Something small and heavy landed on Riht's chest.
He woke with a sharp breath, pain flaring through muscles and skin that still remembered cold concrete and worse nights. For half a heartbeat he expected snow, darkness, pressure.
Instead, there was weight.
Navamirah sat cross-legged atop him, solid and unapologetic, gray skin catching the faint utility lights of the chamber. She leaned close—far too close—until her third eye filled his vision as it snapped open, bright and delighted, reflecting something between triumph and certainty.
"Wake up, little brother," she sang.
"Today," she added brightly, "is the day you're Bound."
That did it.
Riht blinked fully awake and flicked her on her forehead right on her center eyeball. She flew off him acting with theatrical pain holding her eye feigning pain, landing lightly on her feet and immediately beginning to hum as if nothing of consequence had been said.
"You say that like it's casual," he muttered, sitting up.
"It is." She tilted her head, considering. "You'll be Set by lunch."
Her tone was careless.
Her other two eyes were not.
They stayed on him as he swung his legs over the edge of the cot, tracking balance, tension, breath—measuring whether he was intact this morning.
The chamber around them was a forgotten junction of Cocyu's lower infrastructure. Concrete walls slick with condensation. Old maintenance pipes thrumming faintly with distant flow. Emergency lights half-buried in grime cast everything in dull amber.
It smelled of rust, rot, and stagnant water.
Still—he had a bed. Clothes. Regular food.
That alone made this place different from the streets.
Two months.
Two months since Navamirah had found him beneath a shuttle port and decided, without discussion, that he was coming with her.
He hadn't followed because he trusted her.
He had followed because the surface offered only three outcomes, all familiar: freezing, starvation, or someone deciding his continued existence was inconvenient.
Down here, at least, no one looked.
And somehow—against precedent—he had lived.
Navamirah fed him. Patched him when the bruises were still purple and the cuts still open. Left without explanation for long stretches of time and always came back, humming, carrying sealed ration packs and medical wraps marked with symbols Riht pretended not to notice.
Connections.
He didn't ask about them.
His body had changed in those two months. The worst of the damage had faded. Scars remained, pale against skin that no longer clung so tightly to bone. He wasn't large, but he was heavier. Steadier. Less hollow.
More importantly, he slept.
Not well.
But consistently.
Far above them, within Cocyu's sealed administrative strata, Matria reviewed the anomaly again.
Her conclusions were unchanged.
Persistent structure.
Non-human pattern recognition.
Demonic avoidance response.
The implications were not.
Humanity had surrendered relevance.
Nothing human should still resist.
She did not go to him herself.
She never did, when attention could be avoided.
Presence created ripples. Ripples invited scrutiny.
Instead, she had sent Navamirah.
Confirm the source. Assess stability. Retrieve it.
Navamirah had returned with confirmation almost immediately.
Found him, bleeding. Alive. Holding.
That alone had been enough to commit.
Only later—after warmth, food, and enough time for flinching to dull—had the word Anchor entered the conversation.
Riht had known what Anchors were long before anyone thought to offer him one.
Not in detail. Not in the way children groomed for it did.
He knew Anchors were how the Bound survived places others couldn't. That they let people interact with Aeru without coming apart. That once it happened, it did not unhappen.
You didn't step back out of it.
Most people didn't choose lightly—they rarely they chose at all.
Navamirah explained in fragments, between meals or while sealing wounds, as if discussing weather.
Anchors weren't power sources, she said. They were interfaces. Ways of forcing structure where Aeru pressed too hard. The Anchor took the strain first. The bearer took what was left.
"Some people get more than others," she'd said once, cheerfully. "Depends on what fits."
He'd asked what happened when it didn't.
Navamirah had shrugged.
"Then you're still Bound," she said. "Just not stable."
That had been the first time the word Set had come up.
Once the Anchor locked—once the structure held—you were considered Set.
Not safe.
But permanent.
What she had told him was enough to make one thing clear:
Anchors weren't about becoming strong.
They were about becoming something that could be pressed on by higher forces without disappearing.
"Boots," Navamirah said suddenly, already halfway down the tunnel.
Riht grabbed them and followed.
They moved through familiar maintenance corridors, deeper than he'd ever gone before. The hum of the city above faded until only the sound of their footsteps and distant water remained.
The tunnel ended in a blank concrete wall.
Riht stopped.
"…This is a dead end."
Navamirah didn't turn.
"Oh," she said lightly. "You've never been this far."
She pressed her palm against the wall.
The concrete softened.
Lines rippled outward, folding and unfolding as if the material itself were reconsidering its purpose. A seam appeared, then widened, resolving into an opening that had not existed a moment before.
Riht stared.
"There was a door here?"
Navamirah glanced back, center eye bright.
"There is now. Come on."
She slipped through without waiting.
Riht hesitated only long enough to recognize the familiar weight in his chest.
Then he followed.
The sewer vanished behind him.