They came on the second day.
He heard them before they reached the shop — the pause-and-backtrack rhythm of a search pattern, multiple people, deliberate. Not monsters. He gripped the knife, pressed into the corner, and waited.
Voices from the front. Strangers, none from Fengate's permanent roster, none from Sora's group — he'd catalogued both well enough to know. The flat practical tones of people doing a job. Drawers opened. Shelves disturbed. Someone said the register was empty, someone else said that meant someone had gotten there first, a brief argument about it.
"Shop like this has a back operation." A man's voice. The certainty of someone who had done this many times. "Find the stairs."
Kael closed his eyes. Not fear — something quieter, past fear. He had understood somewhere in the second day of waiting alone that this was the shape the exit would take. He'd been too weak to do anything about it regardless: three days without food, the weakness coming in at the joints first, his hands slightly wrong.
He heard them find the door.
✦ ✦ ✦
It was wood. Voss had meant to replace it with iron. It came in on the second impact, frame splitting along the grain, and four men descended with lamps high and weapons out and stopped when the light found him in the corner.
"There's a child," said the one at the stairs.
The broadest one looked at Kael with no particular expression. Heavy build, the kind of body that came from specific professional history. "Money and stock. Where."
Kael said nothing. The money was wherever Voss kept it — the old man had never told him. The stock was on the shelves upstairs in plain sight.
The man crossed the room, grabbed his shirt, pulled him upright, and hit him open-handed across the face — calibrated, communicating seriousness rather than doing damage. Kael's ears rang. He kept his face still.
"Money and stock."
"Nothing down here but monster parts," said one of the others, moving through the shelves.
"Register and food upstairs," called the one at the stairs. Then: "What do we do with him?"
The broad man looked at Kael with the assessment of someone doing arithmetic. Age. Condition. Current market rate for a T-unknown boy who was, despite three days without food, still in functional shape.
"Wagons."
✦ ✦ ✦
He talked.
He was not a person who begged — had worked specifically against it, had understood since early Fengate that presenting as someone who could be pushed into panic was an invitation. But he talked now: quickly, practically, in the only terms that might apply. He knew the processing system. Cataloguing, mana-trace readings, tier identification, joint anatomy for every monster class in the Duskfen registry. A skilled processor was worth years of training. The wagons would get a fraction of that value —
The broad man hit him again. Fist, short, to the side of the head. White at the edges.
"They all do," the man said, to no one in particular, and handed him off.
✦ ✦ ✦
They took him up through the ruined shop — front window broken, shelves half-emptied, door hanging open — and out into Fengate.
He saw it properly for the first time. Three buildings on the main street structurally damaged. One collapsed to its foundations. Bloodstains on the market square stone. Carrick Dune — T3 Hunter, had grown up in Valdenmere and mentioned it often — lying near the east well in the jacket Kael had seen him in a hundred times. He looked. He filed it. He kept moving.
Multiple salvage groups moved through the wreckage with the efficiency of people who understood that recovery windows under Valdenmere law were narrow. Monster kills in a permanent settlement triggered legal salvage rights, which meant everyone who'd come for it was moving fast.
At the far end of the street: the grey-and-crossed-chain banner of Sora's mercenary group. Working — monster bodies tagged and assessed, grid search systematic. T4-plus fighters doing T4-plus work, efficient and professional.
He was close enough to call out. He ran the arithmetic: a professional mercenary crew under contract, a T1 boy being walked to the slave wagons, and the question of what that arithmetic produced. It didn't produce rescue. He kept walking.
✦ ✦ ✦
The wagons were on the northern road. Three of them, canvas-covered, two guards per wagon who did this specifically. Four people already inside — two men, a woman, a girl younger than him with the stillness of someone who had gone somewhere inside themselves and shut the door behind them.
He was put in. The door locked.
He sat against the side wall and felt the pendant against his chest — still there, still warm, the warmth it always had that he had never examined too carefully because the examination led to questions he didn't yet have the tools for.
He thought about Voss. The step that had gone quiet early in the attack. What it meant that the old man had said come on then to a crying ten-year-old at the city gate and never explained why, for eight years, and what it meant that in the monster registry there was a single survivor named Deren Voss listed against a creature called The Pale, who had been unable to speak for three months afterward.
He thought about a voice in a dream — male, low, fraying with pain: protect this child.
He thought about a T1 test result and a tester who had looked at the instrument twice and written something in his ledger and said nothing. He thought about mana traces that registered as dead rather than absent. He thought about a pendant that had always been warm and a symbol he had never been able to read.
He thought about Sora's group — decent, professional, contracted for something in Fengate they hadn't explained. He thought about the fact that they were still there, working the recovery, and that the wagon was heading north.
The wagon began to move.
He kept his face still, his hands open on his knees, his breathing even — the way Voss had taught him to sit when something was wrong and nothing could yet be done about it.
Yet.
— End of Chapter Seven —