Silex didn't bother dressing the order in ceremony.
"Underlayer pull," he said. "Tonight."
He led Ø7 down past the levels where the tower pretended to be a city and into the concrete marrow where it remembered it was a machine. The air went cold and dry, the kind of sterile that makes your nose itch. Lights ran in veins along the ceiling. Somewhere, a server farm breathed like a restrained animal.
Arden walked beside Darius, the leash warm on his neck, the shared link a faint five-part thrum under his skin. Seraphine jingled a pocketful of illegal, looking like sin in a coat that could pass for clergy or thief depending on the angle. Lyra padded lightly, bare ankles ghost-pale above her boots. Kai moved the way he always did when there was code nearby: like gravity had changed and found him personally interesting.
"What exactly are we stealing?" Arden asked.
"Not stealing," Silex said. "Reclaiming."
"From who?"
"Us," Kai said. "That's the funny part."
Silex stopped at a door stenciled with an honest word: OSSUARY.
"Judiciary Archive Sub-Basement," Silex said. "Legacy cold-storage annex. No public access. Echo Tithe rides through here when the main routes are 'over capacity.'"
"Bone room," Seraphine said, amused. "Cute name."
"It stores adjudicated lives," Kai said, eyeing the lock. "'Ossuary' is tasteful compared to what it actually is."
Silex held up a wafer-thin slate—clear, with a thread of gold running through it.
"Godkey," he said. "Temporary access token, incident response waiver, internal incident already logged to justify it. You have one hour before the log expires and something loud comes looking."
Kai took the slate and smiled with half his mouth.
"Either you trust me too much," he said, "or you really want what's inside."
"Both," Silex said. "You'll have physical anchor, telem leash, and my override on your collar loop. Reik, you're anchor."
Arden nodded. That meant kneeling next to Kai while the tower crawled through both their skulls, and if anything went wrong, dragging him back from wherever the Underlayer decided to keep him.
"What's the play?" Arden asked.
"Find Echo Tithe's root," Silex said. "Figure out whether Rowan's signature is a smokescreen or the bonfire. Map the buyers. Copy before someone burns it."
"What's the catch?" Seraphine said, casual.
Silex's eyes slid to Kai. "Echo uses a tithe protocol. It demands an offering."
Kai's expression didn't change, but Arden watched his fingers flex around the slate.
"What kind of offering?" Arden said.
"Memory," Kai said. "You pay a toll in something you won't get back. Keeps out tourist thieves."
Seraphine looked at Silex. "You're okay with that?"
"I'm okay with outcomes," Silex said. "He's a Netrunner. The price is built into his job description."
Lyra's voice came almost too soft to carry. "You don't get to decide which part of him goes."
Silex didn't look at her. "That's what the hour is for. Decide fast."
He palmed the door.
Inside, the Ossuary looked like an apology that never took. Row after row of upright slabs, pale and luminous, each with a name. The air hummed with cool, slow computation. If you stood still too long, the place tried to catalog you.
"Creepy," Seraphine said, approving.
In the center: a low dais ringed in old restraints and new blankets. Someone had tried to make a pit look like a prayer bench.
"Set him up," Silex said.
Kai lay back on the plinth like he'd practiced dying before and got bored of it. Arden knelt beside, checking straps that weren't quite cuffs. Lyra stood at the head, palms hovering an inch above his temples, eyes distant. Darius took the perimeter, a monument at each corner. Seraphine drifted, almost aimless, but every turn put her between the door and something expensive.
"Lifeline?" Arden asked.
Kai lifted a cable with an almost obscene coaxial tip. "Kiss the bride."
Arden took it, slotted it into the port at the back of Kai's neck. The collar hummed. Arden's leash answered. The link spiked, then flattened into a braided line that made Arden taste copper.
Kai exhaled like a diver.
"I'll be chatty while I work," he said. "Helps me not drown."
"Do that," Arden said. "And if you go silent, I'm dragging you out by your damn hair."
"Romantic," Seraphine said, leaning on a slab with someone else's life in it.
Silex stood with arms folded. "Begin."
Kai set the godkey on his sternum and palmed it. The wafer dissolved like sugar under his skin. Arden felt the system blooming through Kai's nervous system: a cold vine, thin fronds exploring, harmless until you moved wrong.
"Hello, little cathedral," Kai murmured. "Show me your altar."
The room's Veil-slab flickered, then went black. Arden's view went suddenly smaller: Kai's pulse on his own HUD, Lyra's breath counted by his collar, Darius's slow iron drum heartbeat like a distant train, Seraphine's heartbeat a fast, amused flutter.
"Gate," Kai said. "I see it."
He swallowed.
"And the tithe," he added. "Of course."
"What does it want?" Arden asked.
"Authenticity," Kai said. "Not a pretty one. Something that matches the corridor. An execution. A near-death. A public burning. It likes footage. It prefers stolen."
Arden knew before Silex spoke.
"Use the Mercy Glitch," Silex said. "He's already paid it once."
Arden stared at him. "You want him to burn my leash event as a key."
"That file already exists," Silex said. "It's his best match. It will open the door."
"And cost what?" Lyra asked.
Kai's mouth tugged. "The gate takes a wafer. You don't lose the whole cake."
"That's not an answer," Arden said.
Kai turned his head on the pillow to look at Arden. His eyes were too bright, pupils dilated to Underlayer dark.
"It will chew a piece off the memory," Kai said. "Maybe the color, maybe the sound, maybe the part where you changed your mind. I won't know until it eats."
"You can take mine," Darius said from the corner. "Plenty of deaths it could snack on."
Kai shook his head once. "The gate's keyed to the rumor of us. It wants the one it's already monetizing."
Seraphine's voice went dry. "Arden, if you let him jack that, I'm going to say something supportive later and then drink about it."
Lyra's palm hovered a hair closer to Kai's temple.
"I can buffer," she said. "Not stop it. But I can make it take a smaller bite."
Silex didn't move. "Decide."
Arden looked down at Kai.
"You're sure?" he asked.
"No," Kai said. "But I'm sure enough to lie."
"Do it," Arden said. His throat felt like old rope. "Use me."
Kai's mouth ticked. "Such a giver."
"Shut up and steal my death."
Kai closed his eyes.
For a second, nothing happened.
Then the room breathed wrong.
The Veil in the walls let go of neutrality and showed appetite. Arden's HUD stuttered. The Ossuary's slabs flickered images he could not have seen and had seen already: the plaza floodlights; the rope; the crowd. He smelled the starch of Marshal uniforms and the sharp, almost citrus stink of new rope.
His collar pulsed hot as the Mercy Glitch unspooled.
"Easy, easy," Lyra said, voice thin. "Anchor."
Arden's fingers dug into the plinth.
He felt the moment the machine bit down.
Sound sheared. The roar of the crowd went away. Color bled. The only thing left was the ache in his jaw and the weight at his throat and the absurd, stupid thought that there was an itchy seam in the hood they'd stuck over his head.
Then even that thinned.
The gate swallowed.
Kai gasped, chest arching.
"Open," he said. "We're in."
Arden realized he was shaking. The leash cooled slowly. Lyra's hands trembled above Kai's temples.
"Cost?" Arden asked, voice raw.
Kai licked dry lips. "You won't hear the crowd in that memory anymore," he said. "Not the real one. Only the fake they added later."
Arden wanted to say something like Good. He didn't. He just nodded once and let the anger go somewhere the tower couldn't root in it.
"Primary corridor," Kai went on. "It's a spine, yeah? Like the tower. Side chambers are nodes. Names. Purchase orders. Everyone who ever bought a bite of someone else."
"Walk," Silex said. "Fast."
Kai's pupils widened, chasing a threshold only he could see.
"Guardian," he said, a second later.
Lyra's breath hitched. "What kind?"
"Curator flavor," Kai said. "Stitched judicial aesthetics with a predatory loop underneath. It's wearing a child's voice, because of course it is."
For a second, Arden did hear it, not in his ears but on the shared link: a little-girl cadence, perfectly enunciated.
Do you have your tithe, citizen?
Your offering keeps our sanctity clean.
"Fuck off," Kai said conversationally. "Showing credential."
The room tightened. The slab at Arden's knee vibrated once, like something heavy had dropped down a distant hallway.
"Second gate," Kai said. "This one wants redundancy. Surprise me."
Silex said, "Use mine."
Lyra actually laughed, short and astonished. "You first."
Kai's mouth tugged again.
"It wants a living donor," he said softly. "A brain on current. It wants to make sure you can still bleed. That only happens if I go deeper. If I graze the meat."
Arden felt it then: the shape of the sin tucked into the architecture. The gate wanted proof of life to open a room about death.
"You can't take from him," Arden said, meaning the man on the slab in Rook who'd been left rigged like livestock. "Not again."
"Not him," Kai said. "Me."
Lyra's eyes went wide. "No—"
"Don't argue," Kai said. "We've got forty-two minutes and the Curator is already starting to count my lies."
"Price?" Arden said.
Kai looked at him and, for a heartbeat, dropped the mess of sarcasm he wore like armor.
"My first sound," he said. "Keep it little. Something only I'll miss."
Lyra whispered, "You don't know what it'll bite."
Kai smiled sideways. "That's why it's interesting."
Silex's voice stayed level. "Proceed."
Seraphine folded her arms and looked at Silex the way a tired cat looks at a hand it has decided not to bite. "If he comes up wrong, I'll make you pay in something you do miss."
Kai went deeper.
Arden felt it on the link like a plunge into cold. Kai's body shivered once. His jaw clenched. The cable at his neck hummed with a note Arden knew he'd hear in his bones for days.
"Payment made," Kai said, a second later, voice too even. "Second gate opens."
"What did it take?" Lyra asked, barely breathing.
Kai blinked at the ceiling.
"I can't hear my mother laugh in my head anymore," he said. "Happy?"
"God," Seraphine said, very quietly.
Darius's hands opened and closed once, like he'd been given something too small to crush.
Arden wanted to cut the cable and carry Kai out. He didn't.
"Map," he said. "Before it changes the locks."
Kai worked.
He spoke like a surgeon and a thief at once. Names spilled. Routing codes. Purchasers hiding behind philanthropic fronts. Committees bigger than Oversight—charity boards that bought the poor to sell them back dressed as lessons. He chased Echo Tithe's spine to a black chamber labeled with bureaucratic mischief: MORALITY RESEARCH / CIVIC SENTIMENT.
"People with nice stationery," Seraphine said.
"Nicer teeth," Kai said. "Three downstream laundries, two backflow pipes. One goes to Saintglass. One to Pastor Rook's basement cathedral. One goes straight to the Crown's little party rooms. Not even coy about it."
"Copy it," Silex said.
"I am," Kai said. "Twice, thrice, a dozen times. Redundancy makes religion."
The Curator arrived.
It didn't show on the walls. Arden felt it in his collar: a slow pressure, like a hand on the back of his head. Lyra hissed; Darius straightened. Seraphine's eyes went flat.
"Visitor," Kai said. "It smells like a jury room set on fire."
The child-voice came again, in their teeth.
You have taken what was not given.
Atonement required.
"Always with the tolls," Kai muttered. "What's your price, sweetheart?"
Return what you took with something of equal weight, it said, clear and cold. Or leave without your hands.
"Define 'hands,'" Kai said.
Your file system. A pause that wasn't a pause. Your motor skills.
Lyra's breath stuttered. "It can burn him out."
Arden's hand closed around Kai's wrist before he thought about it.
"You don't pay that," he said. "We walk."
"We don't walk," Kai said, still too even. "We crawl, and Silex writes it up as 'technical debt' until he finds another priest."
Silex stepped closer, close enough Arden could see the old scar at the corner of his mouth.
"You're not dying here," Silex said. "But you are working."
Kai exhaled.
"Options," he said out loud, counting on his fingers because counting was a rope. "One, give it a copy of the copy of the copy—won't work. It knows the weight. Two, sacrifice a living donor's long-term memory—no, I'm not a church. Three, burn something of mine that matters."
"Not again," Lyra said.
Kai smiled without humor. "I have more than one thing in my head."
Arden squeezed his wrist harder. "Take it from me."
Kai blinked. "What?"
"Use me again," Arden said. "A bigger bite. I can take it."
Lyra shook her head violently. "It will escalate. You're linked to us. It will share."
Seraphine cut in. "And I'm not screaming tonight. So no."
Darius's jaw set. "Me, then."
The Curator found their link and looked at them with the kind of interest a bureaucrat has for a new tax.
One sacrifice per entry, it said. And you have paid once with the Dog's leash. Multi-use is fraud.
"Of course it has rules," Kai said, almost admiring. He took a breath. "Alright. I've been meaning to quit anyway."
"What?" Arden said.
"My first world," Kai said. "The one with more grass than code. Mud. Dogs. The one that got me wanting to program weather to behave. I'll keep the mud. I'll burn the bark."
"Kai," Lyra said, something like panic now.
"Do you want me to pick a happier one?" he said, finally angry. "Because I can't hear my mother and I'm tired of asking permission to bleed."
Arden said nothing because anything he said would be a command, and the last thing Kai needed was another man with a leash on his throat.
Kai closed his eyes.
"Take the dog," he said to the empty air. "Leave me the field."
The Curator took it.
Arden felt the bite like a sympathetic echo, a tug just behind his own breastbone. Lyra cried out once, small. Darius cursed. Seraphine said nothing at all.
Kai inhaled sharply, let it out slow, and for a second he looked exactly like every kid in Rook who'd ever traded something precious to eat.
"Atonement received," the child-voice said. Record returned.
The corridor opened.
"Out," Silex said, finally tight. "Now."
"Copy's in," Kai said. "I wrote a little worm while we paid. Nothing destructive—just a symptom flare. When they pull the next tithe, it screams at three audit boards and one Crown party."
Seraphine barked a laugh. "Now we're talking."
"Walk me," Kai said, softer. "Before the Curator decides it wants dessert."
Arden palmed the cable at Kai's neck and pulled the connector free. The light under Kai's skin spiraled down and went out. For a heartbeat, his eyes went empty. Then they refocused on Arden.
"Hey," Kai said. "We steal God's purse?"
"Something like that," Arden said. His voice didn't crack. Barely.
Kai sat up slowly.
"Easy," Lyra said, hands not touching, just there. "How many fingers?"
"Three and a half," Kai said. "You're wiggling your thumb weird."
She laughed wetly. "Good."
Darius offered a hand. Kai took it and let himself be hauled upright, mouth tight, humor flickering in and out like a bad light.
Silex held out another wafer-slate—real, this time. "Give," he said.
Kai passed him a drive. Silex didn't look at it like a prize. He looked at it like a live wire.
"We have enough to hurt," Silex said. "And enough to be hurt. That's balance."
Seraphine stalked close.
"If he doesn't get something for this," she said, low but sharp, "I will decorate your office with your sense of balance."
Silex didn't blink. "He gets to live and eat my food and break my enemies," he said. "That's more than most get."
Lyra said, without looking at Silex, "I'm buying him dinner." To Kai: "We'll find you a laugh."
Kai's mouth ticked. "Just not a canned one."
They packed up quick. The Ossuary let them go with bad grace, the slabs flickering faintly as if disappointed at an interrupted meal.
In the corridor, with the door sealed behind them, Arden leaned his head back against the cool concrete and counted to eight.
"You good?" Seraphine asked Kai.
"I'm missing a dog," he said. "But my field's still there."
"You didn't have a dog," Darius said. "You were allergic."
"I do now," Kai said. "It's a hole."
Lyra winced.
Silex stepped past them, already dialing a ghost number.
"Don't get sentimental," he said. "We've got to decide where to spend this sin."
Arden didn't move.
"Kai," he said.
The netrunner looked up.
"You go under again," Arden said, "and the machine asks for more blood—you ask me first. If it takes from you, it's because we chose together."
Kai stared at him like that was new, then nodded once.
"I'll invoice you," he said.
Seraphine nudged Arden's boot with her own. "He's lying," she said, too gentle to be the insult it sounded like. "But he heard you."
They walked, a crooked line of Dogs with a stolen god in a pocket and a debt pulsing in their throats.
The tower breathed, pleased.
It had gotten what it wanted. So had they.
That was how the Obedience Machine preferred its bargains: everyone dirty, everyone smiling.