# CHAPTER 1: THE SCAB
---
The air tasted like copper and something worse. Yevlin pressed his mask tighter and crouched beside the dead thing — a Rot-rat, bloated and split open along the belly. Four hours dead, maybe. The flies had already showed up, because of course they had. Flies in the Scab were more reliable than people.
He tilted his head and studied the wound. Clean. Way too clean. No teeth marks, no claw gouges, no messy tearing. Something had opened this creature with purpose, scooped out what it wanted, and walked away. Like a butcher. A very precise, very unsettling butcher operating in a wasteland where nothing should be that precise.
His vision snagged on the wound's edge without his say-so. A little tug behind his eyes, pulling his focus toward a discoloration he would've missed otherwise. The tissue around the cut was off — wrong color, wrong texture. Not normal Rot-decay. Something chemical he couldn't identify.
That was the Vestige. Doing its thing.
He'd gotten it at fifteen like everyone else. Walked into Athan's bones, came back with a quiet presence lodged behind his eyes that occasionally nudged his attention toward details. Not a voice. Not a power you could show off at parties. Just a tap on the shoulder now and then. *Hey. Look at this. You almost missed it.*
Wasn't exactly the divine gift the old stories promised. But it kept him breathing, which put it ahead of most things in his life.
He filed the dead Rot-rat under *weird but not my problem right now* and stood up. Information was currency in the Fringes. Even the kind you didn't understand yet. Especially the kind you didn't understand yet.
---
The Scab was not a beautiful place. Not even close.
Flat, cracked, and stretching to the horizon in every direction — dried Rot-flesh baked by years of sun and wind into something that almost resembled normal ground. The key word being *almost*. If you stopped walking and stood very still, you could feel it pulse beneath your boots. Slow. Once every thirty seconds. Like the world was breathing in its sleep.
Most scavengers trained themselves to ignore it. Put it out of their minds. Pretended the ground was just ground and got on with their day. Yevlin had tried that for about a week when he first started scavenging. Didn't take. Instead he'd started counting the intervals, mapping the variations, noting that the pulse quickened near certain ridges and slowed near exposed bone.
He didn't know what any of that meant. But he knew it, and as far as he could tell nobody else bothered to pay attention, and knowing things other people didn't was the closest thing to a superpower he had.
To the south, Athan's ribcage owned the sky.
There was no other way to describe it. Bones taller than mountains, curving upward from the earth in massive arcs that disappeared into cloud cover on bad days and gleamed yellow-white against bruised sky on good ones. A ribcage. An actual ribcage. Belonging to something that had once been alive and was now very, very dead and also somehow the foundation of everything humanity had built for the last five centuries.
*The One Who Remained.* That's what the scholars called it. They had theories about the name — Athan chose to stay, Athan was the last to fall, Athan died with purpose. Real pretty stuff. The kind of thing that sounded profound in a university lecture hall in the Hearthlands where the bones were just a smudge on the horizon.
Out here, where you could see the texture of divine bone if the light hit right, the name felt less like philosophy and more like a joke. It remained. Great. Remaining didn't save it. Remaining just meant it was still here, rotting, five hundred years later, while people like Yevlin picked through its decomposing outskirts for scraps.
Inspiring.
He adjusted his pack and kept walking. Three more hours of daylight. If he was efficient and a little lucky, he could fill the pack and get back to Dusthollow before dark. The haul would net him maybe forty chips at the market — enough for filtered water, a meal that wouldn't make him sick, and the registration fee for the Crucible.
The Crucible. Three days.
His stomach did a small complicated thing that wasn't quite excitement and wasn't quite fear. More like the feeling you get when you've been stacking cards for months and someone's about to bump the table.
---
He'd been preparing for seven months. Not training — he couldn't outfight a determined house cat and he'd made peace with that. Preparing. There was a difference, and the difference was going to matter.
Seven months of watching the Reaper garrison at Ironmarrow from enough distance to not look suspicious. Studying which candidates walked in confident and stumbled out broken. Tracking which ones passed and trying to figure out what they had in common. It wasn't strength. Some of the strongest candidates washed out. It wasn't Vestige power either. He'd seen Tier 2 holders make it through while Tier 3s crumbled.
It was something else. Something harder to measure.
He'd figured it out over drinks with veterans at the Dusthollow tavern. Not by asking — asking important questions directly was amateur work. You never got real answers that way. People either lied, got defensive, or gave you the version of the truth they thought sounded best.
Instead, Yevlin would say something slightly wrong. Drop a small inaccuracy like bait. "I heard Squad Captain Moren cut three candidates last year for being too slow." Then he'd take a sip of whatever cheap drink he'd bought the veteran and wait.
And the veteran would jump on it. Every time. *No no no, Moren cut them for not communicating. Speed had nothing to do with it.* And they'd lean in and explain, happy to correct the ignorant Fringe kid, happy to show off what they knew.
And Yevlin would nod and look impressed and file the real answer away in the part of his mind that never stopped collecting.
People loved correcting you. It was one of humanity's most reliable impulses — right up there with hunger and the need to complain about the weather. All you had to do was be wrong in the right direction and they'd hand you exactly what you needed while feeling good about themselves.
Seven months of that. Seven months of smiling at the right people, remembering their names, their kids' names, their complaints and preferences. Seven months of doing small favors that cost him almost nothing — carrying someone's haul when they were limping, sharing information about good scavenging spots he'd already cleaned out, mentioning to trader Beck that old Harren was looking for a new supplier. Little things. Free things. Things that made people think *that Yevlin kid's alright* without ever really examining why they thought that.
Was he ready for the Crucible?
Let's see. No combat training. No family connections. No money beyond what he scraped out of the Scab. A Vestige that made him marginally more observant and absolutely nothing else.
So no. By any reasonable measure, absolutely not.
But Yevlin had noticed something about reasonable measures over the years. They only worked when the situation was reasonable. And the Crucible, from what he'd gathered, was anything but.
---
He found the bone fragment an hour later, and that's when the day got interesting.
Bone fragments weren't unusual. Pieces of Athan's skeleton broke off sometimes — weathering, Rot-acid erosion, seismic shifts from deep below. Scavengers collected them because divine bone was the foundation of everything. Currency was literally made from it. Finding a fragment in the Scab was like finding loose change on the street. You picked it up and moved on.
This one was the length of his forearm, wedged between two ridges of dried Rot-flesh. He almost walked past it. Would have, if not for the scratches on its surface.
At first glance — nothing. Weathering damage. Animal scoring. The kind of surface marks you saw on every piece of salvaged bone.
Then the tug came. Sharp this time. Almost uncomfortable. His vision locked onto the scratches with an intensity that made his eyes water, and for a moment — just a moment — the marks rearranged themselves in his perception.
Not random.
Patterned. Repeating sequences with deliberate spacing. Like someone had taken a sharp tool and carved them with intention. With *thought*.
Yevlin's hands stayed steady. His breathing didn't change. He'd learned a long time ago that visible reactions were a luxury, and luxury was something that happened to other people. He wrapped the fragment in cloth, slid it into the bottom of his pack beneath the other salvage, and kept walking at exactly the same pace as before.
Inside, though, his mind was running.
Rot creatures didn't make marks. Didn't use tools. Didn't create patterns. Not in Ring 5. The things out here in the Scab — flesh moths, bone mites, the occasional Rot-rat — were Tier E. Pest-level. They ate, they bred, they died. The most complex thing a Rot-rat had ever done was figure out how to gnaw through a leather food bag, and even that had taken the species a few generations.
So either something from deeper in the Rot — Ring 4, Ring 3, maybe worse — had wandered out to the Scab, which didn't happen, had never happened as far as he knew.
Or something out here was getting smarter than it was supposed to be.
He thought about the dead Rot-rat from earlier. The surgical cut. The chemical residue. Something precise and intentional in a place where nothing was supposed to be precise or intentional.
Two data points. Not enough for an answer. Just enough for a question that made his skin prickle.
He kept the question to himself. Partly because there was nobody out here to tell. Mostly because a question nobody else was asking had value, and Yevlin didn't give away valuable things for free.
---
Dusthollow appeared out of the evening haze like an apology.
The settlement didn't so much exist as persist — a stubborn clump of bone-and-leather structures squatting on the edge of the Scab like it had lost a bet and refused to leave. Two thousand people crammed into a space built for maybe eight hundred, all of them here because they couldn't afford to be anywhere else. The architecture was a generous word for what was mostly strategic leaning.
Yevlin passed through the outer ring of scavenger shacks — lean-tos and tarp arrangements where people who couldn't afford even Dusthollow's miserable rent took turns sleeping. A woman he knew was hunched over a bone-chip fire, stirring something in a dented pot that had seen better decades.
"Mada." He pulled down his mask and summoned a smile that came easier than it probably should have. "That smells incredible."
"That smells like lies and you know it." She squinted at him with the particular expression of someone who'd survived seven decades in the Fringes and wasn't impressed by anything anymore. "You eat yet?"
"Not yet."
"Then sit down and stop hovering. You're blocking my heat."
He sat. She ladled something into a bowl. It was thin and grey and tasted like warmth, which was all it needed to taste like.
He'd fixed her shelter's support beam last week. Hadn't been asked. Hadn't made a thing of it. Just noticed it was sagging, found a time when she was out, and braced it properly. She'd come back and noticed and hadn't said anything about it directly. Instead, she'd started making too much food whenever he walked by.
Neither of them acknowledged the transaction. That was how it worked in the Fringes. Favors flowed in circles and you kept track without keeping score. Or at least, most people didn't keep score. Yevlin kept score. He kept score the way other people kept breathing — constantly, automatically, without having to think about it.
Was that manipulative? Probably. But he also genuinely liked Mada. Genuinely cared whether her shelter stood or fell. Both things were true and he'd stopped trying to figure out where the calculation ended and the real feeling began. The line was blurry. Maybe there wasn't a line. Maybe that was fine.
She talked while he ate. The weather. The Rot-rat population this season. Her grandson in the Hearthlands who sent letters about his important job and his nice apartment that were almost certainly fiction. Yevlin listened with the easy attentiveness of someone who actually found other people interesting — which he did, in the same way a locksmith found locks interesting.
He noticed her grandson's letters had stopped three months ago. She hadn't mentioned that. He didn't push. Some information wasn't currency. Some information was just pain, and he wasn't in the business of making old women hurt for no strategic reason.
"You doing the Crucible?" she asked.
"Thinking about it."
"You're too skinny for Reaper work."
"Probably."
"And too nice. Nice boys die first out there."
He laughed. Genuine. Mostly. "Then I guess I'll have to be useful enough that they keep me around anyway."
She studied him over her bowl. Two years she'd known him. She thought she knew him pretty well by now — polite kid, good scavenger, a little too clever for his own good but not in a way that caused trouble. She was wrong about the last part, but she was right about one thing. There was something behind his easy manner. Something that watched the world with more attention than a nineteen-year-old scavenger had any reason to possess.
"Be careful," she said. Not advice. Something heavier.
"Always am, Mada."
He thanked her for the food. Dropped a bone-chip onto her fuel pile as he left — visible enough that she'd notice, casual enough that she wouldn't feel like a charity case. It was a small thing. Small things were what he dealt in.
---
The Dusthollow market was closing for the evening. Traders packing up. Arguments winding down. The daily business of poverty wrapping itself up for the night.
Yevlin sold his haul to a trader named Beck — a round man with a permanent squint and the moral flexibility of a wet rope. Beck counted the salvage, pretended to think about it, and offered a price that was about fifteen percent below fair.
Yevlin knew it was fifteen percent below fair. He'd tracked Beck's pricing for months. He knew what Beck paid other scavengers for the same materials, adjusted for quality, and he knew his own haul was above average.
He took the price anyway.
A trader who thought he was getting away with something was a trader who kept doing business with you. Beck would buy from Yevlin reliably, consistently, without suspicion. That reliability was worth more than fifteen percent. It was an investment. Yevlin was very patient with investments.
Forty-one chips. Close enough to his estimate.
He paid the Crucible registration at the garrison's outer office. The clerk was a bored woman with ink stains on her fingers who wrote his name without looking up. Yevlin Srath. Another Fringe kid trying to become a Reaper. She'd process thirty of these by tomorrow.
Good. Forgettable was always the goal.
---
His room was generous if you were describing a closet.
Sleeping mat. Water jug. A candle he'd been rationing for two weeks because candles cost four chips and four chips was a meal. He lit it anyway. Some things were worth the expense.
He unwrapped the bone fragment and held it near the flame. The Vestige stirred — that quiet tug behind his eyes sharpening his vision until the scratches on the bone's surface came into focus with uncomfortable clarity.
Repeating sequences. Deliberate gaps. A structure that sat right on the edge between random damage and intentional design. Not quite language. Not quite not-language.
Something in Ring 5 of the Scab — the safest, tamest, most boring stretch of Rot in Athan's territory — was making intentional marks on divine bone. Something that according to five hundred years of human observation and classification shouldn't have the intelligence to do anything more complex than eat and reproduce.
He stared at the marks for a long time.
Then he wrapped the fragment carefully, slid it under a loose floor panel, and lay back on his mat.
The candle flickered. Shadows moved on the ceiling in patterns that meant nothing. Outside, Dusthollow settled into its nightly routine of dogs barking, someone arguing about money, and the distant low hum of the Rot doing whatever the Rot did when humans weren't watching.
Three days until the Crucible. Seven months of preparation funneling down to a single trial that would either carry him out of this place or confirm that this place was all he'd ever have.
He wasn't doing it for glory. Wasn't doing it to serve humanity or protect the Fringes or any of the other noble reasons people gave when they talked about the Reapers.
He was doing it because somewhere in the Hearthlands — in a comfortable house, in a comfortable city, with a comfortable life built on stolen secrets and a dead woman's silence — a man named Darrin was sleeping peacefully.
Yevlin was going to fix that.
Not today. Not this month. Maybe not this year. But eventually, patiently, one careful step at a time, he was going to walk from this edge of the world to its shining center and find the man who took everything from him.
And Darrin wouldn't see him coming. Nobody ever did.
He closed his eyes. The presence behind them settled in alongside him — patient, quiet, watching the darkness with the same steady attention it watched everything else.
Outside, the Scab pulsed.
Once every thirty seconds.
Like something breathing.
Like something waiting.