Kael's hand moved before his head made the order.
It slid out of the sleeve as if someone else pulled the string.
Fingers found the cold.
Skin met stone.
The world narrowed to one beat.
Wind, the smell of rot, the distant hum of failing neon — all of it fell away.
There was only the pulse at the centre of that black shard, slow as a drum in a cave.
It matched something inside his ribs.
It matched a countdown he had never known he kept.
He had not walked toward it.
He had not decided.
His muscles obeyed a hunger older than thought.
His fingertips touched.
Pain detonated.
Not a pain that screamed.
A pain that taught him alphabet.
A pressure that pushed teeth backward in his skull.
A vision slammed into him the way a cartel slammed a door: sudden, brutal, impossible to ignore.
A sky without edges.
Not blue. Not black.
It was the color of broken rules — a smear between words.
Forms moved there that were not creatures and were not ideas.
Monsters built from the grammar of fear crawled like constellations.
They ate definitions and vomited laws.
And across that ragged cosmos a contract lay open, inked in light the way stars are inked.
Letters dragged themselves from one world to another.
Hands — not human hands — tore that contract.
The tearing felt like earthquakes in his chest.
Something cold bit through his arm.
The tattoo along his right forearm flared, then glowed.
Amber.
Not a neat burn, but a bruise of light that spread like spilled metal.
The pattern — tribal, crude, laughed at by Ordo examiners — shivered.
Lines rearranged themselves under his skin like a map redrawing while the traveler slept.
A voice, old as brick, filled the room.
It was not a voice any human mouth could have made.
It threaded through his teeth and filled his bones with syllables that were not words.
Then it folded them into meaning.
Contract. Remember. Claim.
His arm tore with pain.
It felt as if something beneath the skin wanted out and was being shoved back in.
When the shard dissolved, it did not shatter.
It evaporated into smoke the color of the gaps between seasons.
The smoke did not climb.
It unthreaded and crawled, greedy, into the lines of the tattoo.
Kael fell to his knees.
He tasted metal.
He tasted salt and something sweet he could not name.
The whisper kept gnawing at the edges of his mind.
Not language, not yet.
It was a hunger.
A memory of being made.
A promise.
It told him of shapes that had once been called gods.
It told him of the names those shapes had used for one another.
It suggested that rules had been made because someone had been scared enough to make them.
When he could breathe again he clutched the concrete.
He tried to make the silence hold.
The shard was gone.
The ruin smelled the same.
But nothing was the same.
The tattoo lay on his arm like an accusation.
The lines had thickened.
A faint amber bled from them and pooled at the knots of his fingers, vein-bright and alive.
His breath came faster.
The chronic hollow that lived in his chest — the one he had carried like a thin, iced scar since childhood — felt smaller.
There was a curious weight where exhaustion used to sit, like a coin pressed into his sternum.
He could feel a pulse there that was not his own.
It answered the shard's beat, steady and patient.
He forced himself up.
Around him the broken office breathed dust.
The shards of a window mooned the floor with light.
He wiped the blood off his lip with the back of his hand.
He tasted something old on his tongue: iron and a memory of thunder.
The tattoo pulsed again when he flexed his fingers.
A faint shimmer rose from his knuckles, like afterimages in the air after you move too fast.
He blinked and the shimmer snapped back into place.
He should have been afraid.
Fear had a place reserved in him, maintained like a ration.
Tonight, for reasons he could not explain, fear was thin and whispering.
It was not the thing that moved his legs.
He grabbed his jacket, ignoring the way the lines of the tattoo crawled up toward his elbow.
The ruined stairwell felt steeper than before.
Each step a small argument with gravity.
His arm throbbed and sang at the same time.
The singing was cleaner.
When he pushed the door at the back of the ruin, night hit him hard — hotter and greasy.
The smell of the city was like old oil.
He kept moving without looking back.
On the walk home, glimpses ghosted his vision.
A street sign read in letters he did not recognize for a half second, then snapped back.
The shadow of a patrol drone floated where it had no right to be.
The world flashed like a poor projection struggling at the edges.
He ducked into a collapsed lot and used the darkness to read the new map the tattoo offered without permission.
The lines on his skin hummed.
For a sliver of a heartbeat his eyes — plain brown since birth — caught a sliver of gold at the iris.
He stopped.
A simple thing happened.
The chronic ache in his bones — the one that threaded through every morning — eased enough for him to stand straighter.
That was progress.
Small, stupid, huge.
He walked faster.
He thought of Leo sleeping on the mattress with holes in the blanket.
He thought of the powder that had been pressed into crumbs at the hands of three marked knights.
He thought of the notice on the pole: Ceremony. Collection. Central Square.
Another pulse echoed from the tattoo, like a responsive drum.
This one carried more information than pain.
It carried pattern.
It wanted to be counted.
When Kael reached the ladder to their floor, he hesitated at the bottom.
The alley smelled of oil and someone's discarded breakfast.
The building he shared with Leo sagged the way tired things sag.
He had learned a long time ago how to make his face belong to the building — how to look like a man who had already been owned.
He climbed.
Inside the room the light was wrong.
Dawn had not come, but a weak yellow leaked in through a hole in the roof.
Leo lay curled on his side still.
He breathed like someone who owed the air money.
The sickness had not left him.
There was a tiny new thing.
Kael held out his hand without thinking and watched the tattoo throw a faint glow into the air.
It was barely a whisper of gold.
But when it touched the mattress the thread of the blanket answered with a soft tremor.
Leo's lashes fluttered as if the light had tickled him awake.
That small response told Kael two facts.
The mark was not purely destructive.
It could touch, and touch could touch back.
Also: something in Leo's chest considered the glow as currency.
Kael broke the ration bar in two and handed the larger piece to Leo.
The hierarchies of survival had small etiquette.
Leo ate slowly.
The sickness made him clench his face like a man trying to hold down a sob.
Kael sat on the edge of the mattress.
The tattoo along his forearm crept like a creature, swelling slightly, lines rearranging again.
He kept his mouth shut.
Words were volatile when the new thing inside him hummed.
A knock at the door split the room.
Not a soft knock — a measured rap that had been practiced by officials until it rang like command.
Kael's stomach dropped.
The knights did not come without cause.
"Citizen identification," a voice called through the door.
Not civil. Efficient.
Kael's fingers tightened around the bar.
Leo's eyes opened, clouded.
The sickness smelled like sweat and fear.
If the knights came now, they would see the tattoo glow.
They would see the amber under his skin and know there was something different.
Kael's heart beat in a pattern he did not recognize.
It did not match the shard's slow drum.
He moved to the door and peered through the peephole.
A patrol stood in the corridor: two marked, one older officer with a plate that meant rank.
They talked softly, not about him.
But things this small could grow teeth when fed.
He stepped back.
The patrol's shadows cut across the cracked floor like knives.
The older officer's Brand pulsed, bright and deliberate.
A single light on an arm like a code.
Kael could have opened and lied.
He could have smoothed his face into someone else's grief and practiced not being a threat.
He had done it before.
He did not open the door.
Instead he moved Leo to the floor, wrapped the blanket tighter, and used the sleeve to cover his forearm.
The tattoo hummed against cloth like a trapped animal.
He listened to the patrol walk away.
The knock at the door had not been about them.
It was only a ripple.
But ripples attuned to the wrong frequency could become waves.
He breathed until his lungs stopped shaking.
The dawn gilded the broken skyline.
The city looked like an old wound someone had tried to stitch and failed.
By mid-morning the tattoo showed its real side.
Kael was awake and teaching himself to be still when the first true thing happened.
It began as a small glow at his knuckles, the kind of light you felt more than saw.
Then the air around his hand tightened.
A pressure like a fishhook pulled the fabric of reality a fraction to the left.
His hand moved without precious care, shaping nothing.
But the motion left traces.
A blade of light cut the air where his fingers had been.
Not a weapon he could hold, but a projection — sharp, thin, humming with a sound that made the room colder.
It folded like paper between his palms and then spread.
A fan of energy that tilted the dust motes away.
He had never made anything like that before.
He had not known he could make.
He had not known he would want to.
The blade whispered with the sound of metal being remembered.
It rang in the silence.
Leo woke fully, eyes wide.
For a moment their gazes locked.
No need for translation.
The blade was real and the blade was not theirs to keep.
He swallowed the taste of it.
The chronic hollow in his chest felt smaller still.
Outside, a siren started low.
The street filled with dogs barking — not coordinated, just animals replying to the change.
Kael stuffed the sleeve over his forearm and left the projection folded inside his mind like a promise.
He moved through the building with new attention.
Passageways that had been just empty space now had a rhythm.
Nodes of light that only his eyes could track.
Points where something in the city had been stitched tight or left to fray.
At the corner, by the power pole, the notice still proclaimed the Ceremony.
He had seen it last night.
But seeing it in daylight felt like a knife polished.
A crowd gathered there on purpose — citizens who had nothing left and those who had everything and wanted to show it.
A herald stood on a lift with a megaphone and read the lines of the notice as if reciting scripture.
His tattoo itched.
The lines under his sleeve heated, as if the skin wanted to breathe.
A form of hunger made his palms sweat.
He could go to the market and sell the larger half of the ration, pick up the stabilizer, come back.
He could keep moving and ignore the ceremony.
Or he could—because he never could keep away when the world made strange music—step closer and see what the Ordo would do with this next harvest.
He stepped closer.
Maybe he was curious.
Maybe something in the shard's whisper told him that the centre of a ritual was always a seam he could pry.
Maybe he was tired of being a shadow.
He did not go all the way to the square.
Not yet.
He watched from an alley where his form would blur with the dark.
He watched marked officers drill citizens like cattle.
He watched neon lines on their plates flare when someone didn't fall in time.
When an officer's hand raised to brand a neck, the tattoo at Kael's sleeve flared with a pulse.
It matched the officer's motion like an answering drum.
For a second, the officer hesitated.
The hand trembled as if some invisible weight made the motion harder.
And then the officer continued, a practiced thing.
The hesitation was testament.
A small crack appeared in the order.
Small things like that could be widened.
He should have felt triumph.
But the shard's whisper had taught him something raw: victory had a price.
And prices were rarely paid by the buyer.
He slipped backward into the ruin-littered lane.
The newness did not leave.
At his fingertips, the gold shimmer spread like a halo around the joints.
Each motion drew thin threads into the air that snapped back and died.
He could feel attention landing on him in ways it never had.
Not only because the tattoo glowed.
But because something else—some net the Ordo kept for anomalies—had a scent.
He thought of Leo, who would not last a month without the stabilizer.
He thought of the three knights who had ground a ration into dust.
He thought how fast Ordo harvesters could take the healthy and the unlucky.
He moved faster, pressing the stolen dignity of a man with a new trick through the city.
The sun moved.
With it came the sound of engines and the distant harmonics of authority.
A rumble in the air.
A pattern of lights sweeping like teeth.
People turned.
A drone crossed the sky, scanning.
Its shadow blinked over the roof of the building.
Kael flattened himself to dirty concrete like a stain.
He had new things to learn.
He had new dangers.
The tattoo throbbed in time with the missing contract he'd seen in his vision.
It sang of pieces of power tied together with clauses and seals.
It was not a miracle without constraints.
At noon, they began to test the public.
A platform in the Central Square filled with the Ordo's appointed.
People were herded forward by cables and light.
The marked stood on stage like trophies.
A priest of the Ordo recited burning lines.
The crowd cheered because the crowd had been taught to applaud fear turned holy.
Kael stood watching from a backstreet.
The shard's drum beat in his chest as if exultant.
The lines on his arm mapped themselves again.
For a terrifying second he saw not the present but the back of a hand pushing into a chest.
Tapping something like a hidden key.
Visible progression.
When the ceremony reached its first purge, a marked official stepped forward and pointed at a boy in the crowd.
The boy froze.
The official's palm glowed.
A light bloomed across the boy's skin like a brander finding its target.
Kael felt a pull from his forearm so tangible it made him stagger.
The tattoo wanted to answer.
It wanted to rise like a second voice and cover that boy with its own light.
To do something that would peel the world open.
Kael clenched his teeth.
He pulled the sleeve down until cloth rasped across the skin.
He kept his hands deep in his pockets and forced his fingers to stillness.
The shard's whisper tightened like a chord that wanted to snap.
A smaller alarm rang in the air.
People turned toward the lift as if hearing a bell.
A siren started — high, then low, layered like a chord the city used to call order.
The Ordo's herald spoke into the megaphone.
The words spread across the square, carried by sound and by light.
He could not tell if the voice was an order or a prayer.
He could. Listen. All citizens—
He did not hear the rest at first.
His attention crowded the space where the tattoo met the sleeve.
He could feel a response in the joints of his fingers.
A warmth like someone setting a coal to his skin.
The gold at his knuckles flared brighter than before.
And then the loudspeakers cut through the morning with the clarity of a blade.
The voice rolled out.
Everyone around the square reiterated it with practiced obedience.
A hard voice announced the edict.
"All citizens to the Central Square. Delays will be punished with immediate marking."
The words landed like a gauntlet.
The crowd moved as one: some with fear, some with ritual devotion.
Parents edged toward their children.
Soldiers tightened belts.
The boy on stage looked like a puppet with the strings suddenly pulled taut.
Kael felt something in his chest match that edict's tempo with a new beat.
He understood, in a way that had nothing to do with morality, what "marking" would mean.
For the unmarked: a branding that rewired a life.
A searing of will.
A plugging-in to the Ordo's system that meant the body belonged to someone else.
For Leo, for the weak on his block, it was thin insurance.
For Kael—who was still learning that the lines on his own skin whispered deals—marking would be a verdict.
He watched as the officers readied instruments.
As glowing plates scanned the crowd looking for anomalies.
The tattoo at his sleeve burned like a warning flare.
The shard's voice rose, jubilant and dangerous.
He stepped back into the alley where the shadows swallowed him.
He adjusted the sleeve to cover the tattoo as fully as he could.
The cloth was not enough.
The lines under his skin glowed the way a vein shows through paper.
He could run.
He could hide.
He could stand and try to claim the seam the way the shard suggested.
He could keep the secret of what had been fed into his arm and hope it stayed secret.
A siren climbed higher.
Then broke into a long keening note that bent the steel of the air.
The megaphone repeated the order, less patient now.
"All citizens to the Central Square. Delays will be punished with immediate marking."
The voice made the skull ache.
Kael felt the amber under his skin slide like a coin.
For a hair of a second something else connected.
A trace.
A resonance in the scanning lights that suddenly tilted toward the alley where he stood.
Like a compass needle finding metal.
He was not safe in the dark.
He had been a shadow.
Now the world had learned to find him.
He slid his hand into his pocket.
He felt the small, brittle ration bar waiting there like a promise.
He could give it to Leo and return.
He could try to be careful.
The tattoo pulsed against the cloth.
The shard's whisper softened to a hungry murmur.
Then, as if savoring the city's panic, laughed.
On the street the crowd moved toward the square, obedient and loud and blind.
Above them the drones hummed and turned.
The Ordo's lights stitched across the rooftops.
The city became a net.
Kael had to make a choice — and any choice would make a new shape of danger.
He took one step out of the alley.
The ground under his boot was a thin, familiar concrete.
He looked at his hand.
The gold at his knuckles was nearly bright enough now to show through fabric.
He thought of Leo's breath.
He thought of the shard and the way the smoke had crawled into his skin.
It had not gone into him like theft.
It had gone in like an inheritance.
Far off, the megaphone barked again, closer.
A finality to the cadence:
"All citizens to the Central Square. Delays will be punished with immediate marking."