Chapter 106: No Alternatives
"I wouldn’t go in there if I were you," Boris says.
I’m not looking at the shop. I’m looking at the old man sitting behind the blanket. The hood. The posture. The skin—thin, pallid, stretched over bones that seem too close to the surface.
I’ve seen that skin before. On the figures chained to the walls along the main road when we first entered Lost Ark.
"Boris. Why does this man look exactly like the slaves?"
Boris exhales. Long. Heavy. The kind of breath that precedes an explanation he’s given before and hates giving.
"If you really want to see Lost Ark without the mask, go ahead. I won’t stop you."
"I’m not liking any of this, Boris."
His face locks. The grin is gone. The warmth is gone. What’s left is stone—the hardest expression I’ve seen on him since we arrived. Harder than the Red Tide. Harder than the Stalker.
"It’s not about liking. It’s the only answer we found." He steps aside. Gestures toward the door. "Go and see."
I look back at Rhayne and Lola. Rhayne’s eyes are already scanning, reading the tension in my shoulders. Lola is examining a gear on a nearby stall, oblivious. Oliver is just ready.
"Stay close to me," I tell them.
I push past the blanket. Through the door.
The front room is a workshop. Crude but functional. A forge in the corner, cold. Racks of weapons along the walls—blades, spear tips, armor components. The quality is a step above anything I’ve seen in the market stalls outside. Master-level craftsmanship adapted to scavenged materials.
The energy I felt from outside isn’t coming from here. It’s deeper.
A doorway at the back. A beaded curtain made of polished bone fragments that click against each other when I push through.
The room behind it stops me cold.
It’s a laboratory. Rough stone walls. Low ceiling. Torches casting orange light that makes everything look sick. Along the walls, stone slabs—maybe a dozen of them—each one holding a person.
Some are strapped down. Leather restraints at the wrists and ankles. Others are sitting upright, unrestrained, staring at nothing with the vacant concentration of people whose minds left the building a long time ago.
They’re not being cut. They’re not bleeding. There’s no gore. But the exhaustion on their faces is total—the kind that goes past the body and into whatever’s behind it. Dark circles so deep they look like bruises. Lips cracked and white. The trembling of muscles that have been pushed past failure and forgotten how to stop.
And every single one of them has the same skin. The same color. The same hollowed look I saw on the old man outside and on the chained figures in the streets.
Drowners. All of them. Sick ones.
I draw Eventide. The hilt is in my hand before the thought completes.
"Boris." My voice is flat. Controlled. "This is for my safety. I have nothing to do with whatever you’re running here."
Shadows shift along the walls. Guards. Four of them, stepping out of alcoves I hadn’t registered, hands on weapons. They look at Boris. Waiting.
"I just want a brief explanation for safety," I say. "Then I’m leaving."
"I told you not to come in here, kid. I warned you." Boris isn’t angry. He’s tired. The kind of tired that sits behind the eyes, not in the muscles.
"This is the testing laboratory. And it’s not what you think."
"I’m not thinking anything. I don’t care. Just let us leave."
"It was you who wanted to enter," Boris says. He raises a hand. The guards step back into the shadows.
"I thought you were hiding weapons, not zombies..."
I sheathe Eventide. Turn around. Rhayne is behind me, the Cloaked Cape shifting nervously between shades of grey, her face pale, her eyes locked on the people strapped to the slabs. She’s shaking. Not from cold.
Lola is looking at a wall-mounted instrument with clinical curiosity, like she’s at a museum.
"We’re leaving," I say. "Now."
I walk. They follow. Through the beaded curtain, past the workshop, past the blanket, into the blue light of the market cavern. The noise of the district hits me like a wave after the suffocating quiet of that room.
I keep walking. Out of the market. Up the slope. Into the open air of Lost Ark’s upper quarter where the false stars and the distant tower pulse against the dark sky.
Boris catches up. His hand closes around my arm.
I look down at his fingers. Then up at his face. The look I give him could strip paint.
"Let go."
He doesn’t.
"Dryden Sands. Listen to me." His voice is low. Urgent. No trace of the jovial bear. "Those people are already gone. No system. No rank. No skills. Their bodies are alive but everything that made them Divers is dead. They volunteered."
"I said I don’t care." I signal to my group. "We’re done here."
"If I were you, I’d care." Boris tightens his grip. "Because Rhayne is going to end up exactly like them."
The words hit me like a bullet I didn’t hear fired.
I stop walking. The night air is suddenly cold against my skin. The sounds of the city—hammers, voices, the distant clatter of the market—fade into static.
"What did you just say?"
Boris lets go of my arm. He doesn’t step back. Holds my gaze. Doesn’t blink.
"Non-combatants." His voice is quiet. "Every single person in that room was a non-combatant. Healers. Craftsmen. Cooks. People who stopped fighting. People who relied on others to kill for them. The erosion doesn’t care about time—it cares about use. If you stop activating your system, stop fighting, stop engaging with Ocean’s Law... the erosion accelerates. Doubles. Triples. And the end isn’t a Drowner. It’s worse. The mind breaks before the body does."
He pauses. Let the math land.
"Your girl doesn’t fight on the front line. She supports. I felt the Links. She absorbs. But she doesn’t kill. She doesn’t engage the system the way a combatant does. Her erosion rate is faster than yours. Faster than Oliver’s. Faster than the little girl’s."
I turn and look at Rhayne.
She’s standing ten feet behind me, the Cloaked Cape wrapped tight around her shoulders, her storm-cloud eyes wide, her bare hand clutching the fabric at her throat.
She heard everything.
The hole I thought was deep just lost its bottom.