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Something moves outside the structure.

Not people.

I know the difference.

The Hollowborn don’t approach the way humans do. There’s no rhythm to them. No negotiation with space. They don’t walk toward something—they collect around it, like rot deciding where it belongs.

I don’t see them.

I feel them.

A pressure along the edges of the room. A subtle tightening in the air, like breath being measured by something that doesn’t need lungs. The scars across my chest itch—not the wounds themselves, but the places around them, like my body is trying to remember where the leash used to be.

They’re close.

They always listened to me before.

Not because they obeyed.

Because I was loud in the way things that have been claimed are loud. Scripture does that to a body. It teaches the world how to read you.

Now—Nothing.

The Hollowborn hesitate.

I feel it distinctly: a falter, then a recalibration. They circle instead of closing in. Drift where they used to converge. One of them lets out a low, wet sound, searching and confused, like a dog that has lost the scent it was bred to die following.

The Ridge burned loud enough to tear holes in old commands.

I’m no longer the signal.

That should feel like freedom.

It feels like being cut loose mid-fall.

The space I’m in is temporary. I know it by the way the walls don’t pretend permanence, by the antiseptic smell failing to cover smoke and blood. Black Harvest triage. Functional. Ugly. Honest. No altars. No scripture etched into bone.

Good.

I don’t deserve comfort.

Memory bleeds in whether I want it or not.

Not the fire. Not the crown screaming as it melted. Not his voice collapsing into something that wasn’t language anymore.

The choice.

That’s the part that stays.

I knew they were moving.

The Iron Gospel always moved before dawn when they wanted to turn someone into a lesson. I knew the signs days ahead: tightened patrols, too many bodies on the ridge, the Choir rehearsing until the same hymn started sounding less like worship and more like a weapon being sharpened.

I warned Cass enough to unsettle her.

Not enough to save her.

I told myself I was buying time. I told myself I could only move one piece at a time without tipping the whole board. I told myself warning all of them would make the Gospel adjust, that pulling Scarlett from the house would draw eyes faster, that if Selah knew too much too soon, she would run straight into the teeth of it with a blade in her hand and no plan for coming back.