Rin made no sound. But when he chanced a glance, he found the tendons in her wrist standing out like wire where she gripped the wall. She wasn't watching the victims. She watched the crowd.
He followed her gaze.
The painted knelt in successive rows, heads bowed. Their lips moved. Not chant. Not prayer. A murmur with no words. It vibrated the torches. It made his teeth ache. Ezra's breath found the rhythm before he could stop it.
He adjusted away from it with a small act of will, felt his pulse stagger, then right itself in his own cadence.
The drum rolled again.
The keepers lifted their hands as one.
The plaza quieted further—a feat Ezra would have called impossible. Then a voice spoke.
It did not need to be loud. It was everywhere at once.
"—Tzai ith. Ssae. Ith."
He didn't know the language. He understood exactly nothing. And yet the muscles on the back of his neck tightened; his knees wanted to bend. The voice made obedience feel like posture.
A figure descended from the haze.
Not walking. That would have humanized him. He arrived—one step, then another, and each step revealed a little more of a body covered in paint and something that wasn't paint. The mask hid the face, a serpent's skull lacquered in green so dark it drank the torchlight. Spirals crawled over bare arms and down a bare chest that did not move with breath. A collar of teeth hung at the throat, each incisor filed to a needle.
When he stopped, the entire plaza bowed. Even the torches guttered, leaning their flames.
Rin's breath ghosted his ear. "High Keeper," she said. "Mouth of Her."
The High Keeper lifted both hands.
Up close—if "up close" applied when Ezra watched from a wall across a sea of bodies—the man was not wholly alive. Too still at the joints. Too fluid at the wrists. His shadow flowed a heartbeat behind his limbs, like it needed time to remember where to land.
"—Ssae," the voice said again. The crowd answered with the same word, breathed more than spoken.
Something pressed Ezra's head forward by a hair. The shard in his wrap turned to ice.
No, he thought. You don't tell me how to kneel.
He set his jaw and looked.
The High Keeper lowered his hands. The keepers raised the next victim.
Ezra made himself catalog details; it was the only trick that kept fear from widening. The keepers' paint wasn't paint—powder mixed with oil that soaked into the skin and hardened to a shell. The bone knife's edge reflected no light. The altar hummed at a pitch too constant to be natural. The High Keeper's mask had small holes bored at the temples and lower jaw, long healed.
Once a man, Ezra thought. Then a role. Now a mouth.
The blade pricked skin. Threads bloomed.
They didn't rise at random. They took the same path, every time, forming a lattice that reached the apex like a spider's stair. Ezra watched until his eyes burned. The pattern didn't alter by a single angle.
When the steady mechanics became unbearable, he looked at faces.
Not the victims'—there wasn't much left to read there—but the people kneeling in the rows. Most watched the altar with soft, reverent focus. One man's gaze drifted, following a torch moth with starving attention until his neighbor nudged him and his chin dropped again. Children moved their lips without sound, eyes big and bright. The High Keeper's shadow pulsed, just once, when a child's whisper edged toward voice. The child went still as a stone.
"Why do they do it?" he murmured, almost without meaning to.
Rin didn't answer. Her eyes tracked a line of attendants moving along the pyramid base, each carrying a bowl of thick, black powder. They smeared it along grooves in the stone where old stains seeped back up like weeds.
"Because it works," she said at last.
It was the ugliest answer she could have given him, and the only honest one. The city had rules because rules fed something. The sacrifices continued because the haze above the pyramid kept drinking.
The drum shifted.
Not faster. Not louder. The cadence changed, a new measure under the old. It did something to the breath in his chest.
Keepers brought a litter.
This one was draped in black cloth that drank the torchlight so completely it looked like a hole cut into the procession. It was carried with extreme care—no sway, no jostle—toward a low arch at the pyramid's base. Ezra leaned a fraction over the wall's edge to keep it in sight.
The crowd's hum rose half a pitch.
A lock turned somewhere he couldn't see.
The High Keeper turned his head a degree. For an instant, the serpent mask's eye hollows aligned with Ezra's line of sight.
Cold stroked his brand, cat-soft, and every hair along his arms lifted.
Down, something suggested, silk over steel.
He didn't go down. The effort it took not to bow in his bones startled him; he flexed fingers around his spear until the ache steadied his hand.
Rin exhaled, the sound almost inaudible. He realized she'd felt the same palm.
The litter disappeared inside the arch.
If Ezra had to name the feeling that remained, he would have called it hunger. Not the sharp edible kind—calories, fruit, bread—but the other sort that had found him since the branding. The kind that licked old wounds and called itself mercy.
The ceremony wore on.
Victim, threads, haze, husk. Drum. Breath. Wordless whisper. The plaza didn't blur—nothing here ever did—but it fixed instead, the kind of repetition that turned humans into gears.
What he had seen was enough.
Rin touched his elbow. He started; he hadn't heard her move.
"We're done," she breathed.
He didn't argue. He let her lead, the route already in his head—the broken wall to the narrow alley, the tilted roofline with the missing tile, the ladder of handholds someone had carved into masonry three lifetimes ago.
They didn't speak until the drums were a pressure behind stone.
Only when the city's noise settled into its nightly hum did Rin stop, palms on her knees, breath quieting. Paint had flaked at the edge of her jaw; under it, her skin looked drawn.
"That was your first full one," she said. Not a question.
He nodded.
"What did you see?"
"Order," he said, surprised at the word. "Not devotion. Not even fear. A system."
"Good," she said.
"Good?"
"Better to see the machine than the god."
He thought of the High Keeper's head turning as if pulled by a wire. "And him?"
"Tool," she said, but something in the way her mouth shaped the word made him think she didn't believe it entirely. "Mouth of Her. Nothing more."
He slid down the alley wall until he sat with his knees up, forearms draped over them. He didn't close his eyes. The brand over his sternum still prickled. The shard against his ribs felt like a coin someone else kept flipping.
"Rin," he said. "That litter."
"I saw it."
"The last time you saw something like that—" He didn't have to finish. She had told him what she'd seen days ago.
Her expression didn't change. "I don't know."
"You think it's him."
"I think rumor travels faster than truth," she said. "And this city thrives on rumor it can shape into rules."
He didn't press. The unspoken but hung between them anyway, heavy as the drum.
Silence stretched.
He filled it the way he always did: with inventory.
"Inner courts," he said. "The arch. The attendants with the black powder. The grooves in the stone. The hush when he spoke."
Rin nodded, once for each item, eyes on the alley mouth.
"Tomorrow," she said, "we watch the courts."
He didn't say we should move now. Every part of him wanted to. The urge to do something—anything—itched like a healing wound. But the city punished impulse with elegance. And tonight had already put too much weight on his balance.
They walked the rest of the way to their shelter without words. The room had once been a storeroom; jars lined the walls with their lids cracked and their contents turned to paste. He checked the trip threads he'd set across the gap where the door had been—fine, hair-thin, easy to miss. Still there. Untouched.
Rin went to the back corner and rolled her shoulders. "Short watch, then you."
He didn't argue. He took the first position anyway, settling in the shadow near the entrance where he could feel the draft and hear the corridor's breath.
When Rin's own breathing fell into the deep wave of sleep—too fast at first, then easing—he finally pulled the shard out.
He expected it to glow steady, a loyal dog pointing toward the pyramid. Instead, the pale spirals dimmed and brightened in a slow pulse that didn't match the city's rhythm. Not quite. Every few beats, they stuttered, as if syncing to something else. Someone else.
"Who are you," he whispered to the bone, "and why do you want me there?"
The shard gave him the same answer the city had given the man with the wrong step.
None.
He turned it until it dulled and tucked it away. He pressed his palm flat over the brand on his chest until the prickling calmed.
Think, he told himself. Observe, catalog, survive. You don't fight a machine head-on. You find the teeth and jam them.
On the alley air, the faintest breath of incense and copper seeped under the stone. Under that, something sweeter, cloying, like fruit left in the sun.
He thought of the High Keeper's shadow, late by a heartbeat. Of the invisible hand that had tried to set his head at the proper angle. Of a litter passing into an arch that the city pretended not to see.
His eyes stayed open until the watch changed, the drum quieted, and even the torches seemed to sleep.
When Rin nudged him, he slid down to the floor and let his eyes close, his last clear thought a small, stubborn spark:
The brand warmed, not in approval, not in warning. Simply there—like a second heart.
Outside, the city's breath went in. And out. And in.