CHAPTER 3.

It Must Be Whole.

Morning came in on slow, pale feet—an indecisive light that fell through grime-streaked windows and touched the room without demanding anything back. The space smelled of damp wool and tea, not the theatrical smoke of a bonfire: a gentler combustion. Someone had pushed an old radiator toward the center and set a battered kettle on top; steam fogged the panes in soft, transient halos. The candles in the bottles were low, their wicks black with history.

They moved quietly, the emissaries—no uniforms, only the small, private things that made a group out of people who had become one another’s witness. A woman with hair like silver thread untied a bundle of yellowing letters and smoothed each page with the tenderness of a nurse handling a fevered forehead. A boy whose teeth needed fixing pressed his thumb to a photograph and closed his eyes as if feeling for the weight of the person who had smiled from the paper. An older man, sleeves patched, cradled a toy truck in both hands and rocked it slightly like someone easing a child to sleep. Every motion was careful, as if the objects could break at the wrong angle.

They set the offerings into bowls and boxes—every item chosen because it still hummed with meaning. A woman laid down a ring whose gold had gone thin with wear. A man placed a recorded lullaby on a scratched MP3 player, then tucked his phone away with fingers that trembled in a way the others avoided. Someone else folded a clean handkerchief until the crease matched the crease in their face. The leader accepted each offering with a reverence that made the exchange feel less like tribute and more like a small, necessary burial.

“No phones,” the leader said, matter-of-fact, as if she were reminding them how to breathe. “We keep nothing. We give back. We do not keep score.”

Her voice had the thin clarity of one who had learned to use softness as a blade. She sat in a ring on an old rug and gestured them nearer. The morning had the muted theatre of a congregation: light pooling between bodies, hands visible, faces open to one another. Around them, the walls bore chalk marks in careful, repeated symbols—paper hands, little semicircles—each one rubbed and traced by fingers that were not allowed to forget.

They did not call their practice a prayer. They called it return. The words they spoke were small, exact phrases repeated until they steadied like steps: Not a tool. Not a scaffold. Return as returned. These were not hot slogans; they were instructions. They were also comfort. They were what you tell a wound when it must learn to close.

When the leader took a bowl, she did not pour into it or burn anything spectacular. She moved slowly, tipping a scrap of cloth into the bowl, laying on top a single, folded photograph. Then she cupped it with both hands and bowed her head. The group leaned with her. No one said the word aloud at first—some words had the wrong weight in sunlight; they waited until the group had steadied itself on the rhythm of the room.

A youth—no older than nineteen—came forward and put his forehead to a metal rail and spoke into the air in a voice that cracked on the vowels. “He left the whistle by the station,” he said. “I found his cap.” His lips worked with a memory that felt like a bruise. When he spoke, a woman behind him tied a length of blue thread around his wrist and knotted it twice. The knotting was a ceremony; each double loop was a promise of care. They did not promise miracles; they promised to remember.

You could see why they were here. Each face was a map of a loss: an empty sleeve, a faded training jacket, a scar that liked to hide under the collar. They were not cleansed by reason; they were offered absolution by procedure. The ritual’s tenderness was not a mask for cruelty but a kind of medicine: small gestures that told a grieving body it would be attended to, not dismissed.

There was a crucible of rules that kept the rite small and therefore dangerous in the only way that mattered: real people carrying out real remedies on the worst of their nights. No cameras. No names published. No judgments about who deserved what. The leader moved among these constraints like someone knitting a net—gentle, precise, knowing where to put each stitch so the net would hold.

When it came time for the return, they did not chant, did not raise arms. A paper handprint—cut from the same flyers Gianni had seen—is pressed to the wall, inked carefully by the leader’s hand. People placed their offerings before it: a bus token, a tiny dog-eared comic, a woman’s glove. The leader’s fingers trembled once, as if the weight of the things made her marrow move. She folded her hands over them and said, low enough that the windows swallowed it but clear enough that everyone felt the syllables vibrate.

“Return as returned,” she said. “The borrowed must be whole.”

That last word—whole—hung like an instruction and a desire both. Whole was not just a hope. It was a line. A body patched by machines could not be whole. A soldier spliced from remnants could not be whole. Wholeness meant chosen, seamless, touched only by the Mass itself. Anything less was false—an imitation that wore breath but not blessing.

Some of them closed their eyes and let the morning imagine the Mass into the room; others kept watch, fingertips resting on their offerings as if contact alone could deliver the thing they sought. One man—face like loosened leather—lifted a small, distorted photograph and kissed it like an apology. He whispered something in a voice meant for the thing that had gone before; whether he spoke to that person or to the Mass, no one could say, and it would not have mattered. Outside the ritual, the city was waking with traffic and clatter. Inside, the group practiced their careful refusal of the world’s routines—no business calls, no municipal forms, only the tight, shared grammar of hands and objects. The leader moved with purpose and then, once the ritual had settled into itself, made a final motion that carried the morning’s true weight: she laid a folded strip of paper into the central bowl and traced a small symbol along its edge. The symbol matched the sigils they had drawn on walls in the tunnels—simple, childlike lines that had become their heraldry.

“We do not want to be led astray by machines,” she said, not preaching but clarifying. “The Mass speaks. We listen. We are not taking lives for malice; we are returning what was borrowed.” Her voice was calm. It carried something that might be called conviction.

There was tenderness in the way they handled the objects, yes: the way a woman smoothed an old man’s hat over her palm as if smoothing a forehead. But beneath that tenderness was an insistence—an iron creed dressed in homespun words. Return did not always mean rescue. In some cases it meant removal. In others, it meant a ritual unmaking: soft, bureaucratic, and final.

A child in the circle—no more than ten—folded a paper hand with studious care. He had arrived with scraped knees and a voice that still sounded like a question. He pressed his tiny hand to the folded paper and, with all the earnestness of someone offering a pebble to the sea, placed it in the bowl. His small fingers trembled; when his palm left the paper, his eyes were wet and fierce.

“We offer what we cannot carry,” said an elder, voice like loose pages. “We offer what ties us to pain.” She tapped the bowl where the child’s paper lay. “We give it so that there might be room.”

There was a silence after that, a full-body silence that does not demand the city’s thunder. If you listened long enough you could hear the kettle hiss. Someone rose to pour tea into paper cups, careful hands shaking as they moved. The ritual closed not with fireworks but with the handing out of something warm and ordinary. A bowl of soup would have been the same: simple sustenance to steady bodies used to holding grief.

Before they dispersed, the leader looked at each face. Her eyes were not unkind. “Watch for the signs,” she said. “We will know when the time is right.” The phrasing was private but urgent, like directions at the edge of a weather change. No names. No dates. Only the quiet understanding that they awaited something—someone—whose arrival would answer questions they had not yet formed.

They folded up the letters, turned the lullaby back into silence, wrapped the toy truck in a cloth and tucked it into a satchel that would be carried down into the city later. Slowly, collectively, they slid back into the rhythm of morning: footsteps leaving dust, doors eased closed, the small bustle of people making way for work and water and errands. The ritual’s tenderness stayed behind like a scent in the air—soft, stubborn, and not easily cleared.

As they left, one of the younger men lingered and smudged a tiny paper handprint into a seam on the wall, pressing hard enough to leave a dent. Then he stepped away with the others, shoulders hunched, faces set like people hauling cargo. They were people who had been broken at different seams and found, in that tiny, improvised church, a way to fold the pieces until they fit.

Outside, the morning resumed its ordinary noise. Inside, the bowls of offerings cooled. The paper hands sat on the wall like questions. Somewhere in the ritual’s hushed geometry a plan had been left—quiet, patient, and growing.

***

The South Rail markets had always been the city’s soft underbelly—part transit hub, part bazaar, part rumor mill. Stalls leaned into each other like tired men, tarps sagging under dew, the air sharp with frying oil and the sour of uncollected rainwater. Here you could buy anything: counterfeit chips, half-dead batteries, cigarettes wrapped in yesterday’s newsprint. But beneath the noise, people whispered about a different kind of theft: not money, not goods, but bodies.

That morning, Claymore cut through the crowd with measured pace, the grappling rig slung against his side, weight balanced now with Gianni’s patchwork fix. It no longer dragged at his hip; when he shifted, the coils answered quick, obedient. The repair had teeth.

Web Beat was already there, half-hidden above the awnings, visor dimmed to a faint glow. He crouched on a steel pipe, skates hooked on a railing, the hoodie’s hem fluttering like a flag in the updraft of a passing train. To anyone below he was just another shadow clinging to the mess of girders. To Claymore, who didn’t miss things, he was a pulse in the corner of vision—familiar now, irritatingly so.

The thieves moved sloppy. Three of them, jackets too big, knives small but eager. Their jackets weren’t swagger but insulation—layers on layers, sleeves gone shiny with use. One chewed his lip bloody, the way you do when hunger makes you mean. Another’s knife hand shook, not with fear but with the tremor of someone who hadn’t slept right in weeks.

They’d been trailing a courier—young, rail-thin, clutching a satchel like it was oxygen. The satchel was nothing but transistor parts, but here that was reason enough. The first thief cut close, hand out, voice low and threatening. “Just give it,” he muttered, tone more exhausted than cruel. “Don’t make it worse.”

The courier froze, eyes darting for help that wasn’t coming.

Claymore moved first, hand on the rig, launching with the efficiency of someone trained to end things quickly. The hook snapped upward, bit the edge of a canopy, and swung him into the fray like a pendulum. His boots hit pavement solid, one arm deflecting the knife, the other shoving the boy back. Precise. Minimal.

But desperation makes people reckless. One thief darted behind, pipe raised. Before Claymore could pivot, a line snapped down from the scaffolding: neon, reckless.

Web Beat dropped into the fight like a glitch in the system, wheels sparking on the wet concrete. The visor spat a jagged >:) as he spun low, cutting the pipe-man’s ankles out from under him. The kid yelped, clutching his satchel.

“Tag-team time,” Gianni’s modulated voice crackled, light with bravado.

Claymore didn’t answer. He pivoted into the second thief, disarming with a twist and a clean strike to the shoulder. Efficient. Clinical. Web Beat, by contrast, was chaos: sparks, momentum, the grind of wheels as he skated a low arc around them, scattering the thieves’ nerve as much as their formation.

“Stay down,” Claymore ordered, voice flat as a blade.

One thief scrambled to his feet, spit blood, and bolted into the maze of stalls. The other two followed, not brave enough to test their odds. In moments, the market swallowed them. Only the courier remained, satchel still clutched, eyes wide at the two figures who had collided into his morning like myths with opposite grammars.

“You’re clear,” Claymore told him, already turning away.

Web Beat crouched, visor blinking ^_^. “No autograph?”

The courier stammered thanks and fled.

For a moment, silence stuck. The crowd’s hum returned, pretending nothing had happened. Claymore adjusted his rig, checking the coils, not looking at Gianni.

“You almost missed that swing,” Web Beat said, lightly, but the edge of concern was hidden in the joke.

“You telegraphed your landing,” Claymore returned, cold and precise.

Gianni’s visor blinked ;). “Feedback accepted.”

The quiet that followed wasn’t friendly. It wasn’t hostile either. It was the fragile pause between two men pulling in opposite directions, bound by a fight neither could quite refuse.

Then Claymore turned, already stepping back into the crowd, boots cutting their steady rhythm.

Web Beat watched him go, pulse still alive in his chest, restless and unspent. He hated how the man’s silence stayed louder than his own laughter. He hated how he wanted him to turn back.

But Claymore didn’t.

The market swallowed him, leaving Gianni with nothing but the hum of neon, the faint stink of oil, and the unshakable sense that rivalry felt a lot like orbit.

***

Gianni picked the building because it fit the memory—boarded windows, a sag in the roof that kept rain from pooling, a cracked stairwell that smelled of old water and mildew. Up close it smelled of the same things as the memory and also different: wax and boiled sugar, the flinty bite of cigarette smoke, the metallic tang of a pipe recently hit. His palms went slick at the thought of the place. It was the kind of ruin that folded sound into itself; you could stand at the doorway and the city’s noise would stop like someone closing a door on a conversation.

Gianni kept to the shadows. He’d left the visor dimmed in his pack; this time he wanted his eyes to be his own. He climbed the outside stairs two at a time, breath short and steady, stopping at a landing where plaster had peeled and a hole in the wall let in the bare gray of the morning. From there he could see the ground floor—an old assembly hall or storage room flattened of furniture and filled with people. Candles burned in glass and tin, a ring of faces bent low around a makeshift altar of bowls. Paper hands were stuck to the pillars; ink had been pressed into thumbprints and left to dry.

The sound was more a rhythm than a chant: low, regular syllables layered into each other like someone sewing slow stitches. The leader’s voice threaded the pattern, small and precise. Gianni felt, before he named it, that this was the kind of ceremony where every motion mattered—the way a stitch must be made right so a garment won’t come apart.

He crouched behind a fallen shelf, knees tucked, every sense unwinding down to quiet. The air smelled of candle wax and the faint, sweet sourness of boiled fruit—someone burning an offering—and beneath that the dust-sour of old wood. They had forbidden phones; he knew that from the ritual at the smaller circle, but people always left things undone. There were volunteer habits that never died: someone’s lit cigarette tucked in the corner, a muffled cough—details that made the scene feel lived-in rather than staged.

At the center, a space had been cleared. Someone knelt; someone else stood. Gianni’s gaze snagged on the man standing there and refused to leave him. Him. Older, yes, but not by much. The same soft features, the same downturned lips, the same curved line of jaw that had once looked like the promise of something else. Pale skin, tired eyes rimmed dark. His hair hung straight and neat, bangs falling just above the glasses that had always perched at the bridge of his nose. Now his glasses were pushed up, and the light caught on the square rims. Gianni could have sworn for a second that the light in the room had tilted toward him alone.

Dante moved with the easy composure of someone used to being watched. There was a ritual calm to him—hands deliberate, shoulders unhurried. The person he bent toward was wrapped in plain cloth, head bowed like a supplicant. When Dante lifted the other’s face with two fingers, it looked like something he’d done a thousand times and something he’d never done at all.

Gianni’s body remembered small things first. The faint, green scent Dante used to chase through his hair—cheap shampoo, a note of something citrus—rose through the candle smoke and slashed across his throat. A memory slammed into him so precise it hurt: the warm, rough flick of Dante’s palm once pressing a splinter from Gianni’s hand in the back lot when they were twelve; the rust taste of a shared soda can; the way Dante’s laugh had fit into the hollow between the warehouses like it belonged there. Those flashes were not poetic—only raw, sensory facts—and they unstitched him faster than any argument could.

Dante’s lips touched the other’s in a slow, clean line. It was not the heat of a private abandon; it was the steady pressing of two people sealing an old wound. There was tenderness in it—enough to make anyone watching uncomfortable—but for Dante it read like instruction, like a covenant performed by habit. The kneeling cultist closed their eyes and folded as if receiving a benediction. Around them, hands hovered; a hush pressed the air down to skin.

Gianni felt everything at once: the small, stupid relief that Dante was alive, and the hot, impossible twist that came right after—proof that being alive could mean being elsewhere now, part of another grammar. He’d spent ten years carving the idea of Dante into a place he could carry without bleeding; this—this public tenderness, ritualized and offered to a movement that worshipped what Dante wore inside him—was a slap to that careful work.

He tried not to breathe too loud. The memory that came then was immediate and ridiculous: Dante’s glasses clicking when he pushed them up with restless fingers—how that small motion once drove Gianni crazy in the best way—then the dry plastic taste of a cigarette he’d once borrowed from Dante on a roof. The present folded into those trivial pasts until the edges went sharp with grief.

Someone laughed softly behind him—just a sound, not an alarm—and his whole body flinched. The shadow he’d been crouched in shifted; a sliver of light grazed his knuckles and he tasted metal. He forced himself to stay perfectly still. If they noticed him, this place would be over in a different way. If they noticed him, he might not be able to stand the next sight.

Dante straightened after the kiss, hands steady. He drew a small, neat symbol in the air with his fingertip—one Gianni recognized now from the flyers and the chalk: a semicircle with a line through it, childlike and made holy by repetition. Someone passed him a folded strip of paper; he tucked it into his coat as if it were a talisman. The circle of faces exhaled together, a soft wave of acceptance washing the room for a breath.

Gianni’s vision tunneled. The sound of the ritual blurred into something that might have been the echo of the roof where they had first trespassed, the first time they’d discovered something that shouldn’t be and had been too young and cruelly curious to keep from touching it. He saw, for a second, the exact spot Dante had pressed his hand against a cracked window: the place where the plaster flaked and a spider had nested. He felt again the jerk of a stolen cigarette, the clumsy, intimate reach across a shared hoodie, the tilt of Dante’s head when he took their secret in.

A small, ridiculous noise—Gianni’s shoe scuff on crumbling concrete—threatened to give him away. He sucked in a breath so sharp it hurt, pressed his palm against his chest to steady the thudding, and slid back, one foot back over the broken stair. His throat worked; he could taste salt and copper, and his hands shook so hard the backpack strap dug bright lines into his shoulder.

He should have fled. He should have stayed and watched and learned what the kiss meant and what it made Dante into. He could have stepped forward and shouted the old name that lived like a wound inside him. Instead his body made its choice before his mind did: a soundless, animal recoil, as though something inside him knew that recognition would break him in a clean place he could not repair.

He backed away until the wall hid him, and the ritual swallowed the world whole again—candles, the leader’s soft motions, the circle of people folding into ordinary movement. Dante’s silhouette remained for a needle of time at the center of it, the figure of the man Gianni had cared for and not saved, and then the human geometry shifted and Dante—chosen, solemn, and peculiarly distant—was lost among them.

Gianni pressed his palms flat to the cold stone behind him and let out a single sound that wasn’t a word: a small, sharp sound like someone snapping a twig. It might have been a laugh. It might have been a sob. It might have been the exact moment he understood that the thing he had tried to bury ten years ago had not only survived; it had been crowned.

He left the stair slow, the memory of the kiss searing into him the way a brand marks hide. The world outside smelled different—rain and grease and the city’s thin gold light—but the inside of his chest felt ancient and new all at once. He walked away not toward the heat of exposure but toward the cold logic of planning: he needed to know more, to map what had been done without him, to find out whether the boy he’d known had been chosen or stolen. The questions sat in him like embers.

Behind him, a murmur followed the ritual’s close. The leader’s voice threaded the last quiet instruction into the room: “We will know him when he walks.” The words were small as a seed and sharp as a splinter.