"Compliance is survival."
The voice lingered. Too smooth, too sterile—like steel dragging against bone. It didn't echo; it embedded itself. A parasite nesting behind Ivar's ears, somewhere between breath and thought.
He didn't move. Cross-legged before the fractured mirror, chest aligned with its jagged spine, he sat as if part of the ruin. Not a boy, not a man—just a question waiting for an answer.
His hand twitched.
The reflection didn't.
His breath misted briefly. The mirror's surface remained still, untouched. Not a mirror. A mouth. Waiting.
"What do you want?" he whispered, tongue raw from the dryness.
The reflection blinked.
Wrong rhythm.
Then it smiled.
Too slow. Too smooth.
Behind him, Rill let out a hiss. Not fear. Disgust.
"Compliance?" she muttered, eyes darting toward the crumbling pylons. "That's not a warning. That's an executioner's lullaby."
She paced the perimeter, boots crunching broken reliquaries and rusted sanctum locks.
"A purge wrapped in festival banners," she snapped. "They're dressing up a bloodletting."
Lysa stood apart, half-cast in shadow. Her silence wasn't emptiness—it was calculation.
"You knew," Rill said, voice low and sharp.
"I knew something," Lysa murmured. "The way things folded in the boneways. The pulse of it."
"And you just led us here like lambs?"
"Lambs don't bend bone," Lysa said. "You're not prey. Unless you act like it."
Fennel crouched in the soot, smearing shapes into the ground with blackened fingertips. Symbols with no language. Loops within spirals, numbers inside lungs.
"Eighteen," he whispered, not to anyone. "Eighteen. Eighteen. It's counting."
Ivar moved to him. "Who's counting?"
"The marrow," Fennel said, eyes wide. "It dreams backwards. Down the vertebrae. Tick, tick, tick."
His teeth clacked once. He shuddered.
Sleep didn't claim them. It took them—like drowning.
The Cull seeped into their bones. Quiet, heavy. The silence tasted like copper and dust, like something forgotten too long in the earth.
They didn't dream.
They remembered.
Ivar stirred first. Morning smeared across the broken ceiling. Dull and gray.
He hadn't moved.
Neither had the mirror.
He stared.
It stared back.
Then it smiled again.
He flinched. Raised his hand.
The reflection didn't follow.
Then it moved.
The wrong hand. Off-beat.
His stomach clenched.
Eighteen.
The number hit him like a cracked bell.
Memories pulsed: numbers scored into skin, syringes arranged like candles, the cold scrape of restraints. A woman's voice reciting numbers like lullabies.
Not a number.
A brand.
The Cull hadn't chosen him.
It had made him.
Lysa moved through the ruin with a new gait—measured, almost ritual. The Threadlings mirrored her. Not in mockery. In reverence.
"They follow you now," Rill said. "Like dogs or ghosts."
"They're not either," Lysa replied. "They're... alignment."
"Of what?"
"Fracture. They reflect pressure lines. Stress fractures in the city's mind."
Rill frowned. "That doesn't mean anything."
Lysa smiled, tight-lipped. "Not to you."
Rill found the note tucked beneath a cracked ossuary plate. Folded in half, stained dark.
One number. Repeated.
18.
She held it up to the light. The blood was dry, but still sticky.
She peeled a layer from the note. Underneath: sensor wax.
Her pulse jumped.
"This is a tag," she said.
"They're already coming," Lysa said. "There's no more hiding."
"And you're calm?"
"I'm not calm. I'm useful."
Fennel thrashed in his sleep.
In the marrow again. The spiral bled light. Ribs curled into themselves.
"You're the hinge," something whispered.
He tried to scream.
"Eighteen opens. But cracks first."
His teeth screamed against each other.
He woke gasping.
Blood ran from his mouth.
"It's not blood," he muttered. "It's memory. It's leaking."
The pylons wailed.
Not alarms. Mourning.
"Reaping Festival begins at dawn. Joy is compliance. Order is survival."
Lysa stood motionless.
Fennel twitched like a live wire.
Rill drew her blade.
"We run."
"They'll bracket us," Lysa said. "The grid's already shifting."
"Then we fight."
"No," Lysa said. "We shatter."
She turned to the Threadlings.
"They were born of fracture," she said. "Let them remind the Spine how easily it splits."
"You'd send them to die," Rill said.
"They're not dying. They're dispersing."
"You think that makes it cleaner?"
"I think it makes it matter."
Ivar still watched the mirror.
"You know what it is now?" Lysa asked beside him.
"A warning."
"No. An invitation."
He touched the glass. It was warm.
Not from him.
He lifted a shard.
In the reflection, his mother's smile wore someone else's teeth.
He screamed.
And shattered it.
Black ichor seeped from the cracks.
Fennel whimpered. "It listened too long."
"No," Lysa said. "It answered."
They fled. Through forgotten tunnels. Past the bones of older rituals.
The Cull shook behind them.
Fennel's hum turned into a counting.
Rill wiped blood from her mouth.
Ivar clutched his shard.
Lysa didn't look back.
Above them, Eelgrave swayed beneath red banners.
Not in joy.
But to hide the tremor.