One dead Bone Runner lay half turned against a rib support with his chest opened by something sharp enough to leave the clothing in ribbons. Another body was missing entirely, but there was enough blood to say the absence was not luck. A salvage hook line had been cut from above, not broken in struggle. The line itself still hung from the higher rib, one end swinging free with the fibers sliced clean.
Human hand.
Not a creature's tear.
Pell crouched by the dead runner's side and touched the ground near the body without touching the body itself.
"Dragged?" he asked.
Leon joined him and looked.
"No," he said. "Dropped."
He pointed to the broken line, then to the scrape marks in the dust below. "The hook load fell here after the line was cut. It pinned him or threw him into the kill lane."
Orren's face looked carved from harder material now.
Mara had found the next thing.
"Here," she said.
The missing runner's trail started in blood, then turned into one dragging foot line and one knee mark where the person had forced himself onward after the attack. It did not lead back toward the Market.
It led down.
Beyond the broken corridor, between two split rib arches, a narrow opening dropped into the carcass below, where pale interior bone curved inward around a shadowed channel of black water and half collapsed salvage ladders.
The air coming out of it smelled wrong.
Wet.
Stale.
Close.
Pell stared into the opening and said, "No."
Orren looked at the blood trail. "He went down there."
"No," Pell said again, more sharply. "No one goes down there unless they are being chased, dying, or catastrophically stupid."
Toma shifted beside Leon and looked into the cut. "Then we know at least one of the conditions."
Leon followed the trail one last time with his eyes.
The missing runner had not chosen a strange escape line in panic. The blood marks bent around the safer outer shelf and toward the interior channel with too much consistency. He had been driven.
Or forced.
Mara adjusted her grip on the spear and said, "We're going in."
Pell made a soft, defeated sound.
And below them, from somewhere inside the carcass cut, something moved in the dark water.
Chapter 27 - Marrow Cut
The descent into the Marrow Cut was narrow, wet, and wrong from the first step.
A broken salvage ladder had once offered the cleanest line down, but half the rungs were gone, and the lower section hung split away from the bone wall where something heavy had torn through it. They had to use the remains only for the first drop, then shift to a series of pale shelves and carved natural ridges that curved along the interior of the carcass.
The bone inside was smoother than the outer ribs and darker in places where damp had sunk into it over time. Black water lay pooled in channels below, not deep enough to hide large movement completely, but dark enough to make guessing dangerous. Old salvage lines crossed overhead, some snapped, some hanging loose, some still tied into anchors that no longer looked trustworthy.
No one spoke above a whisper.
Even Pell understood that.
Sound traveled badly here. Or too well. Leon couldn't decide which. A dropped pebble ticked against one wall and came back from three directions. The drip of water from above seemed to move when he wasn't looking at it. The whole place felt like a structure and a grave at the same time, and neither version wanted them inside it.
The blood trail was still there.
Thinner now, but enough.
It moved down to a lower ledge on the far side of the cut where the channel widened. Something pale lay there, partly obscured by a jutting bone spur and a hanging salvage line.
The missing runner.
Alive, unless the movement Leon saw was only the tremor of the line in the damp air.
Orren saw him too and exhaled once through his teeth. "Riven."
Mara crouched at the edge of the upper shelf and scanned the lower ground. "Distance?"
"Too far for a clean pull," Orren said. "Close enough to die trying."
That was accurate.
The route to the ledge ran along a narrow rib curve to the left, then down across two broken support beams and one sloped section of slick interior bone where a fall would dump a body into the black channel below. The water there was moving very slowly.
Leon did not like that.
Water that slow usually meant depth or obstruction.
Possibly both.
Pell pointed with two fingers. "That lower beam is cracked."
Mara nodded once. "I see it."
Toma stayed a half step back where the footing gave him more room to plant the bad leg. He looked at Riven, then at the channel below.
"Can he move?"
As if to answer, the missing runner shifted weakly on the lower ledge and made a sound that barely reached them.
Alive.
Not for long.
Orren said, "I go."
"No," Mara replied at once. "You go down first and the crack goes under your weight if he panics and grabs you."
"He's mine."
"He's dying," Mara said. "Make a better argument."
Orren looked like he wanted to answer with his hands.
Leon spoke first.
"Mara opens the path," he said. "Pell reads the beam. Toma anchors the upper line. Orren goes only on the last stretch where he can actually get him up."
All three looked at him.
He kept going because the shape was already there.
"The first problem isn't the rescue," he said. "It's everything below the ledge waiting for us to make noise."
As if in answer, something moved under the black water.
Not a full body. A pale line.
Then another.
Pell whispered, "I hate this place more than I thought possible."
Mara said, "Good. Stay sharp."
They moved.
Toma anchored the highest salvage line around a rib spur that still held firm, testing the strain once before locking it down. Pell went to the left curve and checked the cracked beam by dropping his weight in tiny careful shifts and listening to the response in the wood and bone. Mara took the spear in one hand and the line in the other and started across first, feet placed with exact economy on the wet, pale surface.
Leon followed her with his eyes and tried not to think ahead too quickly.
That lasted three seconds.
The lower channel beneath Riven's ledge held more movement now. Slow. Gathering.
Creatures.
Not shell crawlers this time. Something longer. The black water broke around a narrow pale back and then closed again.
He looked upward instead, along the salvage lines and broken supports.
There.