. The fight thickens. The sound repeats at the edges of hearing like a bad memory trying to insist itself true.
I move forward because someone must set the tempo while the rest follow the blade. The first swing takes a man's throat out of rhythm; the second swing makes that absence hold. Blood sprays. The scent of burnt thread curls into the air and tastes like victory.
Mid-battle, mid-breath, mid-beat, I look up into the curve of the hall and see a flash of light through a crack: someone above is looking down, thinking us monsters. They are not wrong.
There is no time for regret.
I take another step.
And then—
(A sound hits the room that is not ours, a note played from the Kernel itself, deeper than any instrument. The world lurches as if an actor on cue forgot his line, and for the first time in hours, the rhythm slips in their chest. I hear the twin on my right pull a breath that will not match the step he makes next. My thumb drags the dial — a twitch, half a promise — and the light in the corridor fractures into ten slow heartbeats.)
We are not done. The Guild keeps coming. The pipes sing a new, panicked melody. My dial has a new hairline crack along its edge and the skin at my wrist pricks silver as if it remembers fire.
I lift my head and find Raal watching me. He breathes once, a sound like a bell struck wrong.
"Mael?" he says. Not a question. A check.
"Yes," I answer.
He nods, satisfied. He tightens his fingers on a length of thread and steps forward.
We go back to killing.
—
End of chapter 26
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