The rumor starts as a breath in the tunnels and finds me on the warehouse roof before midnight, warm as a hand closing around my throat. They’re saying my name like it’s a fuse. From up here the undercity looks alive for the first time in years—lanterns and torches moving in currents, faces turned upward, the sound of feet gathering into a rhythm I can feel through the tar paper and rust under my boots.
Dominic comes up the ladder soft as a secret, breath fogging in the cold. “You hear it?”
“I do.” The wind stings my eyes. Down below, a child drags chalk across a brick wall in crooked letters: VEX. “It’s the sound of people remembering they’re not furniture.”
“And when fear remembers them back?”
“Then it can get in line.”
We drop into the light and heat of the warehouse and the night
