The derelict salt refinery groaned under the weight of its own decay. Moonlight dripped through shattered skylights, fracturing into silver pools on brine-stained concrete. Kael sat cross-legged on a rusted catwalk, his back pressed against the cold bulk of a dormant filtration tank. He'd propped his corrupted arm in a shallow pool of saltwater leaching from a cracked vat, the brine biting into his blackened veins. It was a clean, simple pain—nothing like the Shard's rot, which gnawed at his bones like a rat worrying meat from a carcass.
Gutter lay beside him, her crystalline fur muted to the color of tarnished silver. One ear twitched at the skitter of Husk-Mimics nesting in the refinery's lower chambers—half-alive things, their flesh threaded with Oblivion filaments. She didn't growl. Didn't stir. Just watched the shadows with eyes like fractured amber, her breath fogging the air in slow, even pulses. The mimicry of calm.
Kael counted the cracks in the concrete floor. Nineteen. Twenty. Twenty-one. A habit he'd learned as a child in the Dregs, tallying fissures in walls to avoid tallying days without food. Now, he counted to avoid the numbers that mattered: Four months until the Bond drags Jarek to his throat. Three weeks since the rot reached his collarbone. Two hours since Mira last spoke.
Below, the scrape of metal echoed. Mira hunched over a workbench cobbled from splintered pallets, her shard-eye casting a sickly green beam across an Epiphany shard. She dissected it with tools stolen from Inquisition labs—titanium scalpels, neural clamps, a syringe filled with liquid starlight that hissed when it touched the air. The shard writhed under her ministrations, its core pulsing like a trapped heartbeat.
"You're quiet," she said, not looking up. Her voice was a clinical thing, sharpened by years of talking to corpses and corrupted things.
Kael flexed his fingers. The brine had numbed the worst of the rot, but the tips were cold, waxy. Dead. "Thinking."
"Dangerous habit."
A droplet of saltwater fell from the ceiling, striking the Epiphany. It screamed—a soundless, psychic wail that vibrated in Kael's teeth and made Gutter's fur blaze sudden gold. Mira slammed a lead case over the shard, her breath fogging the lens of her monocle.
"It's angry," she said, as if diagnosing a fever.
"Aren't we all?"
The shadows shifted. Ryn perched on the carcass of a conveyor belt, dismantling a gutted radio with a screwdriver he'd sharpened using Scavenger's Echo. The Shard's power lingered in the air around him like the smell of ozone after a storm—a brittle, electric thing. He hummed as he worked, the melody fraying at the edges: The Ballad of the Sundown Bazaar, a tavern tune from their Dregs days. Kael remembered the words—gold for your grief, steel for your sins—but Ryn only mouthed the ghosts of them, his hands steady as they soldered wires to a broken circuit board.
Talis sat apart, their massive frame folded beneath a leaking pipe that dripped brine onto their scarred knuckles. They'd plucked a Husk-Mimic from the shadows earlier—a small one, its jaw unhinged in a permanent scream—and now peeled strips of crystalline fungus from its spine, their movements methodical, almost gentle. When they caught Kael watching, they signed a single word: Soon.
Kael didn't ask. Talis's warnings were carved into the air like prophecy—simple, inevitable.
The radio crackled to life in Ryn's hands, vomiting static and half-formed syllables of an Inquisition broadcast: "—curfew in Sector 7-D. Report Shardbearers to—" He silenced it with a slap, the sudden quiet heavier than the noise.
"Cheery bastards," he said, tossing the radio into the dark. It shattered somewhere below. "Bet they've got a song for torture chambers. Waltz of the Broken Kneecaps."
Gutter whined, nosing his elbow. He scratched her ears, his smile not reaching his eyes.
Mira's ledger lay open beside her tools, its pages filled with equations that spiraled into sketches of Kael's corruption—black veins branching like roots, devouring muscle and bone. A photograph slipped free as she turned a page: her sister, Elara, standing beside a Shard-geode in a lab long reduced to ash. Elara's veins were already blackened, her smile already fraying.
Mira injected herself with a syringe of silver serum, her hands trembling faintly. The shard-eye flickered, projecting a hologram of Kael's necrosis over the workbench—the rot coiled around his ribs now, inching toward his heart.
"Metastasizing faster than predicted," she murmured. Her reflection glowed green in the hologram, a ghost layered over his decay. "Why won't you break?"
Rain began—a slow, acidic drizzle that hissed against the refinery's roof. Kael stood, brine sluicing from his arm as Gutter pressed close, her warmth a grounding weight. The storm's rhythm matched the drip of the pipes, the skitter of mimics, the hum of dormant Oblivion filaments in the walls.
Ryn joined him at the catwalk's edge, tossing a rusted bolt into the void. It clattered against metal, the sound swallowed by the dark. "Used to collect these as a kid. Thought they were stars."
"They're garbage."
"Same thing, in the Dregs."
Talis rose, water sloughing from their armor as they signed: Inquisition. Close.
No urgency. No panic. Just the sigh of a city grinding its teeth.
Mira packed her tools, the Epiphany shard rattling in its lead prison. "We'll need to scavenge Neutralizer-8. The serum's efficacy is dropping."
"Sure," Ryn said. "After we hit a spa. Rot here could use a facial."
Gutter growled, low and resonant, as the first Inquisition drone pierced the storm—a winged silhouette backlit by lightning. Kael's venom stirred, sluggish and bitter.
"Dawn," he said.
They moved deeper into the refinery's guts, brine pooling in their footprints. Ryn hummed again, the ballad dissolving into static. Talis carved warnings into the walls with their claws—crude phoenixes crossed with X's. Mira clutched the Epiphany case to her chest, her sister's face burning behind her eyelids.
And Kael counted cracks in the walls, the numbers blurring. Twenty-two. Twenty-three. Twenty-four.
Somewhere, the storm broke. Somewhere, Jarek laughed.
The salt in their veins kept them moving.