When Jiang tried to answer Aylin, a raw contact call scraped out. Its exact shape had been stolen by Gredudande; hearing his own throat carry it filled him with disgust.
He clamped his beak shut.
Ruth understood. She raised one flour-dusted finger to her lips without touching him. "We will find another way. Save your strength and your voice."
Aylin reached toward the new mark under his breast feathers. Jiang snapped his beak beside her knuckles.
She pulled back at once. "That is fair. I should have asked."
The mark resembled a crack hidden under his white feathers. It offered neither warmth nor instruction, which made it easier to fear.
With the shelter open on its cool side, Ruth crossed into the kitchen. A metal pan struck another, making Jiang's neck pull low.
"Sorry," Ruth called. "My kitchen has opinions."
She returned with a black baking tray and flour. Keeping Jiang inside the shelter, she slid it within beak reach and dusted the metal white.
"Low technology has served this building well," she said. "Try not to sign away the chapel."
Jiang almost laughed. The attempt became a soft breath through his nostrils, stirring a pale cloud across the tray.
Aylin sat on the floor beyond the shelter. Her hands remained in her lap. "Tell us what it put inside you."
Jiang lowered his beak.
The first stroke pushed flour ahead of his beak. He angled the side of his bill and tried again. A crooked line appeared, blurred by his shaking neck.
He kept drawing through the tremor.
L O O K.
He rested his beak in the flour. Each forward lean pulled his shoulder wound, while the low left flipper offered little balance.
Ruth moved the wrapped heat farther along the shelter wall, keeping it indirect while he worked. "You may stop whenever you need."
Jiang added the second word.
O N C E.
The letters leaned into one another like people on a crowded train. They were ugly, legible, and his.
Aylin glanced toward the empty altar case. "The sight rod may look at the prison once."
Jiang tapped the tray rim with his beak.
"Only if you choose to let it," she said.
He tapped again, then dragged his beak sideways across a clean corner. Ruth caught the crude distinction.
"A tap is yes. A line is no," she said. "We can work with that."
Jiang turned the tray with one webbed foot. His claws slipped over the rim before finding purchase. Flour spilled onto the blanket.
Ruth looked down at the mess. "The chapel has survived worse confessions."
The second line took longer.
N O / R E L E A S E.
Aylin read it twice. Anger tightened her voice. "You bargained with a prisoner who wants freedom."
Jiang pointed to the words.
"I can read them," she said. "I also know what desperate beings hide inside careful promises."
Ruth folded her arms. "That sounds like experience worth sharing instead of a reason to scold him."
Aylin stared at the flour. Green light moved once beneath the skin around her bruised throat and went quiet.
"I was about to tear the Link apart when the second heartbeat passed," she said. "I thought the thing had taken him."
Jiang drew a line across an unused corner. No.
"It could have," Aylin answered. "You had no proof."
Neither had she. Jiang held her gaze until she looked away.
The third term started with a clean N and a square O. Before he finished the next word, pain had spread from his shoulder into his neck.
N O / C O N T R O L.
Aylin stopped breathing for the space between one shallow rise of his chest and the next.
"You made it repeat that?" she asked.
A tap confirmed the question.
"And the prison accepted the limit?"
Another tap answered her.
Aylin rubbed flour between her finger and thumb where the spill had reached the floor. "I never gave the others terms. I gave them instructions."
Jiang kept his beak above the tray.
"When they hurt, I called it synchronization," she said. "When they were afraid, I called it a test. I kept asking them to become the body I had chosen without asking what they needed to keep."
The four dead candidates needed no ghost or panel. Jiang remembered Aylin holding the bell shadow while admitting what her lesson had cost.
"I thought urgency made the choice mine," she said. "It never did."
Ruth crouched beside the tray. "Regret becomes useful when it changes your next decision. What is your next decision?"
Aylin looked at Jiang before answering. "His stop belongs to him. Even when I hate where it leaves us."
Jiang's anger stayed beside the memory of her hand closing around his wrist. He offered no unearned comfort, yet his beak gave her one tap.
Aylin bowed her head. "I understand."
The fourth message required rest. Jiang settled onto his breast while Ruth kept his chest free and the blanket loose. One side received warmth; his numb feet stayed curled toward the cooler opening.
When the ache in his neck eased, he wrote again.
M A R K / C A N / D I E.
Ruth read the line aloud. "You can destroy it by refusing the rod?"
A firm tap answered Ruth.
"Can it punish you for refusing?"
Jiang drew a clean line: no.
Aylin leaned nearer, staying outside beak range. "Can it speak through the mark?"
He tapped. Her hand closed around the compass chain. "Can it speak now?"
His beak drew a line.
"At a change in synchronization? One message each time?"
Two measured taps answered both questions.
Aylin's black-tipped ear flattened into her hair. "Then every evolution may announce you to whatever is inside that prison."
Her fear matched his. Jiang pointed from NO CONTROL to MARK CAN DIE, terms that allowed information while denying obedience and preserving retreat.
Ruth placed one finger beside LOOK ONCE. "Why carry it at all?"
Jiang nudged the dark silver shaving toward the tray. The compass needle followed it east and struck its green rim.
Then he touched the shaving to the flour beside NO RELEASE.
Aylin watched the needle tremble. "Because Gredudande wants the same rod. If the rod can reveal hidden cores, one look may expose it before it finds another body."
His beak knocked against the metal.
"May expose it," Ruth said. "There is honesty in that word."
She turned to Aylin. "Can you inspect the mark without warming him, opening it, or touching him?"
"I can look along my side of the Link. That proves its present state and little else."
Aylin held out her empty palm and waited.
Jiang considered the hand that had changed him, touched her wrist with the blunt side of his beak, and withdrew.
Green light circled the shelter without entering his body. It ran along the Spirit Link, reached the black-gold mark, and stopped at every hidden edge.
Two restrained lines crossed Jiang's sight.
[FOREIGN MARK: DORMANT]
[Synchronization: 50% | New Abilities: None]
No strength entered his feet. His damaged flipper remained low, his shoulder still burned, and his tail felt uneven beneath the blanket.
Aylin released the light. "I can see no draw through the Link. That proves only what it is doing now."
"Then now is all we claim," Ruth said.
The chapel landline rang from the kitchen. Ruth answered it while keeping Jiang in view.
Across the room, Samira reported that wildlife transport had reached Mercy Street with a veterinarian and warming equipment. The zoo kept her with the colony and the covered dog.
Ruth gave the driver the side entrance and ended the call.
"More people will see him," Aylin said.
"A secret ended when an injured penguin bled on my floor," Ruth replied. "I also called the priest who catalogued that case."
Aylin rose too quickly. The compass swung against her knee. "You invited a priest here after learning Jiang carries a prison mark?"
"I invited a man who handled our evidence. He may decline to believe the rest."
A knock sounded at the dry side door.
Ruth checked the window. A white wildlife van waited at the curb, while a broad man in a rain-dark coat stood on the step with reading glasses tangled around his neck.
Father Matthews entered, saw the emperor penguin under the soup table, and removed his wet shoes without being asked.
"Ruth," he said, "your telephone description showed admirable restraint."
"He has had a difficult morning."
"So have I, and only one of us is dressed for Antarctica."
Jiang decided the priest could stay.
Matthews knelt beside the case and examined its faded velvet, stamped tag, and silver shaving before acknowledging anything stranger.
His humor left him. "This is the case. Where is the rod?"
"Rome, according to your tag," Ruth said. "Why was it sent there?"
Father Matthews checked the open chapel, perhaps ensuring every ordinary shadow remained attached.
"The transfer order said provenance review," he replied. "That was the acceptable reason."
Aylin's compass needle struck east again.
Ruth waited. "And the true reason?"
Matthews touched the empty velvet channel. "The rod passed a dead priest during his vigil. Side-door light cast the body across the floor. Everyone saw what the silver revealed."
The copied penguin call came through the far chapel wall. It had grown fainter and farther east.
Jiang's mark remained cold under his feathers.
Father Matthews looked directly at him. "Something alive turned its head beneath the dead man's shadow. That is why they sent the rod to Rome."