Chapter 56: The Old Shop

The shop was smaller than Kael had imagined.

On the way there, the streets weren’t as empty as they’d first seemed. A family was boarding up their apartment window, the father driving in nails while the mother handed them over one by one without looking at him. A man sat on the curb listening to a small radio that kept cutting out, half the words coming through clearly, something about "staying indoors after dark" and "instructions to follow soon" from an authority that no longer existed to issue any instructions at all. Two kids leaned out of an upper window, then vanished quickly when their mother called them back inside in a sharp voice.

At the corner, an old woman passed them dragging an empty shopping cart, and stared at the mark on Kael’s wrist a second too long before hurrying off without a word.

The city hadn’t died. It had just learned how to hide, and how to pretend not to see what it didn’t want to see.

The shop’s door was rusted iron, its sign broken, the name on it barely legible. Dana stood in front of it for a long moment before she moved her hand to unlock it.

"Aren’t you going to open it?" Kael asked.

"I’m opening it." She didn’t move.

"Dana."

"Fine, fine." She put the key in, then stopped again, hand still on the lock. "Last time I was in here I was fifteen."

"What happened after that?"

"After that I closed the door and left, and never came back."

Nobody knew what to say to that, so they stayed quiet until Dana finally pushed the door open, and it swung with a loud creak that made everyone step back.

"Good God," Nadia said. "Does everything in this city have to make a terrifying noise?"

Inside was dark, full of metal tools hanging on the walls, and one big worktable in the middle covered in old spare parts under a layer of dust. The smell of oil and metal still hung in the air, even after all the years it had been closed.

Mira sat Kael down in a chair by the table immediately. "Your hand. Now."

"I’m fine."

"Your hand, Kael."

He held it out. His palm was red, a clear burn line across it, and Mira looked at him with the expression that meant she was about to say something he wouldn’t like.

"This is going to hurt," she said, and pressed something cold onto the wound without waiting for a response.

"AH—!" Kael jumped out of his seat, his knee hit the edge of the table, and a pile of rusty screws clattered to the floor.

"Sorry," Mira said, not looking sorry at all.

"You said it would hurt! You didn’t say it would kill me!"

"You’re exaggerating."

Dana laughed from the corner, digging through a drawer. "Best thing I’ve seen in two hours."

Nadia sat on the floor, back against the wall, notebook open on her knee. "Okay. Is someone going to talk about the fact that people are paying money to catch Kael, or are we all going to pretend we forgot that little detail?"

"It could be the Registrar," she said, after a short silence. "We saw their headquarters with our own eyes. We talked to their First Governor. If there’s one group in this city that knows Kael’s name, it’s them, before anyone else."

"I don’t think so," Kael said suddenly, looking at his bandaged hand. "That rod that man was carrying. It wasn’t like anything we’ve seen from the Registrar. No symbols, no code, no system messages coming off it. It was... different. Simpler, and heavier, at the same time."

Nadia paused, pen hanging in the air. "Maybe they’re hiding technology we haven’t seen yet."

"Maybe," Kael said. "But something about it didn’t feel right. The Registrar loves paperwork and records and order. That man wasn’t carrying any of that. He was carrying a tool. That’s it."

"Then who else wants you badly enough to pay for you?" Dana asked.

"That’s what I don’t know," Kael said.

At that moment, they heard footsteps coming from a small door behind the worktable. Everyone jumped up, Dana faster than anyone, grabbing the nearest metal tool she could find.

"Who’s there?!" she shouted.

An old man stepped out of the dark, tall, thin, wearing an old coat covered in oil stains, and threw his hands up the second he saw the tool in her hand.

"I just came to check on the noise, I swear," he said quickly. Then he stared at Dana for a long moment, like his memory was working slowly. "Dana? Dana, Haroun’s girl?"

Dana lowered the tool slowly, cautious. "Who are you?"

"I... used to work with your father. Tommy. They called me ’Tommy the Key,’ because I was always losing mine."

For a second, Dana said nothing. Then she laughed, a short laugh, more confused than happy. "Tommy the Key. God. I thought you were dead."

"So did I," the man said. "But apparently the ceiling decided not to cave in on me at just the right moment." He sat down on an old crate, tired, like standing itself was a real effort. "I’ve been living here since the sky changed. The shop was closed, and it was safe, and I didn’t have anywhere else to go."

Kael looked at him. "Since you’ve been living here since the sky changed... have you seen anything strange? Anyone looking for anyone?"

Tommy looked at him for a long time, more closely than Kael expected from a man who looked this worn out.

"I’ve heard about you," he finally said. "People on the street talk about a man they’re looking for. They want him alive. The reward, from what I hear, is big enough that people are taking risks they never used to take."

"Who’s paying?" Nadia asked, pen ready again.

"That’s what I’ve been trying to figure out myself all week," Tommy said. "The talk on the street says it’s not the Registrar."

Everyone froze.

"What do you mean?" Kael said. "We thought—"

"I know what you thought. I thought it too, at first." Tommy paused, like he was weighing his words before saying them. "But the talk says whoever’s paying isn’t even from here. Not from our city at all. They say they come from somewhere else entirely, from beyond a border nobody even knew existed, before the sky changed."

Kael looked at Mira. Mira looked at Dana. Nobody said anything for a long few seconds.

"So we were completely wrong," Nadia said slowly, scratching out what she’d just written with fast, frustrated strokes. "Not the Registrar. Something else. From somewhere else."

"That doesn’t make me feel better," Kael said.

"Me neither," Dana said. "At least with the Registrar we knew how to deal with them. They had rules. Even if they were bad rules."

"This," Nadia said, writing again, slower now, more focused, "is the most important thing I’ve heard since all of this started."

They sat around the table after that, and Tommy insisted on making tea from some old bags he found in a drawer, claiming they were still good despite everyone’s silent doubt.

"Your father was the best mechanic in the neighborhood," Tommy told Dana, without waiting for permission. "And the worst card player I’ve ever seen in my life. Lost every single time, and swore every single time that next hand would be different."

"It was never different," Dana said, a small smile appearing on her face despite herself.

"No. Never."

The place settled for a minute, the first real quiet in hours, the kind that makes everyone suddenly realize how tired they are. But it didn’t last.

From outside, the sound of glass shattering nearby, sharp and sudden, then a man’s scream, real this time, close, from the street right next door, not somewhere far enough away to ignore.

Tommy shot to his feet, all the color gone from his face.

"That’s my neighbor," he said, his voice suddenly shaking. "Pierce. Old man, like me. He was still here last night, I saw him feeding his cat."

Kael looked toward the door. He felt his wrist buzz, hard this time, a vibration impossible to dismiss or explain away as imagination.

```

[WARNING: UNREGISTERED-RANK ENTITY APPROACHING]

```

"We need to move," Kael said, standing despite his hand protesting the sudden motion.

"Move where, exactly?" Dana said, grabbing the nearest tool again.

"I don’t know," Kael said. "But not here. Not while we’re hearing that."

Mira looked at Tommy. "Is there another way out besides the front door?"

"This way," Tommy said, his voice still shaking, but his feet already moving toward the back door he’d first come out of. "Hurry."

They followed him out, and the screaming from next door hadn’t stopped — it had gotten louder, joined now by a second sound, far less human than the first.