Season 2, Episode 18 — Dock 17 Redux: The Living Ship
Timeline: Two nights after the Tribunal. Zack: Level 25. Oath humming. The river's got opinions.
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Cold Open — "It's moving."
The first sign wasn't sirens. It was a wake where there shouldn't be one.
Zack stood on the hospital roof with Luna and Silas, the city under them stunned quiet for once, and watched the Hudson draw a jagged breath. The water humped, bulged, and then rose—a barge's silhouette shoved itself out of the current, ribs first, metal stitched to bone, lights burning the color of old bruises. A cathedral welded onto a hull, a wheelhouse grown from gristle and steel. Dock 17's ruin had learned to float.
Floodlights swept the shore, pausing like eyes. A siren wailed—not emergency; church. The ship's spine rang with a bell that wasn't a bell; people on the ferry terminal two piers down clutched their heads and stumbled toward the water.
"Marrow built a church-ship," Luna said. "Of course he did."
Silas flicked his coin. "He's pulling intake from the shoreline—like a trawler for hearts."
Zack's HUD burned lines across his vision:
ALERT: DOCK 17 (RECONSTRUCTED)
OBJECTIVE: Stop the Living Ship from harvesting.
CIVILIANS ABOARD: 200+ (in flux)
THREAT: Cathedra-Class Entity + Shades + Priests + Surgeons
LEVEL: 25 | EXP: 0 / 1000
Zack didn't wait for the rest. He stepped up onto the ledge, tasted rain. "We go now."
"Mateo stays," Luna said, not looking back at the boy glaring from the stairwell.
"I hate this," Mateo said.
"Same," Luna said, tucking a finger under his chin, meeting his eyes. "Count our breaths. I'll come back and you can tell me my form sucked."
Silas tossed Zack a radio—real, not praying. "Channel five. Fireboats will hear it."
Zack nodded. "Keep them off my civilians."
He took the drop. The wind put a hand on his shoulder like an old friend, the river opened its teeth, and he hit the pier running.
"Prestige or die," he whispered, and sprang into the night.
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Act I — Boarding
The Living Ship eased off the pier like a guilty miracle. Hooks dangled from its flank and the hooks had hands. Shades in stolen uniforms ran catwalks along its ribs, clipping harnesses to the captured onshore and reeling them in across taut lines. People slid over black water like beads across a rosary built by a serial killer.
Zack sprinted the length of a jutting pier, lungs full of salt rot and electricity. Hearthchain snapped—five tethers now—click click click click click—latching to five harnesses at once. He yanked. Lives snapped backwards through mist, skidding into his arms and the arms of firefighters that had just arrived and knew better than to ask questions.
+500 EXP (Mass-rescue)
EXP: 500 / 1000
"House 47!" Zack barked into the radio. "Cut those shore lines! Fireboats—pressure on the bow, starboard intake looks soft!" He didn't know if boats had starboards or feelings; he said it like he meant it and that's most of engineering.
A Shade on the catwalk raised a bone flare and hurled it. Zack launched—boots thumped the harness line like a tightrope—and sprinted the cable in three blinks, Surge humming. He hit the catwalk in a roll, rose into the Shade's space, and fed it its own flare. It didn't agree with the diet.
He looked down. Floodlights showed the deck—altar masts, a wheelhouse with stained-glass windows that moved, a central heart engine thudding under a ribcage dome. The sound hurt. Come in, it said. Bleed with intention.
Zack bared his fangs. "Choke on me."
Luna came down hard on a cargo net, riding a ladder truck's extended bucket like it owed her money. She kicked two Shades off the rail; they splashed and didn't resurface. "Permission to board your awful boat," she shouted.
"Permission granted," Zack said, and jumped.
They hit the main deck together. Hollow Priests in slicker robes turned as one and sang; the sound tried to make the steel inside Zack turn inward. He shoved back with oath; the choir gagged.
Silas arrived without touching anything obvious—one second on the pier, the next on the stern rail, coat snapping, coin bright. "Try not to sink it near a bridge support!"
"No promises!" Luna crackled, and split a Priest down the sternum.
Zack drove through a scrum of Shades, punching, biting, using Hearthchain as a tripline and drag net by turns. Behind him: the shout of real firefighters on real boats putting real water where it mattered. Above him: the bell welded inside the spine, finding its swing. The first partial toll crawled under his skin.
DEBUFF: Bell Dissonance — Surge Control −10% | Crowd panic +
NEW SUB-OBJECTIVE: Silence the bell.
Zack pointed. "Silas—the bell!"
Silas looked up the climbing lattice of ribs, squinted at the geometry, and vanished into angles.
Luna jerked her chin at the ribcage dome pulsing over the heart engine. "You're thinking stomach."
"I'm thinking core," Zack said. "Cut the belts, kill the machine."
"Or wake it up," Luna said cheerfully, and ran.
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Act II — The Heart Engine
Inside the dome, the air was heat and sermon. Ribs arched over a pump the size of a room, pistoning red through tubes into the hull. People lay strapped to gurneys in a ring around it, feeding it by proximity and fear. Surgeons tended controls made from jawbones and levers and guilt.
The floor flexed. The ship breathed.
Hearthchain sang, chose ten points of love on autopilot—kid, nurse, man in a blue suit, a woman still in scrubs, an old lady in curlers, three teenagers with their hands linked, a cook in a stained jacket—clicks rippling—and Zack ripped them off the feed line into a slide toward the door. Luna planted herself as a wall and caught them, shoving them into a corridor that had temporarily decided to be safe.
A Surgeon swung a cleaver. Zack caught the wrist, twisted, broke it like cheap plastic, and fed the Surgeon's face into a control lever. Something hissed. The ship groaned.
+400 EXP (Critical Rescue)
EXP: 900 / 1000
The bell above boomed—a full toll this time. The deck shuddered; panic surged. Zack's HUD screeched. Surge staggered one step off-beat.
"Silas—!"
"Working," Silas's voice came down the comm, strained in a way he usually forbade. "This bell cheats. It rings ideas."
"Un-ring it," Luna said, chopping a Surgeon in half. "Politely."
Zack slung the last gurney free, then shouldered into the heart engine's catwalk. The pump's pistons punched like gods. Every stroke pulled a scream out of the ship: not human, not machine—city. He jammed his steel fingers into the belt system and pulled.
The belt shredded. The engine belched bloodfire.
+200 EXP (Subsystem damage)
EXP: 1100 / 1000
LEVEL UP → 26
Gain: Hearthchain Range +10 m | Surge heat tolerance +
The engine stuttered, then doubled its pace in spite. The ship lurched, turning hard toward the ferry terminal.
Zack slammed into a rail. "He's going to plow the crowd."
"Copy," Silas said. The bell rang again, not louder—closer. "Which is why we…do this."
For an impossible second, the bell's echo missed—it rang and didn't—and the sound fell out of the world like a kicked chair. Silas landed on the bell's crossbeam, hair wild, eyes silver-lit, one hand clamped around the clapper like it was a dog collar.
"Bad instrument," he told it, and snapped the clapper's hinge.
The bell shuddered into silence.
DEBUFF CLEARED: Bell Dissonance
CITY BONUS: Crowd flow + (Silas assist)
The ship reeled as if insulted. Onshore, the crowd stopped moving toward the water and started moving toward away.
Luna spotted two Priests trying to re-engage the heart engine's override. She vaulted the ring of controls, scissored one at the knees, and threw the other into the pump column. The column dented. The Priest made a sound like a prayer choking on a bone and then didn't.
Zack tore the last belt. The engine sputtered and coughed, hitting a death rattle. The dome ribs shivered.
"Deck's yours," he said. "We starve it."
They burst back into the storm.
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Act III — War on the River
The scene had gone grand.
Fireboats hosed arcs of water at the ship's stern where intakes gulped; firefighters on the pier cut shore lines; cops ran cordons instead of shooting the wrong people for once because three captains had decided rumors about "steel-faced first responders" could be politically useful for a week.
Shades sprinted along the gunwales, anchor hooks on chains. A Captain in a turnout coat stitched with bone sigils stood atop the wheelhouse with a longboat pike and a radio that argued with the air.
Zack climbed the sloped deck with his fingers until it learned not to be slippery. Hearthchain flared out like a net—five lines—and dragged five harnessed people out of the air mid-zip. A mother slammed into him, sobbing thanks in a language he didn't speak but truth translates.
+500 EXP
EXP: 600 / 1000 (L26)
A coil of chain whipped toward his throat. He ducked; it caught his shoulder; sparks spit and stung. He grabbed the chain, yanked, and pulled a Shade into a slide. He planted a heel into its neck and saved the body as a lesson for gravity.
"Zack! Bow!" Luna shouted. "They're loading the choir!"
He ran. At the bow, thirty Hollow Priests knelt in ranks, throats yawning, keening up a storm. The song felt like an elevator to drowning.
Zack didn't argue. He flew.
The first line died in a hail of fists. The second line tried to hold a harmony; Luna's axe broke their metronome. The third line started a counter-melody; Silas reached a hand out from the bell crossbeam and pinched the air; the melody forgot its notes.
+300 EXP
EXP: 900 / 1000
The wheelhouse door burst open. The Shade Captain in the signal-studded coat stepped out with three Surgeons and something that hissed in a steel cradle.
"Signal boost," the Captain purred, and flipped a switch.
The river bulged. Not like before. More organized. Teeth rose beyond the hull, a grin of water and shadow edging up along the port side.
"Silas," Zack said.
"Not a leviathan," Silas said, voice thinner. "A sleeve of one."
"Giant wet sleeve; got it," Luna hissed.
The sleeve slapped the port side, water fangs trying to hook the deck and roll the ship. Fireboats skated. People screamed onshore. The city leaned to see and the skyline made a face like don't you dare.
Zack set his feet—Hearthchain to the starboard rail, to the mast, to the altar base—three anchors—and held. Steel sang. The ship listed, stopped. The sleeve snarled soundlessly and slid back into dark with a promise.
+250 EXP (Anchor Save)
EXP: 1150 / 1000
LEVEL UP → 27
Gain: Hearthchain "Anchor" subskill — temporary moor vs. force
The Captain laughed and pointed its pike at Zack. "Your trick is cute."
"So's your coat," Zack said, and bit the air between them like a threat.
The Captain nodded to a Surgeon. The Surgeon raised a bone-thurible, swung it, and blew ashes across the deck. The ashes weren't ashes. They were flies with glyphs in their wings. They hit skin and bit and wrote things.
Zack felt curses try to settle. The vow bucked like a horse that remembered being wild. The glyphs smoked and died.
"Bite me harder," he said, and launched.
The Captain met him with the pike; sparks burned new constellations in the rain. Zack turned the pike aside, stepped inside the reach, and bit the Captain's collarbone—marking through armor. The taste was bitter: ritual and cheap cologne.
OATH MARK: Applied (Reinforced)
Trace: Strong (72h)
"Mine," he said, and threw the Captain into the wheelhouse door so hard the door developed regrets.
The surgeons converged. Luna took the left, a dozen cuts in a second. Zack took the right, two punches and a headbutt his mother would have grounded him for. Silas appeared on the wheelhouse roof and kicked a lever through its slot; the rudder hiccuped sideways and jammed pointing away from the ferry terminal.
Zack grabbed the radio from the Captain's belt. "Fireboats, push her aft," he guessed, sounding like he'd always known this. "We're turning her into the current."
"Aye," a voice came back from a Staten Island-born throat that believed in orders said like that.
The ship started to spin. The bow drifted away from the crowd. People onshore cheered because cheering is a weapon.
The heart engine thumped harder below, angry that its rudder had been told no. The ribs around the dome flexed. The deck tilted.
"Time to end it," Silas called, voice faraway. "Zack—core breach or we get a second bell."
Zack turned. Luna's face was lit by fire she hadn't caused for once. She grinned like a church burglar. "Race you to the heart."
They ran.
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Act IV — Core Breach
Back into the dome, back into heat. The pump labored; pipes throbbed; a second clapper was crawling along a cable—Marrow's backup plan, a parasite ringing itself down toward a casting cradle.
"Not happening," Zack said, and Hearthchained the clapper mid-crawl, yanked it into his fist, and crushed it until it learned humility.
Luna cut the final trunk line with three blows too fast to teach. Steam roared. The deck pitched.
The heart wheezed, then screamed in a voice like a building falling in love with gravity. Ribs around it contracted, trying to crush them out of existence.
Zack planted. Anchor Lines to four ribs—click click click click—and held them wide, braced like a man keeping a door open for last-chance saints.
STR + | Surge drain++
"Silas!" Zack grunted.
"Coming," Silas said, and he was—with a length of chain stolen from the bell. He leapt, looped it around a piston, and jammed the engine with an argument the pump couldn't parse.
"Pull," he said.
They pulled.
The engine tore free with a wet quake. The room went wrong—gravity forgot its lines—then found a new floor: down.
"Sink?" Luna asked sweetly.
"Sink," Zack confirmed.
They sprinted as the dome collapsed behind them, ribs imploding like a kicked ribcage. The deck heaved. The ship listed hard to port, groaning like a myth earning its retirement.
Shades fled along the rails and got in the way of each other. Priests shrieked themselves hoarse. The Captain clawed to its feet, marked and furious, reaching for a flare that wasn't there. Zack Hearthchained its feet out from under it and booted it into the sea.
"See you in seventy-two," he called, and meant it.
They threw themselves across the last stretch of deck as the freeboard disappeared. Fireboats backed off, whistles screaming. Zack grabbed civilians with both hands and dragged them over the rail into water where firefighters and cops and ordinary people in hoodies grabbed them and hauled them onto the pier.
Zack stayed to the last possible second, Hearthchaining anyone with a pulse, Anchoring to the rail as the ship tried to take him with it. The sleeve of Leviathan rose one last time to swallow the dying church.
Zack looked it in the teeth. "Not tonight."
He threw Shield Yank across the wave, snagged a floating door and ripped it into the sleeve's mouth; it gagged on debris and missed him by an inch. He took the inch and jumped.
He hit the water. The cold said hello in old dialect. Hands grabbed him—firefighters, Luna, Silas—and pulled him onto slick concrete that smelled like victory and old fish.
The Living Ship rolled and went under, bell silenced, heart engine dead, ribs scattered to silt. The river closed over it with the solemness of a judge pronouncing a sentence that won't stick in appeals but matters anyway.
For a breath, the city was quiet.
Then it roared.
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Act V — Receipts
Zack lay on the pier like a man who had eaten thunder and wanted seconds. His HUD was a brutal ledger that felt like applause:
LIVING SHIP: Neutralized
Civilians rescued (direct): 86
Civilians rescued (indirect via flow control): 230+
Collateral: 0
EXP: +2200
LEVEL UP → 27 → 28 → 29 → 30 → 31 → 32 → 33 → 34 → 35 → 36 → 37 → 38 → 39 → 40
NEW: Hearthchain Rank 6 — Range city-block for 3 s; split (6); Anchor Lines duration +; Shield Yank can intercept two projectiles per 30 s.
NEW: Oathwave (R1) — emit a pulse that temporarily stills panicked motion in a radius, turning stampede into flow (cost: high).
Surge Phase 2 Mastery: fatigue −; control ↑↑.
Luna flopped down beside him, laughing and coughing. "Level forty, chrome-teeth. Midseason flex."
Silas sat with his legs over the water, coin silent for once. His eyes were bright with something like pride and something like future dread. "You pulled a cathedral by its heart and denied a bell twice. The Tribunal is taking minutes."
Firefighters gathered around them, faces ash-smudged and grinning. One captain—real, human, middle-aged, done with a thousand nights—offered Zack a hand. "Whatever you are," she said, voice rough, "you're on our side."
"On the city's," Zack said, and shook. It mattered.
Phones pointed. A news chopper circled. Someone shouted his name—whatever the internet had decided it was this hour—and someone else shouted, "THE KID WITH THE STEEL!" and it didn't matter because another voice yelled thank you and the river translated.
Luna sat up, scanning faces, panicking for a beat until Mateo hit her like a small freight train. She caught him, swore softly into his hair, and then pulled back to inventory limbs. "You stayed put?"
"Mostly," Mateo lied. "Silas bribed me with a coin trick."
"I didn't," Silas said, pocketing his coin, innocence a cut-glass joke.
The pier vibrated underfoot with the aftershock of a beast dying. Far out in the black chop, something large rippled and then stilled.
Zack pushed himself up. The vow thrummed like the city had tattooed itself onto his sternum. He looked at the skyline: hospital roof, laundromat neon, the bridge with its ribs.
He whispered to the air that had his mother's shape in it if he squinted: "I'm still counting."
The HUD chimed again, softer, like a cathedral that had learned to whisper:
SEASON ARC (Routes of Blood):
Catacombs — ✔️
Firehouse Syndicate — ✔️
Subway Grid — ✔️
Dock 17 Redux — ✔️
NEXT ARC: The Weight of Oaths
UPCOMING THREAT: River Leviathan (Ep 22) — preparing.
CITY ACKNOWLEDGEMENT: Moderate → Strong (crowds route around you; first responders coordinate on sight).
Silas rose, water dripping from his cuffs like punctuation. "Marrow will answer with markets and politics. He lost a ship; he'll buy a senator."
"Then we repossess," Luna said, wiping blood from her knuckles.
A phone buzzed at Zack's hip—no number again. He thumbed it open.
A text. A single sentence: Prestige is a doorway with two locks. You just found the first key. — M
Zack tasted metal. "He's not grieving."
"He's auditioning," Silas said. "For your attention at his coronation."
Zack stood, joints screaming in the most satisfying way. He looked downriver where the ship had gone under. The water remembered. It always does.
"Make me a list," he told Silas. "Buyers, brokers, market bosses. We flip them or we fold them."
Silas's smile was a knife in friendship's clothing. "With pleasure."
Luna swung her axe up and onto her shoulder, and the crowd parted instinctively because she'd taught it to. "Let's go make capitalism cry."
Zack rolled his neck. The steel sang—it didn't scream now; it harmonized. He felt older. He felt dangerous in a way that wasn't just sharp but shaped.
"Season two," he said to nobody and everyone, "goes loud."
He started walking. People moved with him, not in front of him. The city made room.
Behind them, under water, in darkness that did not admit to being below, something huge turned over in its sleep and smiled with too many joints. It had heard a bell un-ring and decided to practice swallowing church bells whole just to be petty.
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Stinger — Insurance
A boardroom that didn't know it was a crypt. Carpet like false sincerity. Windows with views of the river. The Tribunal sat (five, one throne empty), screens showing chopper footage of the sinking ship, of the boy with steel under his skin.
"Level forty," the pearl-eyed woman observed. "Midseason indeed."
"His vow set its teeth," the braid-jawed man said. "He'll Prestige with an oath welded to him. That will break our business model."
"Then break him," the boy-old one said, smiling like a paper cut.
The blurred figure steepled its hands. "Or break the oath."
Silas's teacher voice drifted from the doorway, as if he'd been invited. He hadn't. "He has two locks to Prestige. One's city. One's self. You can't pick either. He has to open them."
"Who invited you," the braid-jawed man spat.
"Results," Silas said, and vanished before consequences got there.
The pearl-eyed woman rang the silver bell on the table—softly. It didn't ring so much as set a calendar invite on God's desktop.
"Call the Leviathan's broker," she said. "Tell him the river is hiring."
The river, outside, watched the windows with the patience of old hunger.