The message buzzed his pocket like a cheap insect that had learned manners: midnight, no banners, bring no one. Triangle-eye. The city's back teeth.
Raek went alone because that was the shape of the dare. He took the long way that wasn't long—through Window Street where the glass kept score, under the tram line where the bolts creaked lullabies, then down into the service throat where the air tasted of hot metal, old rain, and the kind of oil that keeps secrets. The hatch with the slit-eye sat where he'd seen it, rust still flaking its soft apology, the mark's bite fresh enough to sting a thumb. He thumbed it anyway. The steel answered with that mean little vibrato that doors get when they want to lie.
He smiled with half his mouth and none of his kindness, rolled his shoulders, and knocked once—because even chaos observes the polite fiction of knocking.
The hatch unlatched itself with a reluctant cough; the corridor behind breathed out steam like laughter that had been sharpened. Pipes ran along both walls in a ribcage rhythm, some warm, some hot enough to make thought hurry. Floor slick in patches, dry in others, the whole place laid out like a trap designed by a committee that had never met but agreed on spite. Lights hummed the color of teeth.
They didn't rush at once—no, the corner crews were learning. They let sound arrive first: a chain whisper above, a bottle-plink behind, a foot test to his left that was almost gentle, and somewhere up-corridor the quiet slide of a cart that wanted to be useful and would settle for being loud. The street had followed him underground just to see how he behaved without sky.
Rage on.
Heat stepped to the skin as if it had been waiting in another room, hands got heavier without getting slower, the little idiot in his nerves put down its drumsticks and let the rest of the band play. The hurt-centers moved to the cheap seats and watched.
"Welcome!" someone called in that cheerful tone men use right before they forget who taught it to them.
"Thanks," Raek said, and meant none of it.
The chain net dropped from the dark like an idea that had finally found evidence, iron rings singing, hooks at the edges greedy for coat and throat. He did not backpedal—never gift a net the luxury of your heels. He stepped in and turned his right shoulder through as if he were shrugging off a question. The iron kissed leather, found the Boarhide mantle, slid, complained. He took a loop in his left hand, whipped it, and the net's edge became a leash with a rude dog at the other end; he yanked and felt a body arrive without ceremony from the catwalk above. The body said oof in a language shared by every city.
"Too friendly," Raek told the air, and fed the leash to the floor, hard.
They came properly then—left, right, and dead center, a three-tongued argument. The left was a knife with honest legs, the right had a pipe-wrench that had loved someone once and never got over it, the center sold empty hands because empty hands were supposed to look safe.
He bought none of it.
Knife first, because knives cut more than flesh—they cut conversation and time. He met the blade with brick, except the brick was his forearm and the wall was the wall: a flat thud, a specific jolt, the wrist clapping the masonry like a bad handshake you refuse to repeat. Fingers opened on reflex; the knife tried commitment and failed. Raek didn't bother to track it; his hand was already in the man's elbow, not to break it, just to teach it humility, and that lesson took.
Pipe-wrench swung big, a cathedral arc meant to consecrate his skull. He set Spite Guard—cleaver flat up like a door, hips behind it, and the wrench hit not a man but a refusal. Steel clanged; the sound ran down the corridor and upset a rat's timetable. He shoved, and the wrench-bearer went backward as if edited from a scene; Raek's back-spike found a belt loop on the way and took him another step the wrong direction, right into the hot pipe that hissed like a cat told it will be getting a bath. The scream was brief and industrious.
Center tried to be clever—heel feint, shoulder dip, the kind of gym-floor move that works on men who went to gyms. Raek gave him a table that wasn't there: both hands on the man's collarbones, a sudden forward step, and down he went across nothing at all because the floor had been helpful and slick where it counted. Elbow. Knee. Floor. That old prayer. Gravity said amen.
A bottle exploded behind. He did not turn; turning is a tax paid by people who trust their necks. He took a half step left, dragged a beat-up service table with his boot like a lazy dancer pulling a partner into line, and the runner who thought he was fast made friends with the wood in that particular way wood remembers for days. Raek let momentum have the man's pride and took the ankle instead, the boot pinning with no theatrics. Ribs are quieter than teeth, so he chose ribs for punctuation—one, two—each strike a stamp on paperwork nobody would read.
From the catwalk a voice said, "He's not that big," and another voice said, "Why are you up there then?" and the chain net gave a miffed sigh because it had expected applause and gotten used.
"Triangle-eye," someone announced as if naming a god. Slit-eye was scratched into the wall there too, shallow and fresh. The mark wasn't a signature; it was a doorbell. He prepared to meet the host.
They obligingly sent him a test—two bodies at once in a narrow space, like the city making him do arithmetic with shoulders. He solved it with subtraction: Hook Drag on the first—back-spike snapping belt and pulling hips half a foot off truth—Skull Bell on the second—forehead to teeth, a sound like a shelf losing a jar—and then the first man, reclaimed and surprised, was a handle he could swing into the third that had thought he was a bystander. People are terrible furniture, but they do in a pinch.
Someone upstairs figured out the problem and tried to solve it with volume: a crate on a pulley, simple gravity plus ambition. It dropped toward him with the speed of regret. He stepped forward, not back, because math works both ways; Whirl Cut low, the cleaver singing under the crate's belly like a saw with manners, and wood became two argues instead of one. The halves hit on either side; the pulley rope jerked; the catwalk complained; the man above learned that architecture can be an opinion and sometimes disagrees with you.
"Down," Raek suggested, and the catwalk took his side.
They threw a new flavor into the stew: bottles of oil smashed at his feet while a spark skittered across from a scuffed flint. The corridor wanted to be a throat of fire. Raek, in the honest tradition of men who hate other people's plans, stole the flint with his boot, flicked it, and kicked it under the hot pipe he'd already made angry. The pipe flared in protest there instead, a controlled cough of blue that burned up the oil but not his coat, the air showing him a quick map of heat that he filed under "later."
He caught another chain with one hand because chains apparently breed here, wrapped it once around his Tusk Hook like a marriage you plan to annul, and yanked the owner off his balance. Elbow Drop—hip turn, weight through, spine to pavement—and the man remembered how to pray to saints who never answer under the city. Raek's knee pinned the man's bicep; his boot stamped the open hand like he was canceling a stamp. The knife it had thought about holding clinked against concrete with the exact pitch of a habit broken.
"You keep the corner," he told whoever needed to hear it down here, voice already bored because the work was not, in truth, interesting. "Or sell it. Not both."
"Not both," a voice echoed. Sarcasm wants to be a mirror and often fails.
The corridor adjusted tactics. Three silhouettes appeared in the steam, slow, sure, stepping to the half-beat of a song only brutal men know. These were not day-clowns. These were Night Shift: coats waxed against blood, knuckles taped, eyes the color of debt. The one in the middle had a triangle-eye carved not into the wall but into the leather over his heart. Leadership by needle.
"Pay your toll," the leader said, and the two beside him smiled the way bad dogs show they understand a command.
Raek breathed once, long through the nose, let the air catalogue a room he could close in his fist if he had to. Rage was already there, but he turned the knob another quarter turn; the world's edges sharpened until they could have peeled fruit.
"Fine," he said. "I'll pay in posture and reminders."
They came as one, tightly braided aggression, and he met them as if the city had finally decided to spend its best coins on him. He didn't edge away or circle or respect the space their confidence drew; he stepped inside and made a new space that was only him and pressure and the neat, ugly mathematics of joints. The left man's jab became Grip Break to brick; the right man's cross turned into Spite Guard and a shove that wrote him into a pipe's hot lesson; the middle man, triangle-heart, swung a short hook meant to unscrew the top of Raek's head and got Skull Bell instead, a forward notch of bone that rang his teeth like cutlery in a drawer.
Triangle-heart lived through it—that detail did please Raek—and answered with a knee, honest and high. Raek took it on Boarhide, polite as a funeral attendant, then showed him Elbow Down across the clavicle, a blade-less cut that still carried the promise of edges. He felt bone argue with him and lose the debate by committee.
Something at Raek's left ankle tried to be a snake and turned out to be a rope. He followed it without looking—follow the insult to its source—and found a hand, delicate and insistent, pulling at the loop like a lover. He crushed the hand without drama, not because he disliked drama but because drama has a time and this was not it.
The leader tried to talk again—men in coats love to add words to fights—but his voice had to travel through pain first and got lost on the way. Raek saved him time: Hook Drag, shove, shoulder, wall. The dent he made rhymed with a dent made earlier topside. Poetry, but in steel.
Rage down.
He let the room catch up, air stumble back into lungs that had thought the lease canceled. He rolled his wrists once, twice—the knuckles reported a reasonable inventory of complaint—and looked for strangers' feet still arrogant enough to point at him. None. The corridor had learned humility fast.
The slit-eye mark on the wall sat there, small and pleased with itself. He crouched and touched it again, listening to the scratch in the metal. The bite was wrong for this crew—too careful, not greedy enough. New hands. Message sent by a middleman who would either be dead by dawn or very busy pretending he had been born elsewhere.
He took a piece of chalk from his pocket because Raek believed in courtesy for future versions of himself and drew a second mark under the eye: a small square. It meant "room cleared, trap remains, enter rude." A language only three people in Eboncrest read and two respected.
As he stood, a bun seller's thin voice drifted from the hatch, that fearless curiosity children mistake for armor. "Mister?"
"Mm?"
"Was that a toll?"
Raek looked back up the corridor at the heap of expressions that had become furniture, at the chain net sulking, at the pipe sweating, at the door's dent-now-in-stereo, and at the little wedge of night that held all that human noise and had the nerve to call itself quiet.
"That was exact change," he said, and the tunnels, being honest structures, agreed.