Devour the Dungeon

New Babel is a tower with a rate for everything, and everyone in it is bound a Core at sixteen. Kael Verrin, nineteen, drew Porter: forty kilos of licensed carrying capacity and not one ounce of anything that could kill a monster. Demoted to the Sump, the flooded crawlspaces under floor three, for a theft he reported and a clerk chose to punish, he kills a gnaw-rat the size of a beer keg and finds a core no broker will buy him a stamp for. He swallows it anyway, and a panel blooms behind his eyes: DEVOUR. Fourteen XP. Class ceiling: F - not applicable. Then something vast and patient opens a door inside his skull, in his own voice, and asks one word: hungry?

The Guild's Spire keeps a secret with an arithmetic under it. Floors are farmed, cores are tithed, and children with the right resonance are requisitioned as conduits, including Kael's sister Mira, taken at thirteen for Conduit Testing and warehoused on floor seventy-seven, where the batteries burn out on schedule. The Guild has even filed the date she will stop producing light. When Kael's old mentor dies on the stairs and leaves him a stolen requisition page and thirty years of silence, the trail runs straight up the tower to a kind, sleepless man: the Guildmaster himself has been feeding children's light to the thing under the foundations, because the thing under the foundations leans.

Because the Spire is a nail, driven through a lid, and the lid was made to hold a hunger with no bottom. Every hundred years the nail works loose, and the thing beneath lends its hunger out to a hand: a born-late vessel who can climb, eat what the Guild cannot feed it, and open the last door. Seven hands on record. Six came back full, and every one of them fed the lid.

Sponsored by Ysolde Vahl, the S-rank Blade chasing the partner the tower ate, Kael climbs the toll road with a second Core in his spine and one rule he will not break: he does not eat people. He fools weighing sleds, out-lifts meters, drinks a spilled piece of the bottomless thing itself, and turns the Guild's own arithmetic against it, because a porter's real gift is reading weight, and Kael can read exactly what his strength will cost and who gets billed. When the Guild finally offers the deal, his sister's life signed against his leash, body and door, he asks the question no vessel has ever asked: what happens if the door shuts from the inside?

The answer makes him the first hand in a hundred years to eat the eater instead of feeding it, and leaves him holding a sealed room full of the filed dead, a rope-caller, a lost partner, eleven strangers still singing, waiting on a promise that outlives the last battle: every core the Guild ever filed as weather is a name, and names get carried home.

The vaults of River-End are empty now. The road east is open, chartered, and paid by the kilo. Five more cities have their own nails, their own lids, and their own ledgers of names, and one of them has not said a word in a hundred years. The porter is coming anyway. Cargo: names. Route: open. Status: with.