Chapter 7
They didn’t climb higher into the Tangle. Obi led them down, onto broader catwalks and steadier stairs, then paused at a landing where the market’s din swelled up like heat.
"Field trip’s been fun," he said, already walking backward with that lopsided grin of his, "but it would be a better idea to leave now... You never know who lurks around the corner"
Raizen blinked. "Oh, your bravery suddenly disappeared??"
"Better to be safe than sorry" Obi tapped the tip of his nose. "I’m everywhere, rember? And if anyone gives you trouble later, tell them you know the loudest smith in the Underworks."
Raizen almost smiled. "That’s not a rank."
"It is when I say it is." Obi winked, then spun and threaded into the crowd, curls vanishing like a thrown coin in smoke.
Left on their own, Raizen and Hikari drifted along the periter of the market, keeping to the shade of pillars black with soot. The city beneath the city breathed around them - steam hissing from valves, chains clinking sowhere in the rafters, a generator thumping like a slow, iron heart. From above, the Tangle crossed and re-crossed itself, a hand-stitched sky of wire, tal and pipe; a second city casting its net over the first.
They turned down a lane where lanterns hung low and close, their glass fogged white with mineral bloom. A woman hawked boiled root from a dented pot. A boy hamred horseshoe-shaped scrap into sothing like a knife. Chalk arrows and symbols - so fresh, so aged to ghosts - pointed toward vents and places you shouldn’t go.
The noise thinned. Ahead, a knot of people had ford in a shallow, open space where the floor dipped like a basin. Raizen felt the change before he understood it: a hunger in the air, a tightening in bodies, the way laughter frays and disappears.
In the center stood a man with a ledger chained to his wrist. Two bruisers flanked him, leather coats creaking, batons hooked at their belts. On the ground, a thinner man knelt on both knees, palms up and empty, his cheeks hollowed by long hunger. A girl clung to his sleeve, her eyes too large for her face.
"You’re late again," the ledger-man said, calm as a cut. He turned a page, the paper whispering like a threat. "And less, again."
"I’ll make it right," the kneeling man whispered. "Work’s been bad, but please, another week."
"You had another week." The ledger-man glanced at the crowd - at the way most looked away, and the way a few did not. "The debt grows when you don’t feed it. That’s how debts live."
Hikari took a step forward before she knew she had. Raizen’s hand found her wrist, not hard, but enough. She looked back at him; he didn’t shake his head, but everything in his face was a quiet no.
Her fingers had curled into knuckles without her noticing. "Nobody’s going to help...?" Her voice was level; only her eyes shook.
Raizen swallowed. His bandaged hand twitched uselessly against his side. "At least they didn’t make it worse by beating him again..."
They quickly turned away in silence after that, not wanting to be witnesses any longer. The market’s colors seed duller. The food slls turned the stomach. Above, the Tangle kept tracing its web, indifferent as weather.
By the ti they turned toward Takeshi’s door, the weight in their legs wasn’t fatigue. It was knowledge.
Takeshi sat at the workbench, as he always used to, distracting himself with small gadgets or trinkets. His tal hand was still, palm up, as if he’d been contemplating its emptiness.
He looked them over once, a watchman’s sweep: the dust on their boots, the way their shoulders sat, the way Hikari held herself an inch tighter than before. "You saw enough?"
"Enough," Raizen said. The word felt small.
Takeshi nodded toward the table. "I don’t have anything else for now... Eat." Two bowls of cold stew waited, Takeshi’s clumsy doing, by the mushy consistency. Neither reached for them. They just sat in silence, a silence the underworks taught them that can be so precious.
Finally, Takeshi asked:
"So. What is it you want?"
Raizen had been carrying the answer like a live coal since the village fell. He didn’t know if this was the right ti, only that it was the only ti he had.
"I want to kill them," he said. His voice surprised him with how steady it was. "All of them."
Takeshi didn’t blink. "Who?"
"The Nyxes." Raizen’s throat tightened, but the words did not. "Every last one."
He expected argunt, laughter, a long lecture about impossible things. Takeshi only watched without moving at all, the kind of stillness that made rooms feel colder. Sowhere in the walls, steam hissed.
"And you?" Takeshi asked without moving his gaze, though Raizen knew the question traveled to Hikari. She could have said sothing strange, sothing literal, sothing that didn’t belong. She had many of those. Instead, she simply said "I’ll follow him."
There was no vow under it, no oath. Only the clarity of a true thing that did not need dressing. Takeshi exhaled, a breath that could have ant a dozen things. He wrapped the tal fingers of his prosthetic around the edge of the table and let them click once, softly, against the wood. The sound felt like the last tick before a clock strikes.
"You want to live long enough to try," he said at last. "Then you need more than anger and luck. You need to be torn down and built back in the right order." Takeshi pushed his chair back and stood, the old joints of it complaining. He reached for a thick cloak from a peg and threw it around his shoulders, the hood shadowing half the eyepatch and the cable of scar that ran under it. "There’s a place."
Hikari looked from Raizen to Takeshi. "Where?"
Takeshi’s mouth pulled at one corner – a gesture that you couldn’t exactly call a smile. "Sowhere that’s not on maps."
He took a small key from a concealed pocket and slipped it into the inner seam of his tal wrist, turning it with a practiced flick. The fingers tightened, then loosened with a cleaner whir. In that one unconscious gesture, Raizen understood that Takeshi had been deciding this since the mont they stepped in. They followed him into the corridor. The Underworks always seed to echo, but Takeshi’s path found the spaces where sound died. Past the market’s edge, down a service tunnel where condensation ran in cold threads along bolted seams, through a chamber of sleeping boilers whose bellies ticked as they cooled. Chalk marks on the walls - circles crossed, arrows reversed - caught the lamplight and hid again.
They crossed under a rattling grate where the Tangle’s lowest ropes thrumd like a plucked instrunt. Hikari glanced up at the netted ceiling; the glow of lanterns in the sh made her eyes drink light and turn it blue.
"Is this... legal?" Raizen asked, more to fill the hush than to get an answer.
Takeshi’s shoulders didn’t move. "Legal is a word the people above use when they co below."
They reached a junction where three tunnels t and argued quietly in drafts. Takeshi chose the narrowest, one that bent sooner than it should have. The floor changed under their feet - from rough stone to a tal grate, then to sothing that was neither, a composite that humd faintly, as if it rembered electricity.
Takeshi stopped before a door that didn’t look like a door. To anyone else, it was just a wall panel where the paint had surrendered to ti, hidden under the scab of corrosion. Rust powdered the floor beneath in a fine, dark snow.
He rested his flesh palm against one rectangle of tal no bigger than a book. Under his hand, a line of light breathed, thin as a scalpel. Sowhere within the wall, a lock woke up and started whirring. A faint, but ominous sound.
"Before the Wardens," he said, and his voice had a different weight now, a history’s, "before half the gangs that think they own these halls, a different kind of order trained here. Not good. Not bad. Simply useful. I was part of it, once."
He pressed his palm again. The seam split with a sigh that echoed too far into the dark, and the door slid aside on rails that complained softly, as if they resented being asked.
Cold air breathed out to et them, smooth and sterile, so unlike the Underworks that Raizen’s skin prickled. Takeshi stepped aside, not in invitation, but in warning. "You asked what you want," he said. "This place will ask you what you’re willing to lose to get it."
Raizen swallowed. Hikari’s shoulder brushed his, light as thought. Neither of them spoke. "Welco," Takeshi said quietly, as if saying it any louder would wake sothing best left sleeping.
"To the Rust Room."
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