Ty sat on the bathhouse tile with water running out of his sleeves.
His ribs hurt when he breathed. His shoulder still carried the boundary burn from Threxian’s room. The cut inside his cheek had started to swell, and every time he swallowed, he tasted the place where his teeth had gone through skin.
Milo stood over him with both hands in his pockets. "Keep glaring if it helps you breathe better."
Ty wiped water from his eyes and pushed his back against the wall. "Your bedside manner makes drowning look professional by comparison."
"Drowning had a head start and still lost."
"That joke needs work after you save someone."
Milo leaned down enough for Ty to smell old smoke on his collar. "I pulled you out because Rui-Chai ordered it, and because leaving you there would make the pools harder to clean."
Ty looked past him at the room, and nobody inside it looked safe. The place had been built for comfort before war found it. Square pools sat under plain stone arches. Steam leaked from cracked vents in the floor, thin enough to show where the ceiling had split. Black Bulls occupied every dry stretch they could claim. Some wrapped burns. Some reset fingers. Some stared at the nearest door like Threxian might step through it by boredom alone.
That made Ty feel less alone and angrier at the same time.
Two Bulls came through the far arch dragging a man between them.
His feet scraped across the wet tile. His head hung forward. Blood had dried under his nose, and both sleeves ended in bundled cloth where hands should have been.
Ty recognized the shape before his mind wanted the name.
The frozen tundra came back in pieces. White ground. Bad footing. A man trying to turn Ty’s own survival into a trap. Ty’s blade cutting through wrists because there had been no cleaner choice.
The memory pulled tight through his stomach and stayed there.
The scarred Bull on the left dumped the man beside an empty pool. "Found this piece of work in the drag with us."
The woman on the right kicked the man’s shoulder, more test than blow. "The portal picked up trash along with our wounded."
The man groaned and tried to curl around arms that had no hands left to protect him.
Ty pushed himself upright. His legs shook immediately, so he used the wall and hated needing it.
Milo’s squint sharpened. "You know the handless one from somewhere, then."
"He tried to kill me in the ice field."
The scarred Bull gave an ugly little nod. "Good. Then you can stand there and enjoy the cleaning."
Ty looked at the man on the tile. He had wanted him stopped back then. He had wanted the next breath more than mercy, and he had taken it the way the fight offered it.
The fight had been one thing, and this floor was something else.
Ty stepped away from the wall and put himself between the man and the boots around him.
The woman stared at him. "Move before your conscience gets expensive for everyone."
Ty kept both hands low because raising them would make his ribs answer first. "He came through helpless, so nobody finishes him on the floor."
The scarred Bull stepped closer. "He hunted you, lost, and still gets your pity."
"Pity has nothing to do with keeping execution out of a bathhouse."
Milo made a small sound through his nose. "That line sounded rehearsed before you reached skeleton."
"Then your room has bad taste in timing."
The woman looked to Milo because Milo had pulled Ty from the water and apparently that gave him temporary ownership of the problem.
Milo lifted both hands. "Leave me out of the holy argument. I save bodies, then I complain about it."
The scarred Bull ignored him. "You have been here less than a day, demon. Our dead are older than your opinion."
Ty felt that land and hated that it did.
The Black Bulls had bled under Threxian. They had dragged each other out under a spell that cost Xuan Wei more than anyone wanted to say aloud. Their leader had stayed behind. Now a prisoner who had tried to kill Ty was lying in front of them without hands, and revenge looked clean because nobody had strength left for a trial.
Ty understood the urge, then blocked the path because understanding it changed nothing.
"Your dead deserve better than making you kill a half-conscious man on wet tile."
The scarred Bull’s jaw shifted. "Say that again after he bites your throat."
"If he manages that without hands, I will file the complaint myself."
Milo pointed at Ty with one wet sleeve. "That one was almost funny, which makes this worse."
The woman crouched beside the wounded man and checked his breathing with two fingers at the neck. She looked up at the scarred Bull. "He lives for now, which is more than he earned."
"He lives because the demon got sentimental today."
Ty turned enough to show the Black Bull the burn across his shoulder. "The demon got tired of watching stronger people decide helpless bodies are convenient."
That took some of the room with it, whether they wanted that or not.
A few Bulls looked away. A few looked angrier. Milo stopped smiling altogether, and that made his face sharper than the jokes had allowed.
"Rui-Chai told us to bring him through alive," Milo said.
The scarred Bull stared at him. "You waited until now to say that, Milo?"
"I wanted to see who disobeyed before I ruined the lesson."
Ty looked at Milo, who shrugged without any shame worth naming. "I never promised to be useful early in arguments."
Footsteps came from the inner arch, slow enough to make every wounded Bull straighten before the man appeared.
Osalf entered with his coat buttoned wrong and blood drying along one cuff. His hair hung loose around his face, streaked with gray through black, but his eyes moved with the calm of someone counting exits before greetings.
He looked at the man on the floor, then at Ty. "Rui-Chai expected you to interfere with the prisoner."
Ty laughed once, and it hurt. "Then Rui-Chai has been wrong before about people."
"Usually after he has already accounted for being wrong."
Milo muttered, "That sentence is exactly why nobody likes strategy meetings."
Osalf ignored him. "You are alive because Rui-Chai believed you would choose a line before you understood the map."
Ty’s patience, already thin, tore in the middle. "I am alive because people keep throwing me into rooms and calling it meaning."
Osalf gave him the name like a burden. "He called it Vishu, and everybody in this room knows why."
The name moved through the Bulls faster than steam. Some heads turned. The wounded woman by the prisoner lowered her hand from his neck. Milo’s eyes narrowed as if Osalf had brought a blade into the room without permission.
Ty wiped water off his chin. "Explain that without prophecy fog or temple smoke."
Osalf stopped three paces away. "Vishu is the demon expected to return when Threxian’s rule starts feeding on its own foundations."
"That still sounds like prophecy fog with furniture."
"Rui-Chai said the return would look like you. Bone body. Human temper. Wrong loyalties in the correct place."
Ty felt his soaked shirt cling colder to his back. "I am not your religious evidence for anything."
"Good, because evidence usually behaves better than you."
Milo gave Osalf a flat look. "You rehearsed that one, and I resent it."
Osalf’s attention stayed on Ty. "Rui-Chai never needed you to believe him. He needed you placed where your choices would damage the king."
"So I am a tool with legs, then."
"Everyone in that room was a tool by the end."
Ty thought of Heriean bleeding across stone. Gears laughing with a broken wrist. The doll woman holding bodies that looked too close to children when they fell apart. Rui-Chai outside the circle with one burned hand and a face that had finally cracked.
The answer came out rough. "That is not an argument in your favor."
"It was never meant to flatter either of us."
The scarred Bull shifted behind Ty. "Osalf, the portal strain is widening behind us."
Osalf nodded as if the warning fit inside a schedule he hated. "Xuan Wei bought a short window. Threxian will search through every official route first, then private routes, then blood routes."
Ty looked toward the nearest door. "Then your emergency plan brought us to a bathhouse?"
"An abandoned transit spa built around an old time rail."
Milo pointed both thumbs at the floor. "Welcome to luxury travel for fugitives, where every seat is damp and every ticket is a bad decision."
Ty stared at him until Milo’s grin returned by a fraction. "You missed my charm while you were underwater, clearly."
Osalf moved past the joke. "The rail can move us before Threxian’s people finish sealing the roads. It needs bodies on board, power fed cleanly, and nobody starting an execution beside the launch pool."
Ty glanced at the handless man. "That explains keeping him alive through the jump."
"It explains only the useful part so far."
"The other part is Vishu, and the part after that is Rui-Chai told me you would ask whether a prisoner gets to live before asking whether you were safe."
Ty wanted to throw the prophecy back at him. The words stuck because he had done exactly that, and everybody in the room had seen it.
The inner door opened, and conversation thinned around the movement before failing altogether.
JJ stepped in with her arms folded tight across her ribs. Her hair was loose around her face, damp at the ends like she had crossed through rain or steam. One pale streak near the crown caught the bathhouse light and made her look more tired than ghostly.
Ty’s body reacted before his thoughts caught up.
Anger came first. Relief followed too close behind it, which made the anger worse.
JJ stopped when she saw him. Her eyes moved over the burn on his shoulder, the wet clothes, the blood at his mouth, then the prisoner on the tile behind him.
She looked at Osalf. "Clear the room enough for him to hear me."
Ty hated that she sounded careful. Careful meant prepared. Careful meant she had been walking toward this conversation while he was still falling through someone else’s circle.
Osalf looked at Ty rather than JJ. "You have less time than either of you want."
"Then stop spending the minutes that belong to us," Ty said.
Milo clicked his tongue. "That is a terrible tone to use with the only people who know where the time train is."
Ty looked at him. "You named an escape rail like a toy?"
"I named nothing. I am a victim of old infrastructure."
Osalf signaled with two fingers. The Bulls began moving, reluctant and wounded, lifting the prisoner with more care than they had used to drag him in. The scarred Bull gave Ty one last look before taking the man’s shoulder.
"If he kills someone later, that one sits with you."
Ty held his gaze. "Fine. Leave him breathing long enough for that to matter."
The scarred Bull carried the prisoner out without answering.
Milo lingered until Osalf pointed toward the arch. "I am leaving because I respect command, privacy, and the chance to complain elsewhere."
"Leave faster before your complaints start breeding, Milo," JJ said.
Milo gave her a wounded look. "That tone hurts more when I already smell like pool water."
He left anyway, muttering something about hostile workplace conditions.
The bathhouse settled around Ty and JJ with pipes knocking inside the walls. Somewhere under the floor, old machinery gave a low grinding sound, then stopped, as if the building had swallowed.
Ty kept his back near the wall. "You picked a strange place to explain why everyone keeps deciding my life for me."
JJ’s hands tightened around her own elbows. "I picked the place where I could reach you before the rail moved."
"That makes it sound like you are coming with us."
"I am coming because the rail will need me."
The answer hit harder than it should have after everything else.
Ty looked at the door the Bulls had used. He wanted more people in the room all at once, which annoyed him because he had just ordered them out with his mouth and his anger.
JJ took one step closer. She stopped before he had to move away.
"You were right to stop them from killing him."
Ty almost laughed. "Starting there is cowardly, and you know that."
She accepted that with a small nod. "Then I will start worse. Rui-Chai saved you for reasons other than trust."
Ty’s ribs tightened under the next breath until sitting still hurt.
JJ kept her eyes on him. "He saved you because the time rail only opens for the person Threxian’s court has been trying to misname since you arrived."
Ty heard the machinery under the floor grind again.
This time it kept going under their feet.