She stepped closer. Daniel's body tensed for flight, but the prey lock was fading, replaced by something worse — curiosity, exhaustion, the stupid goat-brain that wanted to trust a human with a knife.
The girl reached out. She didn't touch him. She touched the rope, the binding cord, and her fingers traced the pattern with a kind of hunger that had nothing to do with food.
"Vein Cult," she said. "Same rope that bound my parents."
She looked at his eyes.
Really looked.
Her hand hovered over his forehead, between the horn nubs, and something ignited in her palm — not light, not heat, but a resonance that made Daniel's stolen body hum like a tuning fork.
She gasped. The sound was sharp, startled, the sound of someone who had just touched a live wire and found it warm.
"You're —" She jerked her hand back. Her eyes went wide, too wide for her thin face, and she stared at him like he was a corpse that had sat up and asked for tea. "You're human. Inside there. You're — that's not —"
She looked at her palm, then at him, then at the alley mouth like she expected someone to jump out and explain the joke. No one did. The rain kept falling.
Daniel's heart hammered. She knows. She knows she knows she knows —
Panic and something else, something bright and dangerous, fought in his chest. He wanted to run. He wanted to bleat until she understood. He wanted to cry, which was impossible, because goats didn't cry and he wasn't sure he had tear ducts anymore and even if he did they wouldn't be the right shape for human grief.
The girl's mouth opened, closed, opened again. "That's not possible," she said, and her voice had gone thin, reedy, the voice of a child trying to sound like an adult who had everything under control. "Sympathy Root doesn't — it can't — there's no record of —"
She stopped. Looked at the sword in his mouth. Looked at the rope burns on his legs. Looked at his eyes — horizontal pupils, alien, desperate, human.
"You're real," she breathed. "You're actually — oh no. Oh no, oh no, oh —"
She jabbed a bone needle into the seam between his horns.
The pain was white and absolute. Daniel's legs buckled. His vision doubled, tripled, and the system text flickered and blurred, and something in his skull that wasn't bone or brain stitched — a thread pulled tight, a knot tied in a place that shouldn't have knots.
The pain stopped.
Not all of it. But the screaming wrongness of the binding, the sense that his soul was a foot in a shoe three sizes too small, eased. He could breathe. He could think.
"That'll hold for six hours," the girl said. Her voice shook. She was still staring at him like he might vanish, or explode, or start speaking in tongues. "Then you convulse until your spine breaks. I — I need to —"
She looked at the alley mouth. Looked back at him. Looked at her empty clay jar, dropped and forgotten in the mud.
"Can you walk?" she asked.
Daniel didn't move. His legs were jelly, his mind a storm. She knows. She helped. She didn't run. She's scared too.
"Right," she said. "Of course you can't. You're in prey-lock. Of course you are."
She grabbed the wool at his neck. Her fingers dug in and pulled. His body dragged across the mud, hooves scraping, the sword in his mouth banging against the ground. He tried to kick. His legs twitched and locked. She hauled him past the tannery, through a gap in a fence that peeled his flank, and into a dark that smelled like corpse-moss and regret.
She shoved him into a corner that had once held a woodpile. Now it held a goat.
The door clicked shut.
Mei's shack smelled like corpse-moss and regret.
She'd shoved him into a corner that had once held a woodpile. Now it held a goat. The symmetry was not lost on him. Daniel lay on straw that scratched through his wool in ways he didn't have words for, four legs splayed, the sword still locked in his jaw. His body had gone from frozen to jelly, adrenaline draining out of limbs he didn't know how to control.
Mei stood by the door, bone knife in hand, watching him like he might start speaking. Really speaking. Human words from a goat's mouth.
He couldn't. He'd tried. What came out was a bleat — flat, nasal, nothing like the sentence he'd formed in his head.
I was a person, he'd tried to say. I had an apartment. I think I had a job, something with spreadsheets, something no one would miss.
She hadn't understood. Of course she hadn't.
"Don't move," she said. "I'm checking the stitch."
Daniel didn't move. He couldn't have if he'd wanted to. His heart still hammered against ribs that felt too narrow. Every time he closed his eyes he saw the alley, the knife, the girl's face when her palm had hummed against his skull — human, you're human — and the panic came back, and under it something worse, something he didn't want to name because naming it might kill it.
Hope.
Mei knelt beside him. She was small for her age, all angles and scabs, with hands that moved like they were counting something invisible. She checked his eyes — holding his jaw with one hand, peering into pupils that were horizontal slits instead of rounds.
"You're not blind," she said. "That's something."
She ran her fingers down his neck, feeling for the stitch she'd placed between his horns. Her touch was light, precise, the touch of someone who'd learned to work on things that bit.
"Binding cord was third-pattern," she muttered. "Same as my parents. The cult's been active six months, maybe longer. They don't usually bind beasts. They bind people." She looked at him. "They bound you. Which means they knew what you were before you did."
How? he thought. How did they know? How did YOU know?
He bleated. The sound came out longer this time, carrying the shape of questions that never formed.
Mei frowned. "That sounds like pain. The stitch shouldn't hurt anymore."
It didn't. The pain was deeper than the stitch. The pain was looking at his own legs and not recognizing them, feeling the weight of the sword in his mouth and knowing he'd grabbed it because he had no hands to grab with. The pain was a twelve-year-old girl speaking to him like he was a person, and him answering like livestock.
She moved to his hooves. Checked the rope burns. Tutted. "They tied you too tight. Amateur work. If you're going to sacrifice something, at least don't damage the merchandise."