Chapter 45: The Bone Masks

The first enforcer moved like water poured from a height.

Luo Chen copied Hong's dodge before he thought to dodge. The sideways throw, the roll, the coming up in a crouch. The bone-white hand passed through the space where his throat had been, and the air screamed.

"Run!" he shouted to Luo Xiao.

She did not run. She grabbed the obsidian inkwell from the broker's desk and threw it with the accuracy of a girl who had spent years skipping stones.

It struck the second enforcer's mask. The bone cracked. Black fluid spilled.

The enforcer did not flinch.

Luo Chen intercepted.

He copied the spear form, adapted for rain, modified for tight space. No wooden blade in his hand, he had left it with his pack, but his body remembered the movements. His palm struck the enforcer's wrist, redirecting the grab, using the creature's own momentum.

"The window!" a voice shouted.

Asha stood in the doorway, her gray eyes urgent. "Behind the desk! Break the glass!"

Luo Chen moved.

The window behind the broker was narrow, barred with iron. But the bars were old, rusted. He struck them with the heel of his palm, a brawler's technique, and the metal bent. He struck again. The bars groaned.

The fourth enforcer reached him.

Its hand closed on his shoulder, and the touch was cold beyond cold. A cold that reached inside and tried to pull something out. The seed. The shard. His mother's paper.

Luo Chen resisted.

Not with strength. With emptiness. The same blankness that had repelled the ancestral resonance during his ceremony. The enforcer's pull found nothing to grip. It slipped through him.

The enforcer hesitated.

No one had ever hesitated before.

Luo Chen struck the bars a third time. They gave way. He pushed Luo Xiao through, followed her, scraping his back, and they fell five feet to hard stone.

Asha dropped from the window behind them, landing with practiced ease. "Run! North! The old section!"

They ran.

The enforcers emerged from the broken window but hung in the air, supported by nothing, their black wraps billowing. Asha led them through the terraces, not down toward the market floor but up, toward older, darker stalls.

"The old section!" she gasped. "Bindings older than the brokers. The enforcers cannot follow!"

They passed through an archway carved with Pre-Monument script. The enforcers stopped at the threshold, shrieking. A sound like stone grinding against stone.

They could not pass.

Luo Chen leaned against the wall, breathing hard, the seed inside him dim and drained.

"They will wait," Asha said. "Bone masks are patient."

"Who are you?" Luo Xiao demanded. "Why do you have gray eyes? Why are you helping us?"

"My name is Asha. I am helping you because I was like you, once. A blank. A mistake." She touched her gray eyes. "These are not a clan trait. They are a scar. The mark of someone who looked too long at what the monuments hide."

She turned and walked deeper into the tunnel.

"Come. The old section has a record. A name. The name of the scraper."

Luo Chen followed.

Because the truth was close.

And because his mother had asked him to find it.