The factory crouched at the edge of the ward like a rusted jaw. Wind slipped through its broken panes and made a mouth-harp of the place—thin, metallic, teeth chattering in the frame. The stink inside wasn't human rot; it was wet concrete, mold, and the bitter charge of RC cells that said a ghoul had been nesting here long enough to forget the sky.
Hayato stood at the threshold with his mask tilted up to taste the air. Hunger burned in him the way fever takes a house and leaves only the studs—everything rattled and light and wrong. His kagune trembled behind his ribs as if it wanted out more than he wanted breath. He kept it caged and stepped in.
The Jacks ghosted after him. Eleven shapes. Iron-mask to his left, steps precise, eyes narrowed to slits. Bone-mask at his back, that split down his cheek like a grin someone had cut. The lacquered "eyelash" mask watched without moving at all. No one spoke. The only sound was glass dust grinding under boots and a chain tapping a beam, tap, tap, tap, like a pulse.
Iron-mask pointed, voice low. "Bikaku. Mean. He's taken three in two weeks."
Bone-mask's laugh was dry. "Make it four."
Hayato didn't answer. He didn't trust his throat. He rolled his shoulder once. Plating crawled down his right arm in jagged sheets, heavier than last month, heavier than yesterday—the weight that came with hunger. Three Ukaku shards bled out from his back and hovered like cold stars. He pressed them closer to spine with a breath. Control.
He slid between crates. A smear of dark on the lip of one—old blood already turned brown. Another streak lower, a handprint dragged as if someone had tried to get up and didn't. He stepped over it.
He heard the tail before he saw the man. That whickering sound—scaled flesh shivering against concrete—then the Bikaku uncoiled from behind a column, barbs glistening, the tail tip heavy from use. His eyes found Hayato and narrowed to slits.
"You're not one of mine," he said. Voice smoke-rough. He glanced past Hayato and caught the shadow of a mask. "Clan."
Hayato didn't waste a reply. The Bikaku moved like a hammer from the shoulder—straight lines, ugly intent. The tail slammed across the gap with a crack that snapped echoes out of the walls. Hayato met it on plating. The blow stung the bone inside his armor and rang his ribs like a bell. He slid back two steps and made them look like one.
The rogue pressed. He had the weight—he'd been feeding. The tail scythed low for Hayato's legs. Hayato jumped, landed crooked, and countered with a short, mean hook of metal into meat. The rogue grunted. A second strike drove for the hip; Hayato rolled his shoulder, took it on plate, shards snapping from his back in a stutter. One hit a support column and sparked. One kissed the rogue's forearm and carved a shallow line that steamed in the cold.
The smell hit like someone had opened an oven. Not human meat—different density, mineral and battery, marrow like a hot coin under the tongue. The hunger reared so hard his knees went soft. Bastion's voice came with it, not kind, never kind.
Don't drift. Press. It's just weight and angles. Put him where your body wants him.
Hayato shoved the rogue toward a crate stack and gave the tail nothing to brace against. The Bikaku tried to pull his weight into a sideways chop; Hayato slid close and killed that angle with his chest, plating between them, then drove a plated knuckle into sternum. The crack was sharp as winter.
The rogue hissed and brought the tail down in a chop that would have split a man. Hayato threw his forearm up and caught it, bones singing. Pain spidered along his ulna. He grabbed the tail's underside with his left hand, let it bite his palm, and yanked. The Bikaku stumbled two steps. Hayato's shards flared and fired again—three quick needles that stitched thigh, wall, shoulder. Blood spat in a fan and pattered the floor.
Behind him Bone-mask said softly, to no one, "He's starving. Listen to it."
The laughter that followed scraped the back of Hayato's skull like wire. He drove forward anyway. His chest felt hollow and hot; breath came thin. He didn't try to look clever. He made his body mean and small and close. He hit hips, ribs, collar. The tail caught his thigh once—white heat and a hitch in his stride—but the next step came, and the next. The rogue's eyes went wild when distance died and the plating wouldn't let him reset his whip.
He broke the man to a knee. The Bikaku's hands clawed for anything—gouged at his plate, caught nothing. Hayato snared the wrist and twisted until tendons sang. He brought the armored edge of his forearm down and the wrist went loose. The tail flailed weak and angry. Hayato pinned it with his shin and stared down at the throat.
His shard fan jittered up like a reflex. The smell ate the room. The part of him that had made a vow after Jackdaw—if it makes me stronger, I'll do it again—leaned forward with his whole spine. His jaw unhinged. Teeth bared. A heat sprinted up his back that had nothing to do with effort.
"Thirsty, Twelve?" Bone-mask said, lazy, delighted.
He didn't look back. He didn't have to. He felt eleven gazes press across his shoulders like hands. If he fed now, it would be for them, not for him. It would be a show, a boy gnawing. Not a secret, not a blade he could keep in cloth.
He let the shard fan collapse one plate at a time until it was pain to hold still. He ground his teeth until the urge to bite found bone and quit knocking on his mouth. Then he shifted his knee an inch, lifted his arm an inch, and gave Iron-mask the angle he wanted.
The koukaku that bloomed from Iron-mask's forearm was clean, utilitarian, no flourish—just a sharp wedge that said work. He stepped in and ended the rogue with a single diagonal cut. The body made a soft sound on the way down. The tail spasmed once, twice, and was still.
No one praised. They didn't in this family. Iron-mask looked at the mess, then at Hayato. His eyes in those narrow slits were steady.
"Unstable," he said. "But he held position."
Bone-mask leaned so close Hayato could smell the damp fabric at the edge of his mask. "One day you'll slip where we can see it," he whispered. "I'm patient."
The eyelash mask never moved. Hayato felt that gaze like a nail in a board—fixed, quiet, measuring.
They left him.
Boots clicked glass. Masks turned into rectangles of night. The door's shadow swallowed them and the factory breathed again. The chain on the beam tapped three times in the wind and then was quiet.
Hayato didn't move for five breaths. He listened until the sound of eleven footfalls was a smear in the distance. He lifted his head. The world sharpened to a point. The hunger came back like a hand around his throat.
He knelt beside the body and dug his fingers into the ruined shoulder. Flesh was already cooling; steam wandered up in thin threads where blood met air. He put his mouth to the arm and bit. The first tear was always a seal breaking—skin surrendering with a wet sigh—and the taste hit like a battery wired wrong. His stomach flipped. His veins flared. The shards behind his ribs sparked of their own accord. He swallowed quickly and forced himself to stop at a mouthful and a half.
It didn't taste like humans. It never would. It tasted like licking a wound clean. It tasted like something you did because you were going to die if you didn't.
His breath came hard. He put his forehead to the cold concrete for a count of ten, letting the wave pass. The fever flattened to a manageable hum. His limbs stopped shaking quite so loudly. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and streaked his lower mask dark.
He stood, swayed, found his feet, and cut the room with a final look. Iron-mask had marked the kill clean; there'd be nothing for the CCG to learn here except that one more rogue went quiet. He turned toward the door.
Night outside had gone colder, thinner. Wind lifted grit across the threshold. He pulled his mask down, felt the crack along the jaw press his cheekbone, and stepped back into the street's skeleton. The Jacks' scent trail was easy to follow—iron and old leather, the ghosts of their kagune like condensation on glass. He didn't rush. He didn't dawdle. He moved like someone who belonged to a group that would not wait if he fell, and would not look back.
Roofs hunched overhead, black on black. Laundry lines crossed gaps like tripwires; he ducked them without thinking. The ward's breath was all gutters and quiet televisions and cats that knew better. He cut through an alley and found the inner wall of the estate like a riverbank he'd been born beside. The gate was a mouth. He went in.
They were already in the yard.
The torches burned low and mean. Iron-mask stood at the rack with his arms folded, koukaku melted back into skin. Bone-mask had his hands in his pockets, head cocked. The eyelash mask leaned against the wall like a sketch someone had forgotten to complete.
No one asked where he'd been. No one needed to. The blood streak on his chin would have been visible to the blind.
Iron-mask's eyes drifted to it, then away. "Next time, control your fan earlier," he said. "You waste charge when you let it chatter."
Bone-mask made a little pleased sound at the corner of his mouth. "Or don't. It's fun to watch."
Eyelash spoke for the first time, voice softer than the others, level and uninflected. "He kept the kill clean," he said. "That matters."
Bone-mask spread his hands. "Oh, it matters, little saint. So does watching a number learn what he is."
Hayato didn't rise to it. He let his plating retract in a grind of teeth and tendon and felt the world get a fraction heavier when it went. He wanted a shower. He wanted ten minutes with his back against cold tile and the water on his face until the taste went to the drain. He wanted food, real food, not the rancid thing still sitting under his heart like a coal.
He was not getting any of that. Not tonight.
"Three laps," Iron-mask said. "Silent. Roofline."
They went up the inner stairs and onto clay. The estate's eaves were slick with dew; breath came back at them off tile in quick white ghosts. They ran single file along the lip with the courtyard yawning twenty feet below, every step a choice. Hayato's legs found their rhythm on the second corner. The third corner when the slope pitched wickedly, he bent his knees and used the angle the way a carpenter uses a plane—let it feed him forward instead of taking. He didn't think about falling. He thought about not falling so hard it felt like a religion.
The last lap was the quiet one. No calls. No permission to make noise with anything but breath. Hayato could hear the flutter of the eyelash mask's coat, the almost-sound the bone-mask made when he swallowed laughter, the steady, relentless cadence that was Iron-mask. He fixed his steps to that metronome and made himself small.
Back in the yard Iron-mask nodded once. It wasn't approval. It wasn't even acknowledgment. It was a tick in a ledger nobody would show him.
"Eat," Bone-mask said, almost cheerfully, and kicked a tin bowl toward him. The smell that came up was the ugliest kind of charity: congealed, offal-heavy, barely worth gnawing. "Not the fun kind."
Hayato squatted and put the spoon in his mouth because numbers did not choose. Muscle needed something even if it was garbage. He got it down without a sound. The bowl made a soft ring when he set it back on stone.
Iron-mask's eyes flicked to the gouge on Hayato's thigh where the tail had kissed him. "Wrap it," he said. "We move before moonset tomorrow."
"Tonight," Bone-mask corrected gently, as if that mattered in a place where time slipped its skin. "He means tonight."
The eyelash mask's gaze touched Hayato again and went past him to the open sky. "If he keeps the fan quiet and the plate light, he won't die before he learns why we don't get names."
"Look at you, writing fortunes," Bone-mask said. He patted Hayato's shoulder where skin met plate. "Sleep on your feet if you have to, Twelve. The floor's taken."
They filed off again. Hayato stayed. The torches spat once and then calmed. He pulled a strip of cloth tight around his thigh and tied it with teeth and fingers. The wound would knit fine by morning. Ghouls broke and mended like storms. It was the inside that didn't heal the way it should.
He rubbed the groove a shackle had left on his wrist and then let his arm fall. He could still hear the chain in the factory tapping that beam—tap, tap, tap—like a second heart outside his body. He could still taste the Bikaku on his tongue, rot and iron, and beneath it the cleaner nothing where human food used to live and did not anymore.
His mother's voice would have told him to stop while he still could. It didn't come. Hadn't since the arena.
Bastion's voice sat down beside him on the stone like an old weight. You fed. You fought. You lived. Tomorrow you do it cleaner.
"Tomorrow," Hayato said into the yard, and stood. His legs wobbled, then remembered. He tilted his mask down so the cracked jaw hid his mouth and the blood there. He breathed. The night breathed back.
He didn't have a bed. He leaned his shoulder to the rack and let his eyes go half-closed because that was what sleep was here. The hunger purred low and mean in his bones, satisfied for now. Not gone. Never gone.
He was Twelve. He would be here when the torches guttered out and when they flared back. He would be here when Iron-mask called and when Bone-mask laughed and when the eyelash mask watched without blinking. He would be here when the next rogue made a den and when the next rumor said a boy ran rooftops with shards like a comet tail.
He put his head back and waited for the yard to quiet against his spine. When it did, he let the minute between breaths grow long.
Tomorrow, then.