The contact changed everything.
For one second the world narrowed into weight, angle, and grounded force. Toma's steadiness moved through Leon in a tight, borrowed line, just enough to let him understand exactly how to brace, where to place his feet, and how to take more of another person's balance than his own body should have allowed.
"Trust me once," Leon said.
Toma did.
They went over the edge together.
Not a jump. A controlled drop to the first shelf, Leon taking the angle badly but keeping Toma from twisting the injured leg on landing. Pain shot up through his own knees and spine, but the borrowed balance held long enough for one more shift.
Above them, Mara struck again, forcing the pale creature farther off line.
Shell creatures clicked against the crossing edge, trying to angle down after them.
Pell was below now, crouched on the second ledge and shouting upward in a harsh whisper. "Left foot first! Not the dark patch!"
Toma slipped.
Leon caught the back of his coat and pulled hard enough to wrench his own shoulder. The fragment of balance in him began to tear away.
Not enough.
He needed one more piece.
Mara's timing from the earlier jump, from the crossing, from every precise placement she had made all morning was already sitting somewhere close in memory and debt.
Leon reached for it without thinking.
The next movement came cleaner.
He shifted left, braced Toma's weight at the exact right moment, and shoved him down onto the second ledge just before a shell creature struck the stone above where his head had been.
The impact sprayed grit into his eyes.
Pell grabbed Toma's good arm and hauled him lower with surprising strength for his size.
Mara came down last, not by the route Pell had used, but by turning at the top of the descent, planting the spear once into the shoulder seam of the pale creature to delay it, and then dropping onto the upper shelf in a controlled fall.
"Move!" she snapped.
They moved.
The basin was worse than it had looked from above. The stone was wet, angled, and broken by narrow runoff channels that swallowed the foot if it landed wrong. Pell led at speed through a path that did not look like one, cutting between jutting black shelves, ducking under a leaning slab, then forcing them through a narrow waist of rock where the shell creatures could not spread properly behind.
Toma gritted through the descent and stayed on his feet through stubbornness, training, and the fact that Leon kept close enough to help without calling it that. Mara moved just behind Pell, turning now and then to stab backward into any creature that came too near.
Leon brought up the rear for part of it, then the middle, then wherever the line looked weakest. The chained use of Borrowed Hand had left him shaken inside, as if his body was trying to decide how much of him it still liked. The weight in his chest had become a hot pull under the sternum. Breathing was harder now. His hands felt unsteady whenever he stopped moving.
No time for that.
Ahead, Pell slid through one final cut in the rock and came out onto a rising shelf of pale stone.
"Up!" he shouted.
They climbed.
The basin fell behind them in broken drops and wet channels. Two shell creatures made the last turn too wide and slammed into the stone trying to follow. One of the pale-limbed creatures reached the narrow cut and stopped there, long body folding in stillness as it watched them gain height.
It did not pursue.
That bothered Leon far more than if it had.
They kept climbing until the ground widened and the footing became dry enough to trust for more than one step at a time. Only then did Mara stop and turn, spear still ready. Toma bent forward with both hands braced on his thighs, breathing through pain and effort. Pell sat down hard on the nearest flat stone and looked at his wrapped arm as if blaming it personally for everything. Leon stayed standing because he suspected that if he sat too soon, getting back up might become theoretical.
No one spoke for a while.
The silence after movement felt unreal.
Then Toma straightened slowly and looked at Leon.
"You said you'd get me down," he said.
"Yes."
"That wasn't much of an explanation."
Leon wiped grit from the side of his face. "I was busy."
Pell laughed once under his breath and then winced because even that seemed to hurt somewhere.
Mara was still looking back toward the basin.
"They're not coming," she said.
Pell followed her line of sight. "Good."
"No," Mara answered. "Just different."
Leon knew what she meant.
Predators that broke pursuit because terrain or instinct told them to were one thing. Predators that stopped because they didn't need to hurry were another.
He turned away from the basin and looked ahead.
The ground rose once more, then dropped off beyond a broad shelf of weathered stone. He walked to the edge of it slowly, feeling the last of the borrowed steadiness leave his body, and looked out across the land beyond.
For the first time since arriving on the Shore, he saw a place made by human effort.
It stood in the middle distance, built into the vast remains of something enormous that had died long enough ago for scaffolds, platforms, bridges, and clustered structures to grow through its ribs and along the curve of its open carcass. Bone-colored arches rose over hanging walkways. Dark canvas roofs patched the gaps between old supports. Smoke climbed in thin lines from higher platforms. The whole place looked half settlement, half wound that had learned to keep functioning.
No beauty in it.
No comfort.
Just scale, desperation, and the cold certainty that many people had reached it because the alternatives had been worse.
Pell came up beside him and followed his gaze.
"There," he said quietly. "Carrion Market."
Toma joined them a second later. Mara stayed a pace behind, but she was looking too.
Leon stood in the thin morning light, breathing through the ache in his body, and looked at the distant structures rising from the corpse of something too large to understand.
For the first time since arriving, he was looking at a place made by human hands.
And he felt less safe because of it.