The city was good at forgetting names. It was not so good at forgetting faces that had hit it hard.
They met in a ruined bathhouse where the steam pipes still moaned like old ghosts. The room smelled of iron and disinfectant, and the floor was slick with oil and a light dusting of ash. Kest was already there, boots splayed, one gauntlet laid across his knee like a threatening promise. He had a bruise blooming beside his eye and the kind of grin that meant his patience was paper-thin.
Lirra arrived with a soft footstep that meant trouble. She kept her blade wrapped and the cloth around her shoulder showing where it had been nicked. Her eyes measured Kest the way a hunter gauges wind.
"You want a fight in public?" she asked, voice low. "You want the Guild to find this place because you like the way their boots sound?"
Kest laughed, a sound that tried to be a joke and failed. "You think I want their boots to find me? I want them to hear the crash so they look over here while we slip away over there. You think I enjoy being careful?"
"You enjoy being loud at the wrong time," Lirra said. Her fingers tightened on the bandage. "You think running a riot is strategy. It's ego with armor."
He rose like a man made of iron and slammed his gauntlet on the floor. The echo shook the pipes. "And you? You think silence wins things. You cut the same way twice and call it art. We need to move faster. We need to hurt them now before they learn to watch for us."
Raal watched from the doorway with a patience that had worn to a rag. He had thread across one wrist and a faint crust of Mirra burns. "Both of you make valid points," he said. "But arguing here wastes time." He was tired and practical, the kind of man who fixed problems by tying knots and pulling. "We split as Mael ordered. You make noise north. Kest, you play the butcher. Lirra, you watch the knife-hand. If you two die sloppily, we all bleed."
Kest's jaw worked. "We don't need lectures."
"We don't need slaughter," Lirra said. "We need teeth and patience."
The twins hovered nearby, one cleaning his remaining knife slowly, the other humming like someone trying to recall a lullaby. Their silence was a kind of pressure. The boy sat on the rim of the bath, fingers worrying a sphere that didn't hum right anymore. No one trusted the sound of the thing and nobody wanted to ask why.
"You think Mael will care if we bicker?" one twin asked, voice thin.
Raal snorted. "Mael cares about results, not love stories."
Kest spat. "Results aren't poetic. They're bodies and contracts."
"You always liked contracts when they were signed in blood," Lirra said, and it was almost affectionate until it wasn't.
It could have been a hundred small arguments across a dozen cities. The difference was that here, every word vibrated into the metal and made the city remember. A stray word could be an echo that invited hunters.
They settled their plans because that's what tired people do — they make tidy things in messy places. Kest would pull the north cordon with an overt theft, a staged attack at the market square that would force the Guild's mid-level Seekers to reassign. Lirra would hit a courier line where prizes were small but routes were vital. Raal would trade the shard's piece for a map and a smuggler who knew the old sewer-tunnels. The twins would shadow Kest and pick pockets. The boy would do what he could with his spheres — distractions and small detonations, nothing that sang too loud.
After the plans, there were easier, filthier things: mending torn cloth, cleaning weapons, fitting new threads where old ones had fused. For a moment the room felt like a gang that could still function — until the first insult scraped across the floor and reopened the tension.
"You talk like Mael isn't breaking," Kest said suddenly, more to himself than anyone. "He's... different. That thing he used — the way the walls blinked — it left something on him."
Lirra's hand paused over a strip of cloth. "You mean the hairline? We all saw it."
Raal didn't look up. "He paid for it."
"Paid?" Kest barked. "He's bleeding something into his wrist already. I felt it — a hum like metal trying to sleep. If he breaks, so do we."
Lirra's eyes went distant for a heartbeat. "If he breaks, maybe he takes the shard with him."
Silence folded them. The boy's sphere slipped and clinked against the bath rim. For a second the thing gave an uncertain chirp and then went quiet; the room swallowed the sound like it had been waiting.
"Then we keep him from breaking," Raal said, blunt as a tool. "We do what we must. No theatrics. No desperate heroics. Keep your heads."
Kest's laugh came, softer. "You always sound like a midwife when the world's dying."
They left in pairs. The night consumed them like a good secret. Kest and his two brutes melted toward the market with the confidence of men hungry for spectacle. Lirra and a twin slunk toward the courier line. Raal moved toward the west market with the boy at his side, the shard piece heavy and unnerving in its wrappings.
They were not five minutes out when the first line of the Iron Chorus hit.
It wasn't dramatic — no fanfare, no drums. A single squad, precise, methodical, stepping into the street like a denied sentence. Their armor was different, polished bright and barbed with relic-tech. Their leader wore a visor that reflected faces like broken glass. They had that look: the kind who killed people as if checking boxes.
Kest saw them first. He smiled because he liked noise and because he believed he could take on a squad and still get away. He waved one of his men forward; the man ran and tossed an improvised charge into a packed stall. The market erupted in controlled chaos — merchants ducked, stalls toppled, coins flew like frightened birds.
The Iron Chorus didn't flinch. They flowed through the riot as if the scene had been prepared for them. Their lines closed with clinical efficiency. One of Kest's brutes took a gauntlet to the chest and went down like a fallen gate. The other was cut in the throat by a wire that had been invisible until it struck.
Kest cursed and reached for a grenade, but his hand brushed a seam in the air and felt the wrongness — a pressure like a palm where there was nothing there. He froze for half a beat. In that half-beat, a Chorus seeker planted two blades in his ribs.
He fell hard, the world spinning. He tasted metal and the thin clarity of surprise. A single, stupid thought flared: So this is how loud ends.
The twin nearby dropped his knife and screamed without sound, then leapt like a man with nothing left but a moment to destroy. He clawed through a Chorus member's visor with his stump and made the man bleed. It was savage and ugly and brief. The Chorus soldier staggered, then closed like a trap.
Raal's threads braided through the market like steady hands. He cinched small barricades, sent a single filament to trip a charger, and grabbed the shard and the boy and pulled them into an open cellar hatch. The world above them sounded like someone smashing a thousand cups.
When the dust settled, the market lay in a crooked silence. Shopkeepers cried hoarse. Iron Chorus men picked bodies out of the wreckage with professional cold. The squad moved away with a single quiet: a list of names to erase.
They regrouped in a cellar with the smell of old bread and mildew. Lirra's arm was bleeding where shrapnel had nicked her. Kest's two men were gone or dead. One twin sat with his face wet and red; the other was still breathing but hollow in the eyes. Raal's hands shook as he rewrapped the shard binding.
"We drew them," Lirra said finally. The words were simple. "Your noise worked, Kest. But it cost." She looked at the twin with the stump. "Did you see… anything? Did you see where they came from?"
He shook his head, tears making tracks through soot. "They were like the city. There… then not. We could taste them like smoke."
Kest's breath was a thin rasp. He tried to laugh. "We had a good hit. I'd do it again."
Raal's voice had a shape to it now — edge and calculation. "They move like machines, but they're not fully Guild. We didn't get a regular Iron Chorus. Someone else is pushing the Queen's dogs forward — a higher order. They knew exactly when we'd make noise."
Mael walked into the cellar without announcing himself. No one had seen him approach; that was just how he worked. He looked at the mess — the bandages, the shard wrapped in cloth, the red stains in the corner. His hand went to his wrist like checking a clock.
"You heard," he said.
They told him everything. When they were finished, he sat down on a crate and folded his hands. The trembling in his wrist had deepened into a small, consistent sting.
"We move sooner," Mael said at last. "No more markets. No stolen fires. We burn a different trail." His voice was not angry; it was an assessment. "We bait the bait. We find who's giving the Guild its teeth."
Kest's laugh was bitter. "You want us to hunt the hunters?"
"I want us to decide whose teeth bite first," Mael said.
Lirra's eyes were hard. "And if they find us?"
"Then they will find a problem," Mael said, with a flat finality. "They'll learn not to bite the hands that hold the knife."
He stood and the room inhaled a little. Outside, the city remembered its markets and its missing and its new shadows. Inside the Ninefold, a new fracturing ran like a hairline down a wall — small, not yet fatal, but visible if you looked close.
They left the cellar split into moving pieces: Raal taking west, Lirra shadowing north with one twin, Mael staying in the city's seam with the remaining forces. Kest's fate was a bruise on the map and the memory of noise that had cost them men. None of it was clean. All of it felt inevitable.
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