Lowwater had always been a loud city. Markets argued with themselves at dawn, the Docks whistled and swore, the Foundry sang in sparks, and the Towers told everyone what hour to feel tired. Tonight, none of it fit. The noise had slipped sideways. People spoke, but only with doors mostly shut. Wagons rolled, but with blankets thrown over their cargo so light wouldn't catch. Bells tolled, but the sound crawled instead of rang.
A new name lived in the spaces between sounds.
Cross.
Hook Street said it like a curse. The Docks said it like rain that wouldn't stop. The Slums said it like they were testing a rotten tooth with their tongue and finding it still hurt. Even the Towers—stone that thought it was god—let the word pass along corridors where only orders should go.
Evan Sharp tasted it in the broth old Marra forced into his hands.
He sat on a cot in a storage room above her bakery, shirt off, ribs wrapped tight, violet lightning fretting weakly along his shoulders like a storm trying to remember itself. Every breath felt like someone had tucked a knife under it. The fight's dirt still couldn't decide if it wanted to leave his skin. His suit lay folded on a chair, black-and-white stripes cut by claw-rents and baked with brick dust.
Marra stood with a ladle like it was a weapon and glared at pain on his behalf. "Eat," she said, because that was a thing the world could still do right.
He tried. Swallowed. The warmth hit his gut like a small apology.
"I'm fine," he lied around a split lip.
"You look like the city fell on you," she said. Then, softer: "It tried to."
He set the bowl down. The panel that lived in his eyes hovered without being asked.
Status — Evan Sharp Level: 10 Speed: 920 Tier: 2 — Silver (Lightning Stepper) Condition: Critical — rib fractures, soft tissue trauma, internal bleeding (minor), conduction fatigue Warning: Extended combat not advised. Note: Hostile anomaly [Cross] exceeds present output in confined environments. Recommendation: increase distance or capacity.
He shut it with a blink and looked at the ceiling instead, boards scored with years of heat. His violet arcs hissed tiny threads along the wood, then died into splinters.
Marra's hands shook when she reached to tighten his bandage. "They say you lost," she murmured. "The Slums say it first. Words run faster in places used to running from things."
"I lived." He grinned, or tried to. It cracked. "That's the only word that matters right now."
She swallowed like he'd given her a coin that might buy bread later. "Some of them say Cross didn't kill you because you belong to him now." Her face hating the sentence even as she said it. "Like a fisherman cutting a fish loose to grow. Come back later. Take more."
"He said it to my face," Evan said. The memory dragged a line across his bones. Because I only kill fast things. "He's wrong about the part where I belong to him."
"Good," Marra said. She squeezed his wrist, rough palms warm. "Then make the city hear that."
He didn't promise. Promises were bricks. Right now, he felt like string.
When she left, he eased up, feet to the floorboards, and stood to see which part of him would protest loudest. All of them agreed at volume. He breathed through it and walked to the little window that watched Hook Street's back lane. The world below moved like a story after someone died in it—slow, careful, pretending it hadn't seen the body.
A boy with a basket paused under the sill, looked up, and saw him. The boy didn't cheer. He lifted a hand anyway, two fingers to brow in a salute he'd seen dockhands throw at boats that came home. Evan raised his palm back. The boy's mouth set. He kept walking.
The panel pulsed again, but different—less doctor, more dare.
Quest — Rise Again Objective: Increase capacity beyond Cross's threshold before hostile returns. Timeframe: Unknown. Reward: Path evolution opportunity (Silver → ?), Domain Network stabilization. Failure: Domain erosion (Slums first).
He let the window catch his breath for him and closed his eyes. Under the pain, under the fear, under the thought that his speed had finally found something that didn't care about it, there was a hum. Four notes he knew—Hook Street's stubborn cobbles, the Docks' restless pull, the Foundry's iron lungs, the Towers' cold pulse—and the fifth still learning the song, the Slums. Domain Strider threaded them, a net that had already held. Cross had ripped holes in it, true, but it hadn't torn apart. Not yet.
He dressed. Every move hurt. The suit's fabric stuck where lightning had fused it to itself, but he coaxed it on, tugged sleeves up over wrappings, cinched ribs under the jacket like he meant to keep them. When he stood, the room tilted; he set it straight with his jaw.
The door whispered open. A cluster of Hook Street merchants crowded the hall, locating words together.
"What do we tell people?" the butcher asked, voice thick around a throat made for laughing when meat was good. "You… you'll fix this?"
"We saw smoke from the Slums all night," the lantern-mender said. "We saw stone talk."
A girl with flour on her cheek stepped forward because fear hadn't told her to stop yet. "We painted bolts on shutters," she said, chin out. "I can paint crosses too, if that scares him away."
"Don't paint his name," Evan said. "He likes that kind of respect." He forced his shoulders square. "Tell people the city's still ours. Tell them to keep the lanes narrow, keep the lights up; he doesn't like tight places that don't belong to him. Tell them I'm running again by dusk." He let his arcs show, just enough. Violet filaments crawled along his sleeves like veins made of tomorrow. "Tell them I don't stop."
No cheer. But a different sound—shoulders settling, throats clearing, eyes making room for a possibility. It was enough for this hour.
He took the stairs slow and stepped into Hook Street's morning. The air smelled like scorched sugar and fear. A cart rattled past with its wheels too loud. He started walking; his body argued and lost. His first lap would be slow. Laps were how you taught the world its job again.
He crossed into the Slums before noon.
The border wasn't a line you could see, just a feeling: mortar that gave up faster, roofs that sagged like they already apologized, eyes that didn't want to be caught. The Domain thread there tugged loose in his chest. He pushed back with his own hum and felt it tighten a fraction, like a hand taken and squeezed.
The alley that had been a market now was a bruise. Cross's gouges climbed a wall like laughter. The trough he'd smashed Evan through had been replaced with two planks and hope. A woman watched from a lintel with arms folded across a baby; the baby slept, or pretended, the way children do when they know sleep is the only gift they can afford to give.
"You shouldn't be here," the woman said, not unkind.
"This is mine," Evan said. "So I should."
"Cross said the same thing." Her mouth tried to be bitter and landed somewhere tired instead.
"He was wrong."
He didn't push past her. He went around, through an alley that smelled like old oil and new prayers, and found the boys by the barrel fire again—same faces, less talk. One stood when he saw Evan and didn't break the way the other had last night.
"You lost," he said, because children don't hire language to lie for them.
"I did." Evan let it sit. "I'm still here."
The boy's chin tilted. "He'll come back."
"I know." Evan crouched, the ache in his ribs coming with him like a friend who never pays for anything. "So I need you to do something important."
"What?"
"When he's in the Slums, don't say his name," Evan said. "Don't call him. He likes hearing himself in other people's mouths. Call me instead."
"How?" the boy asked, skeptical and hopeful like two crows on the same branch.
"Three knocks on the nearest pipe. Then two. Then three again. Hook Street hears it. The Docks hear it. The Foundry hears it. The Towers… pretend they don't. But they do. I'll come."
The boy looked at the pipe running along the lane's edge, rust-bloomed and singing faint with water. He nodded, solemn like he'd been appointed to hold up a corner of the sky. "Okay."
Evan stood. "Good. And if he comes before I do—make the alleys thinner. Barrels, carts, doors. Make him pick his steps. He hates that."
"We can do that," said someone from a doorway. Another nod. A murmur. The Slums were not cheering. They were remembering how to arrange themselves to hurt someone else's feet. That was as close to a hymn as this place had.
When he left them, his panel chimed—the nice sound, the one that meant the world had agreed with him about something.
Micro-Objective: Stabilize Slums (Phase I)Complete: Civilian coordination initiated, terrain modified. Reward: Domain Bond — Slums (Minor → Moderate)Effect: Fear resonance -10% within Slums; minor ally speed bonus near Evan.
The tug in his chest deepened. The Slums' note no longer trembled like it was only pretending to belong in the chord.
He started to run.
Not far. Not fast. The first ten strides were for his legs, convincing them they were more than injury; the next fifty were for the Slums, marking lanes with a rhythm that didn't include panic. By the time he rounded the third corner, his storm had learned to whisper again without coughing.
Thunderstep itched under his right foot like an animal that wanted out. He gave it a test—small, controlled, nothing stupid—and let the shockwave bloom low across cobbles. It rolled under crates and up walls, rattled shutters without breaking them, kissed the scar where Cross had gouged stone and left it a little less proud.
Thunderstep (D+) practice registered. Conduction strain +3%. Advisory: Moderate pacing recommended.
He took the recommendation. There was a difference between brave and wasteful. Cross had taught him. He wasn't going to forget the lesson just because pride had good marketing.
By afternoon he'd stitched a loop through five neighborhoods and two spines. People saw him three times, then four. Grown men nodded as if to say, Fine. Keep doing it. Kids practiced three-two-three knocks until their knuckles were red. A woman with a hammer moved a cart across a lane and stood back to see if it made the world more difficult for monsters. It did. She smiled into her sleeve like she'd stolen a coin from a king.
The Slums' Domain thread hummed louder. The Foundry answered across distance with a heat that felt like a hand at his back. Hook Street sent the smell of bread along an alley it had no business knowing about. The city's net wasn't unbroken, but it knew how to hold.
Night fell wrong.
Not because the sky misbehaved; it did what sky does. But because somewhere in the black an absence walked, and absence makes a kind of sound. Evan felt it before anyone saw. Speed Sense drew white lines and then didn't—arcs bent like they'd been asked to make room for something that didn't fit.
Three-two-three knocks banged from three different directions. The Slums were ready. Evan cut the corner so tight the wall took some of his jacket with it.
He arrived at a courtyard already half broken—the oil drum from last night dented in, the tiles cracked, a doorframe lying like a leg. People clustered at the far edge with the courage of those who know they will never have enough of it.
Cross stood under a gutter that leaked even when it shouldn't. The X carved into his chest glowed like a coal slid under skin. His claws were cleaner than they had any right to be.
He looked at the crowd first. His head tilted. Something like satisfaction breathed out of him without being a word. Then he turned toward Evan without turning, the way mountains decide where the horizon is.
"Ghost," he said. It was almost gentle, which made it worse.
Evan didn't give him time to write the rest of his sentence. He moved—Quickstep into Burst Step into the little chain of movements Acceleration loved—and struck not at Cross, but at the ground to the left of him.
Thunderstep detonated sideways, the shockwave banking along the lane and hitting the monster at the knee from the wrong direction. Cross shifted his weight—just that. Just enough for physics to remember someone else had a vote. Vector Break flared for a heartbeat, a clean window the size of a man's pride, and Evan slid a forearm into it and hammered.
Cross grunted. It was small. It was real. The crowd breathed that sound into their bones like medicine.
Then the monster's hand closed on empty air where Evan's head had been. His claws had not moved. The air had.
Evan felt it—the way pressure breaks when something big enough wants it to. Not magic. Not gravity like Aelira's. Just size and will and the refusal to let the world be inconvenient.
He ducked, rolled, came up with ribs burning and lungs arguing, and smiled anyway because smiles are knives if you hold them right.
"Had to check if you were heavier tonight," he said.
Cross's jagged mouth didn't change. "And?" The word dragged stone dust when it walked.
"Still ugly."
The laugh came out of the monster like an avalanche that didn't see the point of slowing. He didn't swing. He didn't have to. He stepped, and the courtyard remembered being sand. Evan used the crumble, let Momentum Shift turn betrayal into a push, and skated back to where he had room to be the thing he was built for.
The three-two-three knocks pulsed from another pipe. The Slums were talking to themselves, saying, We are not alone in this.
Cross turned his head a fraction to listen. Evan went then—Velocity Veil+ tearing ten ghosts out of him, Vector Veil threading a single true note through them, each afterimage flicking like card tricks in a con played at the speed of anger. Half-strength hits mattered. Copses of stone fell off walls like bark. Cross blinked for the first time, which was a win in the kind of math Evan needed to count tonight.
"Again," the monster said, almost pleased.
"No," Evan said, because defiance makes better music than compliance.
He didn't try to win. He tried to teach. Thunderstep low, never where children watched. Vector Break small, at inches instead of yards, to show the Slums how to shape a lane. He nicked Cross twice, in places that wouldn't matter to a creature like that—the meat above the hip, the thick of the forearm—because a city learns in scraps, not in feasts.
Cross stopped when he understood the lesson being taught wasn't for him.
His claws dropped. His head canted. He breathed once, slow enough for everyone to decide whether to take their own breaths, then spoke to Evan like a parent sighing at a child who'd stayed up too late.
"Not yet," he said. "You're still wearing fear."
Evan opened his mouth to answer and tasted blood trying to be brave. "I'm wearing you, big man."
"Soon," Cross promised—not to Evan, to Lowwater, like weather looking at a field. He dragged a claw across a wall in a single long pull that carved an X two men high. Bricks squealed. The sound laid down inside the day like a second backbone. "When you're faster."
"Come now," Evan said.
The monster smiled with all the wrong edges. "Don't tell me when to be hungry." He stepped backward into shadow. A gutter broke. Then he wasn't there, and the absence he left found a place and sat down.
People started talking all at once in the way people do to keep from falling.
Evan didn't fall. He stood with his hands shaking and his storm refusing to go quiet and made himself look like something the Slums could borrow a spine from. He took the next hour to walk every lane within three blocks, pointing at barrels and at beams and at ways to make the city a bad room for a big man. Kids banged pipes until the rhythm felt like part of their wrists. Someone fetched paint and slashed bolts on door lintels so any eye that glanced up would meet a promise.
Only when the Slums' hum under his ribs smoothed from tremor to low song did he turn toward Hook Street. The run back was ugly—hips hitching, breath clawing, arcs stuttering—and he let the ugliness show. Not because he wanted pity. Because truth is the only thing heavy enough to hold a city when lies get thin.
At the bakery, Marra had a second bowl waiting and a chair pulled up to the door so she could hit any problem with a ladle as soon as it forgot its manners. He dropped onto the cot and let the room tilt if it wanted.
The panel floated in and waited until he looked.
Stabilization Progress — Slums (Phase II) Status: Active Network: Hook Street ↔ Slums conduit strengthened (+10% movement between) Overflow: 15% → 16%+1 Speed Speed: 920 → 921
It wasn't triumph. It was a stitch. Stitches are how you keep blood in until triumph arrives.
Across the city, the Registry's slates updated themselves as if they were tired of being argued with.
"Cross sighting confirmed," someone said to Aelira in a voice that wanted a nap. "No fatalities this time."
"Because Ghost got there first," another added, like blaming a man for not bleeding enough.
Cairn's yellow arcs burned steady. "He's limping," he said, and didn't specify which he. Maybe both. "Tomorrow?"
Aelira twisted her braid tighter, as if density were a decision. "At dawn," she said. "Silver squad moves at dawn."
Above them all, in the scaffold of a half-dead tower, Cross crouched on a beam and looked at the layout of light. He traced with a claw where Evan's laps had been. The line pleased him. The promise inside it pleased him more.
"Faster," he said, almost tender, and let sleep take him the way a knife takes cloth.
Evan stared at the ceiling until the boards remembered to be boards. His violet lightning buzzed like bees in a jar, angry and alive. Fear had found a seat in him earlier. It didn't get to keep it. He set another chair at the table for resolve and told them both to eat or leave.
"Rise again," he said into the wood.
The city heard him.
And somewhere in the dark, so did the things that planned to catch him if he didn't.