The tracker's screen pulsed with a tired blink—one pale dot wobbling across the edge of a grid and then losing heart. Marc and Howard followed it along a fence line that separated ragged pasture from a thicket of wind-stunted pines, the winter air gnawing at their ears. For an hour they walked, the device chirping every few minutes as if to apologize for its own uncertainty. The land felt empty in the way old secrets are empty—bare on the surface, heavy underneath.
"Nothing," Howard muttered at last, rubbing his palms together for heat. "Either the depot's buried deeper, or something's scrambling the aetheron."
"Or both," Marc said. The limiter hummed softly against his collarbone. Tecciztecatl's leash.
By the time the light vanished, they had persuaded neither field nor pine to confess anything more. They made plans to widen the search at first light and drove back, headlights gilding frost and fence post. At the cottage they shared coffee at the kitchen island—Alexia had a way of pre-stocking every space with gentleness—and traded small jokes like people who were careful not to touch the electric wire of what they knew.
Howard left for his new house after nine. In London he had lived in a rectangle of rent and fatigue; here his father's money had bought him a labyrinth—high windows, bare floors, rooms that swallowed footsteps. He walked it room by room with the lights off and then turned them on all at once as if waking a machine from sleep. Lab tables arrived at the back door while he signed with a stylus—oscilloscopes, resin printers, sterile boxes, a crate of raw aetheron wafers he'd hidden in various places across the country years ago, brought home now like bones to a family plot. He spread schematics across the dining table and began assembling a research drone by feel, his hands moving in a rhythm he had learned in secret.
"This one gets lungs," he murmured, fitting vanes onto the chassis, "and this one gets eyes."
By midnight the drone's shell lay open like a rib cage. Howard placed a wafer of aetheron at the core and watched it glow—soft, reluctant blue. "Hello," he whispered. The machine did not answer, but light crawled across the board like thought starting.
Across the county, in the cottage kitchen, Alexia and Marc lay entangled on the couch beneath a throw, her head on his chest, the television flickering quiet news beside a candle burned down to a crater. They talked in fragments—the stubborn girl who wouldn't turn in her assignment, the stubborn minister who wouldn't return Marc's calls, the way the wind here sounded like water through pines. At some point the TV forgot them and began telling the city a bedtime story about traffic and finance.
"You're leaving," Alexia said, not a question.
"For a few hours," Marc said, kissing her hair. "I'll be back before dawn."
She tipped her face up. "Be careful."
"I will."
In the entry he summoned the veil like a breath and felt the suit answer. Tonight the fibers thinned along the joints for speed, the soles of his boots fattened into quiet pads, the internal musculature tightened its springs. He could feel the math of a leap in his calves, the geometry of a roofline in his ankles. A step and he was a shadow on the lintel. Three more and he was a moon-colored line across the yard.
He ran. The dark unreeled under him like ribbon. Hills fell away; road surfaces became strokes of graphite; his breath wrote cursive in the cold. He jumped and the wind put its hands under him and pushed. Once, twice—then a kilometre vanished beneath a single long arc, the ground pulling him down slow, reluctant, as if gravity had been persuaded but not convinced.
By the time the city rose up—black glass with arteries of sodium fire—his suit had remembered its original face. The black dulled. The crescent flared white, then softened. He landed on the lip of a midrise and looked across to the place where he and Juarez had turned a street into a wound. In daylight it had been taped and tidied. At night, it looked honest again—broken glass like ice, gouges in brick, a bus shelter bowed as if in prayer.
He stood still until the city's noise sorted itself into layers. Sirens far, drunk laughter near, a train's heavy whisper in the buried dark. Under it—breathing. Not human. A churn like meat in a grinder. He closed his eyes and let the moon god's hearing uncoil through him like filament.
There, Tecciztecatl said, his voice a thin, steady line. Below. The earth remembers what he ate.
Moonveil dropped the block to a maintenance yard and followed a scent only a god could name—old blood made new by hunger. A rusted gate, a turnstile frozen like a metal flower, then the yawning mouth of an abandoned tube entrance choked with weeds and plastic. No light. He stepped into it and the dark closed behind him like a tongue.
He made his own light—no more than a lantern-dim smolder along the lines of his forearms and the crescent on his chest. The concrete around him registered it without warmth. Posters curled off tile in brittle sheets. Rats wrote cursive along the edges where floodwater had dried to tide marks.
He descended.
The stairs became a tunnel. The tunnel became a throat. Water talked in a culvert below his left foot in a language all cities learn. The smell came first—iron and sweet rot dressed in disinfectant. He wanted to call it hospital and decided not to lie to himself.
Ten minutes in he saw the first of them.
At first it looked like trash. Then the light found the color of bone under plastic. A hand in a plastic bag. A hand without a person. Wrist bound in a knot of rope and hair, the skin puckered where teeth had argued with tendon.
He crouched. "Tecciztecatl."
Go on, the god said. The voice had gone very old. You must see it all or you will not understand what he has become.
He went on.
Another landing, another turn. The walls narrowed until his shoulders brushed tile. And then the tunnel widened into a service bay and the light from his body touched a place where the world had decided not to be a world anymore.
He stopped breathing for a second.
The room was no longer a room. It had become a midden. A hill. A topography of what a city's absence looks like when it is piled in one place. Human remains rose in a slope that reached almost to the ceiling—a moraine of ribs and femurs and clavicles and jawbones. Some scoured clean by time or teeth, some furred with rot. Between them: torn clothing braided into ropes, shoes without feet, bracelets clinging to radii like thoughts that refused to let go. Above the mound, strings hung from the ceiling—their ends knotted around organ bags that dripped brown-black into trays. The rats had tried and failed to chew the strings, left little gnawing signatures in frayed ends. The room sounded wet.
Moonveil whispered it without deciding to. "My God."
Phones lay scattered like fallen stars in the mire—screens cracked, still-looping notifications blinking under smears: Mum, where are you?—Call me please—We thought you'd be home hours ago. He knelt, picked one up, and the screen unlocked to a child's picture of a dog in a hat. He put it back.
"How," he said. It wasn't a question. It was an ache.
How is a human word for why, Tecciztecatl said gently. Listen to why.
"Why aren't people reporting missing—" He stopped. He knew the answer before the god said it.
They are, the moon god said. But the favor at work has weight. When stars sponsor a sin, the city's memory thins. The report is filed. The file is mislaid. The name is misspelled. The witness forgets what she saw on the way home. The camera would have looked, but someone unplugged it and then died of a sudden cough. It is not invisibility. It is subtraction. Favor is a god's eraser, Champion.
Moonveil stood in the dripping light and felt hatred arrive like a clean, sharp thing. He had not invited it. It came anyway.
"Tell me." He stared at the uncountable dead. "Tell me why only the organs."
Tecciztecatl's silence stretched into shape like a thought being made.
Because appetites are geometry, he said at last. Flesh feeds an animal. Organs feed a ritual. Heart, liver, lungs, kidneys—these are the densest warehouses of your species' wind and blood. Your ancestors called them seats. Of courage, of fear, of memory. They hold what you shed when you die. The dark one eats what the world has not let go of yet.
Moonveil looked at the hanging sacks. "Courage. Fear. Memory."
And desire, the god said. The liver keeps a ledger for the body. Accounts of want, of rage, of surrender. When the Tzitzimimeh first came to the oldest cities, they ate the shelves that kept those ledgers. It was not random savagery. It was accounting. They balance their god's books using yours.
Moonveil swallowed, tasting old iron. "And Sangre de Luna?"
The black liquid is not a liquid, Tecciztecatl said. It is a concentrated result. A distillate of what remains after the hunger has paid itself. The El Lobo brothers learned the recipe by accident when they worshipped without discipline. William learned to refine it on purpose.
The mound made no argument. He could see inside the hill where the organ-takers had burrowed to harvest. Ladders of metal and bone. A jacket pinned under four bodies still trying to be a person. A small hand that made his knees go wide for balance.
"This is how they disappear," he said. "Not into the dark. Into someone else."
Into the ritual, Tecciztecatl said. And into the man who believes he can wear a demon like a suit.
He circled the room. At the far wall a cleaner geometry cut into the absolutes of the pile: a table as neat as a confession. The legs had been bolted to floor rail. The top sloped into a drain. Serpentine symbols had been carved into its steel—some Aztec, some older than language. There were scratches on the ceiling where someone had tried to climb it.
Moonveil set his hand on the table and the steel remembered hands. They came like heat—one pair, three, twelve. Women mostly. Men too. In his head they were crowding a door, asking one favor from a stranger: Tell them I didn't run away. Tell them I tried to go home.
His hand shook.
The limiter pulled tight like a choking. He closed his eyes and leaned into it, breathing until the pressure gave back a fraction of control.
"Can we burn it," he asked. "Now."
Not yet, the god said. He hated the pity in it. You must memorize it first. Map it for those who will never be allowed to see. When he is vulnerable, we will burn what he built with the absent.
Moonveil moved through the horror making a survey he knew he would forever regret having made. He took what the city would need to believe: photos, counts, the geometry of atrocity. He picked up three phones and tucked them into his suit, as if returning them would do anything at all.
The farther corridor led deeper. He followed it. The air cooled. The bones stopped. Someone had tried to scrub the next chamber's floor and given up. It was empty except for four chalk circles and a shape like a half moon eaten by shadow scrawled on the wall.
He stood before it, his own crescent beating faintly under his sternum.
He means to invert you, Tecciztecatl said. To write your sign backwards across the city until what you are becomes what he says you are.
Moonveil put his knuckle to the crescent and smudged it. The chalk smeared into a gray bruise. The motion did nothing to the hunger behind the symbol.
He went back the way he came. At the threshold he looked over his shoulder once more at the hill. The phones blinked in their slow, patient way.
He killed the light on his body and let the dark have him for thirty seconds. He counted them. When he turned his light back on, nothing had moved. The dead kept their silence like saints refusing to tell who killed them.
On the stairs, his foot slipped on something soft. He caught himself with one hand on tile and looked down. A wallet. He opened it. The plastic had been chewed ragged by damp. He could still read the name. He said it out loud into the tunnel and let the stones keep it a while.
"Why are you showing me like this," he asked the god when he reached the top.
Because you wanted to know why, Tecciztecatl said. Men are very brave when they have an enemy they can shoot. They are less brave when the enemy is the shape of absence. You must be brave in both directions now.
He stepped into open air and the night had the fragile blue of an hour no one claims. He swallowed twice and it didn't change the thing metal had made of his throat. The city hummed around him, ignorant and industrious.
He moved along the rooftops without sound and found himself back at the battle block without wanting to be there. The bus shelter was a skeleton of glass. The wall he had used to hold a building upright still bore the curved smear of his fingers, five black arcs like a cave painting.
Minutes became useless.
At two in the morning a woman dragged a suitcase past under a streetlamp, headphones in, seeing nothing. At three he saw a fox cross the street with something in its mouth that was not his business. At four he turned toward the river and followed it a while because that is what men have always done when they don't know what else to do.
At half past he dropped through an atrium of shadow and ran like a rumor back toward the cottage. Before he reached the open country he stopped on the last rise of city and turned to look. Somewhere under his feet a room with a hill of people waited—patient as geology.
The limiter hummed. He hated it. He whispered anyway, because prayer is an old habit even in those who don't believe.
"I will come back," he said to no one. "I will bury you."
We will, the god said.
The word made a different shape in the cold.
He slipped through the birches and crossed the lane and stood for a long moment on the step to let the night fall off him like a coat. Inside, Alexia had left a lamp on in the hall. He dimmed the suit to nothing. The crescent faded. When he opened the door, the cottage remembered him and did not ask questions.
"Hey," Alexia said from the doorway of the bedroom, hair on one side, sleep on the other. "What did you find?"
"Enough," he said.
She walked to him and touched his chest, feeling for a wound that wasn't there. "You're freezing."
"I won't be."
She looked up at him and saw the thing he was not holding well. "Tea?" she asked, and the word felt as serious as a spell.
"Please."
While the kettle began to sing, he sent three messages to three numbers he did not know would ever receive them. I found your phone, he typed. I am sorry. I will not stop. He did not hit send. He sat with the unsent things. He closed his eyes. He saw chalk. He tasted iron.
Howard's drone woke in an empty house and took its first breath of blue light.
The city slept.
And somewhere below it, the devoured waited for dawn that would not reach them.