The tannery didn't sleep—it exhaled beneath the floorboards like lungs steeped in mildew. Even when the city above held its breath, something deeper still drew in rot and let it out slow.
Ivar lay with one shoulder braced against a support beam. Splinters worried the wound at his ribs. He didn't move. Movement cost blood, and blood, here, had a scent that traveled. Eelgrave had things that listened with their teeth.
Across from him, Lysa sat curled beneath the sagging roof. Her eyes traced the darkness between warped attic boards—not fearful, just counting. As though trying to mark each breath the tannery made.
The crawlspace was a casket nailed together by rust and mildew. But it held them. For now.
"How many have seen you like that?" she asked, voice low, not curious—just cataloguing.
"That shape?" he murmured.
She nodded.
"Four. Five, maybe. Including today. I try not to keep count."
"You will," she said. "The city does."
Eelgrave kept score in scars, in the absence of names, in glances held too long. Ivar let the silence stretch. Some debts were older than numbers.
They left before light—though light was a generous lie in Eelgrave. Morning here was a wheeze through metal lungs, a rasp of iron dust and breath gone sour. No sunrise. Just a thinning of shadow.
Fewer eyes.
The sootstreets coughed them toward the Cutthreads—a neighborhood so knotted in its own grief, even the buildings seemed to lean away from it. Alleys ran like split veins. Windows blinked with soot. Doors wore rust like armor.
Perfect.
Ivar walked hooded, the blood at his ribs clotting beneath bandage and linen. Beside him, Lysa moved in silence. She'd wrapped her hands in cloth torn from attic walls—makeshift gloves stitched from desperation.
"They'll look for you high first," she said.
"Why?"
"Because you came down."
No further explanation. In Eelgrave, direction was a kind of morality. Down meant surrender. Up meant hunger.
They passed a row of statues—iron men half-melted by an old warehouse fire. One had no face. Another had three mouths, all open in different screams. Lysa slowed, eyes tracing the misshapen hands.
"What is it?" Ivar asked.
She didn't speak at first. Just stared.
Then, quietly: "They tried to be remembered."
A child darted past—boils ringing his eyes like halos. He clutched a buzzing cloth bundle that bled at the corners. No one followed. No one cared. The alley swallowed him.
They turned down a corridor where bone-carved signs swung on gut-rope: a rust-barber, a grief-seller, a windowless chapel that stank of burnt herbs and fresh chalk. One door had nails hammered into the shape of an open eye.
Lysa gestured. "This way."
The bathhouse she led him to was half-eaten by time. It slouched beneath a collapsed district, its bones held up by habit more than stone.
Inside, mold had bloomed into colorless fur across cracked tile. Air curled with the ghosts of floral salts long dead. Pools lay dry, save for one—green with time, ringed in detritus and lost things.
They descended into the lowest basin, where marble women with serpents for arms watched from frescoes that peeled like old scabs. Lysa crouched near the edge and unwrapped the copper-wire hand again. It gleamed dully, twisted into a gesture that didn't belong to any known prayer.
"Do you ever finish them?" Ivar asked.
"Sometimes. But not here."
"Why start, then?"
She didn't look up. "Because when I don't, something worse comes."
Worse didn't need defining. He let it lie.
She turned the hand again. Not with care—with ritual. Searching for a pulse in the wire, a tension left behind.
"Sometimes," she said, "I wonder if I'm fixing something—or just hiding what it was."
He leaned back against cool stone. "There's a difference?"
She didn't answer.
Dusk came like a bruise.
Ivar watched it settle in the cracks of the walls, listened to the steady tick of wire between Lysa's fingers. Her work had rhythm. Not peace. Just the quiet violence of concentration.
Then something changed.
Not the air.
The weight of it.
Lysa stilled. "They're close."
Ivar rose. "Crowhunters?"
"No. Dirtier. Something without a name."
A howl rose—wet, ragged. Not animal. A sound pulled backward through a throat that didn't fit it.
Stone scraped. Something shifted.
Ivar moved, but Lysa caught his wrist. "Don't shift. It remembers shapes. Yours most of all."
From the far wall, a seam split open. Not broken—peeled. Something emerged, built wrong. Arms too long. Skin like melted pewter. No face. No eyes. Where its mouth should've been, there was thread.
The thread moved.
Lysa reached into her pouch. Not the hand. Something smaller—a shard of jawbone, wound in braided cord.
She whispered. The creature twitched. The thread in its mouth tangled.
Then twisted inward.
It screamed—not sound, but shudder. A groan forced through hollow bone.
It retreated. Dragged stone behind it like a child closing its own wound.
Silence returned.
Ivar turned to her. "What was that?"
She didn't blink. "A warning."
"To us?"
"No. From something older."
"You keep bones that whisper back?"
"No." She rewrapped the cord. Tight. "I keep memories that don't lie."
They moved before the dark could settle too deep. Not fast. Not straight. They walked the edge of the Cutthreads—the place where the city's skin peeled and the old blood showed through.
Walls wept chalk symbols. Ash-covered prayers etched by hands that hadn't eaten in days. Markings left not to be read, but to be feared.
People saw Ivar now. Some flinched. Others stared too long. The old ones didn't turn away. They nodded. Not with welcome.
With recognition.
A child sang to a glass jar. Inside: a moth the size of a fist, its wings painted with eyes. When she saw Ivar, she stopped singing.
"You're him."
He said nothing.
"You're the one who didn't scream."
Lysa touched his arm. "We should go."
They reached a stairwell leading nowhere. Stone steps into collapsed ruin.
Lysa found the seam. Peeled it open. A tunnel waited. Dry. Lined in broken shrine tiles.
"Where does it go?" he asked.
"Nowhere important."
He followed.
In the narrow dark, Ivar whispered, "You said clarity peels. What if it peels too much?"
She didn't answer. Not right away.
Then:
"Then something else grows in the gaps. And you'll have to name it."
He exhaled. "And if I don't?"
"The city will."
And the tunnel kept going.
Longer than it should have.
Something waited at the end.
They reached a rusted door, bolted from within.
It opened.
And the voice behind it said:
"You're late."
Then saw Lysa.
"And you shouldn't have brought him."