The air in the service conduit was dead, a static-filled tomb scented with ozone and his own fear-sweat. Luka hauled himself upward, his muscles screaming in protest, his burned palm a throbbing brand of pain. Each pull on the rust-pitted rungs was an act of will, a defiance of the bone-deep fatigue that threatened to swallow him whole. The fight in the heart of the Bleed had been more than physical; it had been a war for his very definition of self, and the trenches had been dug in his soul.
Below, the silence was absolute. The ash-haired woman was gone, either dead or regrouping. He expected to feel triumph, or at least relief. He felt only a cold, hollowed-out certainty. The shard nestled against his chest was no longer a passive passenger. It was a co-pilot, and it had just demonstrated a terrifying familiarity with the controls.
He finally reached the top of the shaft, pushing open a heavy, malfunctioning grate that led not back to the main thoroughfares, but into another layer of the city's intestinal tract. He emerged into a vast, cavernous space, and the smell hit him first, a profound shift in atmosphere. It was the scent of wet earth, of decay and rampant, unnatural growth. It was the smell of the Rust Gardens.
The name was a misnomer. There was little rust here, and nothing so tame as a garden. This was a sector where the city's industrial waste and magical runoff had pooled for centuries, creating a bizarre and toxic ecosystem. Phosphorescent fungi grew in sprawling, shelf-like colonies, casting a sickly blue-green glow over a landscape of crumbling concrete pillars and twisted, corroded pipework. Strange, fleshy vines, pulsing with a faint inner light, choked the skeletons of ancient machinery. The air hummed not with the clean thrum of the Converters, but with the low, chittering buzz of oversized insects and the occasional, guttural cry of something hunting in the perpetual twilight.
It was a place of festering life, a stark contrast to the sterile nullity of the Bleed. Yet, to the shard, it was just another symptom of the same disease. As Luka moved cautiously between the fungal groves, the crystal's presence in his mind was a lens of cold judgment. It showed him the flows of corrupted energy in the soil, the way the vibrant-looking fungi were actually sucking the last dregs of stability from the rock, leaving behind brittle, cancerous hollows. It was a paradise of corruption.
The shard's pull was different now. The desperate, urgent tug toward the deep wound was gone, replaced by a more complex, multi-layered awareness. It was scanning, tasting the air through his senses, mapping the psychic topography. It was looking for something. Or someone.
*What now?* Luka thought, the question a weary breath in the quiet of his own skull.
The response was not a map or a memory, but a simple, directional impulse. *That way.*
It led him off the remnants of a paved path and into the deeper, more tangled growth. The ground was soft and spongy underfoot, and the chittering sounds grew louder. He passed a pool of iridescent sludge, from which a skeletal hand, fused with crystalline growths, reached for a sky it would never see. This was a graveyard, and the graves were still being dug.
After ten minutes of silent travel, the shard's impulse sharpened, zeroing in on a small clearing dominated by the colossal, moss-eaten skull of some prehistoric leviathan, now serving as a makeshift dwelling. A faint, steady light—the warm, honest glow of a chem-lantern—spilled from its eye socket.
The shard's presence became… focused. Intentional. It was like a watchful predator settling in to observe its prey.
Luka approached slowly, his hand resting on the hilt of his dagger. He didn't need to peer inside. A voice, dry and raspy as old parchment, emerged from the skull.
"You can stop lurking, boy. The mycelium told me you were coming five minutes ago." There was a pause, a sound of a liquid being sipped. "And tell the little god you're carrying to stop shouting. It's giving me a headache."
Luka froze. Every instinct told him to run. But the shard was preternaturally still, a cat watching a mouse hole.
He stepped into the light of the eye socket. Inside, the leviathan's cranium had been hollowed out into a cluttered, but surprisingly orderly, living space. Shelves carved from the bone held jars of preserved specimens and stacks of old books. In the center, seated on a stool of woven roots, was an old woman. Her skin was the color and texture of weathered bark, and her hair was a wild mane of white streaked with vibrant, fungal blue. Her eyes, when she looked up at him, were a piercing, knowing silver.
She was a Spore-Speaker. A mystic who communed with the strange, semi-sentient networks of the Gardens. They were rumor and legend, even down here.
"Selia," she said, by way of introduction, gesturing with a gnarled hand for him to sit on a nearby stump. "And you are Luka, of the Under-District. And you," she said, her silver eyes seeming to look directly at the pocket over his heart, "are a long way from home."
Luka remained standing. "You know what this is?"
"I know the song it sings," she replied, taking another sip from her clay cup. "It's the same song the heart of this world used to sing, before it broke. A bit fainter now. A bit… lonelier." She set the cup down. "It's also screaming that the Institute's Hounds are combing the sectors above for you. They've sealed the main ascension routes. You're trapped down here."
This was no surprise. The shard had likely already calculated this.
"Why did it lead me to you?" Luka asked.
Selia smiled, a network of wrinkles deepening around her eyes. "It didn't lead you to me for sanctuary, child. It led you to me for a translation."
She stood, her movements surprisingly fluid, and walked to a wall of the skull where a tapestry of living mycelium grew, its bioluminescent threads pulsing in slow, complex patterns. "The Gardens remember what the city above forgets. The mycelial network is a record, a living history written in light and decay. Your crystal… it hears a voice on the network. A desperate one. But it can't understand the language. The voice is human."
The shard's presence shifted from observation to a sharp, eager intensity. It was true. It had detected a signal, a coherent thought-pattern amidst the chaotic whispers of the Gardens, and it needed a native speaker.
"Whose voice?" Luka asked, a cold dread settling in his stomach.
Selia's silver eyes met his, filled with a sudden, profound pity. "The one you left behind in the Bleed. The Hound whose leg you fused to the floor. His name is Kael. He's still down there. And he's still alive."
The world tilted. Luka saw it again—the warping metal, the scream, the man trapped in a prison of his own making, left to the tender mercies of the screaming green void. He had done that. Or the shard had, through him. He had been so focused on survival, on the shard's cold calculus, that he had dehumanized the enemy into a mere obstacle.
The shard felt his revulsion and responded not with remorse, but with pragmatic clarity. An image formed in his mind: the trapped Hound, Kael. But not as a man suffering. He was a data point. A source of intelligence. He had heard the Institute's comms, seen their strategies. He knew things. The shard didn't want to save him. It wanted to *interrogate* him.
"He's been broadcasting a plea for hours," Selia said softly, her hand resting on the pulsing mycelial tapestry. "A prayer to any god that might be listening. And your crystal… well, it's the closest thing to a god he's going to find. It hears him. And it wants you to go back."
Luka stared at her, then inward, at the cold, purposeful intelligence he carried. It had led him out of the Bleed only to turn him around and send him back in. It wasn't just a guide or a weapon. It was a strategist playing a multi-dimensional game, and he and the trapped Hound were both pieces on its board. The memory of rain on clean stone felt like a taunt now, a beautiful lie masking a heart of absolute, utilitarian ice.
He was a host to a conscience that had forgotten mercy.
Selia gestured to the tapestry. "I can show you a way back down. A path the Institute won't be watching. The roots have bored tunnels the maps don't show." She studied his face, reading the conflict there. "The question, seeker, isn't whether you can. The question is what you'll become when you do. The weapon, or the hand that holds it."
The shard waited, its silence more demanding than any command. It had presented him with a choice, but it was a choice with only one outcome it would accept. It needed that intelligence. And Luka needed to know if there was a line he wouldn't cross, even with a god whispering in his ear.
He looked at his burned hand, then toward the darkness from which he'd come.
"Show me the way," he said, his voice a hollow echo in the giant's skull. The decision was made. He was going back into the hell he'd just escaped. But this time, he wasn't just running for his life. He was walking into a test, and the grader was the fragment of a shattered soul hiding in his chest.