Light fell like a blade.
A column of gold sank into a boy's throat three meters from Kael.
The boy's mouth opened wide.
The sound wasn't a scream so much as a torn page.
Silver smoke unspooled from his ribs and climbed, obedient, toward the angels above.
People collapsed around the circle.
Some writhed with joy.
Some convulsed as if their skins were being unstitched.
The crowd smelled like smoke and wet fear.
A trio of low-ranking angels stood on the podium.
Armor of compressed light clung like second skin.
Their faces were hidden under faceless hoods.
Their hands moved with the economy of ritual.
Behind them, Celestial Knights in white plates made a ring.
Chest-emblems flashed like slow suns.
The chanting was a tide.
It pressed against Kael's skull, methodical and thick.
A language that stripped edges from thought.
Golden pillars descended in waves.
Where they settled, bodies either sang or bled out lives that glittered like thread.
Strong marks erupted with luminous ecstasy.
Weaker marks browned and faded, then vanished.
Kael felt it as pressure on his temples.
Then like someone pushing a palm into his sternum.
The second heart — the thing that had anchored itself under his ribs — answered with a stubborn beat.
It struck back at the chant in counterpoint: not sound, a push.
The tattoo on his forearm flared when the chant hit its peak.
Not a secret spark but a flare.
A sari of amber running beneath skin.
For a heartbeat the lines skated open.
He saw, as if through a slit, an image.
The angels' hands were not empty.
They were connected — cables of light, hooks into a ledger of energy.
Crowd voices blurred into machinery.
Kael's mouth tasted like dust and hammered metal.
Leo was three rows ahead, shoulders hunched.
The illness had already made his skin chalcedony-thin.
In the light he looked like someone peeled and set in wax.
He kept his hands folded as if prayer could hold him together.
Kael's pulse answered the second heart's.
It was a small victory to feel both drums—his and the shard's—marching at once.
Then he saw it. Where the chant swelled, the second heart pulsed brighter.
The light above Leo wavered.
A thin silver thread, the color of smoke, hesitated mid-flight.
Like a machine misreading a code.
The crowd didn't notice.
The angels certainly did.
An angel's head turned as if by a gear.
The nearest Knight's helmet chimed — a small system check.
Someone in the ring tugged the protocol line.
A family in front of the podium collapsed in a heap.
Their daughter's mark failed to ignite.
The herald on the lift barked scripture.
The crowd obliged with cries of sanctified horror.
Someone pushed through, tears and anger.
A Knight struck him down with a flat palm.
The man's jaw cracked with a sound that made children suck in breath.
Kael moved like a shadow, though he felt new angles under his ribs.
His sleeve hid the tattoo but not its heat.
Cloth did nothing to slow the pulse beneath.
While the angels recited, his hands began to imitate their motion.
Not a perfect mirror but a clumsy sketch.
He pressed fingers together.
A thin filament of light ran between knuckles, quivering like a nerve.
The filament cut the air.
Dust leapt away from it.
Someone nearby noticed the scent of ozone.
Heads turned.
Not at him — not yet — but attention flexed like a muscle.
The ritual pressed on.
A pillar descended on a group of teenagers.
Where it touched, a boy roared as if amphoras were being crushed inside him.
The silver smoke slithered up into the angels' hoods and pooled there as if drinking.
The congregation applauded.
It was both spectacle and slaughter.
The angels siphoned life in patterns.
Kael saw templates — rows and loops the angels traced in the air with slender fingers.
Each trace corresponded to an emblem on the knights' breasts.
The emblems weren't ornaments.
They were locks.
The second heart thudded louder.
Kael's lungs cleared in a way that horrified him.
Oxygen felt like a small theft.
He tasted possibility and guilt in the same mouthful.
He should have left with Leo.
He had a dozen reasons to go.
Leo's need for stabilizer.
The ruin's leaking roof.
But curiosity pulled him closer.
The ritual was a seam.
Seams could be pried.
He edged ahead between bodies, sleeves down, palms tucked, careful.
Every step made the light look up.
A Celestial Knight's gaze grazed the crowd and froze on a shimmer at Kael's wrist.
The Knight blinked.
The helmet's visor flickering like a sensor adjusting.
His hand twitched.
The line between Kael and the podium thinned.
The Knight barked an order.
Two others snapped toward Kael like trained dogs.
Heads turned.
Murmurs spread through the circle—first small, then sharp.
Until the square felt like something that had heard its own heartbeat.
Kael's jaw tightened.
He had never been a visible thing.
The world had not been designed to find him.
Now it pivoted.
The amber under his skin answered the scrutiny by crawling toward his fingers.
The filament between his knuckles coalesced into a blade-slice of light — thin and humming.
It felt wrong and absolute.
Like a debt being collected.
A child reached for his mother's skirt as the Knights closed in.
The mother's face was empty.
People had learned quickly how to look away from consequences.
Kael's feet had one set of options: flee, fight, or fold.
He settled on something in between — a small, ugly attempt to protect.
He slipped forward and laid the flat of his hand on Leo's shoulder.
The contact did not heal.
It did something stranger.
The filament shivered and the space around them cooled.
Leo's breathing slowed.
A notch of steadiness returned like the breath of someone who had almost drowned and found a pocket of air.
Someone near them noticed.
A Knight pointed.
The angels' chanting shifted tone.
It was a modulation that made the second heart ache with recognition.
The voice that had been a wall became a sieve.
Patterns in the orchestration threaded toward their corner of the crowd.
The angels were scanning for outliers.
Now the scan had found a signature in Kael.
Not a match but a trace.
The amber glow.
The filament's frequency.
The lead angel raised a hand.
The air above Kael folded.
A small spotlight like an accusation.
Chaos followed patience.
The square's rhythm broke into staccato moves.
People screamed and ran in clumsy tides.
Knights separated the crowd like hands pulling at a sweater.
The podium's cables hummed.
Kael saw the Knight's brand burn brighter.
A drone dipped low.
Its lens caught the filament's glow through fabric like a needle finding a vein.
The world's net tightened.
A city scanner pinged his location.
A protocol queued.
The angels didn't merely observe anymore.
They signaled.
Something in Kael's chest answered with a sound like a bell being strangled.
An old, cold calculation whispered through his mind.
This was no longer about survival.
It was about being taken, dissected, cataloged.
The second heart pushed outward then folded in like a fist.
Kael felt the shard's voice for the first time during daylight.
Eager, smelling harvest.
It said fewer words and had the patience of a season.
Kael's move was not heroic.
He grabbed Leo's wrist and dragged.
Not out into the crowd but toward a service alley tucked under a stairway.
He pulled with the desperation of a man stealing time.
A Knight's boot slammed into him.
Pain flared, real and ugly.
The filament sliced the air in a reflex.
A white-hot line slapped the Knight's gauntlet and sang metal like a struck bell.
The Knight staggered, not killed, but embarrassed.
The crowd turned.
Kael had left marks.
The Knight's pride hurt more than his body.
The Knight lashed back with a wire strike that swallowed Kael's shoulder.
Pain blazed.
The second heart answered with a rhythm so fierce Kael tasted copper.
He stumbled into a doorway.
The alley swallowed them.
Boots followed, echoing.
Sirens answered from beyond the square.
The angels' hands descended like nails.
A selective beam swept the alley.
It passed Kael and locked on Leo's bowed head.
The tattoo on Kael's forearm crawled like a living map.
Trying to rearrange itself into armor.
A Knight raised an extraction rod — a tool designed to bully and to bind.
Its tip glowed with institutional white.
The crowd's chant hushed to a murmur.
Protocol required isolation now.
Kael felt the gaze of three angels on his spine.
He could run.
He could fight and die.
He could let Leo go and save his own skin.
The second heart beat, patient as a machine and hungry as a mouth.
An angel's finger extended through the golden fog.
Its silhouette was like a spear.
"Heresia latente," a voice boomed from the podium — metal, choir, embargo.
"All citizens to the Central Square. Delays will be punished with immediate marking."
But the angel's finger did not point to the platform.
It settled on Kael.
"Heresia latente," the metallic voice resonated again, closer, intimate as a verdict.
"Isolate. Extract."