The city broke along old seams.
What had been order—measured feet, measured chants, measured breath—splintered into panic so fast it felt like the air tore with it. People ran and didn't look where they were going. Others knelt and pressed their foreheads to stone, chanting harder as if volume could glue the world back together. Drums tried to hold a rhythm and failed. The beat staggered, lurched, went still.
"Left," Rin said—no louder than a normal word, no time to dress it up as a plan.
Ezra took the turn on instinct. The alley pinched into a cleft barely shoulder-wide. Cloth banners rasped his cheek like tongues as they pushed through. Behind them, something hit stone hard enough to shake dust from the lintels.
Not a person. Too heavy.
They spilled into a narrow court where a low trough of black water ran under a grill of bone slats. The bone clicked as it flexed with the vibration in the ground. The city's hum was gone; in its place: the low animal noise people make when words stop being useful.
"Back route?" Ezra asked, already measuring corners, counting exits.
Rin didn't answer. Her eyes were up.
The thing dropped onto the far wall and clung there.
Ezra had learned to classify monsters quickly because fear is a spender of time. This one didn't fit any drawer he'd carved in his head. It was long-limbed and wrong-jointed, hands like bundled knives punched through with holes that whistled as it breathed. Its face was the worst part—no eyes, no nostrils, just a slab of pale, veined cartilage with a seam down the middle.
Sound made it quiver. When a woman screamed somewhere beyond the alley, the seam twitched open and shut like a mouth trying out the word for hunger.
It moved sideways across the wall with the care of a thing that had never fallen in its life. Ezra's palms were already hot, the mark at his sternum brightening in a way that felt like waking teeth.
"No flares," Rin said, fast. "You'll call more."
"It's already here."
It heard him speak. The seam flexed. Every hole in every blade-finger flared and then shrank, pulling the city's thin light toward them and letting it go in a roll, like breath.
It leaped.
There wasn't room to dodge without turning his back. Ezra stepped into it and shoved light up through his bones the way Theodore taught him to shove through a door when the latch won't give. A white, mean burst—no show, no wasted heat. He hit the seam dead on.
The monster's head went back; cartilage browned where the light kissed it, but it didn't tear. Ezra got a hand on its wrist, and a wrist here meant an elbow there, except joints weren't where they should be. The thing's weight drove him half a step, two, boots sliding on powdered stone.
"Down!" Rin snapped.
Ezra shut the light off hard and dropped. The thing's arm scythed where his head had been and carved a row of clean grooves in the wall, whispering as it cut like air through reeds.
He came up inside its reach and jammed the butt of his spear into the trough grating. Bone slats bit the shaft. He used it as a brace to pivot and drive the point into the thing's belly.
The wood bowed. The point went in a finger-width and no more. The monster grabbed the haft and squeezed. Wood shrieked. Ezra let go before it snapped and took his hand with it.
It didn't roar. It pressed its seam to his face like a blind thing hunting a pulse.
Rin moved.
She'd been ten paces to the right, back to a carved post, like she meant to run. She didn't. Her hands went to the cord at her throat. For a half-second Ezra thought she meant to strangle herself.
She yanked the cord. A pendant slid free of her shirt and swung. Not metal. Bone. Carved into a thin hollow, mouth like a reed flute's, sides etched with fine spiral cuts so tight they looked like the grain of wood.
Rin brought it up, inhaled, and blew.
At first Ezra heard nothing. He felt it.
His teeth rang. His sinuses lit, then emptied. The skin of his face went tight, and everything behind it tried to step a half-inch backwards inside his skull. The air between Rin and the monster visibly shivered; for one twitching instant every bone charm in the alley began to sing.
The monster convulsed. Not like a person. Like a sack squeezed hard enough to pop. The seam along its face blew open with a flat crack and a wet gout of clear gel blasted from it, spattering the bone grating and Ezra's shirt. The holes in its blade-hands blew out into ragged circles. Its limbs pinwheeled, not in panic but because there was nothing in them holding tension together anymore.
Rin didn't stop. She drove the note higher and narrower until Ezra's vision softened at the edges. The bone whistle's spirals seemed to spin. The monster's torso dimpled, puckered, and then folded in on itself like paper trying to remember being a tree.
It hit the trough in pieces.
Silence didn't come back. Silence had been taken. What came after was a thin, sizzling ring in Ezra's ears, and the steady racket of his own heart.
He let his knees bend and sat down because he didn't trust them and because pride is lighter than a body when it falls. The world flexed around him, drifted, came back.
Rin lowered the whistle.
Blood ran from her left ear and along her jaw. There was a thread from her nose as well; she wiped it with the back of her wrist and left a smear across her cheek like war paint done by a shaking hand.
He said the first thing that occurred to him because it was either that or watch her bleed: "You've had that the whole time."
"Not for free," she said. Her voice came out dry and husked. "Never for free."
She tucked the bone back under her shirt, and the tremor in her fingers took a moment to go away. When she looked up, there was the same careful calculation in her face he saw in mirrors when he dared them: How much did you see? How much will you tell?
He wanted to ask how many uses she had in her before she fell over. He wanted to ask what part of her hurt worst. He wanted to ask whether there were any notes that did less damage to her and more to things that were trying to take his head off.
What he said was, "Thank you."
Rin huffed a laugh — short, shaky, almost bitter. "Don't thank me," she said, pressing her palm flat against the wall until the tremor in her legs stilled. "Every time I use it, it takes a piece. One day there won't be enough left."
Her shoulders rose and fell, sharp and uneven. The calm mask she always wore had cracks in it now. Ezra caught the way her lower lip trembled before she bit it, hard, like she was angry at herself for letting it show.
"You think I like carrying this?" she muttered, tugging at the cord where the whistle hung.
"They gave us lectures back at Blackspire about pushing resonance too far, remember? Warnings, rules, limits." She shook her head, a few loose strands of hair clinging to her damp cheek. "Here there aren't limits. There's just what kills you first."
Ezra didn't answer. He didn't know how. He could fight. He could burn. But comfort? That wasn't something he'd been taught.
Her eyes flicked to him anyway, searching his face. And when she saw he wasn't laughing, wasn't mocking, something in her expression loosened. She slid down the wall until she was sitting beside him, knees pulled up, arms draped loosely across them.
For a long moment, they just breathed — two kids, not warriors, not marked contestants, not weapons. Just kids, scared and bone-tired, catching their breath in a city that wanted them gone.
"I thought I'd be alone forever," Rin admitted quietly, almost too low to hear. "When I saw you in the crowd, I didn't believe it. Thought it was another trick this place was playing on me."
Ezra let out a low breath, the corner of his mouth twitching despite himself. "I thought the same when I saw you. Didn't think anyone else… lasted."
Her laugh this time was softer, without bite. "Guess we're too stubborn to die."
"Or too stupid," Ezra said.
"Same thing."
They sat in silence again, but it wasn't the suffocating kind anymore. It was something lighter. Fragile. Like a truce with the world, if only for a few stolen minutes.
Then the distant drums started again — steady, heavy, calling the city back into its rhythm.
Rin pushed herself to her feet, wiping the blood from her jaw with the back of her hand. "Come on. If we sit here any longer, they'll find the pieces."
Ezra stood, spear in hand, the mark at his chest still faintly glowing. He looked once at the broken remains in the trough. Then at Rin, shoulders squared but hands still trembling.
She noticed. Straightened her chin. "Don't look at me like that. I'm fine."
"You're bleeding from your ear."
"I said I'm fine," she snapped — but softer than before, more tired than angry. She turned away before he could answer, striding into the next alley where the shadows were deepest.
Ezra followed.
Neither of them said it, but both knew the same truth:
They weren't fine.
But they were still alive.
For now, that would have to be enough.
Rin's whistle still rang faintly in Ezra's bones. The monster's corpse twitched in the trough, steaming, the smell of blood and resin curling in the air. They didn't speak. They didn't need to. Survival had spoken for them.
Ezra's grip on his spear tightened. He scanned the alley mouth again, muscles taut. If one of those things could get this close, more would follow.
"Move," Rin said, voice ragged but sharp.
They started toward the back route, boots crunching in the thin dust. The bone charms overhead still clicked in uneven rhythm, as if mocking the beat of their steps. Ezra's instincts screamed—this wasn't over.
He was right.
The shadow at the end of the alley moved before he registered it. Not a monster. Not painted tribespeople. Human.
He pivoted, spear half-raised—
—and the cold kiss of iron pressed to the back of his skull.
His whole body went rigid. Not a blade. Not bone. A barrel.
"Don't," a voice murmured near his ear. Calm. Controlled. A voice that didn't belong in this place. "We don't want to kill you."
Ezra froze, breath shallow. Rin had her whistle halfway to her lips when another figure stepped out of the dark behind her, movements precise, practiced. The stranger caught her wrist mid-lift. Rin hissed and tried to twist free, but the whistle clattered to the stones.
"Sorry about this," the second voice said. Younger. Apologetic, almost.
Then the butt of the gun cracked against the side of Ezra's head. Light burst in his skull. He staggered once. Twice.
He saw Rin's eyes—wide, furious, but laced with the same sudden helplessness he felt.
And then the world went out.