They call me many names now. They call me vessel. They call me savior. Some still call me a monster behind their hands. The names pile up like coins in a metal tin; when they rattle, people listen. When they stop, people die.
I keep lists in my head the way other men keep prayers. Who eats when. Who wakes when. Who owes what to whom. The ledger the world needs isn't always written in ink. Sometimes it's measured in rations, in hours on watch, in the last warmth a blanket keeps. The zealots call it doctrine. I call it efficient accounting.
Maru learned to make devotion behave like bookkeeping. He makes the people hand over what they can, and they go home lighter, fed, and convinced they paid for it righteously. That's the genius of the Covenant: it tastes like piety until it tastes like habit. Then it tastes like survival, and nobody looks twice at the hands that took.
Juro keeps a different ledger. He writes names.
At night he pulls his notebook from his jacket and scratches numbers with a tiny, knife-point pen. I watched him once do it by the light of a dying ember—two columns, dates, small notes: Hasegawa — missing — refused concordance. Kento — removed — outside ring. Aiko — Passing — supply run. He writes like he plans to hold history accountable when history wakes up. I think he believes the book will become a sword.
Maybe it will. Books can become swords. Men sharpen words into reasons and reasons into bullets.
We were supposed to move north toward the river the next morning. Maru had organized the camp, and the zealot watch was tight, faces gaunt and quiet but precise. They moved like a machine with the rituals greased into its cogs. I had handed them schedules to make sure the outer ring always had eyes. The logic was simple: order reduces lost men. Order feeds the curse through ritual; ritual keeps the nightmare orderly.
Still, order is brittle. The first test was small—the kind of small that reveals a crack in the dam.
It began with a supply run. We needed filters; the pumps scavenged in the market would not last the week without better parts. The route to the salvage yard was tricky—half in Dagon's territory, half in the city's new stomach. Maru volunteered a squad: nine zealots, three of his inner circle, and a handful of the more obedient survivors. I assigned Genji, Daigo, and a squad of our fighters to escort them. Juro insisted on a rear detail, not to fight but to record.
"Bring the ledger," he said with one of those small smiles that don't reach his eye. "If anything goes wrong, names will matter."
I nodded. Names matter, in different currencies. "Bring water. Bring a blade. Bring the willing."
They left at dawn. The market was a skeleton with teeth—glass like ribs, canopies torn and rebuilt into makeshift barricades. The sun was a pale coin behind the smoke. We watched them go, then we watched the ground.
Two hours in, Genji's face came back first—torn, but alive; a string of survivors behind him. Then Daigo half-carried a man who moved like he'd been through a washing machine of teeth. They slammed the gate of the outer ring and collapsed inside as if the city had spat them back up.
Maru's squad had done what they'd been trained to do; they had fought tight and low, and the zealot wedge had created space. They had taken their tins and the brittle pump parts clattered their way out like a prize. The doctrine had proven itself useful—organized sacrifice bought salvage. Efficiency had a taste. Everyone swallowed.
But one zealot was missing.
Not a big thing in an absolute sense—one more body in a city of corpses—but the missing man mattered because of how the doctrine ate. Maru's face went pale the way oil does when cold. He grabbed the nearest man and barked questions about watches and routes. The watchers murmured hollow prayers. Someone muttered that he'd been taken by scouts. Someone else said he'd refused the passing and walked into the night.
The ledger was already writing itself.
Juro's pen scratched softly as if to puncture the silence. "We check their last known position. We don't let funerals defend the doctrine."
It was a reasonable order. Genji and Daigo wanted to go; they always wanted to crack open the city's teeth. I could have stopped them. I did not. The thing about leadership is that sometimes letting men run keeps them from bleeding at your feet in fits of cowardice. Letting them test edge sometimes reveals where you stand. Letting them fail sometimes sharpens the others. I am not history's hero; I'm a calculator.
We found the man three alleys over—Hiro, small and wiry, eyes like a rat. He hadn't been taken by scouts. He had been left behind. "Passed" quietly. A hole in his jacket had been sewn shut with a neat stitch; his knuckles were raw where he'd tried to keep his hands warm. His eyes were glassy. The zealots said they had offered him a chance to leave the outer ring and take a hammocked place inside the bore, but he refused. Refusal, in their language, means fracture.
Hiro lay curled in a niche behind a collapsed billboard; the zealots had left a ring of stones around him—like an altar. He was breathing, but the life inside him had the weight of a man who'd decided it was over. He looked at me without surprise, which is the worst kind of human thing. Surprise is hope; lack of it is finished accounting.
Maru knelt and touched his forehead as if to anoint him. "A passing," he whispered. "He took the choice."
Juro crouched beside me, his good eye taking in the face. He wrote in his ledger: Hiro — refused inner housing — found outside — alive — passive dying. He tapped the page twice as if to mark a magnitude. "Record that the doctrine creates deaths through inaction," he said. "Someone will need to answer for that."
I let him write. Let memory be weaponized. Let the pen become a threat. There is power in memory when it is combined with action later.
Hiro died three days later. No one struck him down. They simply let the cold do what it does. The zealots sang a small hymn and covered him with bark. They said he had been spared the indignity of resistance. They praised his name, and the group moved on.
The ledger recorded him. Juro underlined his line twice.
Some days are basic math: one shelter needs wood, four hands cut wood, the rest watch. Some days are moral calculus. Calculate the weight of a man; subtract the comfort saved by his passing; divide the value across the survivors. It is ugly, but the hunger that answers it is sterilized by numbers.
That night—two days after the salvage run—the doctrine took a new shape. Maru organized a "Festival of Concord," an evening ritual that had all the trappings of celebration and none of the idiot heat of true joy. It was a slow, careful holiday meant to engrain obedience as gratitude.
I watched them string lights—filaments scavenged from dead buses—across the burned arcade. They painted the icon of the Emberhand with mud and iron filings. The zealots wore clean rags and sang the chant softer than prayer, hoping to make it a lullaby for the lost.
I sat on the ridge that shadowed their amphitheater. Juro was beside me, the ledger open and a small lamp near his pen. He listened, irritated.
"You could put out the fires," he said. "Destroy the altar."
"And risk a riot?" I asked. "You want the zealots to wake up mad and knife-hungry? Who feeds the people afterward?"
He tapped his pen. "You could direct them differently. Move the energy into work, not worship."
"People like religion more than work," I said. "Religion does not have teeth. But it has rhythm. Rhythm keeps people moving. Movement keeps people alive."
"Movement isn't the same as meaning." He said the last word slow, as if tasting it. "You make them useful; you also make them obedient. You built both into the same machine."
His logic had the sting of truth. I cannot deny it. I engineered them useful because utility fed the city and the curse. I allowed their devotion because the worship fed the curse differently—more potent, more continuous. Ritual was a steady fuel. Violence was a flash. The curse liked the steady flame.
Maru's voice rose and the chant swelled. A woman named Eri, a healer who had been generous with her hands when demands were high, was asked to stand at the altar as an exemplar. They called her a daughter of the Covenant because she had given bandages until her own skin was raw. She stepped forward like someone resigned to the script written for them.
"Eri will pass a small portion," Maru intoned. "She will give what she can for the vessel's strength."
The wording was careful. A "small portion." Not a life. Not a martyrdom. A boil-up of small concessions disguised as devotion.
Juro shook his head. "You can't keep softening the language until murder wears a robe," he muttered.
Eri knelt and took a bowl of water. She stepped to anvil and cut a strip of the sleeve off her tunic. She knotted it and handed it to Maru. The crowd clapped softly; the ritual ticked forward. Someone called out a blessing. The rhythm held.