Page 159

A place everything else bends toward—trailers built in rings like worship they refuse to name, fences angled like ribs, windows turned inward as if the settlement itself is trying to watch what happens next. The Iron Gospel made their world a mouth and taught it to hunger, and right in the middle of it, in the open where no one can pretend they didn’t see, is the blood altar.

It’s still scarred from the last time I was here.

The boards are blackened in a wide, ugly bloom, the kind of burn that doesn’t look accidental, the kind that tells you fire had purpose. Char climbs the posts like fingertips. Melted wax has hardened into pale tears along the edges. Rusted hooks hang from the crossbeam, swaying faintly in the thin morning wind, and when they move they make that soft metallic sound—like teeth worrying at bone, like a hymn that never finishes.

The altar still provides, not salvation, but proof—a place for every ruined thing that has nowhere else to go.

Shadow presses close enough to warm my calf. Malek walks beside me without touching me, which I register in the same quiet, involuntary way I register every weapon in a room. The space he gives me is restraint, not distance.

His gaze keeps sweeping the ruin, over rooftops and broken windows and the narrow gaps between trailers, copper bright, silver cold, both of them taking in too much at once. He looks like a man who survived by noticing every place death could fit. Still, every few seconds, his attention cuts back to me, catching on my shoulders, my hands, the way I haven’t loosened even though there’s nothing left here pretending to be alive.

I feel the Hollowborn at the edges before I see them clearly—attention in the air like pressure, like the world is being observed by something that doesn’t blink. Shapes threaded between the far trailers and the broken fence line. Heads tilted. Stillness that feels trained.

Shadow growls low beside me, and every old instinct in me waits for the dark to scatter. It doesn’t. The shapes beyond the trailers stay exactly where they are, watching with the patience of things that have forgotten fear but still remember command.

We step closer to the platform, boots thudding dull on packed dirt stamped flat by knees and spectacle and bodies dragged too many times for the earth to pretend it doesn’t remember. The smell here is layered—old smoke, stale incense, iron that lives in the throat and doesn’t leave, and beneath it all that sweet-sour rot the Gospel insists is sanctity.

And then I see him.

A Choir member, black-eyed and lingering near the far side of the altar as if he crawled out of it and decided to keep breathing out of spite. His gaze locks on us and sharpens, hungry with recognition that looks too much like entitlement.

“Saint,” he rasps, and the word lands wrong, coated in scripture and spit. “You can’t⁠—”

He steps forward like the altar belongs to him.

Like I belong to the Gospel.

I don’t reach for my hatchet, not because I don’t want it.

Because the altar is already offering me something else.

My gaze drops to the scorched center, to the blackened boards where the fire took and took and still didn’t cleanse the stain beneath it. Something sits there in the char—a dark curve of metal half-sunk into ash, as if the altar tried to swallow it and couldn’t.

The iron crown.

Warped by heat. Jagged at the points. Its edges burnt dull instead of gleaming, like the fire stripped it of ceremony and left it raw. There’s soot ground into every groove, and when the wind shifts I catch a faint metallic smell off it that isn’t blood exactly, but knows the shape of it.

My pulse thunders in my ears.

Not because I’m afraid of the Choir member.

Because I remember.

The moment I scorched this place to free Malek and Cass, the way the flames climbed like anger finding language, the way the Gospel screamed like it couldn’t stand being told no. I remember the crown being lifted, being presented, being treated like proof of holiness—like cruelty, given a name, becomes a sacrament.

I step onto the platform.

The boards creak under my weight, a low complaint, and I feel every eye in Marrow Ridge tighten on me through dirty windows and cracked doors. The Choir member’s mouth curls, like he thinks he’s watching the beginning of a sermon.

I bend and pick the crown up.

It’s heavier than it looks, cold despite the scorch, the metal biting into my palm like it wants to be held. Ash smears across my skin. My fingers come away black.

Behind me, Malek goes still, his body not startled by the shift so much as ready for it, braced like a man who learned a long time ago that warning usually arrives one breath too late.

Knowing exactly what I hold in my hands.

The Choir member laughs once—thin, wrong. “That’s not yours.”