The tincture smelled of steeped toadflax and rusted iron. Vana pressed a square of coarse linen against Kresnik's flank, biting her lip until she tasted copper as he flinched. The gash Lyzra had torn across his ribs was wide, angry pink at the edges and weeping blackish ichor where the gladiator's blade had nicked an old suture. "Keep still, you mule," she murmured, her voice splintering into a breathless chuckle. "If you rip these stitches out, I'm using cobbler's twine on you." He didn't growl. He didn't even shift away from the sting of the disinfectant. Massive and hunched on the low pallet of the auxiliary ward, he looked carved from slate, his breathing a slow, grating heave against her knuckles. The infirmary smelled of damp slate and moldering bandages, tucked far below the roaring rings where the crowds still argued over the shattered match. Vana's hands trembled. The void where the old lullaby had nested felt like a hollowed marrow bone. She reached inward for the cadence that had always calmed him—the nursery rhyme from her scattered youth—and found only cold silt. The memory-broker had taken every note, every turn of phrase, leaving behind only the cold fact of what she had done. She had been his guardian once. She had thrown her own mind to the pyre to save his neck, and now the song was gone. Desperate to fill the silence before his chest tightened with the familiar, suffocating pressure of his affliction, she opened her mouth. A new melody spilled out. It was unsteady, cracked at the register, lacking the polished cadence of the ancient verse. It was jagged and raw, born of the dirt beneath her boots, the taste of arena dust, the bitter warmth of his blood on her palm. She hummed it through her teeth, her throat tight with unspilled grief. Kresnik went entirely motionless. His scarred brow lowered. His golden, beast-bright eyes fixed on her face, searching the tremor in her chin, the messy strands of hair plastered to her temple with sweat. Then, with a slowness that felt monumental, his thick hand lifted from his knee. He caught her right wrist. His skin was scorching, calloused like dried hide, yet his grip held no violence. He turned her palm toward the damp ceiling. With the blunt tip of his forefinger, pressing hard enough to indent the flesh without tearing it, he traced a line. A stem. A horizontal bar. A curve. *Y-O-U.* Vana stopped humming. Air lodged in her throat. He paused, dragging in a harsh gasp across his broken rib, before continuing. The blunt calloused pad moved again, deliberate, gouging the invisible letters into the sensitive skin of her palm. *C-A-M-E.* Vana looked down at the empty lines of her hand, then up into his gaze. There was no feral madness there. No churning tempest. Only the stark, naked gravity of a soul that had waited in an iron cage for centuries, recognizing the hand that unlocked the latch even if she wore a stranger's eyes. "I did," she whispered, her hand curling over his massive knuckles, squeezing until her joints turned white. "I came back, Kresnik. Even when I didn't know who I was coming for." A siren split the stone above them. It wasn't the dull gong of the arena matches. It was an iron screech, high and tearing, like metal teeth chewing through an anchor chain. The lamps overhead flared a sickly, toxic yellow as the grid shrieked. The door burst off its latch with a crack that bounced between the wet walls. "Pack it up! Pack it, hide it, run, run, run!" Petyr tumbled over the threshold, his leather coat bristling with clockwork pins, rusted needles, and cracked glass lenses. He hit the flags, skidded on the bloody wash water, and scrambled to his feet like an overturned beetle. "She's done it! The spider's pulled the web!" Vana stepped between the gremlin and Kresnik's pallet, her hackles rising instinctively. "Petyr? What is that alarm?" "The Culling!" Petyr shrieked, clutching his ears against the deafening sirens. He hopped from one foot to the other, his long ears twitching violently. "The arena conduits melted, Vana! Half the outer grid went black when you let that empathic filth loose! Morana is calling it an act of sabotage. A foreign strike. She invoked the city's self-preservation charter thirty seconds ago!" Kresnik rose. The motion was terrifyingly swift for a creature with split ribs. The bed frame groaned as his weight left it, his towering frame casting a long, dark mass across the floor. "What does that mean for us?" Vana demanded, her voice cutting through Petyr's frantic babbling. "It means no three-day grace period! It means the final round is tomorrow morning!" Petyr clawed at his matted whiskers, his yellow eyes wide with raw terror. "And it's not a bout for rank anymore. She invoked the Culling Protocol! The loser isn't exiled, Vana. The loser goes straight into the extraction retorts. Rendered down into fuel to recharge the boundary wardens! Both of you, if you don't gut each other for her amusement!" A cold, absolute stillness descended over Vana's limbs. "She's going to harvest us." "She's going to boil your souls into lantern oil!" Petyr screamed. Then, his frantic twitching arrested. He looked at Vana, then up at Kresnik, whose chin set hard as an anvil. The little creature reached into the lining of his tattered vest, his clawed hands trembling with uncharacteristic gentleness. He pulled out an object wrapped in greasy oiled rags. Unfurling it, he revealed a heavy, notched spindle of mismatched metals—brass teeth welded to silver rods, anchored by the tarnished casing of the surface locket Vana had traded him days ago. "You thought I was just stealing trash," Petyr whispered, his mischievous veneer peeling away to reveal something hollowed by decades of subterranean terror. "Everyone thinks Petyr just hoards pretty junk. But I knew the smith who built the old egress gate before Morana had him melted. He left the tumblers in pieces across the lower Warrens." He held the clumsy, patchwork key out toward Vana's stained palm. "It fits the iron hatch beneath the abandoned water sluice," the gremlin choked out, tears cutting clean paths through the soot on his cheeks. "The one that leads up. Past the salt caverns. All the way to the night sky. Take it. Leave tonight. Because tomorrow, you won't walk out of that pit." Vana looked at the key. She looked at Kresnik, whose chest rose and fell in silence, his eyes fixed on her with a decision already made.

An Unspoken Confession