Sleep came in shallow drags that felt more like labored breaths than rest.

  Already over 2 months had passed since he’d woke up on this mountain, and there was weariness seeping into his bones. The only goal till now was making it home, but every day felt like a moving goalpost.

  When it finally spat him back out, Matas’s mouth tasted like old pennies and grit. His jaw ached down to the hinges. The band at the base of his skull had gone from tight to worse—like someone had wedged a bottle jack in there overnight and given it one cautious pump to see what would creak.

  The mailbox flag sat in the top right of his vision, pulsing its usual four-count. Harmless little metronome. Pretending to be a clock instead of a ledger.

  He made himself look anyway.

  The main status line was the same:

  Level index: 15.

  Allocation points 30 unspent.

  Strain index severe, cumulative.

  Below that, a history trace hung like someone had scrolled a receipt halfway off the screen and forgotten to tear it free.

  Probability debt resolving. Local event skewed—axle failure. Casualties minimized.

  Probability debt resolving. Local event skewed—handhold failure. Casualties minimized.

  Probability debt resolving. Local event skewed—brace shift…

  Seven of those lines, each with a timestamp that matched yesterday’s “near-misses” too closely for comfort.

  The last one sat on its own:

  Probability debt resolving. External events active.

  Nothing about XP. Nothing about gifts. Just the system clearing its throat and making notes on where it had nudged things off true.

  “Morning,” Merrik muttered from the bunk below. The word sounded like it had been chewed before it left his throat. “You look like the Heart drove a cart over your face.”

  “Feels more like it parked there,” Matas said.

  He swung his legs down, found the ladder rungs with his feet, and climbed until the floor decided to stay put under him. The barracks smelled like stale sweat, stone dust, and the cold metal tang of too many people trying not to throw up and mostly failing.

  A handful of cots were empty. Most weren’t.

  Reth sat propped against a post, both arms bandaged now. One eye had purpled nicely. He stared at the middle distance where only he could see his own log.

  “How’s nine treating you?” Matas asked.

  Reth swallowed. “Feels like four of me are still on the rope and the other five are still on the floor,” he said. “But I can wiggle my toes, so I guess that’s something.”

  “Set the bar low, you’ll never be disappointed,” Merrik said. He tried for a grin. It got halfway there and fell off.

  Across the aisle, the wallworker woman from yesterday tightened the last wrap on a new brace over her ribs and hissed through her teeth.

  “Heard about the cart,” she said without looking at them. “And the jars. And the rope that snapped on the stone sled. That all you bought us?”

  “Working on a volume discount,” Matas said. “Tell the system to complain to management.”

  She snorted once. “Tell it yourself, hill-hand. It listens to you. The rest of us it just kicks when we’re down.”

  He didn’t have an answer for that that didn’t sound like an excuse.

  Serh appeared in the doorway then, hair pulled back hard enough that it stretched the skin at her temples. The ash-grey streak along her bow limb caught the low light like something that wanted to remember being fire.

  “Up,” she said. “Tharel wants you.”

  “Always nice to be wanted,” Merrik muttered.

  She cut him a look that had no room for humor. “He’s bringing apprentices and chalk,” she added, to Matas. “You said we’d start marking bad lines. He’s decided to listen while he’s still angry enough to pretend that was his idea.”

  “Great,” Matas said. “Nothing says ‘productive day’ like getting paid in vertigo and chalk dust.”

  He followed her out into the lane.

  Samhal felt…swollen.

  Not bigger. Just stretched. Voices bounced wrong off the stone. A kid laughing on one terrace sounded too high; an argument two levels up came down thinner than it ought to. Every surface carried a memory from yesterday: the scorched patch where the coal had spat and almost taken oil with it, the fresh scrape where the falling wheel had hit and bounced instead of going over the edge with a child attached.

  He saw where someone had thrown sand over the spilled water and swept most of the shards away. The little girl whose collar he’d grabbed yesterday sat on the same step now, knees hiked up under her chin. When she saw him, she flinched like she might bolt.

  Her mother’s hand tightened on her shoulder. “Say thank you,” she murmured.

  The girl swallowed. “Thank you,” she said, eyes on his boots.

  “Don’t thank me,” Matas said. “Thank the stone that decided it was bored with killing you outright.”

  That earned him a look from the mother he probably deserved. Fine. Add “public relations” to the list of things he’d always been bad at.

  Tharel waited at the next junction with two stone apprentices and a bucket of white chalk. He looked like he’d slept standing up and argued with himself about it the whole time.

  “You said we’d start marking,” he said by way of greeting.

  “Didn’t know you were listening,” Matas said.

  “Pain helps,” Tharel said. “Focuses the mind.”

  He jerked his chin at the first wall. A hairline crack ran from the corner of a window down through a carved band and into the foundation stones—yesterday’s find, fresh enough that dust hadn’t settled in yet.

  “We brace and gut this one properly when we have muscle,” Tharel said. “For now, I want every joint like it marked before midday.”

  Matas eyed the apprentices. Both wore the stubborn expressions of young men who thought braces were for cowards and pretty mortar solved everything.

  “Fine,” he said. “You get to be my extra eyes. I point, you mark, you fetch whoever Tharel says gets to do the hard work after. But if you smear chalk on something because you think it looks dramatic instead of because it’s actually going to fail, I’m making you stand under it until it proves you wrong.”

  One of them, the taller, squinted. “How are we supposed to tell the difference?” he asked.

  “That’s what the broken eyes are for,” Matas said. “Try not to get in the way while they do their job.”

  He stepped closer to the cracked wall, raised his left hand, and let the Omen overlay come up.

  It hurt. It always did now. Gold lines spidered through the stone, tracing stress paths and micro-fractures. His right eye tagged the obvious fissure in angry red. Under that, finer threads glowed—a web reaching back toward the Heart chamber.

  He didn’t need Identify proper to know this one wanted to run.

  “It’s live,” he said. “Mark from here—” he tapped just above the window lintel, “—to here.” He touched the lower course where the crack vanished into foundation.

  The nearer apprentice dabbed chalk in a cautious line.

  “Bolder,” Tharel said. “We’re not painting trim. I want people to see this and walk around it.”

  They moved.

  It turned into a rhythm, of sorts. Walk. Pause. Let the overlay flare and crawl. Point. Chalk. Move. Each stop cost him a little more—another notch on the band at the base of his skull, another twist under his ribs when the double-vision tried to slide out of alignment.

  On one terrace, they found nothing worse than old mortar that had always been soft. On another, a support pillar that looked fine to any normal eye lit up like a bad X-ray in his.

  “No packing,” he said, when the taller apprentice reached automatically for an imaginary trowel. “You smear mix over that and all you’re doing is hiding the crack until it eats you.”

  “So what, then?” the apprentice asked, sullen. “We pull it down? People sleep on that level.”

  “Then they sleep somewhere else for a while,” Tharel said. “We shore with braces, dig out to solid, rebuild. Slowly, correctly.” He gave the apprentice a level look. “Or you can take your bedroll and lie under it while it decides whether to fall. Your choice.”

  The apprentice shut his mouth and chalked hard.

  By the third wall, the inside of Matass head felt like someone had taken a rasp to his sinuses. The glow in his right eye pulsed with his heartbeat. Every time he blinked, stressmaps tried on new configurations before settling.

  The mailbox, unhelpfully, chimed once in the corner of his vision.

  Environmental log: structural variance increasing. Recommended action: none.

  “Of course,” he said aloud.

  “What?” Merrik asked. He’d fallen in behind them some time during the walk, carrying a coil of light rope over one shoulder like habit.

  “System sees what we see,” Matas said. “Decides to write it down and then sit on its hands.”

  “Maybe it’s union,” Merrik said.

  “Union would imply it thought we were on the same side,” Matas said.

  Serh walked a pace ahead, scanning sightlines, hand near but not on her bow. She hadn’t said much. The line between her brows had dug in deep enough to call itself a new wrinkle.

  At the next turn, a narrow ledge kinked inward around a support column. Yesterday’s broken cart had left grooves in the stone where its wheel had jumped and bounced.

  “Mark the edging there,” Matas said. “Someone will try to push a full load past that point again, and I’m not trusting the same stone to get merciful twice.”

  “Thought you said there wasn’t such a thing as mercy in this system,” Merrik said.

  “There isn’t,” Matas said. “There’s variance. Yesterday it decided to skew the wheel into jars instead of a girl’s head. That doesn’t mean it’s not going to aim for someone’s spine next time just to balance the line.”

  Merrik’s jaw worked.

  “Feels a lot like the same thing from where the girl’s standing,” he said quietly.

  “Yeah,” Matas said. “That’s the problem.”

  They were halfway toward the Heart’s flank when a runner found them.

  “Elders want you,” the boy panted. Sweat slicked his hair to his forehead. “All of you. Now.”

  “Of course they do,” Matas said again.

  Tharel handed the chalk bucket to the shorter apprentice.

  “Keep going,” he said. “If he pointed at something, you mark it. If you’re not sure, you bring me. No packing. No mortar.”

  “What about sleep?” the taller one muttered.

  “Sleep under something I haven’t circled in white today and see how that works out,” Tharel said.

  The Elder Hall still smelled like stone dust and tension, but the flavor had changed.

  Yesterday, it had been fear undercut by greed—the sound of people trying not to say “do it again” with their mouths while they said it with their eyes. Today, the air felt thinner. Brittle. Like the whole room knew it had stepped out onto a bad line and was trying not to look down.

  Chief sat with his elbows on his knees, fingers steepled under his chin, same as before. The new crease between his brows had gotten deeper. Martuk stood at the side table with his ledger open, quill ready. Tharel took his usual spot near the pillar by habit, as if he wasn’t sure yet whether he was there as commander or as man who’d told them this was stupid and lost.

  The bright-eyed elder—Ekher, Matas had finally managed to pin the name to the face—occupied a seat just off the Chiefs left. He wore tradition like a good coat. Well-cut, comfortably broken in. Easy to mistake for simple piety unless you knew to look at where his attention really fell.

  Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation.

  Today, that attention kept skimming to the edge of the table, where the dark-metal key from the Trial sat on a folded scrap of leather.

  Matas felt the key before he properly saw it. A small, wrong-colored weight in the edge of his overlay. Rust-red, not Heart-blue. The stone under it hummed a quarter-note off.

  “Master Tharel,” Chief said. “Matas. Serh. Merrik. Sit.”

  No one argued. There weren’t enough chairs for everyone; Matas ended up in the same not-quite-center space as always, close enough to the Heart’s glow that his neck hairs knew it was there, far enough from the table that nobody could pretend he belonged at it.

  Martuk cleared his throat.

  “Since yesterday’s descent,” he said, “we’ve logged nine structural incidents beyond what we’d consider normal variance. Seven near-misses. Two with significant injury. No fatalities. Yet.”

  He didn’t raise his voice, but the word yet sat heavy in the chamber.

  He ran a finger down his ledger.

  “Cart axle failure on north-east terrace. Rope snap on stone sled in storage tunnel three. Ladder handhold crumble in cistern access. Brace shift in storeroom five—”

  “We know what happened,” one of the older, conservative elders snapped. “We were here. Some of us even pulled bodies out.”

  “You asked for numbers,” Martuk said. “I’m giving you numbers.”

  He tapped the page.

  “Every incident maps to the same pattern in the Heart log. Probability debt resolving. External events active.”

  He looked at Matas. “You saw the same?”

  Matas swallowed against the dry in his mouth.

  “Every time something went wrong, the flag flared,” he said. “Same sentence. Different nouns. The system is tallying those hits as repayment.”

  “Repayment for what?” the conservative elder demanded. “We strengthened the Heart. We strengthened the village. What debt do we owe for that?”

  “The two hundred and one thousand units it shoved into every bound body,” Matas said. “The strain it cleared off that crystal when it used me like a plunger. The Throat load we dragged back up. Pick your poison.”

  His jaw twinged at the memory. His eye joined in for good measure.

  Chief sat back.

  “Whatever the cause,” he said, “the result is this: the redistribution protocol is locked. The Heart will not vent into XP again, according to Matas’s log. We pulled a second load through it anyway. Now it is paying itself back through us. That is not a pattern I intend to repeat.”

  Tharel nodded, slow and grim.

  “We treat this as a hard stop,” he said. “No more descents. No more so-called maintenance runs. We shore what we can up here and start planning for leaving. I will not hang the village from a shaft rope and call it foresight.”

  Across the table, Ekher steepled his own fingers.

  “And leave to where?” he asked mildly. “Into whose Hands? We have one Heart. One set of oaths. The Rust paths beyond our walls have not grown kinder since the last wanderers walked them.”

  “So we wait,” the conservative elder said. “We endure. We have always endured.”

  “We endure until something breaks that we can’t pack with mortar,” Matas said, before the sensible part of his brain could tell his mouth to shut up.

  The weight of the room turned toward him.

  “I’ve spent the morning looking at joints you all pretended were fine,” he went on. “You can’t keep the stress where you like anymore. The Heart’s already under more load than it was built for. Every time you send me under, you’re adding another bag of concrete to the wrong span. At some point, it’s not going to be near-misses anymore. It’s going to be…misses.”

  Ekher’s smile didn’t quite reach his eyes.

  “And what would you suggest, hill-hand?” he asked. “That we never set foot near the Throat again? That we abandon the seals and hope the thing that sleeps beneath us is feeling merciful?”

  “I suggest you stop lying to yourselves about what’s mercy and what’s math,” Matas said. “You don’t want to leave? Fine. But don’t pretend you can both stay and keep using the dungeon like a mine without paying for it in people and stone.”

  Martuk’s mouth ticked upward at one corner. Not humor. Recognition.

  “Nonetheless,” Chief said slowly, “the facts are what they are. We risked a second descent. We learned the Heart will not buy us another wave. In exchange, we’ve invited a string of queued events we cannot predict, only suffer. That is not a bargain I will make again lightly.”

  Ekher spread his hands, palms up, gracious.

  “No one is saying lightly,” he said. “But we cannot make decisions on one anomalous day. We have centuries of practice walking the paths the ancestors set. The Heart has always balanced its ledgers in ways we did not fully understand.”

  “It never did this,” Tharel said. “Rust runs took parties and gave nothing back. This—” he jerked his chin toward the outer village, “—took no one yet and gave everyone a level. And now it skims a little from our days. If we are going to fear anything, fear the novelty, not the old stories.”

  Ekher’s gaze dropped to the key for a heartbeat.

  “If we are to understand which is which,” he said, “we must know more than rumor. There are ledgers older than any here. Field accounts from Rust paths. Notes on rites and seals. Many of them tied to that.” He nodded toward the key. “Let me take the old hunters’ records. The key. I will map what patterns I can. Perhaps then we speak of debt with more than guesswork.”

  Chief hesitated.

  “It is council property,” he said. “Not a plaything.”

  “And I am council,” Ekher said gently. “Bound by the same oaths.”

  Martuk’s eyes narrowed.

  “We’ve already seen what happens when someone takes key and ritual without enough understanding,” he said. “The last man to touch that did not come back.”

  “All the more reason not to leave its meaning in a sack,” Ekher said. “I propose study, not use.”

  Matas’s overlay itched, a faint heat where stone met leather under the key. The new crack down that line glowed a hair brighter. Or maybe that was just his nerves.

  Chief rubbed at the bridge of his nose like it hurt.

  “Very well,” he said at last. “You will inventory the old ledgers, any rites tied to that artifact, and you will do so in the open. Here. Not in some side room.”

  Ekher’s smile turned just a shade too satisfied.

  “Of course,” he said. “Transparency is a virtue.”

  Matas filed the moment away in the same mental box he reserved for beams that looked fine until you tapped them and heard hollow.

  Martuk shut his ledger with a quiet thump.

  “For now,” Chief went on, “no more descents. No more tests. We have enough answers for the moment, and the Heart is already taking its fee. Tharel, you prioritize bracing and repairs on any wall Matas marks. No packing over cracks. No cosmetic fixes.”

  Tharel inclined his head.

  “Yes, Chief,” he said.

  “And you,” Chief said, looking at Matas, “limit how often you lean into that overlay. I would rather lose a store-room than an Omen engineer.”

  “Good,” Serh said before Matas could open his mouth. “Because if he collapses brain-first in some tunnel, you can explain to the village why their miracle hill-hand died marking their pantry doors.”

  Merrik’s eyes flicked between them, something like guilt sharpening his features.

  “We can still…we can still make it worth it,” he said, almost to himself. “If we shore the right places, if we spread the risk, maybe these…hits…stay small.”

  “That’s the problem,” Matas said. “They’re already not small enough.”

  They left the hall into light that felt too bright.

  Voices followed them, echoes of argument and piety and thinly disguised hunger.

  “…no one said never again—”

  “…you saw the boy, seven levels in a breath—”

  “…and what did it buy him? Hands that won’t stop shaking—”

  A group of younger hunters had clustered near one of the terrace rails, overlooking the slope. Their armor was still too new to sit right, the way only gear that had been recently upsized by a sudden level wave did.

  “I’m telling you,” one said, “we didn’t go deep enough. Basins and doors are nothing. The real XP sits where the old scripts are. Everyone knows that.”

  “Everyone who died there, you mean,” an older man said. His braid was shot through with grey. “You want to join them, be my guest. Just don’t drag the rest of us down on the same rope.”

  “If the Heart didn’t want us there, it wouldn’t have paid,” the younger one shot back. “Maybe the accidents mean it’s angry we wasted the chance.”

  Matas kept walking.

  “Hear that?” Serh murmured beside him.

  “Hard to miss,” he said.

  “First taste of real gain without a funeral on the same day,” she said. “They’d rather believe the rope failed because we were timid than because the mountain is bored of letting us live.”

  “People always think the first crack means the wall is paying attention to them,” Matas said. “They forget it’s just gravity with opinions.”

  Merrik blew out a breath.

  “Feels like a funeral from here,” he said. “Seven near-misses, two breaks, and that’s before we tally whatever we didn’t see. All for a maintenance run that bought nothing but Martuk another headache.”

  They turned down an interior corridor, away from the terraces. The air cooled by a degree, picking up more of the Heart’s hum.

  At a junction, a small shrine niche opened in the wall—a simple shelf with a carved stone, a twist of old rope, a bowl for offerings. Matas had barely registered it before; there were dozens like it.

  Today, Ekher stood there alone.

  The key lay on the shelf atop the stone. His fingers rested near it, not quite touching. His lips moved in a murmur Matas’s mapping didn’t try to translate, all vowels and soft consonants.

  For a heartbeat, the overlay jumped.

  Rust-red pitting bloomed under the key, crawling out along the stone in a pattern that looked uncomfortably like the old Witness script. Hairline cracks flickered in and out of existence around it, like the idea of failure rehearsing itself.

  Matas blinked hard.

  By the time his vision settled, the pitting was gone. The stone looked like stone again. Ekher’s hand had moved back a fraction, as if he’d felt the same itch and decided not to press.

  The mailbox flag did its four-count pulse. Nothing else.

  Matas didn’t slow. He didn’t trust his balance enough.

  Serh’s gaze flicked across the niche, then to him. Her eyes narrowed.

  “Later,” he said, under his breath.

  She held his look for a beat, then gave the smallest nod.

  The first big one came mid-afternoon.

  They were three levels below the Heart chamber, in one of the long storage corridors that threaded behind the main terraces, when the hum hit.

  Up until then, the day’s disasters had been small and mean: a water skin splitting at the worst moment, soaking a ledger; a pot hook giving way above someone’s hand, scalding instead of maiming; a stone chip flying just far enough to cut an ear, not an eye.

  This one felt different.

  The wire-under-the-skin sensation that usually preceded a failure snapped taut, then went flat, like someone had plucked it hard enough to break. The hair on Matass arms rose.

  “Stop,” he said.

  Serh froze mid-step. Merrik’s hand went automatically to his spear. The two apprentices behind them stumbled, then caught themselves on the walls.

  “What?” Merrik asked.

  “Something’s going to—”

  The sound cut him off.

  Not the sharp crack of a single stone losing patience. A heavier noise. Multipoint. Like a chorus of bones remembering they wanted to be dust.

  Thirty feet ahead, a supporting brace along the right-hand wall shifted. It had always been a little crooked. Someone had braced it years ago with a second beam and a prayer. Now the old wood finally decided it’d carried enough.

  The brace twisted. The load it had been holding flicked to the main arch. The arch had its own opinions.

  The ceiling above the corridor sagged, then dropped six inches in one murderous lurch.

  The first man under it—a porter hauling a sled of grain, sweat darkening his shirt—didn’t even have time to shout. Stone caught him across the shoulders and pinned him to his knees. The sled jerked sideways, slammed into the opposite wall, and spilled sacks everywhere.

  Grain burst in a dull thunderclap. Dust exploded into the air, thick and choking.

  Matas lunged forward on reflex. The world stuttered sideways with him.

  The overlay painted everything in jagged lines—the new crack that had jumped from brace to arch to ceiling, the stale fractures it woke up on the way, the flex in the slab that had just come down.

  He got his hands on the fallen stone and the beam that had slipped. It felt like pushing against a bad day on a roof when the sheathing gave an inch more than it should.

  “Don’t pull him out,” he gasped. “Yet. Brace it first.”

  Merrik didn’t argue. He rammed his spear butt against the floor, jammed the shaft under the slab at an angle, and threw his weight behind it. The wood creaked.

  “Apprentices!” Tharel’s voice snapped from somewhere behind them. “Cross-brace. Now. Under here—no, here. Matas, where does it want to go?”

  “Down,” Matas said. “Like everything.”

  He tasted metal again. His vision tried to split in two, then three. He clung to the one where the slab stayed where it was long enough for them to wedge extra supports into place.

  They got enough under it that when Tharel finally barked, “Now!” and Merrik hauled, the stone only dropped another half-inch instead of the full foot it wanted.

  The porter came free in an ugly scrape of flesh against rock. He screamed once, ragged, then choked on dust.

  His legs didn’t.

  One of them bent wrong in the middle. The other didn’t seem to want to move at all.

  “Don’t try to stand,” Serh said, kneeling hard enough that her own knees would bruise later. “Breathe. Thats all. Breathe.”

  “Can you feel your feet?” Merrik asked.

  The man’s eyes were wide enough that the whites flashed in the dim.

  “No,” he said. “No. No. No.”

  Matas’s stomach rolled.

  The mailbox flag flared.

  Probability debt resolving. Local event skewed—load-bearing element failure. Casualties recorded.

  Recorded. Not minimized. Not avoided.

  His fingers shook on the beam.

  “Get him to the healers,” Tharel said, voice washing past as if it had far to travel. “Carefully. No jolts. You two—” he jabbed a finger at the apprentices, “—you stay. Nobody walks this corridor until I say. We brace from both ends and clear anything that isn’t nailed down.”

  “On it,” one apprentice said, pale and sweating.

  The other swallowed, Adam’s apple jumping hard.

  “Is he going to walk?” he blurted.

  Tharel didn’t answer.

  Matas didn’t either. The truth felt like another load he didn’t have hands for.

  They carried the porter out on a makeshift stretcher. His hands clung to the edges like grip alone could keep him attached to the rest of himself.

  As they passed, he caught Matass sleeve.

  “You see it, don’t you?” he rasped. “You saw it coming.”

  “Not soon enough,” Matas said.

  The man’s fingers tightened once, then let go as another wave of pain took him.

  By the time they made it back into open air, half the village knew something had happened. News traveled faster than stone dust. A knot of people waited in the lane, faces tight, eyes skittering from the stretcher to Matas’s face and back again.

  “Was it the Throat?” someone demanded. “Did the Heart—”

  “It was a brace,” Tharel said, sharp. “Rotten and packed over too long. If you’re worried about the Heart, go look at your own beams first.”

  “But he was there,” a woman said, nodding toward Matas. “Same as with the jars. Same as with the rope.”

  Her voice wasn’t accusing yet. Not quite. Just frightened. But fear had sharp edges, and Matas could see the angle where it might tilt.

  Serh stepped between them before he had to decide whether to answer.

  “And he pulled my brother out from under one of those failures last night,” she said, voice flat. “You want to start keeping score, start there.”

  The woman bit her lip and looked away.

  Merrik said nothing. His jaw clenched hard enough that the muscle jumped.

  They found a relatively quiet corner near one of the inner supports that evening—if quiet meant fewer people talking directly at them and more talking around them like they were a wall.

  Someone had wedged a brace under a main arch there during the day. Chalk lines ringed its base. The air smelled of fresh wood and fear.

  Serh leaned against the pillar, arms folded.

  “That’s it,” she said.

  “Pretty sure it isn’t,” Matas said. “The log didn’t say ‘all debts paid.’”

  “You know what I mean,” she said. “You say no next time. Whatever they call it. Maintenance. Trial. Blessing. You say no.”

  He stared up at the arch. His overlay painted it in familiar lines: stressed, but holding. For now.

  “I already said yes twice,” he said. “Three times, if you count the first descent. Saying no now just means they find someone else stupid enough to hang from the rope. Or worse, no one, and we keep getting hit by rocks we don’t see coming.”

  “Let them,” she said. “Let the Hills chew on someone else for a while.”

  “They’re not chewing on me,” he said. “Not only me. You saw that man’s legs.”

  Her mouth tightened.

  “That’s my point,” she said. “Every time you let them walk you back to the lip, the ledger finds new ways to underline itself on other people. You can call it math all you want. It still looks like punishment from where the porters are lying.”

  “Refusing doesn’t make the ledger forget,” he said. “It just changes how it routes the bill.”

  “You owe them your work,” she said. “Not your skull.”

  He almost laughed. It came out thin.

  “They bound me to the Heart, Serh,” he said. “The system stamped Honor-bound on my forehead in letters everyone here pretends they can’t see. I don’t get to pretend I owe nothing.”

  “You get to choose where you stand when it comes down,” she said. “On the rope. Or under the beam.”

  He didn’t have an answer for that that didn’t sound like cowardice dressed as prudence.

  The mailbox flag brightened, just for a heartbeat.

  Node status: Heart—affinity over-variance increasing. Suppression field micro-fractures detected. External actors—unresolved.

  External actors.

  He thought of Ekher’s fingers resting close to the key. Of the way the stone had pitted for a blink, then pretended it hadn’t.

  “Whats wrong?” Serh asked.

  “Bad lines,” he said. “Everywhere.”

  She studied his face for a long moment.

  “Then we keep marking them,” she said. “All of them. Stone. People. Elders. Keys. So when something fails, nobody gets to say they weren’t warned.”

  “It didn’t help the porter much,” he said.

  “It might help the next one,” she said. “Or it might give us enough proof to drag this village screaming toward a decision before the Heart makes it for us.”

  Her gaze flicked upward, toward the Heart chamber they couldn’t see from here but both could feel.

  “Martuk said he’s brought the migration writ to that table four times,” she said. “He’ll bring it a fifth. And a sixth. Question is how many queued events we let the ledger throw at us before someone signs it.”

  Matas let his head rest back against the pillar. The stone felt warm and untrustworthy.

  The ledger had stopped paying in numbers.

  Now it was paying in grain and bone and braces and legs. And, if Ekher had anything to say about it, in keys and rituals yet to be named.

  The hum from the Heart vibrated along the pillar, through his spine, into the band at the base of his skull. Not louder. Just more insistent. Waiting, patient as gravity, to see who leaned on it next.