The bone dust never settled in the Graveyard.
Kaelen pressed his filtration mask tighter against his face, feeling the cheap rubber seal crack another millimeter. Three more days and it would fail completely. Three more days and his lungs would calcify like Old Ma's—white deposits spreading through pink tissue until every breath rattled like dice in a cup.
He didn't have three days to waste on sentiment.
The ribcage cathedral loomed ahead, a twisted architecture of divine remains arching two hundred meters overhead. Moonlight—if you could call the sickly bioluminescent glow from the city's upper layers "moonlight"—filtered through gaps in the bone, casting shadows that moved against the light. Always against the light. As if the god's dreams still played out in the mineral structure, refusing to acknowledge death.
Kaelen's boots crunched through the ash layer. Beneath it, fragments. Divine fragments worth enough protein paste to last a week, if you knew where to look and how to avoid the other scavengers' territories.
He knew.
The fragment detector—a stripped-down medical scanner he'd lifted from a dead prospector—hummed against his hip. Three beeps. Close. He dropped to a crouch, fingers scraping through bone dust and petrified marrow until they closed around something warm.
Warm.
Divine fragments shouldn't be warm.
The shard was no larger than his thumb, but it pulsed with a rhythm that matched his heartbeat. Gold and black light spiraled beneath its surface, hypnotic, wrong. Beautiful. Kaelen's breath fogged the inside of his mask. This wasn't a fragment. This was a seed—condensed divine essence worth more than six months of scavenging.
Worth killing for.
The attack came from his blind spot, precisely calculated. A length of sharpened femur whistled toward his skull. Kaelen rolled left, not backward—backward would put him against the ribcage wall with nowhere to go. His attacker knew that. Three of them, then. Standard pack tactics for the Graveyard.
The bone club struck where his head had been, cracking against the ash-covered floor. Kaelen came up with his own weapon—a forearm bone filed to a spike—and drove it through his attacker's knee. Not the kill shot. Never the kill shot first.
The man screamed. Good. Screams drew the others out.
Two more scavengers emerged from behind a vertebral column, their faces hidden behind better masks than Kaelen's. Newer clothes. Fresh water rations visible on their belts. They weren't from the Graveyard. Middle Layer, maybe Layer Three. Slummers playing at being hunters.
"The seed," the left one said, his voice filtered flat by his mask. "Give it. We'll let you keep breathing."
Kaelen's fingers tightened around the shard. It pulsed harder now, responding to his elevated heartbeat, his flooding adrenaline. The warmth spread up his arm like infection.
"No."
He said it calmly. Emotionlessly. Because emotion was weakness in the Graveyard, and weakness was death.
The scavengers rushed him together. Smart. But Kaelen had been surviving here since he was eight, since the day he'd woken in the dust with no memory except the sensation of falling and the phantom pain of something vital being ripped from his spine.
He sidestepped the first thrust, caught the second man's wrist, and used his momentum to throw him face-first into the nearest rib pillar. Bone met bone. The crack echoed through the cathedral. The man slid down, leaving a red smear.
The third scavenger hesitated. Fatal mistake.
Kaelen kicked him backward, into the forest of bone spikes that jutted from the floor like a medieval torture garden. The man screamed. Kept screaming. The wet, ragged sound of it chased Kaelen as he ran deeper into the Graveyard, the divine seed burning against his palm.
He didn't stop running until he reached the edge of the Dust Wastes, where the bone powder hung so thick that visibility dropped to five meters. The Grey People wandered here—calcification victims in the terminal stage, their skin turned to living calcium, minds long gone. They were harmless. Pitiful.
A warning.
Kaelen collapsed against a skull half-buried in the ash, his chest heaving. The mask's filter was clogged now, each breath a struggle. He tore it off, sucking in the tainted air. It burned. Metallic sting at the back of his throat. Wet rattle in his chest. But he was alive.
He opened his palm.
The seed had split.
Gold and black tendrils spiraled from the crack, writhing like living smoke. They wrapped around his fingers, his wrist, burrowing into his skin with tiny hooks of agony. Kaelen tried to throw it away. His hand wouldn't obey. The tendrils climbed higher, spreading across his forearm like veins, like roots seeking soil.
Pain exploded behind his eyes.
The world shattered into fragmented images: a golden altar, two infants wrapped in silk, hands reaching down with surgical precision, the wet sound of tearing, his own infant scream echoing in a vaulted chamber, and then—
Falling.
Always falling.
Kaelen's vision split. His left eye saw the Graveyard as it was—grey ash, grey bone, grey death. His right eye saw something else. Heat signatures. Life force blazing like candles in the dark. The Grey People weren't dead. They were bright, their calcified bodies burning with trapped divine energy, slowly consuming them from within.
His right eye saw the world as the god had seen it. Before it died. Before they built a city from its corpse.
The realization should have terrified him.
Instead, he laughed.
It was a bitter, broken sound. The laugh of a man who'd just discovered he was less than human, and more than alive. His right eye burned, the iris expanding into a black ring edged with gold—a perfect eclipse.
When the laughter finally died in his throat, Kaelen pushed himself to his feet. The tendrils had stopped at his elbow, forming a pattern of black veins beneath his skin. They pulsed in rhythm with his heart.
The seed was gone. Dissolved. Absorbed.
Or perhaps it had absorbed him.
Somewhere above, beyond the layers of bone and steel and neon, the sun families lived in their golden towers. They had names. They had power. They had taken something from him—ripped it out when he was too small to fight back, too helpless to even remember.
But he was remembering now.
Kaelen picked up his bone spike and started walking. Not toward the safety of the Lower Market. Not toward the communal shelters where the other scavengers huddled for warmth.
Upward.
The city's heart beat like a war drum in the distance, each pulse synchronized with the divine corruption spreading through his veins. He could feel it now—the vertical weight of Aurelis pressing down on the Graveyard, three kilometers of industrial hell stacked on top of god corpse and human misery.
Let them press.
He would climb. He would take back what was stolen. And if the city crushed him in the process?
At least he'd die reaching for something instead of rotting in the ash like everyone else.