Chapter 5 - Chapter 5: The Price of Two Marks

 The Price of Two Marks Kael left the clinic at dawn. He didn't say goodbye. He waited until Ren's footsteps faded into the back rooms, until the corridor went quiet, and then he swung his legs off the cot, tested his weight, and walked out through the basement door into the gray light of District 13. It wasn't rudeness. It was mathematics. Every minute he stayed was a minute Ren spent resources on him — water, space, the ambient warmth of a building that was already struggling to keep its own patients alive. He was a deficit. A drain. The fastest way to repay her kindness was to stop consuming it. The morning air hit his bandaged skin like a slap. Cold, metallic, carrying the ever-present taste of Rift residue that coated District 13 like invisible ash. His body protested — a chorus of aches, stiffnesses, and the deep throb of sutured wounds pulling against fishing line. The Scar of Silence was dormant again, its pain suppression inactive. Every injury he'd earned in the Rift was now reporting for duty at full volume. Good. Pain meant he was alive. Pain meant he had something left to feel. **[Bearer status update. HP: 2.4. VIT: 8. Current wounds: Non-critical but performance-limiting. Estimated recovery time at current VIT: 5-7 days. Recommendation: Rest.]** *I don't have five days.* **[Clarify.]** Kael reached into his pocket and pulled out the eleven Rift Core fragments. They sat in his palm like dark teeth — small, warm, faintly luminescent. Twenty-two marks total. Enough for two days of food if he bought from the District 13 street vendors who sold expired ration packs at markup. Not enough for equipment. Not enough for weapons. Not enough for armor, or boots, or a place to sleep that wasn't a concrete pipe. And not enough to go back into the Rift. The math was simple and cruel. F-Rank Rifts yielded minimal cores. Minimal cores meant minimal money. Minimal money meant no gear. No gear meant every Rift run was a coin flip between profit and death. He'd survived Rift-13-077 through desperation, a concrete chunk, and one Scar awakening at the critical moment. That wasn't a strategy. That was luck wearing a mask. He needed more. More cores. More money. More *power*. But the gap between where he was and where he needed to be was a chasm filled with things that wanted to eat him. *What are my options?* **[Option 1: Repeat F-Rank Rift clearances. Low risk relative to alternatives. Low yield. Estimated time to meaningful progression: 3-6 months.]** **[Option 2: Attempt E-Rank Rift clearance. Moderate risk at current stats. Higher yield. Estimated survival probability: 31%.]** **[Option 3: Sell Rift Core fragments to licensed buyers at market rate. Current fragments: 22 marks. Invest in basic equipment. Return to F-Rank Rifts with improved survivability.]** **[Option 4: Sell Rift Core fragments to unlicensed buyers at reduced rate. Faster transaction. Higher personal risk. Black market operators in District 13 are known to rob or kill solo sellers.]** *Thirty-one percent survival for E-Rank. What were my odds for the F-Rank I just did?* **[Retrospective calculation: 44%. You encountered higher-than-expected hostiles due to Rift age. Standard F-Rank probability for your current stats would be approximately 67%.]** Forty-four percent. He'd walked into a coin flip and come out bleeding. Now the System was suggesting he try worse odds. *Option 3. Licensed buyer. Where?* **[Nearest licensed Rift Core exchange: District 13 Commerce Block, Sector North. Operated by Greyhall Trading Company. Hours: 0800-1700. Note: Licensed exchanges require seller identification. Unregistered Awakened selling cores will trigger Guild notification protocols.]** Kael stopped walking. *If I sell cores through a licensed exchange, the Guild finds out I'm Awakened.* **[Correct. Unregistered Awakened are flagged for mandatory evaluation. Outcomes include: Guild conscription into ranked service, transfer to corporate contract programs, or — in District 13 specifically — referral to private acquisition firms.]** Private acquisition firms. Kael knew that phrase. Everyone in District 13 knew it. It was the polite term for the companies that bought Awakened individuals the way factories bought raw materials. Unregistered, undocumented Awakened from the lower districts were particularly valuable — no family to ask questions, no records to trace, no one to notice when they disappeared into private Rift-clearing operations with a 70% fatality rate. Slavery with better marketing. *Option 4, then. Black market.* **[Acknowledged. Nearest unlicensed core buyer: Harrow's Exchange. Sub-basement, Block 19, Sector South. Operated by an individual known as "Moth." Reputation: Reliable payment. Unreliable ethics. Armed security. Seller discretion advised.]** *Reliable payment, unreliable ethics. That's everyone I've ever met.* **[The Protocol does not comment on your interpersonal history.]** Kael pocketed the cores and turned south. --- Block 19 was the part of District 13 that even District 13 pretended didn't exist. If the rest of the district was forgotten by the city, Block 19 was forgotten by the district — a cluster of collapsed industrial buildings, condemned warehouses, and repurposed shipping containers that had been converted into the closest thing District 13 had to an economy. Not the legal kind. The kind that operated in basements and back rooms, where currency was flexible and questions were expensive. Kael navigated the streets from memory. He'd worked Block 19 during his early scavenging days, hauling Rift waste to processing sites that definitely didn't meet safety regulations. He knew which alleys to avoid — Jackal territory markers were painted on walls in yellow, crude and territorial. He knew which buildings had lookouts — second-floor windows with curtains that moved wrong. He also knew he looked like a target. Barefoot. Bandaged. Thin. Moving with the careful gait of someone whose body was held together with fishing line and stubbornness. Every predator in Block 19 would see the same thing: wounded animal, easy take. **[Elevated environmental threat detected. Multiple humanoid signatures within 200-meter radius. Hostile intent assessment: Indeterminate. Scar of Abandonment status: DORMANT. Passive danger detection unavailable.]** *I know. I have eyes.* He kept walking. Not fast — fast attracted attention. Not slow — slow looked lost. A measured pace that said *I belong here and I'm not worth the trouble*. A scavenger's walk. The walk of someone who had nothing worth stealing. Harrow's Exchange was beneath a gutted machine shop. The entrance was a service elevator with no car — just a shaft with a ladder bolted to the wall, descending into yellow light and the muffled bass of music that had no business being played at seven in the morning. Kael climbed down. The ladder was rust and prayer. Each rung groaned under his weight, and his bandaged hands slipped twice before he reached the bottom — a concrete floor scattered with cigarette butts and shell casings. The sub-basement opened into a space that had been a maintenance tunnel before someone decided it would make a better marketplace. Stalls lined both walls — folding tables covered with salvaged Rift equipment, unlicensed weapons, pharmaceutical packets of questionable origin, and stacks of Rift Core fragments sorted by grade and size. The sellers were a cross-section of District 13's shadow economy: scavengers, unlicensed Riftworkers, gang affiliates, and the occasional desperate civilian trying to convert stolen goods into rent money. The buyers were worse. Kael spotted Moth's stall at the far end — distinguishable by the hand-painted sign that read FAIR TRADES in letters that didn't believe themselves. Behind the table sat a figure who matched the name: small, pale, wrapped in layers of gray clothing that made them look like something found in a neglected closet. Gender indeterminate. Age indeterminate. The only clear features were the eyes — large, dark, constantly moving, tracking everything in the tunnel with the precise alertness of someone who had survived by never being surprised. Two guards flanked the stall. Large. Armed. The kind of large and armed that made conversations shorter. Kael approached. Moth's eyes found him immediately — scanned him top to bottom in under a second. Barefoot. Bandaged. Young. Desperate. "Core seller or core buyer?" Moth's voice was soft, papery, like pages turning in an empty room. "Seller." "Show me." Kael placed the eleven fragments on the table. They clicked against the metal surface like dice. Moth produced a loupe — antique, brass, clearly worth more than everything else in the stall combined — and examined each fragment with practiced efficiency. "F-Grade. Vermin-class origin. Skein Rat, if I'm not mistaken. Fourteen months of Rift aging on the ecosystem." Moth looked up. "You cleared 077." It wasn't a question. "Does it matter?" Kael said. "It matters because 077 has been active for over a year and nobody's touched it. The Guild won't allocate clearance resources to this district, and the freelancers won't touch an aged F-Rank because the yield isn't worth the mutation risk." Moth's dark eyes narrowed. "But you went in. Alone. Unequipped. And came out with eleven fragments, which means you killed at least eleven hostiles in a mutated ecosystem with—" The eyes dropped to Kael's bare feet. "—nothing." "What's your price?" Moth leaned back. The guards shifted — a subtle redistribution of weight that Kael's survivor instincts registered automatically. "Market rate for F-Grade fragments is two marks each. I buy at sixty percent. That's thirteen marks for the lot." "Market is twenty-two. Sixty percent is thirteen point two. Round up." "I don't round up." "Then I walk." Moth studied him. The tunnel's background noise filled the silence — distant music, murmured transactions, the occasional metallic scrape of equipment being tested. "Fourteen marks," Moth said. "And information." "What information?" "The kind that's worth more than eight marks of rounding error." Moth folded their hands on the table. Small hands. Clean nails. Deliberate. "You're unregistered. You're Awakened — don't deny it; I've been selling cores for nine years, and no unawakened human clears a mutated F-Rank solo. You're hiding it, which means you're smart. And you came to me instead of Greyhall, which means you're smart *and* trapped." Kael said nothing. His body was tense. The guards were watching. **[Elevated threat. Heart rate increasing. Hollow Point generation: 0.3.]** "Relax," Moth said. "I don't sell people. Bad for repeat business. I'm offering you a trade: fourteen marks for your cores, and I tell you about a job. Unlicensed Rift clearance. Private contract. Pays real money — the kind with zeros on it. Dangerous, obviously. Everything worth doing in this district is." "What Rift?" "E-Rank. Designation 13-041. Industrial sector. A private party wants it cleared before the Guild gets around to it — which, given our district's priority rating, means sometime around never. They're offering five hundred marks for confirmed clearance plus all harvested cores." Five hundred marks. Kael's breath caught — a tiny hitch he couldn't suppress. Five hundred marks was more than he'd earned in the last six months combined. It was equipment money. Weapon money. *Survival* money. **[E-Rank Rift. Survival probability at current stats: 31%. This has not changed since the last calculation.]** "The catch," Kael said. Moth smiled. It was a small, careful expression — the smile of someone who appreciated the right questions. "The catch is that 041 has been active for three years. E-Rank base, but with that kind of aging, the interior ecosystem has almost certainly mutated to D-Rank equivalent. The private party knows this. That's why they're offering five hundred marks instead of fifty. And that's why the last two freelancers who took the contract didn't come back." Silence. Two freelancers. Didn't come back. **[Revised survival probability accounting for three-year mutation window: 14%.]** Fourteen percent. Kael looked at the fourteen marks Moth was counting onto the table. Looked at his bandaged arms. Looked at the dark lines beneath his skin — Scar channels, spreading slowly, branching like roots reaching for something buried deep. Fourteen percent survival. Eighty-six percent death. But zero percent of becoming anything if he stayed where he was. "When does the contract start?" Moth's smile widened by exactly one millimeter. "Whenever you're ready to stop surviving and start *becoming*, dear. The Rift isn't going anywhere. Neither are the things inside it." Kael took the fourteen marks. They were warm in his palm — not core-warm, just body heat from Moth's small, clean hands. Human warmth transferred through metal. He turned to leave. "One more thing," Moth called after him. "Free of charge." Kael stopped. "The boy who follows you home from this place — don't hurt him. He's not a threat. He's just hungry. And in this district, hungry people follow anyone who looks like they might know where food is." Kael frowned. "What boy?" He climbed the ladder, emerged into the gray morning, and turned toward the nearest street vendor to buy something that resembled food. He made it three blocks before he heard the footsteps. Small. Quick. Deliberately casual in the way that only someone very young and very bad at stealth could manage. A pattern of steps that sped up when he sped up and slowed when he slowed, maintaining a distance of exactly fifteen meters — close enough to follow, far enough to run. Kael stopped walking. The footsteps stopped. He turned around. The alley behind him was empty. Quiet. A stack of collapsed cardboard boxes leaned against a wall near a dumpster. Nothing moved. Except the boxes were breathing. Kael stared at the stack. Watched the subtle rise and fall of cardboard shifting as someone small pressed against it from behind, trying very hard to be invisible and failing with the specific determination of someone who had never been taught how to hide properly. "Come out," Kael said. Nothing. "I can see you breathing." A pause. Then the cardboard shifted, and a face emerged — young, sharp-featured, smeared with grime. A boy. Maybe fourteen, maybe fifteen — hard to tell under the dirt. Dark hair cut unevenly, probably with a knife. Eyes too large for his face, darting between Kael and the nearest escape route with the rapid calculation of a small animal assessing a larger one. He was thin. The kind of thin that wasn't a body type — it was a condition. The kind of thin Kael recognized because he'd seen it in mirrors for eight years. "I wasn't following you," the boy said immediately. "You were following me." "I was walking in the same direction. Coincidence." "For three blocks. At exactly my pace. Fifteen meters behind." The boy's mouth opened. Closed. His eyes narrowed with the wounded dignity of someone whose best lie had just been dissected in public. "...Okay. I was following you." He stepped fully out from behind the cardboard. He was wearing clothes that were three sizes too large — a man's jacket hanging past his knees, pants rolled at the ankles, shoes held together with wire. "But not to rob you. I'm not a Jackal. I don't do that." "Then why?" The boy hesitated. His eyes dropped to Kael's bandaged arms. Traveled to the dark stains on his shirt — ichor, not blood, but the boy wouldn't know the difference. Traveled to the faint dark lines visible on Kael's forearms where the bandages didn't cover. "You came out of Harrow's Exchange. You sold cores. Which means you've been in a Rift." The boy's voice shifted — still young, still thin, but carrying a thread of something harder underneath. Something that recognized opportunity the way starving people recognize food. "I want to learn how." **[Unidentified individual. Age: Estimated 14-15. Status: Unawakened. Threat level: None.]** **[Emotional response detected. Category: Recognition.]** **[Hollow Point generation: 0.1]** Recognition. The System had named it before Kael could. He was looking at this boy — this hungry, desperate, too-young boy standing in an alley in District 13 with wire holding his shoes together — and he was seeing himself. Five years ago. Eight years ago. The same eyes. The same sharpness born from the same starvation. The same refusal to stop trying. "What's your name?" Kael asked. "Dyn." "Go home, Dyn." "Don't have one." The words landed like stones. Kael stood in the gray morning light, fourteen marks in his pocket, bandages pulling at wounds held together with fishing line, and looked at a boy who had nothing — exactly the way Kael had nothing, exactly the way the world intended for both of them to have nothing, forever, until they stopped being inconvenient by stopping being alive. *Walk away. He's not your problem. You can barely keep yourself alive. Taking on dead weight will get you both killed.* The logic was flawless. Cold, clean, irrefutable. The same logic that governed District 13, that governed Vastheir, that governed the entire brutal hierarchy of a world where power was the only currency that didn't depreciate. **[Emotional conflict detected. Pragmatism vs. Pattern Recognition. The Bearer sees himself in the subject. This creates attachment risk. Attachment reduces operational efficiency.]** **[Recommendation: Disengage.]** Kael looked at Dyn. Dyn looked back — not begging, not pleading. Just *standing there*. Present. Refusing to be invisible. The way Kael had refused, eleven times, at the Guild registration counter. "Can you run?" Kael asked. "Fast enough." "Can you follow instructions without arguing?" "...Probably not." "Honest answer." "You asked." Something moved in Kael's chest. Not warmth — he wasn't ready for warmth. But a crack in the wall. A fracture. A space where something could grow if he let it, or collapse if the weight became too much. He started walking. Didn't look back. After three seconds, he heard footsteps behind him. Small. Quick. Fifteen meters back. Then ten. Then five. Dyn fell into step beside him. Said nothing. Matched his pace. --- They walked in silence toward the nearest street vendor. Kael bought two expired ration packs — six marks each, highway robbery for food that tasted like cardboard and preservatives. He handed one to Dyn without a word. Dyn took it. Didn't say thank you. Didn't need to. In District 13, accepting food from someone was its own language — an acknowledgment that fell somewhere between trust and surrender. They ate standing up, leaning against a wall that was tagged with Jackal markers Kael deliberately ignored. "The Rift you cleared," Dyn said between bites. "What was it like?" "Dark. Wet. Full of things that wanted to kill me." "Did they?" "Almost." Dyn chewed. Swallowed. Looked at Kael's bandages with an expression that was equal parts fear and fascination. "Will you go back?" Kael thought about the E-Rank contract. Three years of mutation. Fourteen percent survival. Two freelancers who never came out. "Yes," he said. Dyn nodded. As if this was the only answer that made sense. As if walking into darkness was simply what people did when the light had nothing left to offer. --- *That night, in the drainage pipe, Kael lay awake and stared at the notification the System had been holding since the morning:* **[Scar of Abandonment: Status change — DORMANT → STIRRING]** **[Trigger proximity detected: Bearer has encountered an individual mirroring abandonment patterns consistent with Scar origin.]** **[The boy has no one. You had no one. The resonance is... significant.]** **[Be careful, Bearer. The Scars do not distinguish between healing and reopening. Sometimes they are the same thing.]** *Kael closed his eyes.* *In the darkness behind them, his father's face flickered — not a memory, just a shape. A silhouette walking toward a Rift entrance and never looking back.* *He wondered if his father had hesitated.* *He wondered if hesitation would have changed anything.* **[Hollow Point generation: 0.8]** **[Current HP total: 4.5]** **[You are becoming richer, Bearer. The currency is everything you wish you could forget.]**