The market woke with the sound of pneumatic hammers.
Somewhere far above, in the layers where light still existed, industrial machinery gnawed at the bones of god, processing them into building materials for the city's endless expansion. The vibrations traveled down through kilometers of stone and steel, arriving here as a constant, teeth-rattling tremor that made sleep impossible and sanity optional.
Kaelen had stopped feeling it years ago.
He moved through the early market crowds with the fragment still in his pocket, feeling its weight against his hip. The blood on his coat had dried to a stiff, rust-brown stain. People noticed. People always noticed blood in the Ash Layer—it meant violence, and violence meant opportunity for scavengers of a different kind.
No one approached him. The blood was his own as much as it was theirs, and the way he moved—precise, economical, predatory—marked him as the kind of target that bit back.
He needed food. Real food, not the protein paste that came in tubes, not the fungus chips that grew on the bone in dark places. His body was starting to rebel—muscles cramping, vision occasionally doubling. The signs of caloric deficit. Push too far and he'd end up like the grey people, burning his own tissue for fuel until there was nothing left but a shambling husk.
The food stalls clustered near the market's western edge, where the bone dust was thinnest and water—if it could be called that—dripped from condensation pipes built into the ceiling. Kaelen approached a vendor whose stand was built from stacked crates, each one marked with the faded logo of some long-dead corporation.
The vendor was old. Genuinely old, not just aged by hardship—a rarity down here. Her face was a roadmap of scars, her hands gnarled from decades of work.
"Synthetic or real?" she asked, not looking up from the strips of meat she was cutting with a blade that might have once been a surgical scalpel.
"Real," Kaelen said.
"Show credits."
He held up the chit from yesterday's trade. Her eyes—still sharp despite their milky cast—evaluated it, evaluated him, and apparently found both acceptable.
"Rat or protein slab?"
"Rat."
She wrapped three strips in waxed paper and handed them over. The blade she'd been using left a thin line of blood on the paper's edge.
Kaelen's fingers touched it.
The fragment shrieked.
Not audibly. Inside his chest. A sound like metal scraping against bone, reverberating through his ribcage. His hand spasmed, nearly dropping the meat. The vendor's eyes narrowed.
"You sick?"
"No."
"You look sick. Eyes are yellow."
Kaelen turned away without responding. Behind him, the vendor muttered something about plague and bad omens. Other customers gave her stall a wider berth.
He found a narrow gap between two bone structures—barely wide enough for his shoulders—and wedged himself inside. The rat meat was greasy, salty, probably diseased. He bit into the first strip.
Blood from the meat touched his tongue.
The world tilted.
Not physically. But his perception warped like heat shimmer, and for a moment he was somewhere else—
A vast chamber. Walls of light. Two infants on an altar, their cries echoing. Figures in white robes, faces hidden behind masks shaped like suns. One infant glows golden. The other swallows light, devours it, and where the light should be there is only void—a ring of black fire edged in gold.
Hands reaching for the void-child. Cruel hands. Cold hands.
Pain—
Kaelen slammed back into his own skull with enough force to make his teeth clack together. The rat meat fell from nerveless fingers.
He stared at it. At the blood soaking into the bone dust. At his hands, which were shaking.
The fragment in his pocket was molten hot now, burning through the fabric, and when he pulled it out the obsidian surface had cracked. A hairline fracture, glowing from within.
He should have thrown it away. Should have recognized whatever was happening as a threat to survival.
Instead, he held it tighter.
Blood from his palm—where the fragment's heat had blistered skin—dripped onto its surface.
The crack widened.
Golden light poured out like liquid, and Kaelen's vision inverted again—black dust, crimson-gold world, and in the distance, something vast and hungry stirring in the foundations of his bones.
The vision lasted three seconds. Four. Five.
Then the screaming started.
Not his screaming. Distant. Coming from the direction of the Bone Graveyard.
Kaelen pulled himself out of the gap and moved toward the sound on instinct. The crowd was already parting, people backing away from something emerging from the graveyard's edge.
A man staggered into view.
Old. Bent. His frame twisted from years of scavenging. But it wasn't his age that made the crowd recoil.
It was his back.
The cloth of his shirt had been torn away—or perhaps burned away—revealing flesh that looked like it had been flayed and left to heal. Scars formed geometric patterns across his spine, perfect circles connected by straight lines that glowed with faint golden light.
The Mark of Shame.
Kaelen had seen the mark before, on corpses mostly. First-generation slaves. The ones thrown down from the upper layers as infants. The ones who'd had their cores ripped out.
He'd never seen one still alive.
The old man's legs gave out. He collapsed in the dust, and that's when Kaelen saw the blood. It poured from the mark on his back, thick and dark, almost black. Not flowing like normal blood. Moving. Crawling across his skin like something alive.
The crowd stayed back. No one helped.
Kaelen walked forward.
He didn't know why. The decision bypassed thought, moved through him like muscle memory for something he'd never done. His hands were already reaching for the old man before his brain caught up.
"Don't," someone in the crowd said. A warning.
Kaelen ignored it.
He grabbed the old man under the arms and started dragging him toward the nearest shelter—a narrow gap between two bone structures that provided minimal cover from the eternal dust. The man's weight was almost nothing. He was being hollowed out from the inside.
The crowd watched them go. No one helped. No one interfered. They simply observed, the way people might watch a particularly interesting mold pattern spreading across a wall.
Kaelen propped the old man against the bone.
The wound on his back wasn't just scars. The flesh was opening. Splitting along those geometric lines like a seedpod revealing its contents. Beneath the skin, instead of muscle and bone, there was only absence—a void filled with golden light that pulsed and twisted.
The old man's eyes opened.
They were white. Completely white, no iris, no pupil. Just clouded spheres that somehow still managed to focus on Kaelen's face.
"You..." The voice was a whisper. The vocal cords were probably dissolving too. "You have it."
Kaelen said nothing. His hand moved unconsciously to the fragment in his pocket.
"The fragment." The old man's hand trembled toward Kaelen's pocket, fingers skeletal. "I can feel it. Resonating."
Blood dripped from the old man's mouth. Dark blood. The same crawling, living blood that poured from his back.
It splashed onto Kaelen's hand.
The fragment in his pocket didn't just pulse this time. It seized.
Kaelen's entire body locked rigid. His spine arched. His jaw clenched so hard he tasted blood from where he bit his tongue. And in his chest, where the hooks had been pulling inward, something ripped.
Not tissue. Something deeper. A seal. A lock.
Breaking.
The old man's hand closed around Kaelen's wrist, grip impossibly strong for someone dying.
"They carved it out of me," he said, blood bubbling between his teeth. "Sixty years ago. Split me open on their altar and took what was mine." The white eyes leaked tears that glowed faintly gold. "But fragments remember. Divine memory never dies. It just... scatters. Waits."
His grip tightened. More blood welled up where his fingers dug into Kaelen's skin.
The fragment burned.
"The abandoned can become gods," the old man whispered. "But only if they remember why they were cast down."
Then something in his chest gave out—a wet, final sound like meat tearing—and the light bleeding from his back flickered once, twice, then went dark. The grip on Kaelen's wrist went slack.
The old man died the way most things died in the Ash Layer—quickly, quietly, without ceremony.
Kaelen stood.
His hand was covered in the old man's blood. That living, crawling blood that didn't behave like blood should. It soaked into his skin, and where it touched, his veins turned black. Visible black lines spreading up his forearm like cracks in porcelain.
He should have felt something. Fear. Disgust. Concern.
He felt nothing.
Just the fragment in his pocket, pulsing in time with his heartbeat, and the hooks in his chest digging deeper.
Behind him, the corpse was already being stripped by faster scavengers. Clothes, teeth, anything of value. The glowing scars on the dead man's back had already started to fade.
Kaelen walked away.
He found an alcove three levels down from the market, a crack in the bone structure barely wide enough for his shoulders. He wedged himself inside and pulled out the fragment.
The crack had widened. The golden light leaking from it was brighter now, more aggressive. And the blood on his hand—the old man's blood—was being absorbed by the fragment's surface, drinking it in like dry earth drinking rain.
Kaelen watched it happen with clinical detachment.
When the last of the blood had been consumed, the fragment pulsed once. Hard enough to feel in his bones.
And then the vision hit.
Not memory this time. Instinct. Raw, predatory instinct flooding his nervous system like poison.
Hunt.
Feed.
Devour.
Grow stronger.
The hunger wasn't in his stomach. It was in his skeleton. In the hollow spaces where marrow should be. The fragment had woken something, and that something needed to be filled.
Kaelen's hand moved behind his back, fingers tracing his spine.
He found it immediately. The irregularity he'd never noticed before. A raised line of tissue, too faint to see, too small to feel under normal circumstances.
But his fingers knew it now. Traced it. Followed its geometric pattern.
Thirteen points. All connected. A seal.
Incomplete. Damaged.
Hungry.