Price in Silver

The bone ends of the Cobre boy's ulna were grating together beneath shredded muscle, but what worried me more was the color of his fingernails. They were already turning the dull, slate grey of starved capillaries.

"Hold his shoulder flat," I told Rafael, dipping my fingers into the diluted salt-pitch Garrido had surrendered at the depot. "If he thrashes when I set the traction, the radial artery tears against the fracture spur. If that happens, he bleeds out before second bell."

Rafael planted both palms against the boy's collarbone. The boy's companion—the young striker who had carried him through the western quad—knelt by the cot, his knuckles white against his knees, watching me with the wary, cornered hostility of someone who expected a blade between the ribs instead of a splint.

"You're Ouro," the striker muttered, his voice raw from running. "The dispensary wardens told us you were poisoning the intake slips."

"The dispensary wardens don't have twenty yards of boiled linen or five grains of willow bark," Inma said from the workbench behind me, not looking up as she sorted our remaining strips. "And if you keep breathing on her sterile field, my partner might charge you for the air."

I ignored them both. I slid my thumb along the medial groove of the boy's forearm, locating the primary somatic pulse. My diagnostic channels still ached from the gentian overcharge in the canyon—a dull, scorched heat humming behind my breastbone—but the tissue map beneath his skin flared clearly enough. The radius was snapped clean in two places; the ulna was splintered into four serrated fragments pressing directly into the deeper nerve sheath.

"Breathe out," I told the boy softly.

He barely had time to draw air before I leaned my full weight into the alignment.

The crack was wet and sharp. The boy screamed into the gag Rafael shoved between his teeth, his heels drumming against the stone floor. I channeled a brief, focused pulse of somatic warmth through my palms, just enough to numb the periosteum and stimulate vascular spasm to stem the internal seepage. I didn't have the luxury of knitting the bone whole; somatic reconstruction of a double fracture would burn half my remaining reserves, and three more Ouro patients were shivering with secondary trench rot two cots over.

I bound the cedar splints tight with our last lengths of unbleached linen, knotting the cord with two swift jerks.

"He lives," I said, wiping my palms on a damp rag. "He doesn't fight for three weeks. If he tries to channel kinetic pressure through that wrist before the callus hardens, the arm shatters permanently."

The striker swallowed hard, his throat working. He looked at his comrade, then at me. "We don't have coin. Aranda froze our stipend accounts the moment the tribunal tabled the charges."

"We don't want your coin," Inma said, stepping between us with her arms crossed over her leather apron. "We want iron, suture wire, and six gallons of distilled carbolic wash. Which means your friend stays on that cot, and you tell anyone who asks that he died in the drainage ditches."

I washed my hands in the iron basin, watching the grey rinse swirl into the drain. "Inma's right. If Aranda finds out we're taking Cobre wounded into this cellar, he won't bother with an administrative tribunal. He'll seal the vents and call it a quarantine failure."

"He's already sealing the perimeter," Rafael said quietly, stepping back from the cot and wiping sweat from his forehead. "Sofia counted twelve disciplinary wardens rotating around the western courtyard. They aren't letting supply carts past the outer sally port."

"Then we don't use the sally port," Inma said. She pulled a heavy brass ring of rusted skeleton keys from her pocket and tossed it into the air, catching it with a practiced snap. "The artisan foundries sit directly above the lower storm sluices. Master Tadeo runs his black-market dueling wagers and scrap metals through the sunken vaults. If we want medical-grade silver wire and carbolic acid without Aranda's seal on the manifest, we buy it from the guild runners before midnight."

I dried my hands, feeling the steady, low-frequency pulse of the Enforcement Pact humming at the base of my skull. It was a rhythmic anchor—a distant, quiet confirmation that Matias was alive, patrolling the upper parapets to keep the wardens' attention fixed on the quad.

"Tadeo won't take promissory notes," I said, checking the satchel at my hip. Inside, wrapped in oiled lambskin, rested the wax impression and resonant frequency trace of the three-grooved kinetic slug I had taken before surrendering the metal to the tribunal. "He deals in leverage."

"Then let's go give him some," Inma said with a wicked gleam in her dark eyes. "Before our patients start drinking vinegar to kill the rot."

·  ·  ·

The descent into the sunken vaults smelled of sulfur, damp slate, and centuries of unwashed runoff.

We slipped through the narrow iron grate beneath the old laundry chutes, dropping three yards into the forgotten masonry tunnels that predated both academies. Here beneath the bedrock, the air was warm and thick with the heavy vibration of the foundry furnaces two levels above. Steam hissed from cracked terracotta pipes, venting into the dark in long, ghostly plumes.

Inma moved through the maze without a lantern, her fingertips trailing along the mortar lines. She had spent two years buying forged leave-passes and contraband spirits in these corridors; every turn was etched into her muscle memory.

"Three paces left here," she whispered over her shoulder. "The floor collapsed during the spring floods. Drop down and you end up in the raw sewage sump."

I followed her step for step, keeping my satchel pinned against my ribs. "How many runners does Tadeo keep down here?"

"Six regulars. Twice that on tournament nights," Inma murmured. "He buys cast-off kinetic focuses from the Cobre smiths and sells refined silver shavings to the Ouro alchemists. He doesn't take sides, Cata. Which means he'll smile while he robs us blind."

"He won't rob us," I said. "He needs what I can do."

The tunnel opened into a cavernous vaulted cistern, illuminated by hanging brass braziers burning pungent whale fat. Workbenches cobbled from driftwood and iron plating were scattered across the floor, covered in disassembled focus rings, smuggled casks of liquor, and crates stamped with the crest of the High Prefecture.

Half a dozen figures in leather aprons and stained linen tunics looked up as our boots clicked on the flagstones. Two men leaned against a stack of oak barrels, their arms crossed over thick chests, kinetic gauntlets gleaming dull bronze in the brazier light.

At the central table sat Tadeo. He was a broad-shouldered artisan student with burn scars running up his neck and a jeweler's loupe pushed up into his curly black hair. He was using a fine steel file to shave the serial markings off a heavy kinetic bracer.

"Inma," Tadeo said without looking up, his file scraping rhythmically against the metal. "The curfew bell rang an hour ago. Wardens are crawling over the quad like maggots on a dead dog. You bring trouble down my flues, I charge double for the exit fee."

"We didn't come to drink your watered-down gin, Tadeo," Inma replied, stepping forward with her chin tilted up and both hands resting openly at her belt. "We need trauma stores. Two crates of silver suture wire, four jars of crystallized coagulant, and all the carbolic wash your boys skimmed off the foundry sanitizers."

Tadeo stopped filing. He lowered the bracer, pulled down his loupe, and looked at us with a slow, skeptical squint.

"Aranda put an absolute embargo on all medical salvage," Tadeo said, tapping the table with the file. "The penalty for moving surgical goods without a prefect's wax seal is twenty lashes and three months in the iron pens. You think I'm risking my skin for Ouro copper?"

"We aren't offering copper," I said, stepping past Inma to stand directly across from him.

Tadeo shifted his gaze to me. His eyes narrowed slightly as he took in my blood-spattered cuffs and the shears at my belt. "The medic. The one tied to Valdivia's leash."

"The one who keeps the people you bet on breathing," I countered evenly. "You've got three crates of carbolic sitting behind that stack of oak staves. I can smell the phenol from ten paces away. You also have twelve rolls of refined silver filament meant for kinetic coils, which happens to have the exact gauge I need for vascular suturing."

Tadeo let out a dry, rasping laugh. "Knowing what's in my cellar doesn't buy it, Flores. What do you have that pays for twenty lashes?"

I reached into my satchel, withdrew the oiled lambskin package, and unwrapped it on the rough oak table.

The hardened beeswax mold of the three-grooved kinetic slug rested on the cloth, its indented, rifled edges capturing every hairline fracture, alongside a crystalline vial holding the captured resonant kinetic frequency trace.

Tadeo went completely still. The loupe dropped from his eye, dangling against his chest by its cord. One of the gauntleted guards by the barrels straightened up, taking an instinctive step toward the table, but Tadeo raised a single, scarred finger to halt him.

"Where did you pull that?" Tadeo asked, his voice dropping to a low, gravelly rasp.

"From the support pylon of the canyon observation shelf," I said, keeping my voice flat and steady. "The three-grooved rifling is unique. It's the bespoke bore of Professor Aranda's personal oversight carbine. The High Prefecture tribunal tabled our insubordination charges this morning because we showed them the physical slug and proved an official inquiry would implicate the entire senior staff."

Tadeo leaned over the impression, not touching it, his gaze tracing the precise machining of the grooves. "If Aranda knows you have this..."

"He knows the inquisitors took the original metal," I said. "And more importantly, he knows they have a formal record of it. But this wax impression holds the exact tooling angles, and this vial holds the residual kinetic heat signature extracted from the casing. To an artisan guild master, this isn't just evidence of a crime—it's a template of Aranda's personal kinetic frequency. A frequency that can bypass the security wards on the upper supply vaults."

Tadeo's jaw shifted. A sudden, sharp calculation flashed across his weathered face. For an artisan broker who lived on stolen scrap and covert access, a master key to Aranda's private stores was worth ten times its weight in gold.

"A wax cast and a frequency trace don't give me the whole cipher," Tadeo muttered, though his fingers were already twitching toward the table.

"It gives you the resonant frequency," I said. "And I'll give you something else right now."

I stepped around the table before his guards could react and placed two fingers firmly against Tadeo's right wrist, directly over the flexor tendon.

"Hey!" the guard barked, raising a bronze-clad fist.

"Stand down," Tadeo commanded sharply, his eyes locked on mine.

"Your fourth kinetic conduit is calcified," I said, pressing slightly deeper into the groove between his carpal bones. "You channeled raw kinetic heat through an unrefined silver bracer two months ago. The feedback crystallized inside the sheath. Every time you grip a heavy hammer, your three outer fingers go numb, and within six months, the conduit will rupture into the deep fascia, paralyzing your dominant hand permanently."

Tadeo's breath hitched in his throat. His lips parted, but no sound came out. He had clearly been hiding the injury from his apprentices; in the artisan foundries, a craftsman who lost his hammer hand was cast out into the scrap yards within a week.

"I can dissolve the calcification right now," I said calmly. "Twelve seconds of localized somatic stimulation. No surgery. No downtime. In exchange, we take the two crates of supplies, and you establish a dead-drop at the third drainage flue every two days."

Inma smirked, crossing her arms. "Look at that, Tadeo. She's giving you your livelihood back and clearing out your stolen inventory in one clean trade. You'd have to be an idiot to say no."

Tadeo looked down at his locked wrist, then back up at the wax impression and vial resting on the table. A long, raspy breath slipped past his teeth.

"You touch that nerve wrong, Flores, and my boys bury you under the flagstones," Tadeo growled.

"Then stay still," I said.

I focused my intent, drawing a thin, disciplined thread of somatic heat from my core down into my fingertips. I bypassed my own scarred diagnostic channels, keeping the flow narrow and clinical. I drove the warmth straight into his carpal tunnel, targeting the rigid, glassy deposits clinging to his nerve sheath.

Under my touch, the microscopic crystals vibrated, fractured, and dissolved into the bloodstream.

Tadeo let out a low, guttural groan, his head falling back as sweat broke out across his forehead. His fingers twitched violently—once, twice—and then snapped shut into a tight, flawless fist.

He opened his hand. He closed it again. There was no tremor. No lag in the tendons.

He stared at his own knuckles in stunned silence for three full seconds. Then, he let out a harsh, barking laugh that echoed against the vaulted ceiling.

"Pack the crates," Tadeo ordered his runners, waving his good hand toward the storage alcove. "Two crates of carbolic wash. The silver wire spools. Throw in a gallon of distilled pitch and six bottles of willow bark tincture."

"And the dead-drop?" Inma pressed, leaning over the table.

"Third drainage flue," Tadeo agreed, scooping the wax mold and frequency vial off the table and dropping them into a velvet pouch inside his vest. "Every forty-eight hours at midnight. Leave fifty copper marks in the iron lockbox, or the crates stop coming."

"Deal," Inma said, stepping over to inspect the wooden crates as two runners hauled them from behind the barrels.

The runners set the crates down with a heavy thud. Inma pried the lid of the nearest box open with her dagger, revealing neatly packed rows of dark glass bottles cushioned with clean straw, alongside four heavy spools of gleaming, surgical-grade silver filament.

"Clean stock," Inma said, looking up at me with a rare, genuine grin. "We just bought our ward another month of life, Cata."

A deep, satisfying sense of relief settled into my chest. With these supplies, we could manage the Cobre striker's arm, flush Mateo's lingering wound infection, and keep our entire cohort operational beneath Aranda's nose. We had outmaneuvered the embargo without losing a single drop of blood.

I stepped forward to lift the smaller crate of silver spools. "Let's move before the fourth watch begins. Rafael is waiting at the lower grate."

"Grab the iron handles," Inma said, reaching down to hoist the opposite side.

My fingers closed around the cold iron handle.

Then, the world shattered.

A sudden, blinding spike of unendurable agony tore through my body.

It wasn't a slow build; it was an explosive, concussive detonation of pure blunt trauma that struck directly into my ribs, spine, and diaphragm simultaneously.

My vision flared white. The breath was ripped violently from my lungs in a strangled gasp. My hands lost all sensation, the iron handle slipping from my grip as the crate crashed down onto the stone floor, shattering two bottles of carbolic in a sharp spray of pungent chemical wash.

I fell to my knees, my forehead striking the flagstones.

"Catalina!" Inma's voice was a distant, frantic scream through the roaring in my ears.

The pain didn't originate from my own flesh. It was radiating in brutal, jagged waves through the five-to-one somatic tether anchored at the base of my neck.

Matias.

Through the magical link, I didn't just feel the damage; I felt the physical rhythm of the strikes. A heavy kinetic hammer blow to the lower left ribs. A cracking impact across the lumbar spine. A brutal, crushing heel stomping into an already fractured costal cartilage.

He wasn't fighting. He wasn't dodging.

He was taking the blows directly, pinned in an enclosed ring, absorbing systematic, deliberate punishment under an executioner's cadence.

The disciplinary rings.

Aranda's loyalist purists had cornered him in the upper courtyard, weaponizing the formal rules of the academy to beat him to death under the guise of an unsanctioned martial review.

A second strike landed through the bond, so violent that my stomach convulsed, vomiting blood-tinged bile onto the stones.

"Cata! What is it? What's happening?" Inma dropped beside me, her hands gripping my shaking shoulders.

I clawed at the stone floor, digging my bloody fingernails into the mortar as I fought for a single scrap of air. My vision swam with dark, spinning spots, but the somatic tether pulled taut like a burning wire, screaming his coordinates directly into my skull.

"Matias..." I choked out, blood coating my lips as I forced my legs beneath me. "They're killing him."