No pretty kata. No formal bows. The four of them carved a small square of dirt away from the ring and taught their bodies the day they wanted to survive tomorrow. KrysKo took Ronan's first rush sober and turned it; he let Jax hit him once with a padded gauntlet so the engineer would remember how good his hands could be; he learned how Kara moved when she had glass to throw and when she had nothing left except the mathematics of a shoulder and a heel. He practiced slowing his blades that last half-inch. He practiced not being what the Mirror wanted.
Above them, the sky's bruise-yellow softened into evening. The bells in the far city—if any still swung—were too far to be anything but rumor. Here, in the small square of dirt where breath fogged and feet scuffed and laughter showed its teeth and didn't apologize for them, the day told the truth at last.
When night came, it came with a skiff's distant whine and then not even that. The caravan snored and whispered and told itself the stories it needed to sleep. Kara tucked her satchel under her head and dreamed of rivers that remembered how to be water. Jax slept with a wrench as if it were a charm against bad algorithms. Ronan sat with his eyes half-lidded and listened to the dark argue with itself.
KrysKo stood at the edge of the camp where the glass road made a thin pale line under the stars and touched the bronze under his skin with his mind.
> [System Log—Private] "Phase pressure rising. The hand above the tower has moved a second piece. The next bell will not be a bell."
"I know," he said.
"Then sleep, if you can. The world remakes its warriors twice: once in fire, once in the quiet after."
He closed his eyes. He didn't sleep, not the way Kara did, but he let stillness put a blanket over his thoughts. The Mirror's kind eyes tried to be a ghost and failed. The bell's lie went quiet in the dirt, salted and done. Practice, he thought, and the word tasted like bread.
At the horizon, a line of low clouds gathered like witnesses. Somewhere past them waited a city of spires and ledgers and a black binder opened to a page with his name. Between here and there lay miles of glass and ash and the particular arithmetic of keeping people alive.
He turned back to the ring of wagons and the slow beacon of their breath.
"Train," he'd said.
They had.
And for this night, at least, the bells were someone else's problem.
Chapter 9 — Part 5: Bells That Bled
The sound led them into the trees. What passed for a forest here had grown out of bones—saplings threading through charred trunks, vines wearing ash like jewelry. The path shrank until the caravan's wheels rasped roots and the undergrowth caught at hems. The bell did not ring again. It didn't have to.
Ronan took point, pupils narrowing to slits beneath the canopy. The scaled filigree along his cheekbones glimmered as if it tasted the air. "Something's watching," he said.
Kara's fingers tightened on her satchel. "How many?"
"More than roots," he murmured.
Jax clicked his drone to silent mode and thumbed down the lamp. "That's a great number."
KrysKo said nothing. The forest sent pressure through his bones like a bass line. The System rode that pressure with him—low, patient, iron-warm.
> [Scan: thirty-seven heart-signals; respiration patterns irregular; movement intermittent—pendular.]
"Careful, KrysKo. The forest remembers its predators, even when it forgets their names."
He drew no steel. The bronze beneath his forearms stirred like sleep trying to become a dream.
They found the bell lashed to a leaning trunk—field brass, rope new and wet with resin. Someone had carved an eye within a circle into the bell's flank, crack-lines feathering outward as if the metal remembered breaking.
Kara's breath fogged. "That symbol isn't Warden."
"Older," Ronan said, hovering a palm over the metal without touching. "Drakari don't mark like that either."
Jax crouched, lamp slit to a thin thread. "Rope's a day old," he said. "The knot's deliberate. This was set to pull us in."
"And did," KrysKo said.
Behind them the caravan compressed: mules blowing nervously, apprentices whispering the way people do when quiet feels like protection. The bell hung heavy and dumb. The air thickened until every breath felt like a promise you weren't sure you should make.
Kara's pulse ran fast. KrysKo could hear it.
> [Cortisol elevation—Kara Myles.]
"She fears the waiting, not the trap," the System observed, almost amused.
He tipped his head toward her. "Stay close."
"You always say that right before something goes wrong," she said, barely louder than the insect hush.
The first body fell from the trees. It struck the ash with a wet thud, armor half-fused to flesh, visor shattered. The insignia on the shoulder was black-banded University.
Ronan's jaw set. "Wardens."
Two more dropped. Then the fourth. Boots roped to branches, throats cut with precision, eyes open to a canopy that didn't care.
Jax swallowed hard. "Not raiders. Same length, same depth—ritual cuts."
Kara knelt beside the first, jaw tight and holy. "May the path remember your feet," she whispered, and then the dead man twitched.
It should have been a stray nerve. It wasn't. His mouth opened and a note came out—pure, low, impossible. A bell tone.
The others answered. Bodies jerked upright, swaying on their ropes as if the wind had found fingers. Hands flexed. Metal hissed inside flesh. The bell on the trunk thrummed without moving.
Jax said, because he had to say something, "Nope."
Ronan was already moving. "Down!" he barked, and tore the first body free in a savage drag that exploded bark and rope.
KrysKo didn't wait for the bronze to ask permission. The forearm seams sighed open and his blades unfurled in dull arcs that drank light. The forest's air changed shape around the metal, a hush that sounded like intent.
The first corpse swung at him with claws that hadn't been there a breath ago. He let the ginga take his weight off the line, heel scything the knee, left blade skimming up through armor into the soft hinge under the jaw. It shrieked—not a human sound, not machine, a relay of the bell through a ruined throat. The rope above him shivered as more bodies learned motion.
Kara's glass cracked against stone and bloomed into green light. The smoke was mint-sweet and copper-bitten, sliding across the roots in a low curtain. "With me!" she called. "Inside the fog!"
Jax slapped his drone awake; its optics narrowed to pinpricks as it screamed an EMP-laced bead through a swaying torso. The body fell and twitched, wiring strobing in the meat. "They're wired," he said through clenched teeth. "Tech in the bones."
"Then we break the music," Ronan snarled. He seized another corpse by the belt and hammered it into a trunk hard enough to shake resin loose.
> [Resonance detected—31.8 Hz; source coupling to cranial implants.]
"A song wakes them," the System said softly. "Someone is listening while they sing."
"Then we shut the choir," KrysKo said, and went to work.
Capoeira's rhythm hardened into geometry. He ducked under a rope-swing, spun into a meia-lua that snapped a head back, rode the recoil into a cut that parted a sternum and the wires webbed behind it. Bronze kissed bone, bone chipped the edge, and the edge didn't mind. Ronan met two at once, ugly-efficient—forearm to block, claw to split, knee to end the argument. Jax's drone stitched blue across the fog, cutting joints instead of chests because you learn economy when you run out of bullets. Kara's vials painted quick arithmetic on the battlefield—green to blind, amber to cling, blue to drink the little currents that made muscles lie.
The bell rang again.
Not from the trunk.
From the ground.
The vibration came up through their soles like a bad old god waking deep. Every rope-shambled body froze and cocked its head the same way. Then the earth between KrysKo and Kara bulged and split and something reached up with a hand that was not flesh and not metal and entirely both.
KrysKo's blades lifted in the same breath his voice did. "Positions."
The hand was followed by a forearm sheathed in smooth, pale alloy. Plates slid back from a wrist to reveal a blade extruding, hydraulic-clean. A torso surfaced, then a head—face like a visor poured in midnight glass. At its breast, the bell's glyph glowed faintly, veins of light spreading outward like frost.
> [Entity: HYBRID CONSTRUCT (UNCLASSIFIED).
Composition: Architectic lattice + human/Drakari biosynthetic sheath.
Control: partial cognitive shard.]
"Look well," the System murmured. "A question that thinks it is you."
The last fragments of brass fell off the tree and chimed dully in ash. Above them, the dead slackened back to meat, strings cut. The hush that followed tightened like wire.
Ronan slid to KrysKo's right with the naturalness of someone who had already learned where not to stand. Kara's hand shook once and steadied; three vials nested between her fingers—blue, green, white. Jax thumbed a cover off his belt. "Two knee-pucks," he said, too bright. "Three if we want to insult its ankles."
The construct lifted its head and considered KrysKo as if measuring a cut. Then its forearms unlaced and twin blades grew cleanly out of the bone-white sheaths. The shapes were almost right—offsets wrong by a breath, torque profile lazy in the tip. Close enough to copy. Close enough to kill.
KrysKo didn't glance away. "Don't get behind me," he told Ronan. "Get beside me."
Ronan's mouth crooked. "That lesson stuck."
"Kara," KrysKo said, "interrupt on my word."
"Ready."
"Jax."
"Doors and bad ideas," Jax said. "Say when."
The construct moved first, an elegant, ugly economy aimed centerline—double thrust to open the cage and slide the heart off its hook. KrysKo let its future miss him by inches. He step-swept left, rotated around his own axis, and took a thin shaving of plate from the construct's guard as it corrected without wasting force. It had balance algorithms; it did not yet have hips.
He feinted a knee the way the dance had taught him and when it raised to counter the lie, he hooked the ankle with bronze and dragged hard. It caught itself with spurs that slid out of the palm and stabbed into soil. Anchored, it turned a fall into a rotation and nearly wrote his throat open. Nearly.
They separated. In the space between them he heard his own breath, regular and unhurried.
> [Mapping: gesture library sync.
Target latency dropping: 117 ms → 94 ms.]
"Do not teach too much too quickly," the System warned. "Dance as if a child is watching, and will be stronger by sundown."
Ronan crashed the flank, and the construct punished the choice with a neat red line across his ribs that would've been deeper without scale. Ronan rewarded the punishment by grabbing at the waist and suplexing the thing into ash so hard the air rang. Ceramic cracked. Microfractures skittered like frost.
"Up!" Kara called, and a white vial blossomed above the construct into snow-bright dust. The world blinked. The lenses on its face mirrored impossible weather.
Jax's first puck clanged behind a heel and spat a net of magnet-thread that clenched. "Door," he said.
"Now," KrysKo answered.
He crossed the gap in two steps and buried a blade where mesh met alloy inside the elbow. The construct jolted—something that passed for blood extruded black and started skinning the wound closed from the inside. It looked down at the failure and then up at him with something very like interest.
> "Prototype variance: 2.3%," a voice said—not from its mouth but along KrysKo's bones. "Directive: reconcile."
"Reconcile this," Jax muttered, and seeded the other knee. The net bit. For two breaths the legs were art and KrysKo turned art into grave, compasso cutting an X across the construct's chest. Sparks bloomed blue and died. The glyph flickered.
It staggered. Ronan didn't waste that breath; he crashed again and drove it back the way rivers teach stone what shape to be.
Kara slid on her knees and slammed a blue vial into an open crack. The draught drank current with delicate greed. The construct jittered, trying to find a signal that no longer wanted to be found.
> [Subterranean resonance—active; vector ESE; depth 6–9 m.]
"Someone is stroking the world to keep the song alive," the System said. "Break the hand."
"Kara—mute the ground," KrysKo called, never taking his eyes off the construct.
She didn't ask how. A fat-bellied vial hit dirt to their left and broke with a soft sound. The hum under their feet died. The construct missed a cue and lurched.
KrysKo took the arm at the elbow. The bronze parted alloy with a scream like a wire pulled past breaking. The severed forearm writhed in the ash, hand still clenching for a blade that wasn't there.
The construct opened the rest of itself. Plates along its spine vented heat, the sole of one foot split into three pads and gripped, the remaining blade grew by degrees to match KrysKo's length and curve. It had learned something it shouldn't. It had learned him.
They traded inches, then knuckles, then breath. The construct matched him stroke for stroke and then tried to improve the last one. He broke his own rhythm—stuttered the ginga, dirtied the count, lied with the shoulder and told the truth with the ankle. Dance became knife and the knife started to sing.
Pain flared when the construct's spines bit his thigh—white, clean, specific. He tasted iron. He did not scream. The System sighed for him.
> [Damage: thigh (R), deep puncture; repair queue engaged (51 s).]
"Stay with me," the voice beneath his ribs murmured. "Pain is a fence. We step over."
He rolled, recovered his second blade from ash, and came back thin and angry. The compasso shaved the guard he'd notched earlier and showed him the power braid glowing rotten blue inside. He levered. The hand went numb. The stolen blade fell point-first and trembled like a tuning fork.
"Now," he said again, and Kara threw the second white. The ground said no. The song went away. In the quiet KrysKo wrote an answer across the glyph—two lines, clean. The light in the symbol guttered and died.
The construct looked down at a wound it had been told not to have, then up at him. In its mirrors he saw his own face—the one that belonged to a weapon who had learned to ask permission.
> "Project KrysKo…" the construct said, voice like an archive waking. "Failed unit… active."
The bell on the tree broke in on itself with a sound like glass biting tongue. The forest screamed once and forgot how.
Ash fell like tired snow. The caravan's mules stamped and snorted and went still again. Somewhere behind him, Kara's breath went out and came back. Ronan flexed his hand and winced, then grinned like a man who had remembered he was alive. Jax's drone whirred and folded its wings as if embarrassed to be seen shaking.
KrysKo did not sheath the bronze. He stood over the thing the bell had called from the ground and listened to the quiet as if it were a door, and he a man deciding whether to open it.
Chapter 9 — Part 6: Ash Road
The boy's eyes swam up. For a moment he found KrysKo there and did not drown. "I—" His voice coughed around ash. "The bells."
"We know," KrysKo said.
"Mister," the boy whispered, opening his fist around an oilcloth parcel. "They told me, if I saw… if I saw the bronze knives, give it to the bronze knives."
Jax blinked hard and pretended to study the ground. Ronan's jaw clicked once. Kara's hand tightened on the waterskin.
KrysKo did not look at his own arms. He took the parcel the way you take a sleeping infant—care without presumption. Inside lay a black binder, edges scuffed, corners stubborn. A stamp in the upper right: a tree in a circle—older than University sigils, older than the current century's lies. Embossed in faint letters across the cover:
PROJECT KRYSKO
The wind that had been holding its breath let it out.
> [Artifact: high priority.
OPEN? (y/n)]
"No," KrysKo said aloud.
The System's chuckle was a warm baritone under his ribs. "Good. Not here."
He wrapped the binder again and slid it beside the mnemonic shard where small terrible things went when he didn't know what else to do with them.
"Can you walk?" Kara asked the boy.
He shook his head once, honest. The scout gestured; two of his team lifted the boy the right way, backs straight, dignity left intact.
"Back to the line," the scout said. "We take you with us."
"Then we walk," Ronan answered, simple as water. He looked at KrysKo. "You bled."
"I will stop," KrysKo said.
Kara's hand hovered near his thigh. Almost permission, almost touch. "Tonight I'll stitch you," she said. "Then you'll pretend you don't need it."
He let a sliver of weight turn light. "Yes."
Jax nudged the split bell with his boot and made a face at the hollow sound. "When we get home I'm bolting chimes to my bunk. If they ever sing by themselves, I'm torching the dorm."
"Please don't," Kara said.
"Half the dorm," Jax compromised.
They formed a column—the caravan, the scouts, Cohort Nine—and moved. Behind them lay ash, a broken song, and a mirror that had learned how to die. Ahead, the road bent toward the University, and the University bent back with news written in a dead man's hand.
The scouts set a steady pace. The boy slept in jolts between breaths. The forest thinned by degrees until black trunks became gray ribs, and gray ribs became fields furred in stubborn color that had decided to be green in spite of everything. The sky gave them a coin of sun and no warmth.
At dusk, they sheltered in the bowl of a broken interchange—rebar hair, concrete bones, wind learning a new whistle. The apprentices unlashed bedrolls; the scouts posted watches. Jax knelt by a wheel he'd repaired and checked it again, because that was how he calmed the world. Ronan found a rock that looked like a chair and made it obey. Kara set her satchel on the ground and began the slow arithmetic of care.
"Sit," she told KrysKo, not asking.
He obeyed. She cut his trouser leg to the wound and hissed softly at the punctures. The flesh around them had knitted along the System's lines, the neat false web of a thing that wanted to pretend it was not hurt. "You heal too tidy," she murmured.
"Practice," he said.
She threaded a needle anyway. "Hold still."
He did. The sting was clean and exact, the way truth is clean and exact. Jax wandered over mid-stitch and dropped into a squat. "So, not that I'm attached to ignorance, but… any chance you'll tell me what's in the book?"
"Later," KrysKo said.
"Define later," Jax tried.
"After we are not bait," Ronan said without opening his eyes.
"Got it," Jax said, and meant I'll try one more time in an hour.
The fire settled into a red nerve. The scouts rotated watches. The courier boy mumbled in his sleep; Kara soothed him with nonsense that sounded like prayer. Somewhere in the dark, little things decided not to come closer.
> [Night Queue: initialized.
Motor fibers (R thigh): 47% → 83% (ETA 00:38).
Pain gate: active.
Learned patterns archived: Mirror-Deflect (generalized), Tempo-Drag (83% efficacy), Ginga-stutter noise (91% efficacy).]
"You did not kill the mirror to prove it wasn't you," the voice said, warm as old wood. "You killed it so your friends kept walking. That is an answer."
KrysKo sat with that a while. He looked at his hands and saw bronze in moonlight, and for the first time since the Vault, the weight in his chest did not call itself guilt or pride. It called itself understanding.
He flexed his leg. Pain answered, obedient and alive.
> [Diagnostics: stable. Neural cohesion: optimal.
Enter rest state?]
"No," he whispered.
The wind turned down the ridge and became a breath. Kara's candle burned out and left rosemary in the air. Ronan's snores trusted the dark to behave. Jax hugged his pack like a debtor who planned to win.
KrysKo leaned back against a rust-cool girder and watched the sky until the stars thinned to needles and the System folded its warmth around him like a cloak.
"Sleep now," it said. "The next song waits in daylight."
For once, he obeyed.
---
The ash gave way to gravel; gravel remembered to be road. By noon of the second day the University rose from heat-haze like a miracle pretending to be a fortress—spires like polished bone, bridges in glass, power humming through seams as if the place had veins.
The outer gates opened before they hailed. Wardens in gold-and-black stepped out, visors down, boots too clean. "Cohort Nine," the lead said. "Return confirmed. Debrief at dawn, Hall B. Weapons logged. Medical—"
Kara stepped past him, already transferring the courier into an infirmary team's hands. "He's priority."
"Already logged," the Warden said, and almost sounded human.
KrysKo handed over rifle and sidearm and kept his arms folded. "These," he said quietly, "stay."
The Warden hesitated. The hesitation ended. "Understood."
As they passed under the arch, banners breathed down the corridor's height. The emblem stitched there was unfamiliar—wings spread, head bowed, beak piercing a broken ring.
Kara frowned. "When did we get that seal?"
Jax shook his head. "We didn't."
Ronan's voice had no warmth. "You weren't meant to see it."
> [Symbol match: restricted archive. Keyword: VULTURE DIRECTIVE.
Access: denied.]
The University swallowed them and called it home.
They ate the kind of meal you don't earn so much as submit to. They showered in water that smelled faintly of old copper and new lies. Beds were issued. Schedules were posted. Cohort Nine scattered for an hour because that was what people did when they were told to be normal.
KrysKo didn't take the bed. He climbed the steps of the eastern spire until the city fell away and the charred valley lay open to the horizon. The bells below kept the hour with proper tones—and then the fourth tolled with an echo under it, as if someone were humming along from inside the metal.
He set the binder on the parapet, wiped ash from its cover, and let his palm rest on the letters.
PROJECT KRYSKO
For a long moment he watched the letters not change.
> [Artifact: OPEN? (y/n)]
He could have said no again. He did not.
The cover creaked. Dust fled. Inside, a single page waited—stamped, redacted, and still somehow heavier than the stone beneath it.
PROJECT KRYSKO — PHASE TWO AUTHORIZATION: REINTEGRATION
File Origin: University Central Archives — VULTURE DIVISION
He read it once. Then again. The words did not shift. They only deepened.
> [Note: breath irregular. Would you like me to read aloud?]
"No."
"Wise," the voice said gently. "Words like that are not meant to be heard more than once."
He closed the binder and felt the faint mechanical pulse beneath the cover—an old heartbeat, patient.
Soft footsteps scuffed the stair. Kara did not ask permission to sit. She leaned her shoulder against the stone and tucked her hands into her sleeves. For a while they let the wind do the speaking.
"Whatever is in there," she said at last, "it isn't bigger than who you are now."
He didn't answer. But the tension under his skin softened a fraction.
"You're afraid it is," she said.
"Yes."
Kara pulled the small river vial from her pocket and held it where the light could find the blue. "My grandmother said water remembers what it's touched," she murmured. "Maybe you don't need to fight what you were. Maybe you just need to teach it something new."
He looked at the vial. Then at her. The steadiness in her eyes felt like a fact.
> "She steadies you," the System said, amused and fond. "Engines require balance. Even prototypes."
"She'd say the same," he said.
"Who would?"
"You," he said, and the smallest laugh escaped her.
Below them the bells tolled the hour again—late by a breath, a shade off-key. The note hung too long, as if someone held a finger to the sound.
"Tomorrow we answer questions," Kara said.
"And maybe ask better ones," he said.
"And after that?"
He watched the valley where the song had broken. "After that," he said, "we build something worth the silence."
They sat until the moon climbed and erased the smallest of the shadows between them. When the cold finally argued them to bed, the binder lay between them on the parapet like a sleeping thing.
> [Cohort Nine—Status: returned. Integrity: stable. Trust: strengthened.
Threat flag: VULTURE—activity rising inside upper echelons.
Advisory: "The river flows home, KrysKo. But what waits there may no longer be yours."]
The System dimmed. The off-key echo under the bells went quiet as if it had remembered how to hide.
At dawn, the University gleamed like salvation and smelled faintly of ash.