They moved like a single thought.
The black seam swallowed them in cold and iron. The shaft dropped away under their boots, the air pressing in with the smell of old coal and wet stone. Shadow went first, the brass key still warm in his fist. Rena followed, blade sheathed but fingers ready at the hilt. Lena and Ryn ghosted along the walls, eyes like hunting birds. Sera lingered at the rear with two of the survivors, packs cinched tight and small wards pinned to the children's collars.
The maintenance crawl was cramped—too narrow for armor, too honest for noise. Water ran along the belly of the seam in a thin black ribbon. Occasionally a handhold protruded, hammered smooth from the work of a hundred years. Merek's map lived in Shadow's mind like a second skin: the seam, the service wall, the ladder down to subfloor three. One wrong turn and they would either surface to a guard ring or fall into the vats of the purification wing.
They reached the service wall where the seam met the facility. Shadow's gauntlet slid a sliver of mana into the rusted plate and the lock gave in with a reluctant sigh. The maintenance corridor beyond smelled of oil and the faint rose of chemical spice. Overhead, a faint glow traced the veins of the place—thin, measured pulses that marked the conduits' beat.
Ryn's voice, barely audible: "Guards on rotation in seven. Mezzanine watchers at the quarter-hour mark."
They moved. Lena's staff curled into a lattice that swallowed stray sigils and dulled the light of observation crystals. Sera's charms—simple loops of blessed thread—hung at each doorway they passed; they were not holy relics, only blunt tools to keep the Veil's sedative scent from hitting lungs hard enough to drop a child into sleep. Shadow's Appraisal swept each junction in a practiced arc—ward strength, runic pattern, mana residues. The gauntlet thrummed under his sleeve, a steady presence.
The first ring was made of metal and men. Anorus had placed pickets—broad-shouldered brutes with rune-axes and heavy shields—along the maintenance corridor, not expecting anyone to crawl in the way shadow and Rena could. Ryn melted into the darkness and took the first patrol out with a silent blade between shoulder and throat. Lena sent a small ignis pulse that looked like a fallen torch and took care of a second guard's plate with a bright, muffled pop. They left the bodies tucked under a grate, masked by Lena's smoke and the tunnel's wet breath.
They pressed on until the channel opened into the subfloor. The room was lower, wider, and worse: pipes like great veins, conduits humming with the sweet, poisonous blue, and glass reservoirs paled in ranks around the Soul Conductor's belly. The engine's pulse beat through the floor. Shadow felt it through his boots and tasted it in the air—unfiltered life turned into commodity.
Lena pointed at the access ladder. "Two up to the mezzanine," she mouthed. "Rena, you and Shadow take the lower gate. I and Ryn will collapse the flank conduits after Sera covers the kids."
Rena's nod was all business. The two of them crept to the nearest service hatch, pressed close to the engine's shadow. Men moved on the mezzanine like clockwork—three mages with porcelain masks bending over levers, one priest with a sanctified staff chanting a slow, mechanical prayer. Sunoct sat where the light bent most kindly, a thin figure wrapped in robes that drank color. He watched the bank of lenses with the cool attention of someone watching for insects.
It was the perfect place for an onlooker—calm, invisible by authority, and impossible to surprise.
Shadow felt the gauntlet pull at his sleeve in a petulant tug. Their plan relied on stillness. Sunoct's sight was not just sight: his weave could taste a shift in mana. If he felt the seam's disturbance, the engine would be locked down within heartbeats.
Shadow signaled. Ryn flaked left and slid into a maintenance conduit while Lena took the glass walkway and began to cut the flange bolts that fed the nearest conduit. The lattice around her turned runes brittle; sparks rained like confined stars. Sera moved to the pods, her hands steady as she read names and tears on tiny lids. She pressed charms over each child's mouth and nose; the wards did not save them from what had been done, but they kept new poison from settling.
On the mezzanine an alarm keyed itself—an appearance of clumsy wear that Sunoct noticed and smiled upon: error, he thought. He bent his will toward the error. Shadow felt the pressure in the air, magic reaching like a hand across steel.
Rena struck.
She moved like an unavoidable law. The courtyard's heavy door gave to her in a cinematic arc—steel groaning as her blade took it. She met the courtyard's guard ring like a winter storm, knocking axes aside and cleaving a path toward the shipment dock. Anorus saw her and roared—battered, thick-limbed, his arms a wheel of rage—but Rena was not about spectacle. Her blade's edge took him in pieces of movement that read like surgical decisions. He fell with a cliff of sound that swallowed a dozen men's courage at once.
Up above, Sunoct's smile thinned. He rose as if pulled by strings and the procession of his robes stirred the air into a net. He began to chant—soft consonants that made the lights over the pods stutter. The observation galleries clicked closed; the service doors clanged; the heart tightened. Shadow's Appraisal picked up the lock: a dozen wards, three anchor sigils, a main glyph threaded through the engine's throat.
Shadow didn't pretend to out-chant a person who spoke with a choir of rituals. He moved.
The gauntlet's Shield Edge expanded, a thin slice of energy that took impact and redirected it to where he aimed. He barrelled for the anchor nearest the heart, fueled by a savage certainty. Sunoct's shards—manifested as little knives of thought—ripped at the world. One nicked Shadow's cloak and ground the fabric to sparks, but Shadow cut, each arc a promise. He slammed his gauntlet into the anchor and the engine shuddered—an animal startled. Runic dust exploded as the binding cracked.
At that instant, the engine rose to protest. The Soul Conductor began to scream—a low, layered wail that was part machine and part lost voices. The pods trembled. Tubes coughed blue. The children thrummed under the glass like trapped birds.
Sunoct lashed out in fury. He sent a corridor of cold fire down the main service pathway, a lattice of black flame that hummed with corruption. Shadow leapt through it, armor blistering on his arm as the gauntlet converted pain to momentum. Where the flame touched, it shrank from his resolve. The gauntlet, humming deep, answered with a burst that tore the flame into ash.
Lena's work finished with a scream of metal. She and Ryn collapsed the flank conduits and the engine's pulse doubled as the supply found itself stuttering. Sera had three children with her, each ragged and thin, the signs of testing clear as paper. She wrapped them and pushed, a healing glow ghost-light in her palms while she sang the small prayers that soothed the bone.
Anorus became a smear in the chaos—men surged to piece him from the ground. Sunoct's anger tightened to a point. He swept both arms and glass and wire shuddered like a struck bell. For a breath, Shadow saw the mage's face plainly: tired, curious, hands that had learned to like the small things of men. And then Sunoct moved elsewhere, leaving a trail of bitter smoke as he sought another anchor.
The engine went unstable.
Metal sang like a harp string being broken. The conduits buckled, then sheared, then melted into a black rain. A central stabilizer cracked and the core convulsed. A white scream of mana tore through the chamber, carrying the echoes of countless small voices, and then the light folded in on itself.
They had been prepared for collapse, but not for the way panic moved through metal and flesh alike. Shadow felt the floor shift under his boots; he felt the gauntlet strain to keep him upright. He grabbed a ladder rung and hauled himself up as the ceiling groaned and a cloud of blue dust poured like snow from above.
Sera's voice reached him through the roar: "Children—here!"
Rena's shout came back: "Move! Now!"
They did. They dragged pods and carried small bodies whose limbs were too thin to hold their shape. The survivors Merek had brought with them helped where they could—young men who had once known how to bear ladders and how to pray with hands that remembered honest labor.
The core's collapse was embarrassing rather than cinematic. It did not explode so much as unmake—gear by gear, seal by seal, until the machine's teeth were nothing more than hot metal beads rolling across the floor. The pods cracked and leaked their last blue into puddles that hissed and smoked. Some of the children's lids shattered and little faces blinked, lightless and raw; others gasped and then cried at once for names and mothers that did not come.
They carried what they could. They burned the rest that might be used again. Rena set charges along the main feed lines, not to make a show, but to make sure there was no salvage. Lena smashed storage canisters into broken bowls, and the Azure Veil steamed away into the ruined air like a bad dream.
When the first funeral pyres were lit beneath the engine's shadow, the lower works were a wreck of heat, smoke, and trade. Shadow moved like a man who had walked through a storm and not expected to be whole when it ended. He found the box of ID tags and thumbed through names until one stuck: Elen. He kept the tag in his palm until his fingers ached.
They made for the refuse chute as Merek had instructed—the narrow neck that would spill them out toward the riverbank. It was a tight and filthy escape, the sort that begged for heroics and allowed none. They shouldered packs and made the hole themselves, hauling children up and out through steam and grit. Sweat coated their faces and ash streaked their arms.
At the chute's mouth the city breathed differently—the sweet, sour odor of the river, the distant clank of street-cleaners, the low hum of life pretending the garrison was still whole. Shadow paused only once to look back. Above the broken hatch, figures in silver veils had already appeared—Executors moving slow and deliberate through the smoke, tablets glowing with bureaucratic light.
One of those veiled figures stood at the rim and spoke into the air. The voice was clear and cold. "Contain the breach. Purify evidence. Report to the Choir."
Rena met Shadow's eyes. There was something in her face that was not exhaustion but a steel tightening. "We know who will cover this up now," she said. "We know who will lie for them."
Shadow slipped Elen's tag into his coat. "Then we make sure their lies die with them."
The river caught them in its gray throat and held them for a long time while they tried to breathe. They hid beneath a fallen barge and let the city slide past them in the pretense of morning. The children clung to Sera, dozing fitfully whenever the pain allowed. Rena wrapped her cloak around a small boy with a fever and checked his lungs for breath like a surgeon who had forgotten mercy.
They had not won, not really. But the engine was broken, the conduits were silent, and a hundred names had been wrested from whatever ledger the Choir used to count human life. Above them Executors would file their reports, smooth the story, and plug the gap with whatever words the Choir preferred.
Below, in a wet alley where the tide crept in, they kept watch. Shadow held his gauntlet by his knee like a relic and listened to the children's soft breaths. The vial of Azure Veil sat heavy in his satchel as evidence and as reminder.
Rena touched his shoulder once, a quick contact that said more than words. "We move. We run. We find the others."
They had what they needed to start a trail—a metal tag, charred documents taken from the engine's control room, survivors who knew routes and faces and a madman's name. The Choir might wash the city clean in the morning, but the stain lived with them now; it would not wash away easily.
Night closed in the city pockets they passed through. The group melted from view by design, slipping into a small complex of tunnels the survivors used during the old days for smuggling coal. There, for a few hours, they ate the thin food Merek had hidden away, and Sera mended small wounds with patient hands. Rena planned travel routes, Lena examined the salvaged documents, and Ryn sat at a corner, staring at the river's slow movement like a thing that had never seen a clear sky.
Shadow slept for a while with Elen's tag clenched in his fist. When he woke it was to the sound of low words—plans, numbers, names—being pinned to a new map. The route had broadened: more labs like this one, whispers of a network that spidered like rot, directives that bore the Holy Land's symbol.
He folded the map and slid it into his cloak. The gauntlet's hum was barely there now, content for the moment. His face in the dim light looked older than it had the night before. He had been made to touch things other men hid from their own sight, and the touch had left a mark.
Outside in the river's cold, the city pretended to sleep. Above them the Executors would go through their rituals and craft their narratives of bandit attacks and tragic accidents. Below them a handful of ragged, burning-eyed people would take their stolen names and step toward a path that would not stop until the Choir's music was silenced.
Shadow stood and took his place among them. They would follow the thread until it led them to Sunoct, to Anorus, and onward—up the chain to the doors that hid the Choir.
When he wrapped the satchel against his side, the metal tag clinked softly—a small, final sound that promised nothing but truth.