They slept in pieces.
Not the whole team — no elegance in that. A few in borrowed rooms, some on the roofs of ruined warehouses, and one tucked against a wall in a cellar where the damp smelled like old iron. The shard breathed faint and wrong in Raal's pack, wrapped in cloth and cord.
Mael sat alone on a ledge above a burned alley and watched smoke move like memory. He had never expected gratitude; he expected the world to answer in measures. Tonight, it answered with a ledger: lost men, broken routes, and the thin sound of new enemies signing their names.
The first voice that complained belonged to Kest. He came clanking down the stairs like a man kneading a drum. "We should move," he muttered. "The east gutters are crawling with Guild dogs." His gauntlet looked worse than the last time; its plating had been fused together, and a faint blue glow leaked from its joints.
"Not yet," Mael said. He folded his hands in front of him, as if counting invisible notes. His wrist tremor had returned; now it was a whisper under the skin. He watched Kest like a man checking the balance of a scale.
"We're bleeding," Raal said once, blunt and pragmatic. He sat on an overturned crate, fingers busy retying a thread that had fused to skin and metal where it had burned. The glyphs along his arm were dull, puffy in places — paid in ash and effort.
"Then stop," Mael said.
"Stop where?" Lirra cut in, voice tight. She walked in like a blade with no sheath — her arm wrapped in cloth, the cut along the shoulder still pink and angry. "Running won't fix anything. We can't keep being ghosts."
"No one said you had to be ghosts," Mael answered. "Just not statues."
The twins shuffled in last, one quieter than the other. The one with the stump kept it wrapped as if touching it with cloth could make it whole. He limped to the corner and arranged his things with an absent care. The boy with the humming spheres sat cross-legged, cleaning glass fragments with the tip of his knife. He didn't look up when they spoke; wounds had a way of eating a child's attention.
"You saw the maps," Kest said finally. He spat to the side. "Iron Chorus units, sealed rings, cordons. They're looking for us."
Mael didn't smile. "Good. A country with hunting dogs is easier to lead." It came out like an observation, not a boast.
"But the shard—" Raal started.
"It changed things," Lirra finished. "People are… remembering wrong." She tapped her wrapped shoulder. "Merin saw voices in the wall. The Guild is burying things. We can't stay here."
"We will not stay," Mael said. "But we will not be chased like rabbits."
"How?" Kest asked.
Mael's hand went to his wrist as if feeling for a pulse. The dial's hairline crack had widened in the days since the Vault—thin spiderwebs along the metal. He hid the tremor with the flat of his palm.
"We split. Small teams. The people who can vanish will vanish. The rest will move like merchants." He looked at Raal. "Take the west market. Trade the shard piece for a map and a pilot." He looked at Lirra. "You and Kest take north. Make noise. Keep them busy. We'll meet in three days by the old crossing."
"And if they find us?" the twin with the stump asked. The question was small and terrible.
"Then we die loud," Kest said with a grin that didn't reach his eyes. It was a joke but not a lie.
They left that night a scattered constellation. Mael watched them go, his eyes tracing the way the city hid and then revealed them with the smallest tremor of light. He heard nothing but the hum of the shard, the small wrongness a heartbeat beneath the world.
Two nights later, a pair of men came calling.
They found Raal first, in an alley lined with burned stalls and a sagging sign. He had the shard under his coat and a bundle of thread at his belt, the wound on his arm still steaming where the Mirra had burned. The men were quick and polite — false smiles over teeth meant for different meals. They spoke as men trained to be unremarkable.
"A word for trade?" one said.
Raal's hands were steady enough to weave and to shake off small, polite threats. "Not looking to trade today."
The polite smiles thinned. One reached for a relic-sleeve at his side and the other split into a motion meant to flank. They were not Iron Chorus — their gear was cheaper, but they moved like men who had been taught to kill without drama.
Raal's threads sprung like catgut, snapping through the air. The first man's throat opened in a neat red line; the second's belt rigging tore, sending him to his knees. But the second man's hand hadn't gone empty — a tiny device bloomed in his palm, a relic-pulse grenade meant to tear Mirra apart on contact.
Raal saw it and cursed. He pulled a thread and threw it like a rope; the device exploded against the wall, shattering glass and knocking him back in a wind of dust and smell. He felt the Mirra in his limbs go dull for a second — a buzzing deadness like a hand falling asleep. When he blinked, the second man was gone. No body. No blood. Just a smear of oil on the cobbles where life had been expected to be.
Raal's chest tightened. The alley was too quiet. He smelled something else now: not just iron but an after-echo, a phantom of movement. He'd heard about this in whispers — people seized by the shard's new habits, reclaimed by the city in ways that didn't leave a corpse.
He went to the meeting point with a redraw of the map. There were empty rooms on the route that they had scouted. There were no footprints. They were no longer simply hunted. They were being pruned.
Mael listened to the reports and didn't move. Then he drilled his fingers into the ledge and felt the skin split a little at the touch. Pain flared up his arm, sharp and hot. He didn't make a sound. The dial had done something new in the nights after the Vault: it hummed at different pitches, like it had learned new songs. Sometimes it sang in ways Mael didn't like.
"We can't hide forever," Raal said.
"No," Mael answered. "We will not hide. We will end the net."
Lirra's laugh was small and without humor. "You mean go poke the hornet's nest?"
He lifted his head. The city spooled its lights like ribbons in the distance. "We will decide which hornets survive."
Raal left with a map and little else. Lirra and Kest melted into the north—riot and rumor and manufactured theft were their instruments. Mael stayed, the shard's hum at his hip like a toothache.
That night, under the black, the name Ninefold went out again — whispered by a vendor, shouted by a drunk, scribbled on a wall by a child who liked the shape of the letters. It was a name no one wanted to own and everyone wanted to say.
In the dark, Mael felt the tremor at his wrist again and smiled at its persistence like a man acknowledging a wound. It had become part of him. It would take more than a Guild, more than hunters, more than a dozen savage fights to remove it.
He rubbed his hand on the ledge until the skin came clean and the pain faded. He felt, in the slow ache beneath bones, the first true measure of cost.
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