Season 2, Episode 16 — Luna's Debt
Timeline: Same day as Ep 15, late afternoon bleeding into night. Zack: Level 22. Oath vector loud. The rain finally thins to a needle-fine mist that feels like a warning more than weather.
⸻
Cold Open — Phone Call with Teeth
The payphone on the corner should've been dead. It rang anyway, bell hammering the glass like a heartbeat with opinions. Zack's HUD ghosted metrics in the drizzle—crowd flow softening around him, police chatter trying to invent a name for him, the city's pulse mapping itself to his.
Luna ripped the receiver off the hook. "If this is a donation plea, I swear to—"
The voice in the handset wore a hospital smile. Marrow.
"Hello, Luna. I borrowed a friend's number."
Her jaw went tight. "Say my name again, I cut your tongue out through your ear."
"Save the romance. You want the terms. Brother, age thirteen, name Mateo. Blue backpack with stitched skull. We picked him up with a dozen others outside a skate park when the sprinklers turned to blood." A pause. "He's alive. For now."
Zack didn't ask how Marrow knew her brother's name. Monsters are librarians when it matters.
"What do you want?" Luna said, voice sandpaper.
"Trade." Marrow's tone warmed. "You and the steelboy for one hour at my market. No interference. You watch. You learn. You do nothing. After the hour, Mateo walks."
"Or," Luna said, "I come over there and make a soup out of you."
Silas took the phone, polite as a velvet mallet. "Counter-offer: we take the market, you lose a hand, the city gets bored of you, and we keep the boy."
Marrow laughed lightly, like tea. "You're the only one who recognizes the game clock, Silas. Tell your chrome child this: if he tries to play hero at the market, I kill one hostage per minute. I'll text the count."
The line went dead. The phone spit a quarter onto the sidewalk like it was sick of being currency.
Luna stood very still, rain drawing commas down her face. "We go now."
Zack's vow tightened like a tourniquet. The market had been on their list for Episode 20; Marrow dragged it forward with wire and malice. He looked at Luna—mouth set, eyes flaring with a fear she'd let him see exactly once. He nodded.
Silas flicked his coin. "He'll spike the floor with the debt test. He's begging you to choose revenge over rescue."
"Not begging," Luna said. "Daring."
Zack's steel hummed. "Then we break the dare."
⸻
Act I — The Market Under the Bridge
They found it where the city always hides sins: under the old steel truss bridge with pigeons for parishioners. Yellow work lights strung between girders stained the air a sick gold. Generators thumped like buried hearts. Booths built from shipping pallets and prayer lined both sides of a muddy aisle. Vendors wore suits that had never seen daylight and smiles with receipts behind them.
Lives were the product. Gurneys with folks in restraints. Cages—some human-sized, some too small for dignity. A cooler case of blood that had been harvested the wrong way. In the back, a stage with a mic stand. Auction numbers on cards. Audience with checkbooks and witchcraft. Shades in security black, necks thick with don't.
Luna's hand found Zack's sleeve and tightened. Blue backpack on the back row of cages, second from the end. Mateo sat cross-legged, chin up, mouth set like his sister's. A split on his lip. A stubbornness in his eyes that made the HUD hum respect.
Marrow stood on the stage in a bone-white suit, holding the mic like he owned yacht clubs and morgues. The smile lit the booth lights brighter.
"Welcome, stakeholders. Tonight's inventory comes with character arcs. We have first responders, we have musicians, we have a surgeon with steady hands—oh, doctor, do wave—and we have one bonus item: a local celebrity's little brother. Luna, dear—"
Every head cocked. Luna didn't flinch. She bared her teeth and lifted one finger.
Marrow's grin widened. "Here are the rules: Zack does nothing but watch for sixty minutes. He learns. He levels quietly. If he moves to interfere, I kill one per minute starting with a number I like." He tapped a strip of LED clock above the stage. It flickered 60:00. "We begin."
Zack's Hearthbreak Vow hissed in his blood. The HUD spat a banner across the world:
OATH DEBT TEST (Major):
Constraint: If attacking market or freeing captives triggers killchain, debt will apply for any within reach who die as a result.
Paths:
1. Observe → delay action; risk long-term casualties elsewhere.
2. Break → attempt stealth extractions under the vow; high risk, high reward.
3. Bargain → trade something (your blood, your hours) for pauses.
Silas leaned in, voice a wire. "We can't rupture him here. Crowd is collateral. The vow will strangle you."
"I don't care if it strangles me," Luna said at a whisper. "We get him out."
Zack stepped forward just enough to feel all sights on him. He raised his hands like a man performing a trick.
"I'll watch," he said, voice carrying. "For one minute."
Marrow's head cocked. "A compromise! We adore those."
"One minute," Zack repeated. "And then I make house calls."
The LED clock began to burn down. 59:59 → 59:00.
Marrow clapped like a polite host. "Lot One: Paramedic, 33, saved twenty-four people this morning, excellent veins, excellent terror, bids start—"
Zack tilted his head, listening—beneath the generator hum, beneath the audience's breath. Seams. The vow mapped him a lattice: tent pegs that held up the canvas roof; lighting rig cabling; the generator fuel line snaked along the mud; the cages' hinges—cheap, hateful. The bell of Station 9 still a taste in his teeth, reminding him how to silence a room.
He whispered to the steel: Pick three.
The vow answered. Three tethers hung invisible in the damp. He smiled small. "Luna, on my count: create panic. Silas—hold the panic in a shape that saves."
Silas's mouth tilted: reckless, correct. "On one condition: you accept that some will die and you keep your hands off that guilt long enough to keep saving others."
Zack didn't lie. "Yes."
The clock 58:12.
A buyer—fat ring, thin soul—raised a card. "Two hundred." Another murmured "three."
Zack exhaled. "Three. Two. One."
Hearthchain snapped.
• Line one hooked the generator fuel line — yank — it cracked, spraying diesel across mud under the stage.
• Line two bit the lighting rig and ripped the central wheeled truss eleven degrees sideways—enough to sag but not collapse—stage lights swiveling, shadows jumping.
• Line three grabbed Mateo's cage hinge pin and pulled.
The hinge pin came free with a sound like a prayer ending.
Zack wasn't there, then was, between cages with his body as a wall. He tore the door open and Mateo looked up, eyes going wide, then hot.
"You're late," the kid said, trying to sound cool with a busted lip.
"Traffic," Zack said. "Hold on."
He scooped the boy under one arm as Mateo scooped the blue backpack. Luna was already on them, axe a promise in the other hand, her face a ruin of relief and anger.
Marrow's smile didn't falter. He simply gestured.
Security fired—not bullets, but bone flares—arcing white heat down the aisle. Audience scattered. A few clapped because they were monsters and thought this was theater. One tried to film. Luna chucked her axe into his phone and smashed it into his nose en route.
Silas stepped into the flares and turned their arcs sideways with will. They hit the mud and hissed into steam. He raised both hands almost lazily and pushed—the crowd parted to either side, leaving a corridor toward the bridge's mouth.
"Go," Silas said, tone that turned motion into compliance.
A gunshot cracked anyway—someone brought the wrong prop. A bullet took a corner off a cage in sparks and screams. Zack twisted, body eating trajectory, eyes bright with kill he didn't have time to earn.
Marrow sighed into the mic, still composed. "Tsk. Improvisation. Very Season Two."
He raised his left hand. The LED clock hiccuped and became 00:59.
"One minute, you said. Begin the minute."
The nearest captive—an older man with a tattoo of Navy across a rope of arm—jerked as Hollow Priests behind the stage reached under the floor and pulled. A blade made of bone slid from the dais as if the stage had grown it.
Zack saw the math: if he ran, if he launched, he'd reach the altar in three heartbeats. He'd save that one. And the security captain would slice the throats of cages down the line to rebalance entertainment.
He didn't run at the stage.
He ran through the crowd.
"Clear!" he barked, voice carrying like a drill sergeant from a worse war. The Hearthchain split mid-gallop, four lines, click, click, click, click, snapping to four cages along the outer edge—hinges, not locks. He ripped all four doors outward, away from the slaughter line. "Move!" he yelled, shepherding with his shoulders, his glare, his oath—the oxygen in the space shifting to escape.
Luna matched him, lethal orbit. She took a Shade's knee backward, rolled into a vendor, vaulted the table, and hacked a chain with one blow that felt like a pact breaking.
Silas made standing into plumbing. He re-routed panic like a river engineer, kept the crush from collapsing folks under pallets. He took Mateo's backpack, slung it with a faintly offended air—"Heavy"—and passed the boy forward into Luna's arms without fuss.
The bone blade fell. The older man's throat opened into a red, angry mouth.
Zack heard Mateo grunt, "No!" and the world paused for one frame so Zack could count the price. One. The vow felt it like a nail in the foot.
OATH DEBT: 1 (within reach, unavoidable collateral)
Penalty: Surge control − (minor) until 3 rescues credited
Note: Debt can be offset by direct saves in same scene.
He didn't argue. He paid.
Hearthchain snapped again—three bodies yanked out from under another descending blade. He threw one survivor into a woman's arms and she cradled a stranger like a brother.
+300 EXP (Triple Rescue)
EXP: 900 / 1000
Debt offset: 1/3
Marrow's eyes gleamed. "That's better. Learn the price as you use their blood for arithmetic."
Zack let the anger burn without steering. He needed hands, not heat.
"Silas!" he yelled, voice hammered flat.
Silas understood the unsent request. He snapped his fingers once. The lighting rig's cable twanged. The central truss fell into the aisle like a gate dropping—between the stage and the cages. Priests scrambled, screaming, robes catching on hooks. The auction mic squealed and died. One of the generators coughed diesel onto a power strip and decided to become a smoke machine instead of a helper.
Luna pressed Mateo against a post. "Eyes on me," she told him. "Count my breaths."
"I'm not a baby," he bit out.
"Good," she said. "Count fast."
A Shade Surgeon with a cleaver stepped into her lane. Luna smashed the cleaver hand into bone chips, head-butted the mask, then used her elbow to finish the argument. She grabbed Mateo's chin, forced his eyes back to hers. "Breaths."
Zack hauled one cage door off by hand and slung the man inside over his shoulder. He half-tossed him to the corridor Silas held open with posture and menace. Hearthchain snagged two more—click, click—into the river of bodies.
+300 EXP (Rescues)
EXP: 1200 / 1000
LEVEL UP → 23
Gain: Hearthchain Range +10 m | Shield Yank cooldown −2 s
Debt offset: 3/3 (Cleared)
The LED clock hit 00:01 and paused, as if it wanted to savor the noise.
Marrow's expression didn't change, but the left corner of his mouth quirked: Fine. You bought the minute.
"New minute," he cooed. The clock rolled to 60:00 again. "Shall we test your budget?"
Silas stepped into Zack's peripheral. "We can't win this as a hold. He'll recurse. He'll buy minutes on corpses."
"Then we flip the board," Zack said.
He looked up at the underside of the bridge. The tangle of rebar and cable. The cheap zip ties that held lights. The diesel hosing a rectangle of mud under the stage. The crowd pattern still obeying Silas's dark suggestions. He inhaled and tasted angles.
"On my mark: panic big," he told Silas. "Then make it narrow."
"Terrible plan," Silas said with a little bit of admiration.
Zack sprinted along the aisle, Hearthchain flicking like a whip. Click—two more cage hinges, rip—doors like teeth. He leaned into the stage, grabbed the mic stand, spun it, and speared the diesel hose. Fuel geysered. The crowd shrieked. He pivoted and shoved the stand into a lighting pigtail. Sparks kissed diesel. Hell slobbered.
"Now!" he barked.
Silas pushed the panic out hard, then pulled it into a corridor—a living hallway from cages to exit. The stampede wanted to scatter; it flowed instead.
Luna dragged Mateo into the corridor and went back into the smoke, teeth bared, a profanity with legs. She cut a woman down from a chain with one pull. She punched a buyer who tried to climb over a child; he went limp and learned ethical gravity.
Marrow watched his market burn with a calm meant to hurt. He tapped his mic and it miraculously still worked. "Do you feel righteous, Zack? This is rescue by arson. But it is rescue."
"Shut up," Zack said, hauling another body. He snapped a Shield Yank across the corridor, dragging a rolling table into the path of a falling beam. It smashed into the impromptu barricade and didn't pulp six living people.
+250 EXP (Interception)
EXP: 450 / 1000 (L23)
The bone-white suit descended two steps from the stage. The hem didn't get dirty. Of course not.
"You wanted to see the market. Consider that lesson free. Now here's mine," Marrow said. He lifted his hand in a gesture that told reality to take a memo.
The river under the bridge heaved. Water rose in a wall at the bank, teeth beginning to show. Leviathan wasn't here, but one of its fingers was, flexing through culverts.
"Fuck," Luna breathed. "He's bringing the flood to the auction."
Zack locked eyes with her. "Get Mateo clear."
"I'm not leaving you," the boy snapped, voice breaking toward man.
"Count my breaths," Luna said, and pushed him into Silas's corridor with a shove that made promises. Silas's hand landed on the boy's shoulder; the boy didn't shrug it off. Good taste.
Zack planted between stage and water. The vow swelled in him until he could have sworn the bridge listened.
The river's finger crashed forward, aiming to sweep the panicked crowd into a soup of screaming and receipts.
Hearthchain sang. Zack threw all four tethers at once across the width of flow—lassos that latched to posts, tables, a scissor lift, a pinned ambulance bumper, anything with mass—and yanked into a makeshift dam. The water hit—shifted sideways—broke around his jury-rig wall. People stumbled, lived.
He held—arms trembling, oath burning his ribs—while Silas walked the boundary with his hands, smoothing the flow calculation, turning drown into wet.
Luna dragged two more cages open while balanced on a rolling lunch cooler, laughing in fury, daring the river to learn manners.
The finger of flood slunk back into its pipe, chastened and promised to return with friends. The fire on stage dwindled to a sulky growl under sudden rain. The market tore itself apart into trash and escape.
Marrow stood in the soot and steam, immaculate, smile intact. He lifted two fingers in a tiny salute Zack wanted to bite off.
"Hour's up," Marrow lied. "I'm bored."
"Then leave," Zack said.
"Oh, I will," Marrow purred, "after a house call."
He snapped his fingers and the auction stage dropped into a trapdoor. Beneath it, a shaft of wet darkness yawned, stinking of river and ritual. A shape moved down there—huge, coiling, promising Episode 22.
Zack lunged and Hearthchained the edge of the stage, yanking himself into the pit after the falling suit like a bad idea given legs.
Luna swore and dove after him. Silas swore more elegantly and grabbed Mateo by the collar before the boy could follow.
"Not your episode," Silas told him, and hopped into the hole too.
⸻
Act II — The Wet Vein
They slid down a chute of slick brick and worse into a culvert big enough for delivery trucks. Water lapped filthy at mid-calf. Runes crawled the ceiling like mildew with diplomas. The sound was wrong—heart wrong. A pump somewhere upstream tried to learn witchcraft.
Zack landed in a crouch, splashing into light thrown by failing bulbs. Marrow stood twenty yards away, hands in pockets, river spray beading his suit without daring to stick.
"Bring the boy and the coin," Marrow said. "Very expository of you."
Luna thudded down beside Zack, axe already in her fist. "I'm going to carve the smug off your face."
"You'll miss," Marrow said pleasantly, and snapped his fingers.
Shades poured from drainage mouths—dozens—wearing sanitation orange and butcher aprons, some dragging gaff hooks, others bone syringes. Behind them, a pump engine whined and the water surged forward with intent again.
Silas dropped lightly like a cat that paid taxes, set Mateo on a walkway, and put a hand on his head to keep him from doing the brave, dumb thing.
"Don't make me tie you to the railing," Silas said to the boy without looking.
"Try," Mateo said, wiping his nose with his sleeve like a challenge.
Zack didn't have time to laugh. The first wave hit.
He was a machine press. He was a floodwall. He was oath. Hearthchain fired and fired again—dragging civilians left over from cages who had spilled into the culvert during the chaos, yanking them onto the walkway, throwing them into Silas's orbit. Luna danced inside hooks, broke arms, buried axe, rose howling.
+300 EXP
EXP: 750 / 1000 (L23)
Marrow watched with a clinical interest reserved for lab fire ants. "See how he saves?" he purred to Mateo. "And how it costs him? Imagine if he simply took. He'd be at Prestige by now."
"Imagine if you shut the fuck up," Mateo said, and grabbed a dropped gaff hook.
Zack punched a Shade so hard its apron did a pirouette without its body. The river's pulse swelled—a bigger finger coming.
"Silas!" Zack roared.
Silas's coin flicked. He spoke that word again—the one probability learned in shame. The surge rolled instead of rising—still ugly, less lethal. Zack threw Shield Yank at the wave and pulled a half-sunken barrier into its teeth. It spat, angered, thwarted, promised subpoenas.
A Shade Surgeon leapt from a culvert lip at Mateo's back, cleaver raised. The kid turned and hooked it in the ribs with the gaff, eyes wide with oh I did it. The Shade hissed and grabbed the pole.
Zack felt the math and moved before fear could wear a name. He covered the distance, wrenched the gaff free, and bit the Surgeon's collarbone—oath mark hissing into bone. He flung the body into dark water and hoped it remembered his teeth.
"Nice hook," he told Mateo, not soft.
Mateo's chin went up. "Taught me."
"Then do the next thing: hide," Luna snapped, shoving him back toward the rail.
The fight telescoped—minutes seemed like one, one seemed like ten. They killed and didn't when not killing saved more. The culvert grew teeth and learned regret. Marrow watched, amused and hungry.
When the last Shade slumped and the pump choked on its own ritual, the water lowered with the sulky air of a defeated lawsuit. Silence poured in.
Marrow checked an invisible watch. "The hour's well spent. You learned something."
"I learned you bleed," Zack said.
Marrow smiled. "Correction: you learned you believe that."
The lights flickered. He stepped backward into shadow and was gone—not vanished, relocated to an upstairs where cameras melt. He left the smell of antiseptic and old jokes.
Luna slammed her axe into the culvert wall until sparks jumped. She stopped only when Mateo wrapped his arms around her waist and held.
She knelt, face cracking into human. "You okay?" she asked, sounding nothing like a saint and everything like a sister.
"I'm mad," Mateo said, shaking hard. "I'm… still counting."
"Good," she whispered into his hair. "Keep counting 'til it stops hurting. Then we go again."
Silas stepped beside Zack, rain curling in from the tunnel mouth like a nosy cat. "You stole an hour out from under him and paid one life for it." His voice didn't accuse. It recorded.
Zack watched the dark where Marrow had been. The vow thrummed, debt clear, muscles empty. "Next time," he said, like prayer. "No receipts."
Silas's coin clicked once. "Next time he'll ring a different bell."
Zack's HUD wrote the night into law:
BLOOD MARKET: Disrupted
Captives rescued: 31
Collateral: 1 (within reach) → Debt cleared
EXP: 950 / 1000
Arc Progress (Routes of Blood): 2/3
Next route: Tribunal Interdiction (Ep 17)
Luna stood, wiped her face with her forearm, left a streak that didn't matter.
"You're not going after him now?" Mateo demanded, angry on purpose to avoid something softer.
"We will," Zack said. "But not by the path he lights for us."
Mateo's knuckles whitened on the gaff. "I want in."
"No," Luna and Zack said in the same breath, then eyed each other like Yeah, okay, we're that now.
Silas turned, listening to a frequency only arrogance and ghosts hear. "The Tribunal is moving pieces. They'll try to leash you. Or hire you. Or both."
"Let them try," Luna said.
Zack tilted his face up to the culvert's slit of sky. The rain had downgraded to spit. The city smelled like hot metal cooling.
He whispered to the steel, to the vow, to the part of him that still said mom without making a fist: "Prestige or die." It didn't sound like a threat anymore. It sounded like a road.
He climbed the ladder. The others followed. The river grumbled about missed meals and promised bigger teeth.
⸻
Stinger — A Table for Vultures
A room with velvet chairs and ugly money. Six figures in old suits sat around a table with a map of the city under glass. A silver bell rested at the center, elegant. Not bone. Worse.
The Tribunal spoke in voices that had rules baked in.
"Marrow has gone off script," said one, female, eyes like the inside of a vault.
"He was never on it," said another, male, hair too perfect to be honest.
A third—gaunt, smiling with no joy—tapped the bell with a knuckle. It did not ring. It asked questions. "The steelblood climbs. Oath path. City resonance. If he Prestiges under that vow, we lose floors in our building."
"Then we hire him," said the first. "Or we break him."
"Or," said a fourth voice from the corner—Silas's old teacher voice—"we offer him the one thing he can't save."
They all looked at the man in the bone-white suit standing by the bar cart. Marrow raised his glass, bored with their drama and delighted by their budget.
"Let him climb," Marrow said. "I prefer killing men with hope."
Nobody rang the silver bell. The table decided to pretend that was restraint.