The corrected came faster now.
Not because their bodies had changed.
Because their attention had.
They poured into the avenue from both ends, jaws clicking, throats lit blue beneath the skin, every face turned toward Static Knife with the same terrible focus. The street narrowed under that pressure until it felt as if Harbor Block itself had chosen a center and made him stand in it.
Static Knife saw it too.
His mouth tightened. "That's new."
Mara grabbed his wrist as if she could hold the rest of him in place by force alone. "Don't."
He did not look at her. "You heard the screen."
Kael had.
[IF HOST FALLS, LINE COLLAPSES]
A statement. Not a promise.
Not a warning.
A law.
Lyra's eyes tracked the oncoming swarm, then the two options at either side of the avenue. Parking structure to the right. Church to the left. Neither looked welcoming. Both looked better than the open street.
"Choose," she said.
Kael looked right first.
The parking structure's lower gate hung half-crushed, leaving a gap just wide enough to force people through single file. Good for choke-point defense. Bad if the interior was already occupied. The concrete ramps beyond it disappeared into darkness, and darkness in this city had stopped being absence. It had become habitat.
He looked left.
The church doors were chained shut from the outside. Blue geometry crawled over the stained glass in thin luminous veins. System contamination, maybe. Or something trapped inside. The front steps were narrow. The stone facade still intact. Better elevation. Worse unknown.
The swarm closed another ten meters.
Flame Spear's fire shook in his hand. "I'm running out."
Metal Arms shifted Static Knife higher against his shoulder and nearly staggered. "Then stop decorating and start burning."
Lyra pointed at the church. "Stone walls. High steps. Narrow entry."
Kael pointed at the chains. "And whatever made someone lock it from the outside."
"That sounds like later."
The corrected at the front lunged.
Decision ended there.
Kael raised his hand and sent one grain through the nearest throat seam. The host dropped. Lyra crushed another into the side of a parked car hard enough to bend the frame. Flame Spear threw a ragged sheet of fire across the avenue, buying a heartbeat of stumbling confusion.
"Church," Kael said.
They ran left.
Daniel half-carried Nina and Owen up the steps. Mara stayed tight beside Metal Arms, one hand still on Static Knife, green light stuttering between her fingers. Flame Spear turned twice while retreating, sending bursts of fire into the leading hosts. Lyra took the rear beside Kael, gravity twisting the footing under any corrected body that got too close.
Kael reached the church doors and drove a grain into the nearest chain link.
It snapped.
Another grain.
Second chain.
The doors jerked inward half an inch and stopped.
Blocked from within.
Of course.
"Move!" Lyra shouted.
Kael did not waste time with the lock. He aimed lower, into the warped brass latch and the old wood behind it. The grain punched through both. The right door sagged open just enough for a body to force through.
Metal Arms hit it first, driving the gap wider with his shoulder as the corrected reached the steps behind them.
The church swallowed them whole.
Darkness.
Cold stone.
Air thick with wax, dust, and something metallic underneath.
Kael turned instantly and fired one more grain through the splintered lower hinge. The damaged door collapsed inward with a violent crack. Lyra seized the nearest pew in a gravity grip and slammed it sideways across the threshold just as the first host hit the opening.
The impact shuddered through the wood.
Then another.
Then many.
For a moment, the church became only sound: fists, jaws, bodies throwing themselves at old timber and broken pew legs in a blind hunger made methodical by the sky.
No one spoke.
No one breathed right.
Then Mara said, "Put him down."
Metal Arms lowered Static Knife into the front pew with a care that looked almost gentle until his bad arm gave halfway and made him curse. Static Knife hissed once through his teeth but stayed conscious.
Blue light traced under the skin of his neck now like fine roots.
Nina and Owen stood pressed together beside the baptismal font. Daniel placed himself in front of them automatically. Flame Spear bent double, hands on knees, coughing smoke into the dark. Lyra leaned against a pillar, chest rising too fast. Her face had gone pale enough to make the blood at her temple look black.
Kael looked up.
The nave stretched long and dim before him. Moonlight should have fallen through the stained glass, but the false sky had replaced it with a blue geometry that bled through the saints and martyrs in fractured patterns. Pews stood in rigid rows. Torn hymnals littered the floor. At the altar, six candles had burned down into thick puddles of hardened wax as if someone had lit them and left in a hurry.
And beneath the altar rail, in dark dried streaks, lay blood.
Old enough to dry.
Recent enough to matter.
Lyra saw him looking. "You were right."
"I know."
"I dislike when that happens."
The pounding at the door intensified.
The wood would not hold forever.
Mara peeled back the collar of Static Knife's shirt.
Everyone looked.
The blue had spread across his clavicle now, branching in thin luminous threads toward the chest. His skin kept tightening, relaxing, tightening again, as if some invisible shape beneath it had not settled on its final design.
Flame Spear straightened. "How long?"
Mara did not answer.
Static Knife did. "Long enough to get uncomfortable."
"That is not a time measurement," Daniel snapped, more frightened than angry.
"No," Static Knife said. "It's a philosophy."
Nina looked at him. "Are you going to become one of them?"
Silence.
Not because no one had an answer.
Because everyone did.
Static Knife swallowed. "I'm trying not to."
Nina nodded once, as if that were a fair arrangement.
Owen finally spoke, voice almost too quiet to hear. "My name is Owen."
No one answered for a second.
Then Daniel said, "Good."
Mara's hands shook as she brought green light over Static Knife's throat. The glow met the blue beneath his skin and hissed faintly, like water on hot wire.
"Does that hurt?" Kael asked.
"Yes," Static Knife said.
Mara's voice sharpened. "Why didn't you say so?"
"Because everything hurts."
That ended the conversation.
Kael stepped away from them and moved toward the altar.
The blood there had not come from one body. Too much drag in it. Too many broken lines. More stains streaked the side door to the sacristy. On the wall above it, someone had written three words in a hurried brown-red hand:
DON'T LET IT SING
Lyra came up beside him.
"Well," she said, reading it, "that is deeply unhelpful."
Kael looked toward the back of the church.
Near the choir loft stairs, something metallic glinted in the dark.
A censer chain, maybe.
Or another lock.
Or a weapon someone had dropped while trying to leave.
The black screen opened.
Not over the whole world this time.
Only over the church.
Thin black lines mapped the interior in translucent strokes. The altar. The pew rows. The side passage. The choir loft above.
And beneath the map, one line pulsed once.
[SANCTUARY STATUS: CONDITIONAL]
Lyra read his expression. "Of course it is."
The pounding at the door changed.
Less frantic.
More organized.
Three impacts together. Then two. Then three again.
The corrected outside were learning pressure.
Static Knife made a sound behind them.
Not a groan.
A flinch.
Kael turned.
Blue light flashed across the younger man's eyes for one violent instant.
Then vanished.
Mara recoiled. "What was that?"
Static Knife looked up slowly, breathing hard.
When he spoke, his voice was still his.
But only just.
"They know," he whispered.
The front doors shook under a synchronized hit.
Cracks ran through the wood.
The black screen pulsed again.
[HOST NETWORK ATTEMPTING REACQUISITION]
Then one more line appeared beneath it.
[TO HOLD THE LINE, SOMETHING MUST BE GIVEN]