The ground west of Carrion Market was built out of old death and newer bad decisions.
The outer ribs rose from the black stone in long pale curves, some whole, some broken, some snapped open so that hollow interiors showed through where marrow and structure had dried away long ago. Salvage lines had been tied across several of them in the past, then cut, retied, or abandoned depending on whether people still believed the routes were worth the risk. The whole area felt used but not owned, as if Carrion Market sent people across it often enough to matter and never enough to trust it.
Orren led the run with one of his Bone Runners a pace behind. Mara took the front edge of Leon's group, reading the direct line of approach and the places where cover narrowed. Pell moved unevenly, fast where the footing allowed it, slower where he was thinking. Toma held the center despite the leg, his face set in the blank, stubborn way people got when pain had become a fact instead of an event.
Leon watched the markers.
They were the clearest language out here.
Short burns on pale rib. Cut cloth tied under hook points. Knotted cord loops left half hidden in cracks where only the right angle of light made them visible. Once Pell pointed out a marker Leon would have missed entirely, a thread of gray fiber twisted twice around a splinter of bone at ankle height.
"Bone Runner pull line," Pell whispered. "Old correction mark."
Leon crouched beside it.
The knot had been turned inward after being set. Deliberately. The kind of small revision that mattered only to someone who knew how the route was supposed to read.
He looked ahead to the next visible mark on the line and then to the ground between them.
"Not leaked," he said.
Orren looked back. "What?"
Leon stood. "Not just leaked. Edited."
Orren's face sharpened. "How?"
"The route changes in sequence. Not one cut, not one wrong sign. It bends the team by degrees." Leon pointed ahead. "That mark says hold high. The next one probably drops them lower. Then another adjustment pushes them toward the corridor where the attack lands cleanest."
Pell looked from one marker to the next and then swore softly.
"He's right," he said. "No one would question the first change. Or the second. You'd only see the whole shape if you already knew where the line started."
Orren said nothing for several steps after that.
Then he said, "Keep moving."
They reached the smoke line faster than Leon expected and later than he wanted.
It wasn't a camp signal.
A shallow fire had been built in a low wind pocket between two rib stumps using oil-soaked salvage cloth and damp grass, enough to create a narrow visible line and nothing else. It had already burned itself down to blackened scraps and bitter smell by the time they arrived.
Orren crouched beside the remains and touched the ash once. "Fresh enough."
Mara looked over the surrounding ground. "No one stayed."
"Didn't need to," Leon said.
The smoke was not for warmth. Not for rescue either. It had been placed where someone moving out from the Market's western edge could see it and follow the line.
A lure.
Or a confirmation.
Or both.
The path beyond the smoke narrowed between rib fragments and dropped toward a broken haul corridor where old salvage crates lay shattered across the stone.
That was where the first creatures found them.
Three shell crawlers lifted from the wreckage almost at once, black wet backs scraping against the broken crate slats as they unfolded on too many limbs and moved in sharp, ugly bursts toward the nearest motion. One came straight for Orren. One cut toward Pell. The third climbed over the crate remains and drove itself at the center where Toma and Leon were crossing the narrowest strip of stone.
Mara moved first.
Her spear struck the nearest creature not in the head, but at the front joint where one limb met the shell. The angle broke its charge and spun it sideways into a crate frame. Orren finished it with a hooked blade driven under the side plate.
Pell went backward at speed, not panicked, just quick enough to become difficult. "I dislike all of this!"
The crawler chasing him leapt.
Leon saw the line before he felt the decision. Broken crate edge to the right. Sloped black stone under Pell's heel. If Pell kept retreating, he would lose footing and go down under the thing.
"Left!" Leon snapped.
Pell cut left instantly.
The creature struck where he would have been and skidded into the crate edge hard enough to crack the shell plate along one side.
Toma stepped in and drove the short hook weapon down with both hands. The blow landed badly for power and perfectly for angle, hooking into the cracked seam and tearing it open.
The third crawler reached Leon at the same moment.
He had no spear. No room for a clean retreat. The thing came low and fast, front limbs spread wide to catch him if he moved either direction.
Toma's earlier steadiness was still somewhere in Leon's memory, a physical certainty of how to set weight without wasting it. He reached for it on instinct.
The borrowed fragment came for half a second.
Leon shifted his right foot, let the crawler commit, then stepped just outside the line of its center and slammed the broken end of a crate board into the eye cluster as it passed.
Not elegant.
Enough.
The creature hit the stone, twisted, and Mara's spear took it through the side before it recovered.
Then the ground under the crate field cracked.
Not a loud break. A low, ugly sound.
Leon looked down.
The haul corridor had been holding on old supports beneath the surface stone, and the combined weight of them, the creatures, and the broken cargo had shifted too much onto one side. A line of fracture ran under Pell's feet and spread fast.
"Off the corridor!" Leon shouted.
Mara moved at once. Orren did too. Pell needed no encouragement.
Toma turned to push away and the bad leg gave under the motion.
Leon caught his arm and hauled him hard to the safer side just as the center section of the corridor dropped.
Not a full collapse.
A tearing fall.
Crates, shell fragments, and one twitching crawler vanished into the gap below in a rush of stone and dust.
Everyone stood still for one second after that, breathing hard and listening to the broken debris settle in the hollow beneath.
Pell looked down into the new split and swallowed. "I hate being right near the wrong things."
Orren looked at Leon. "You saw that early."
Leon nodded once.
Mara did not say anything, but he could feel the look she gave him before she turned away and started searching the far side of the corridor.
The remains of the west pull were scattered beyond the collapse.