Graywater did not welcome them. It absorbed.
The city was a throat. Narrow streets swallowed sound and spat back gossip dressed as truth. Buildings leaned toward each other as if conspiring, their gutters whispering of debt and rain. The air tasted like old coins rubbed between hungry fingers.
Serah moved like someone walking under a sky that had rules. She took alleys that weren't there until she turned into them, nodded to beggars who were not, by any law, allowed to exist, and did not look at the church spires that pierced the fog like knives watching for backs.
"This was home," Kael said.
"This is hunger," Serah said.
They had left the monoliths and the Prelate's laugh behind them on the stair, but the bargain clung like smoke. Kael felt the new absence in himself as if he had lost a tooth and could not stop tonguing the gap. People glanced at him and slid off him like water, as if the parts of him that invited tenderness had been politely excused from the room.
"I should have paid it," Serah said suddenly. "It was my name on the stone."
"It is still yours," Kael said. "That was the point."
They crossed the River Bent by a bridge made of promises and taxes. On the far side, a market tried to outshout the rain. A child with eyes like coins darted in, nimble as a thought, and would have had Serah's knife if Serah hadn't let it be taken. The child paused, confused by victory.
"Spend it well," Serah said, not unkind.
The child showed teeth and vanished.
They found shelter in a tavern that had once been a chapel and hadn't changed much. Benches were pews. The bar was an altar where offerings turned to drink. A saint's statue watched them from behind the bottles, her face carved into a smile that had always been a warning.
"We need information," Serah said. "The Inquisition will come through the front door. We leave by the one they don't know exists."
Kael nodded. His Mark was quiet here, listening. Cities had names too, not just people. Graywater's name was long and complicated and mostly about hunger, yes, but also about stubborn love and what people will make sacred when no one will sell it to them.
A woman slid onto the bench opposite them as if she had been invited. She wore a dress the color of fresh bruises and a knife like a second mouth at her hip. Her smile was Serah's, if Serah had had the luxury of learning to like her own reflection.
"Little sister," the woman said.
Serah's face did not change. "You're dead," she said.
"Only on paper," the woman said. "You left me to that once. I left me to it twice." She tilted her head, considering Kael. "And you brought a storm inside a boy. How rude."
"Lysa," Kael said before he could stop himself. The name rose from the monoliths, warm and sharp. It softened the woman's eyes, then hardened them worse.
"You don't get to say my name," Lysa said. "Not until you pay for it."
Serah's hand closed under the table. "What do you want?"
Lysa's smile got small and honest. "The Prelate has a nest in Graywater. He uses it to hatch saints and monsters depending on the tithe. You want to get to him? You pay me with something I can keep when you're gone." She leaned forward. "Bring me our mother's bones."
Serah did not breathe. Kael heard the city's name whisper itself in the rafters and learned a new vowel in it that meant grief held by the teeth.
"Where?" Serah asked, her voice calm as a blade left on a windowsill.
Lysa's eyes glittered. "Under the Orphan's Church. Where they keep the bones that don't pay."
Kael felt the Mark sit up. Bones had names that remembered themselves.
"We'll bring them," he said. "And then you take us to the nest."
Lysa lifted her cup toward the watching saint. "To hunger," she said. "To girls who learn to eat it before it eats them."
Serah touched her cup to Lysa's and did not drink.
Outside, bells began to ring. Not for prayer. For hunt.
Graywater swallowed the sound, chewed, and swallowed it again.
"Move," Serah said.
They moved, and the city shifted around them like a throat remembering how to swallow fire.