The rail stopped like it hated everyone inside it.
Metal dragged under the bathhouse floor. The walls shuddered once, then settled crooked. Water sloshed out of the nearest pool and ran across the tile in a shallow sheet, carrying ash, blood, and scraps of black cloth toward a drain that had quit doing its job years ago.
Milo landed on one knee, caught himself on a cracked bench, and pointed at the ceiling. "I want the architect arrested, revived, and arrested again."
Nobody had enough strength to laugh properly at him yet.
Ty braced one hand against the wall until the room stopped leaning in his head. His palms still burned from the panel. The skin had tightened across both hands, bright and tender where heat had bitten through.
Blue sat against his collarbone, tucked under his jaw for warmth. "Your hands look like a bad cooking accident."
"Your sympathy continues to change lives around you."
"I am small, injured, and emotionally opposed to rail travel."
JJ came through the arch with Osalf and the scarred Bull behind her. The handless prisoner had been moved onto a broken bench near the far wall, wrapped in two blankets and guarded by a woman with cropped hair and a knife across her knees.
The prisoner watched Ty with hate that had run out of strength.
Ty looked away first because staring back felt too much like accepting ownership.
The place beyond the moving bathhouse was a maintenance hall built under old stone. Long vents ran along the ceiling. Dry weeds had grown through cracks near a sealed stair. Someone had painted letters on the wall long ago, but time and steam had eaten most of them.
Only two remained clear on the ruined wall, G S.
Milo saw Ty looking. "Grief Station, if you ask me. Official name was probably worse."
Osalf unfolded a stained map on an overturned door. "The old name is Gate Spur, according to the map."
"See, worse already by every available measure today."
JJ crouched beside the map, ignoring him. "How long before Threxian traces the route back here?"
"If the panel damage confused the court line, a few hours."
"If it failed to confuse them, we move now."
"Then we already lost the hall and need speed."
Ty pushed away from the wall. "What is the plan beyond standing in a place named after grief?"
Osalf’s finger tapped a mark near the edge of the map. "We move to a safehouse outside the patrol teeth, treat wounds, question the prisoner, and prepare for the arena in three days."
"That sounds like surviving, not winning anything important."
"Winning starts after people stop bleeding through bandages."
Ty hated that the answer made sense immediately.
JJ looked up at him. "Rui-Chai believes Threxian’s strength has a source outside normal royal tools."
Blue shifted against Ty’s neck. "The coin hand felt wrong, for anyone keeping score."
"The coin, the cuffs, the broadcast override, the way his pressure changed when he stopped performing," JJ said. "Those pieces are connected, unless coincidence got organized."
Osalf nodded once. "Break the source, and the king becomes a man with soldiers rather than a law pretending to breathe."
Ty looked at the map, then at the wounded scattered around the hall. "That still leaves soldiers, courts, prisons, and every person who thinks wearing his symbol makes them clean."
"Yes, and that leaves all the uglier work."
"You make rebellion sound inefficient enough to lose."
Milo dragged a crate closer and sat on it with a groan. "Rebellion is mostly logistics with worse meals anyway."
The cropped-haired woman by the prisoner gave him a look. "You ate two emergency cakes during the rail jump."
"I survived two emergency cakes. The distinction matters."
The scarred Bull ignored them and set a bundle on the overturned door.
Ty realized what it was only after JJ went still.
The bundle held belongings for the dead rather than supplies.
A scarf stiff with dried blood. A cracked strip of wrist armor. A pair of thin metal spectacles with one lens gone. A child’s carved bead tied to a cord. Someone had placed each piece with care, not ceremony. Care was what they had left when ceremony would have taken too long.
The hall changed around the bundle after that.
Milo stopped complaining. The cropped-haired woman lowered her eyes. Even Osalf took one step back from the door-map, as if the dead had earned table space before strategy did.
Ty recognized Gerald’s scarf before he recognized anything else.
He had barely known Gerald. That was the problem. The man had become real only in pieces: a voice during a fight, a body in danger, a name someone else said with grief already attached.
Ty looked at the spectacles. "Those were Xuan Wei’s glasses from the spell."
JJ answered before the mistake settled. "He is alive, barely, and those broke during the spell."
Ty breathed through that. "Who else belongs in this bundle with him tonight."
The scarred Bull touched the bead cord with two fingers. "Heiu. Two tunnel runners. A doll handler named Sanna. Three we carried out and lost before the rail took."
The words landed without music, which helped because nobody tried to make them noble.
Ty stared at the bundle until the scarf blurred at the edges. "They died buying time for a plan most of them may never have understood."
Osalf’s voice came from the other side of the door-map. "They understood Threxian well enough to choose anyway."
"That is not the same as understanding your plan."
"It was enough for them, whether we like it."
JJ looked at Osalf with warning in her face. "Let grief stand here without recruiting it today."
Osalf closed his mouth and kept it closed.
That was the first thing he had done all night that Ty respected.
The prisoner laughed from the bench, low and dry. The sound cut across the hall like grit under a boot.
The cropped-haired woman pressed the knife flat against his blanket. "Choose the next noise carefully around that knife."
The prisoner looked at Ty. "You saved me so they could make a shrine beside my bench."
Ty walked over and crouched far enough away that the man could see his hands. Burned palms. No weapon. No kindness either.
"I saved you because killing you on the floor would make them worse."
"You think I have plans to improve them."
"I think you know what Threxian prepared for the arena."
The man’s mouth twitched. "I know enough to be worth keeping alive, which means your mercy came with a leash."
"Everything tonight came with a leash around it."
Blue leaned near Ty’s ear. "I dislike him, but he tracks consequence better than most people here."
The prisoner stared at the small fairy. "What is that talking thing on your shoulder."
"Someone with wings and standards you are failing hard."
Milo called from the crate, "Careful. The tiny one bites with vocabulary hard."
Ty stayed focused on the prisoner. "You get water, bandages, and time to decide whether you answer questions before someone less patient asks them."
The prisoner looked at the cropped-haired woman, then at Osalf, then back to Ty. "You are the least frightening threat in the room."
"Good. That means you can hear me clearly."
The woman’s knife shifted by a finger-width. "His name is Vellor, if you are keeping him."
Ty looked at her because the correction deserved that much.
"If you are keeping him breathing, use the name."
Vellor’s face tightened as if the name had cost more than the bandages.
Ty nodded once. "Fine. Vellor answers questions when we stop moving."
Osalf rolled the map and handed it to JJ. "We leave before the hall warms again. Anyone who can walk carries someone who cannot."
Milo lifted one hand. "I can walk emotionally, which should count less than physically."
"You carry wire coils because your mouth still works."
"Cruel, but legally specific in a hostile way."
The hall began to move in small, painful motions. People lifted packs. Bandages were tightened. The grief bundle stayed on the door until the scarred Bull wrapped each piece into a cloth roll and tucked it under his arm.
Ty watched that happen because looking away felt wrong.
JJ came beside him. "You need sleep before you collapse in public and make Milo feel useful."
"That is the strongest argument anyone has made."
"There is a side room past the vents. It should be dry."
Ty glanced toward the prisoner. "Vellor stays guarded while everybody else sleeps tonight."
"Rosana has him until the hall clears fully."
The cropped-haired woman raised the knife without looking up. "Rosana has him until the hall clears fully."
Ty believed her more than the room deserved.
The side room was storage for rail parts. Empty hooks lined one wall. Rusted brackets sat in labeled bins. A strip of old padding had been dragged into the corner, probably by someone who had used the place for sleep long before the Black Bulls found it.
Ty lowered himself onto the padding and immediately regretted every choice that involved ribs.
Blue climbed down from his shoulder and curled into the fold of his collar. "Wake me if another ancient transportation system decides to murder us."
"That request covers too much of my day."
Her glow dimmed as she settled against him.
JJ stood in the doorway, one hand on the frame. Without the others behind her, she looked younger in a way Ty disliked. Tired did that to people. Guilt did worse.
"You can sit before standing there turns this into a hearing," he said.
She came in and sat with her back against the opposite wall at first. The distance was careful. Ty appreciated it, then hated that there was anything to appreciate.
For a while, neither of them used words.
The hall outside kept moving. Feet passed. Someone cursed at a dropped pack. Milo complained about wire coils with enough detail to make the complaint into a personal history.
JJ folded her hands together. "I meant what I said about following your lead."
Ty kept his eyes on the bins across from him. "That is too much weight to hand someone who keeps ending up underwater."
"I said nothing about you being ready tonight."
He looked at her because the wording mattered too much.
She held the look. "I said I would follow. Those are different risks."
"You keep trusting broken things with sharp edges."
"So do you when the choice gets ugly."
That should have made him angry. It made him tired.
JJ’s eyes dropped to his burned palms. "I can wrap those before the burns split."
"Later, when touching them sounds less terrible tonight."
"You always say later when your body is the bill."
"You always notice my bad ideas at inconvenient times."
Her mouth moved toward a smile and stopped before it became one. "Ty, can I ask for something without making it another plan?"
He knew where the sentence wanted to go before she finished building it.
The old memory came with it. A night before everything had split open. JJ kissing him like she had made a decision and hated herself for needing it. Earth waiting somewhere impossibly far away, with someone he still owed more than memory.
He swallowed around a dry throat. "Ask carefully before I answer badly from exhaustion."
JJ looked at the floor between them. "Can I stay near you tonight for comfort, with no promise attached to it?"
The question sat there between them longer than either wanted.
Clean had left the hall long before this conversation. There was blood on his clothes, a fairy asleep in his collar, a prisoner breathing because Ty had drawn a line, and Rui-Chai hanging on a royal screen three days away from whatever Threxian planned.
Ty had no room for romance after everything tonight.
He still had room for another person to be less alone.
"You can sit here, and that is all I can give tonight," he said.
JJ nodded as if she had expected less.
She crossed the room and sat beside him, careful with his ribs, careful with Blue, careful with every place the day had left damage. Her shoulder touched his after she settled. No more than that.
Ty let it stay because moving away would answer too much.
Outside the storage room, the grief roll moved with the survivors toward the next door.