Pain woke first.
Then the smell: wet straw rotting into muck, rat piss sharp enough to sting the eyes, and beneath it all the iron reek of old blood baked into stone.
Li opened his eyes to blackness that felt solid, like swimming in coal dust. No floodlights, no humming generator, no familiar clang of the site canteen. Just dripping walls weeping cold beads of water that slid down the rock like sweat on a corpse skin.
He tried to sit. A white-hot spike tore through his left ribs. Cracked, maybe broken. Didn't matter. Pain was data.
His fingers found the inner pocket of the filthy grey work jacket. Two objects remained.
The mechanical watch ticked against his wrist, second hand sweeping with calm, relentless precision.
tick… tick…
in the silence it sounded like a heartbeat that refused to panic.
The brushed-steel Zippo was still there too. He thumbed the lid open once, just to hear the
click, then snapped it shut.
A slat scraped open in the iron door. A pair of yellowed eyes, yellowed and wet, peered through the slot. They belonged to something that had forgotten it was human.
"You awake, heretic?"
The voice scraped like sandstone on rust.
Li's throat felt lined with sandpaper. One word came out, cracked but steady.
"Water."
The gaoler blinked, startled by the lack of screaming or begging. After a moment he slid a wooden bowl through the hatch. Grey slop with two dead flies floating on top like punctuation marks.
"Drink up," the gaoler sneered. "Tomorrow at sunrise the bishop's fire will clean your soul."
Sunrise.
Deadline.
Li's mind cleared the way it used to before a critical path review: fear and rage were non-value-adding activities.
He lifted his wrist into the faint torchlight from the corridor. Lume dial glowed ghost-green.
"Sixteen hours, thirty minutes," he said aloud.
Sixteen hours to turn a death row into an exit ticket.
He closed his eyes and let the last three months scroll past like a project timeline.
Three months ago he'd fallen out of the sky like industrial waste.
To eat, he'd hauled two-hundred-pound coal sacks at Blackstone's docks.
To stay warm, he'd pulled bellows at the Gilded Hand guild forge.
To stop wasting half the coal on poor airflow, he'd quietly re-angled the tuyere one drunken night.
The furnace had roared past thirteen hundred degrees.
The refractory brick had exploded.
The guild had thrown him in here.
Now the memory chain locked onto a single frame.
Two weeks ago. Downpour at the river docks.
Red-haired woman soaked to the bone, surrounded by creditors, uncle jabbing a fat finger in her face while dockhands laughed.
She hadn't cried.
She'd spun a rusted iron ring on her little finger and stared at her uncle like she was already measuring the coffin.
No fear. Only murder in those green eyes.
Unstable high-energy reactant.
Perfect lever.
Li opened his eyes.
He stood, ribs screaming, and walked to the cell door. The gaoler actually took half a step back from the pressure behind the bars.
"Want to get rich?" Li asked.
He drew the Zippo.
Click.
A steady flame rose in the dark like a middle finger to the Middle Ages.
The gaoler's breath hitched.
"Steel that never forgets fire," Li said. He snapped the lid shut and slid the lighter through the bars. "Down payment."
The man caught it, cradling the warm metal like a saint's bone.
"Run an errand for me," Li continued. "Silver Anchor Company. Find the redhead."
The gaoler snorted. "That bankrupt bitch? Word is she'll be sold to some old—"
Li produced a thumbnail-sized shard from his pocket—bone-white, flawless, born in the heart of the blast that put him here.
"Tell her two things," Li said, holding up coal-blackened fingers.
"One: I know how to turn mud into this."
"Two: I know exactly what her uncle cooked in the dockside ledgers."
The gaoler stared at the porcelain fragment gleaming like frozen moonlight.
"If she wants to live," Li finished, "tell her to come tonight. Alone. If she doesn't, tomorrow I'm just expensive ash."
He let go.
Zippo and porcelain clattered into the gaoler's palms.
The gaoler looked from the treasures to the calm black eyes behind the bars.
"Four thirty-five," Li said, leaning back against the weeping wall. "You've got fifty-five minutes. When it's done the redhead will pay you five hundred gold crowns."
The slat slammed shut. Footsteps retreated fast.
Li closed his eyes again, letting the watch tick against his pulse.
Sixteen hours left.
Somewhere beyond the stone, rain hammered Blackstone's roofs like impatient fists.
He smiled in the dark, small and sharp.
Project kickoff.