By the time Mara signed LATCH-0 out of Quill’s inspection tray, the rain had stopped and the yard roofs were steaming in strips of weak morning sun.
Tarin had slept eight hours because Mara had stood at the foot of the loft ladder the night before and told him that if he came down before the kettle whistled twice, she would lock the workshop herself. The sleep had done what sleep was supposed to do. Charge was full again. Stamina had come back. The ache in his knuckles had settled into something he could ignore, and the last of the authoring strain was gone.
It had not made the knife less strange in his hand.
LATCH-0 sat in a plain leather sheath at his belt, tagged with Quill’s inspection strip and his authorship mark. Inert, it was still only a compact utility blade with the geometry he had built into it: edge, catch, narrow hook, a body that could be braced into a gap without snapping the first time something leaned on it.
Mara tapped the oilskin envelope on the counter between them.
“Service chamber twelve,” she said. “Three housings. You mark condition, you copy the municipal stamps, you bring the sheet back. You do not remove an infrastructure card because it looks abandoned.”
“I know.”
“You know lots of things immediately after I say them.”
Tarin put the envelope in his satchel. “Cinder stays here.”
“That was not a question.” Mara’s gaze moved to the knife. “Neither is the hold.”
Across the yard, Cinder remained under hold. No field test. No clever exception. Tarin felt the absence anyway.
Mara handed him the municipal access chit. “And Vale?”
He looked back.
“This isn’t a demonstration.”
He almost told her he knew that too. Instead he tucked the chit beside the oilskin envelope and left.
The Old Riverworks began below street level with cold rust, mineral water, and the sound of machinery too large to care who had permission to be there.
The access route was legal, which meant doors with numbers instead of broken locks. Tarin showed the chit twice, descended a service stair, crossed a grated landing above fast gray water, and followed blue-white instrument lamps into the older concrete. The deeper ways were sealed or collapsed. He had no reason to go near them.
Service chamber twelve held exactly what the Quill contract said it held: three obsolete housings bolted above a dry return channel, all of them still municipal property until somebody with the right signature said otherwise.
Tarin crouched, checked the first casing, and wrote down the split at the lower hinge. The second had mineral bloom under the retaining band. The third had been opened before, badly, then wired shut by someone who had cared more about finishing than making the next worker happy.
He pressed the municipal stamp through the rubbing sheet, folded the evidence copy into the oilskin envelope, and slid it back into his satchel.
Something clicked in the corridor.
Not metal settling. Too fast.
Tarin went still with one hand on the satchel strap.
Another click answered from behind him.
He turned.
The first hound stood where the corridor widened around a broken drain lip. Its back was plated in dirty translucent glass, each overlapping shard catching the instrument glow at a different angle. It was bigger than he had expected from old yard stories. Not taller by much. Heavier. Built low enough that its shoulders seemed to arrive before the rest of it.
A second shape moved beyond the lamp.
Then a third crossed the service doorway behind him.
Four.
His thumb dug into the side of his index finger.
The nearest hound did not rush. It stepped left.
The one behind him stepped right.
They were moving him.
Tarin pulled LATCH-0 free.
The click changed.
The nearest hound’s shoulders locked. Glass plates flattened over one another with a dry little sound, front to back, until the line facing him looked less like an animal’s hide and more like a stack of chipped shields.
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Tarin did not need a theory for that.
He needed not to put the knife there.
The third hound lunged from the side.
Tarin jumped the dry channel instead of meeting it. His heel clipped concrete. The hound’s jaws shut where his calf had been, and the force of its turn sent mineral grit against his face.
He ran.
The satchel hit his hip every other stride. Behind him claws struck concrete in a broken rhythm—two close, one farther, another cutting across rather than following.
Herding.
The legal exit was back through the corridor they had taken from him.
So he stopped trying to reach it.
A narrow maintenance cut opened on his left, half-blocked by a bent service gate. Tarin hit it shoulder-first, jammed LATCH-0’s hook into the warped latch, and pulled. The knife held. The latch did not.
The gate opened enough for him to slip through sideways.
A hound hit it before he could clear his arm.
Steel slammed the wall. The knife tore out of his grip and skittered under the rail.
For half a second Tarin stared at the empty shape of his hand.
Then he dropped flat, caught the sheath cord loop with two fingers, and dragged LATCH-0 back before the second hound could put a paw on it.
Close range. Disarmable.
The words would have been funny at a bench.
Here they were just his hand shaking around the grip.
The narrow cut bought him six breaths. Maybe seven.
It did not buy him safety.
The passage bent toward a pump gallery. Tarin could hear the machinery now—not the distant underworks hum, but a repeated hammering churn that traveled through the wall and into his teeth. A blue-white service lamp flashed with each cycle.
Between him and it lay an open maintenance bay.
Too open.
One hound appeared behind him. Another came through a side gap ahead.
Tarin’s hand went to the satchel.
The oilskin envelope was still there.
He could throw the whole bag.
The thought lasted one step.
Then he saw Mara’s ledger hand in his head, saw the municipal stamps, saw exactly how quickly “lost during unauthorized removal” could become Quill’s problem even if he survived to explain it.
Not the bag.
He ripped the used residue cloth from the outside tool loop instead. The rag had spent the morning wiping mineral film and old card-residue dust from the housings. It smelled stronger than he did.
Probably.
He threw it hard into the side passage.
The nearer hound’s head snapped toward it. Not obediently. Not stupidly. It checked for one heartbeat, scent winning just long enough to break the angle.
Tarin took the heartbeat.
He sprinted across the bay.
The fourth hound came in from his right.
He saw the shoulders begin to flatten and did not cut at them. He turned the knife in his hand, dropped his weight, and aimed for the gap beside the service rail instead.
LATCH-0’s narrow hook caught the rail eye.
Tarin swung around it rather than stopping.
The hound committed to where his chest had been.
Its plated shoulder passed the knife at an angle.
The edge bit behind the braced plates.
Momentum did the rest.
There was a hard tearing sound. The hound twisted away with a cry that vanished under the machinery. A deep diagonal wound opened from behind its right shoulder ridge down toward the upper foreleg, dark blood running between pale glass plates. It hit the floor, rolled once, and came up on three legs.
Alive.
Very alive.
Tarin had already lost the anchor point. LATCH-0 ripped free and nearly left his hand again.
The other hounds came over the bay lip.
He ran for the pump gallery.
His lungs hurt now. Not the clean burn of yard labor. This was deeper, every breath arriving late. His legs had begun to feel as if somebody had replaced the joints with hot wire.
The pump gallery opened around a spill channel wider than the street above. Water slammed through black concrete below, fast enough that the spray trembled in the air. Old machinery cycled along the wall in steel housings, each stroke loud enough to blur the next thought.
A grated maintenance bridge crossed the channel to a service stair.
Tarin hit the bridge.
The first hound followed three strides onto the grate, then balked when the pump hammered beneath it. Its claws spread against the vibrating metal.
A second crowded behind it, snapped, backed away, tried again.
Tarin did not wait to learn which instinct would win.
The far gate had swollen crooked in its frame. He shoved. Nothing.
Behind him, claws scraped across the first third of the bridge.
He put LATCH-0 into the gate seam and leaned.
Not powered. No second clause. No impossible strength.
Just a blade he had authored to survive being used as more than a blade.
The seam opened a finger-width.
Tarin changed the angle and pushed again.
The gate screamed against rust.
A hound barked behind him—sharp, furious, close enough that he could hear the wetness in it.
The gap widened.
Tarin shoved the oilskin envelope through first.
Then he went after it.
His satchel caught.
For one stupid instant the strap held him halfway through while the bridge rang under approaching weight.
Tarin did not pull harder.
He cut the secondary strap.
The leather snapped. The satchel dropped through with him, hit the stair, and spilled nothing because he had buckled it properly for once in his life.
He kicked the gate shut from the far side and climbed.
The hounds did not follow into the stairwell.
Not immediately.
Tarin made himself keep moving until the machinery was below him, then until the spray smell weakened, then until the municipal access lamps changed from old blue-white to plain workroom yellow.
Only behind a locked service door did his knees stop cooperating.
He sat on the concrete with the evidence envelope between his boots and LATCH-0 still in his hand.
The blade edge was nicked. The hook had a bright scrape where the rail eye had tried to keep it. His palm was bleeding from somewhere small enough that he had not noticed it happen. His right hip was going to bruise spectacularly.
The oilskin envelope was dry.
He laughed once, without meaning to, and it hurt his ribs enough that he stopped.
A System notice waited at the edge of his vision.
Below it, the resource line was less celebratory.
Tarin dismissed the panel.
No level. No second slot. No sudden answer.
Just the evidence packet, the cut strap, the damaged edge on a tool he had made, and the knowledge that four hounds had almost turned a legal inspection route into a place nobody would have found him until the next utility shift.
He got up because staying on the floor would not make the walk back shorter.
At the last high landing, he looked through the grated window into the lower gallery.
Three shapes moved in and out of the instrument glow.
The fourth stood farther back.
The injured adult held its right foreleg clear of the ground. Blood had dried black along the long diagonal tear behind its shoulder. Even at that distance the mark was unmistakable: a pale wedge of split plate above a dark slash that ran down toward the leg.
It did not cross the bridge.
It watched the stair Tarin had used.
Then it lifted its head toward him, and stayed there while the machinery hammered between them.