The robin wouldn't stop bleeding.
Sable pressed his thumb against the bird's wing—gently, because pressure was the difference between setting bone and snapping it—and watched red seep between his fingers. Not much. Enough to matter.
"Hold still," he muttered.
The bird thrashed. Tiny. Furious. Determined to die out of spite.
Sable's other hand moved without thinking, the way it always did when something was broken and fixable. Matchstick. Medical tape stolen from a supply crate. The splint went on in four seconds, wrapped tight enough to hold but loose enough to let the wing remember what flying felt like.
The bird went limp in his palm. Exhausted. Defeated. Still breathing.
"There." Sable set it down on the overturned crate that served as his table. "Don't die. I've got a reputation to maintain."
He didn't. Everyone in the Dredge knew Sable Voss Lucthilde was the idiot who'd traded six years of medical school for a maintenance shaft and a collection of dead rats. But the bird didn't need to know that.
It looked at him. One black eye. Unblinking.
Sable looked at its feet.
Small. Taloned. Twitching slightly, the way broken things did when shock started wearing off and pain moved in to take its place.
He turned back to the rat on his workspace—the *actual* project, the one that mattered—and made another incision along its abdomen. Tumor. Third one this week. Black veins webbed through the tissue like roots searching for something to choke.
Behind him, the bird chirped.
Sable didn't look up. "You're welcome."
It chirped again. Louder. Indignant.
"I saved your life. That's the transaction. We're done."
The bird hopped closer to the edge of the crate. Tilted its head.
Sable's hand paused mid-cut. He tilted his own head, mirror-habit, caught himself, and frowned. "What?"
Another chirp. This one sounded smug.
"I'm not keeping you."
The bird settled onto the crate like it had already decided otherwise, fluffed its feathers—grey chest, burnt-orange belly, one wing held at an angle that would never be quite right again—and closed its eyes.
Sable stared at it. At the way its chest rose and fell, too fast, still fighting off shock. At the splint that was already coming loose because he'd used cheap tape and cheaper hope.
Something old and bitter turned over in his chest.
He'd seen this before. Years ago. Different channel, same cheap TV in the common room of the group home, back when his adoptive
Father still pretended to care. Nature documentary. Robins. The narrator's voice, smooth and certain, talking about symbols and myths and things that didn't exist in the Dredge.
*"The robin represents renewal. Second chances. A fresh start after the hardest winters."*
Sable had been six. Fresh out of his first foster failure, wearing bruises under his shirt that no one asked about. He'd wanted to believe it so badly it physically hurt—that something as simple as a bird could mean things got better, that the universe kept score and eventually gave you back what it took.
He'd asked the older boy next house about it the next day. *"Do people get second chances?"*
The boy had looked at his hands—the new bruises on his knuckles from the fight that got him moved—and said, *"Some people. Not you."*
Sable had stopped believing in symbols after that.
But the bird kept coming back.
Three weeks. Every morning. Lurching through the ventilation shaft on a wing that didn't work right, landing in his tunnel, demanding food with the entitlement of something that had already decided it wasn't going to die quietly.
He hadn't meant to name it.
Names were dangerous. Names made things matter. And things that mattered could hurt you when they left.
But one night, falling asleep to the sound of the bird's too-fast heartbeat, the word had slipped out—soft, bitter, mocking the documentary and the older boy and the whole stupid idea that anything ever got better.
*"Alright, Second. Let's see how long your luck holds."*
The bird had chirped in his sleep.
And kept coming back.
-----
Now, three weeks later, Sable was wrist-deep in a dead rat's tumor and the bird was perched on his workspace, preening his crooked wing like it was a medal.
"You're going to die down here," Sable told it.
Second ignored him.
"The water's poison. The air's poison. Everything's poison except the things that want to eat you, and those are *worse* than poison."
The bird looked at him. Tilted its head.
Sable tilted his own. Stopped. Looked away.
"I'm not responsible for you."
Second hopped onto his wrist.
Sable stared at the bird's feet. Three toes forward, one back, gripping his skin with a pressure that was somehow both fragile and absolute.
"Fine," he said quietly. "Fifteen minutes. Then you go back to wherever you came from and I go back to pretending I'm doing something useful down here."
He cleaned the scalpel, wiped the rat's blood on a rag that used to be white, and pocketed the blade. Second launched himself—badly, listing to the left because of the wing—toward the ventilation shaft.
Sable caught him mid-flight.
"You have a death wish."
The bird chirped. It sounded distinctly like *so do you.*
"Touché."
He tucked Second into his coat pocket—ignored the indignant squawking—and climbed toward the surface.
-----
The Dredge smelled like rust and yesterday's mistakes.
Sable pulled himself through the maintenance hatch into the service alley behind Hab-Block 19, and the smell hit him like a fist—chemicals and sweat and the particular staleness of air that had been breathed too many times by too many people who couldn't afford better.
Second exploded from his pocket in a burst of feathers and poor judgment.
"Stay close," Sable called. Not an order. A suggestion he already knew would be ignored.
The bird lurched toward a cluster of pipes, landed badly, didn't care.
Sable shoved his hands into his pockets and walked.
The alley opened onto one of the Dredge's main corridors—wide, carved from concrete and failed city planning, lined with vendors selling things that were either stolen or expired or enthusiastically both. Chem-strips hummed overhead, green and grey, painting everyone the color of week-old corpses.
He passed a man selling *filtered* water from jugs that looked like they'd been filtered through someone's kidneys. Passed a woman hawking protein squares that might have been food once, in another life. Passed three kids crouched in a doorway, watching the crowd with the empty eyes of predators who'd learned math early: *one target, three knives, zero witnesses.*
Second swooped past his head, aiming for a vendor's table.
Sable was already moving.
He caught the bird one-handed—muscle memory from three weeks of this exact scenario—and met the vendor's eyes for half a second before dropping his gaze to the man's hands. Scarred. Missing two fingers. The kind of hands that had held knives more often than food.
"Sorry." Sable pressed a meal voucher into the man's palm, kept his voice flat. Clinical. "He's food-motivated."
The vendor's hands curled around the voucher. Paused. Uncurled.
"Keep it on a leash."
"Working on it."
Sable kept walking. Second squirmed in his grip, radiating offense at being caught mid-crime.
"You literally just stole from someone who removes fingers professionally," Sable muttered. "That's not bravery. That's stupidity with wings."
The bird bit his thumb.
"Ow—*fuck*—"
Someone laughed.
Bright. Clear. Wrong.
Laughter in the Dredge meant two things: insanity or an audience. Both were dangerous.
Sable looked up.
The girl couldn't have been more than seven. Small, blonde, wearing a grey dress that was far too clean for this place. She stood near a vendor's stall, staring at Second with the kind of wide-eyed delight that didn't survive long down here.
Three men stood behind her.
Not *with* her. *Behind* her. Close enough to grab. Far enough to pretend they weren't.
Sable's gaze dropped to their hands.
The first man: wired, twitchy, fingers drumming against his thigh. Stim user. Dangerous when startled.
The second: lean, controlled, hands in his pockets. Confident. Probably armed.
The third: broad-shouldered, well-fed, hands loose at his sides. The kind of loose that came from not needing weapons because *you* were the weapon.
The girl giggled at Second.
None of the men smiled.
Sable's hand drifted toward the scalpel in his pocket. He didn't pull it. Just touched the handle. Reminded himself it was there.
The broad-shouldered man's eyes flicked to him. Not a threat. An assessment.
Sable looked at the man's hands. Thick fingers. Callused knuckles. No scars. Which meant he didn't fight—he won.
The girl turned toward Sable. "Your bird is funny."
"He's an idiot," Sable said, keeping his voice light. Dismissive. The tone you used when you didn't want to be remembered.
"I like him."
"Most people do. Right up until he steals their food."
She smiled. The men didn't.
Sable kept walking.
Second chirped—soft, questioning.
"Not our problem," Sable muttered.
The bird pecked his ear.
"I said *not our problem.*"
Another peck. Harder.
Sable stopped. Looked back.
The girl was gone. The men were gone. The crowd had already filled the space where they'd been standing, moving with the shuffle of people who'd learned that seeing things meant answering questions, and questions meant involvement, and involvement meant ending up dead in an alley no one would bother cleaning.
Second made a low, worried trill.
"Yeah," Sable said quietly. "Me too."
He filed it away—blonde girl, grey dress, clean ribbon, three men with the wrong kind of hands—and kept walking.
Maybe she was their daughter. Maybe their niece. Maybe someone they were being paid to protect.
Maybe she'd be dead in a week and it wouldn't matter what Sable had or hadn't seen.
He made it back to his tunnel in silence.
-----
Inside, the rat was still dead. The tumor was still black. The medical textbook was still open to the same page it had been open to for three months: *Environmental Toxicity and Systemic Necrosis.*
Sable sat on his mattress. Second hopped from his pocket to his shoulder, then to the crate, then back to his shoulder, unable to settle.
"I'm not a hero," Sable told the bird.
Second chirped.
"I'm barely a doctor. I'm a guy in a tunnel pretending that writing things down makes them matter."
The bird tilted his head.
Sable tilted his own. Caught himself. Looked at Second's feet instead.
"She's probably fine."
Second didn't respond. Which was worse than responding, because it meant even the bird didn't believe him.
Sable lay back on the mattress. Stared at the chem-strip humming overhead. Counted the hours until he'd forget the girl's face, the men's hands, the way his own fingers had touched the scalpel and done nothing.
Second settled on his chest. Light. Warm. Alive.
"You better not die on me," Sable said.
The bird closed his eyes.
Outside, the Dredge kept moving. Above, the city kept grinding people into numbers. Below, the darkness kept waiting for something to fall into it.
Sable closed his eyes.
The lights went out.
Not dimmed. Not flickered. *Died.*
Every chem-strip, every emergency panel, every glowing sign—snuffed like candles in a held breath.
The darkness was absolute.
Second's talons dug into his chest.
Sable sat up slowly. "Second—"
The dripping stopped.
Not slowed. Stopped. Mid-drop. Like someone had pressed pause on reality itself.
The air went thick. Heavy. Wrong.
Far above—through forty levels of steel and concrete and humanity—something *cracked.*
Not a sound. A feeling. Reality splitting along seams that shouldn't exist. The sky tearing itself open to make room for something that had been waiting a very, very long time.
Sable's hand found Second in the dark. The bird was shaking.
"It's okay," Sable whispered. "It's—"
The hatch at the end of the tunnel groaned.
Metal buckled.
And black water—warm, viscous, smelling of ozone and rot—surged through the gap like something alive.
Second launched himself toward the ventilation shaft, wings beating frantically.
Sable was already climbing.
The water rose. Fast. Impossibly fast. Chasing them up the maintenance shaft, lapping at his heels, warm as blood.
He shoved through the surface hatch and spilled into the alley.
The rain hit like thrown glass.
Black drops. Sideways. Driven by wind that hadn't existed thirty seconds ago.
Above, one of the nine Ashen Veins tore wider—a jagged scar across reality, leaking slow black lightning that crawled inside the wound like something trying to be born.
People poured into the street.
Some stood with arms spread, mouths open, faces tilted toward the sky like they were waiting for God to finally notice them.
Others ran, smart enough to know that miracles and massacres looked the same from a distance.
Most just screamed.
Sable pressed his back against the wall. Second clung to his shoulder, feathers plastered flat, shaking so hard it felt like the bird might come apart.
"It's okay," Sable whispered. "We're okay. We just have to—"
A drainage grate ten meters away exploded upward.
Something climbed out.
It was tall. Wrong. Limbs too long, joints bending in directions that made Sable's medical training scream. Its skin was pale, wet, stretched too thin over bones that looked like they'd been assembled by someone who'd only heard bones described secondhand.
Where its face should have been, there was only a vertical mouth lined with small, perfect children's teeth.
The Torrent-born turned its eyeless face toward the crowd.
Someone laughed—high, breaking, the sound of a mind snapping under pressure it was never built to hold.
The creature opened its mouth.
Reality bent inward.
The laughing man came apart.
Not burned. Not torn. Just… *unmade.* Strips of what used to be human scattered across the wet street in a pattern that looked almost artistic.
The laughter cut off mid-note.
Sable couldn't breathe.
Second's talons dug deeper.
The Torrent-born's head tilted.
Slowly.
Curiously.
Hunting.
And turned toward him.