Chapter 64: Lynea Mei
The room held the kind of silence that makes sound think twice. The ribs of the hall glowed faintly; copper ran under the floor like sleeping veins. Lynea sat in the middle ring with her hands on her knees, fragments quiet at her shoulder as if they, too, were listening.
She began the way a careful driver eases a carriage into motion: not with drama, but with a steadying breath.
"My family" she said, "belonged to a thing most of you have only heard as rumor, if at all." Then, she looked down: "The Moirai."
She watched neither of them. She watched the space in front of her, as if laying planks over a gap one sentence at a time.
"Once - long before us three, but not so long the dust forgot it - the Underworks were smothered by Wardens. Not the guards the surface hires to scowl at doors. Wardens that think people are numbers that need to be sorted. They came down with ledgers and guns and a way of folding fear into law."
Her voice did not sharpen. It did not need to. The words did the cutting.
"The Moirai were hunters before that. Five families that kept knives in the air the way sailors keep lines - old technique passed from mouth to mouth, from wrist to wrist. We were good at killing Nyxes. That was our origin. The knives were for monsters. We learned how monsters move, how they think, how to talk to physics until physics is embarrassed to argue. The Wardens... were not Nyxes. But they bit the same. So the families stood together."
A fragment of hers turned once, lazy, then stopped.
"They rose" Lynea said simply. "Against the Wardens. It was not a speech. It was a week of quiet work and five minutes of loud. The knives did what knives do when they are told to be certain. People cheered. People paid. People slept better because a list of names stopped being lists."
She brushed her thumb over her knee once, as if erasing chalk.
"The story could have stopped there" she went on. "It would be a good story. The Moirai freeing the Underworks. But the thing about being paid for certainty is you start to believe you are owed the world’s doubts too. The families found they could make money faster than they could make rules for themselves. The Wardens left and left a vacuum, and knives are good at filling vacuums."
She did not perform disgust. She stated a geometry.
"They called it "keeping order." They said the Underworks needed a vector while the Phalanx fought topside as the Nyxes got meaner. They were not wrong about the danger. The tunnels took whoever would come - refugees, merchants, smugglers, the tired. Neoshima above was busy pretending to be a miracle. Down here we were busy pretending not to drown. The Moirai set prices and posture. They smiled, sometimes. They taught children to be quiet in halls where knives were already hanging. We got rich. We got richer than surface families who never looked down unless they dropped a coin."
Her mouth did not curl around the word rich. It skated past it.
"They ruled with a bloody scepter" Lynea said, like quoting someone else’s plaque. "Anyone who stood - fell. Not all at once. Not every day. Just enough that people learned which streets to avoid, which jokes not to tell, which debts to pay twice."
She let that hang, then set the next board:
"Someone did not love that. You can guess who."
She did not look at Raizen to confirm his guess. She did not need to.
"They built a room. The Rust Room. It was not elegant. It did not need to be. It was a place to make people who would not die when the knives came. It was a place to teach a different kind of math. They taught angles that refused to be predicted. They taught how to stand where a blade would have been if you were ordinary, and not be ordinary. They taught patience."
She let her hands turn palm-up for a breath, then set them down again.
"That is where Takeshi became an answer" she said. "Early thirties when his file would have been impressive enough to be boring if it weren’t so impossible. The Rust Room put knives and guns in his hands and found out he did not need either to be dangerous. He used both anyway. He did not need to be cruel. He rarely was. He was exact. He spared when he could. People call that weakness until they need someone to spare them; then it becomes a principle."
The hum in the walls seemed to nod along.
"He freed the Underworks. Not by himself - legends always lie that way - but enough that if you say the sentence plainly, it does not fall apart. The Moirai disappeared. The five families went dark. Some vanished. Some swore off their names like they were old coats. Some turned their houses inside out and pretended never to have been houses."
Lynea studied the floor. In the low light the scratches made their own star map.
"Takeshi married" she said, as if it were an ordinary ripple. "He had a daughter. There are parts of the Underworks that breathe differently when somebody lets themselves live like that. People were almost smug about it: a myth trying on a sweater, a knife learning how to butter bread."
She did not linger. She would not sell pathos for cheap.
"And then the remains of knives remembered they can also be petty."
Her jaw did a small tic that could have been a smile in another weather. It wasn’t here.
"They caught him without his tools" she said. "They went for his house when he was not ready because that is what knives do when they are. They killed his wife and his daughter. They took one of his arms, one of his eyes. They left him like a line they thought the rain would erase."
Her voice stayed level. She did not hurry any of it for mercy.
"Everyone good at guessing guessed he died" she said. "It was easier to say it that way. Funerals are simpler than doubts."
A breath moved behind Hikari’s teeth and did not come out.
"After that" Lynea continued, "quiet got teeth again. Not like before, not overt. The Moirai didn’t put banners back up. They did not want crowds. They wanted to remind everyone that locks are opinions. A silent death here. An official gone there. A body nobody could prove belonged to anyone - easier to forget, easier to pretend a bad dream. The Underworks learns to swallow bad dreams. It is a survival trick."
She folded one heel under the other, patient. The fragments near her shoulder held still like birds at first snow.
"Eleven years" she said, so they would have the number. "Since that house."
Her eyes betrayed her: She was feeling guilt, compassion and mercy, like a curse she’s bound to carry for eternity.
"I was born to one of the five" she said. "The kind that thinks it is virtuous because it hands out bread twice a year and beats you when your hands shake."
Hikari’s mouth softened, but she didn’t interrupt.
"They watched me watch knives" Lynea went on. "That is how they decide how to shape you. If your eyes follow a thing as if it owes you something, congratulations. You get a curriculum. By ten I could lift more steel than men who told themselves they loved the knives more than their wives. I could hold six blades without shaking. They always said that "I would "restore control.", restore THEIR control." They said the phrase like a toast. My grandparents believed it like prayer, and then like policy."
She turned her right hand, tracing a remembered pattern along her forearm with the blunt edge of a nail.
"Training is just a word the hungry use for punishment when they’re supposed to love you" she went on. "That is what I learned from them. Miss a grip? No food. Miss a timing? Cold water. Fail a drill? Run blindfolded through a room full of the things you failed with, and if you bleed, mop it with your mistake."
Her voice still had no tremor, but the air around the words held frost.
"They told me to kill animals first. Then men who had been condemned by our own courts - soft ones, the kind we built in our heads to make the law feel like something besides an alibi. I could cut Nyxes." She said it with the same lack of ceremony as I can breathe. "I could make my hands move faster than fear. But people..."
She shifted. The fragments did not. Her eyes went to her own leg, as if remembering where it was.
"I just could not" she said. "I could not kill a person. Even when they told me the person was a murderer. Even when they said it was practice. Even when they put my palm on the grip and their palm over mine and tried to turn our hands into a machine."
The quiet did not blink.
"I disappointed them" Lynea said. "That is the word that hurts certain parents more than you breaking every bone in your body. Not rebellious. Not immoral. Disappointing."
She reached for the hem of her tights out of habit and found skin instead - the dark tights she usually wore weren’t there. She had chosen not to hide tonight. She drew her right leg into the light and turned it, just enough. The back of her calf bore a scar you could trace like a coastline, pale and rippled where the skin had melted and then been told by a healer to grow back anyway. The Eon training room’s dim lines found it and followed.
"They took me to a room when I said no" she said. "They burned me where I could not see the fire, so I would have to feel it as long as they wanted. Then they healed it badly so it would remember whoever looked at me. They called it a lesson. I call it a sign I don’t belong to them."
She let her leg return to its place and put her hands back where they had been, palms down.
"I ran away."
Simple. Not cinematic. Not boasting.
"The part nobody tells you about is not the running" she said. "You can always go. There are doors everywhere if you are willing to be rude to someone’s idea of you. The hard part is what you decide your hands are for when you are not being told. You can take all that training and sell it to whoever smiles the right way. You can die on purpose because it would be tidy. Or you can choose again."
Her gaze lifted from the floor and, for the first time, met both of theirs, one after the other.
"I chose to save people" she said. "Not to balance a scale. There is no scale. Not to be forgiven. There is no priest for this. To prove I can do something besides turn the air sharp. Nyxes are honest in one way - they do not pretend to deserve speeches. They do not ask to be given a second chance. From this point of view, they’re better than my own family. So I enrolled. The Academy doesn’t care what your hands did before if your hands do the right thing now. It will care later. But first it will teach you how not to die."
Kenzo’s rules from earlier floated through the air between them, as if the room wanted a thesis statement.
"I didn’t swear revenge" she added. "I swore competence. That is a less dramatic vow, but it buys more food."
A ghost of humor crossed her mouth and went on.
"Later" she said, and the word sat like a stone dropping into the shallow end, "I learned Takeshi had not died."
No reaction from Raizen beyond a stillness that told the truth.
"He had one arm and one eye and the kind of stubborn that gets you accused of being myth again. He found the remnant that called itself the Moirai. Not noble families anymore - just knives with names they had stolen from their grandparents, hoping the syllables could make them righteous. Bloodthirsty is an ugly word. But it fits. I am not good enough with language to find a better one."
She pulled a breath in through her nose and let it out slow.
"He killed them" she said without embroidery. "All of them that were willing to stand up and try to say, "We are the Moirai." He did it with the same exactness he used to spare. He left the ones who had already left themselves. He didn’t kill me. We never met. By the time I had a rumor worth trusting, the rumor said he was dead."
Her eyes lowered an inch, not in grief, exactly - more like in respect for a line finally drawn.
"Poison" she said. "Not the dramatic kind that melts you in public. The coward kind that kills you from a simple scratch. That’s how fallen the Moiraian pride has become. To use poison-"
Hikari’s fingers tightened over one knee and eased again.
"I asked where he was buried" Lynea went on, and now her voice did something small - only a change of angle, like a knife turned to catch light. "So I could bring something not bought and say something that sounded like an honest thank you."
She looked past them then, just past, as if the question lived on the far wall with the stains and the score marks.
"That is my debt" she finished. "To tell you why the knives listen when I say please. To tell you why I do not want them to like me as much as they were taught to. To tell you my name with the right amount of poison on it. Mei. Lynea Mei."
No one spoke. The hum took a breath and gave it back.
Footsteps - no, not even footsteps. A presence that had always been there, now allowed to be seen. Kori leaned against a pillar where the light failed to take attendance. Her arms were folded low. She had been there long enough for the weight of it to look easy.
"So" Kori said, and her voice landed like a hammer wrapped in cloth, "that’s what happened to him..."