He found it in the bathroom mirror.
Same place. Left forearm, inside, wrist to elbow. Same dark lines. Same branching pattern that his brain kept trying to read as language and kept failing.
Kael stood very still for a long time.
Then he pressed his fingers against it.
It did not hurt. That was the worst part. It should have hurt. Instead it felt like pressing against something warm and deep, like touching the wall of a room where a fire was burning on the other side.
He pulled his sleeve down. He sat on the edge of the bathtub. He thought through his options.
Option one: he was having a breakdown. Possible. His life was not exactly a wellness retreat.
Option two: he had been exposed to something at the morgue. A chemical, a contaminant, something that had caused a skin reaction and was also somehow making him see things.
Option three: something had happened to him last night that he did not have a framework for yet.
Kael was not a man who spent time on comfortable lies. Comfortable lies were for people who had backup plans. He had no backup plans. He had only what was true.
What was true: the mark on the dead man's arm was now on his arm.
What was true: he had leaned close to a body last night, and the body had not been as finished with the world as everyone assumed.
What was true: the bathroom light was flickering in a way it had not flickered before, and in the spaces between flickers, the shadows in the corner of the room were the wrong shape.
Kael looked at the corner. The shadow looked back. Not metaphorically. Not a trick of light. It oriented toward him the way a face turns toward sound, a slow and patient adjustment, and then it was still again.
He stood up.
He left the bathroom.
He did not run. Running would have required believing what he had just seen, and he was not ready to spend that coin yet.
He made coffee instead.
The coffee helped exactly nothing, but it gave his hands something to do, and Kael had learned a long time ago that occupied hands were better than shaking ones. He pulled back his sleeve and looked at the mark again.
Beneath the branching lines, very faintly, there was something new.
A number. 0.
He stared at it.
He thought: that is a debt counter. He did not know why he thought that. The words arrived fully formed, certain, like a memory rather than a guess.
Zero. The number said zero. Something in him went cold and quiet. Zero did not mean empty.
Zero meant he had not borrowed anything yet.