The blade bit in, and he welcomed this pain.

  Far off, rusted bells chimed again, their toll drowned in blusterous roars. The hammer-line faltered as a slave stumbled into Ash’s path; his face was a smear of soot and sweat. With twin-chip flint eyes, he glanced at Ash’s thigh, where fabric clung damply to the fresh row of tallies carved there.

  “Forty,” the man had said, his voice a rasp like iron dragged over stone.

  Ash went rigid, his hand spasming toward the knife at his belt. “Forty,” he repeated, though it wasn’t a question. More a promise than anything.

  The slave’s gaze stuck on the blood welling through Ash’s trousers. “You carve them deep.”

  “Deep enough to last.”

  “Last what? The shift? The cycle?” His laughter was a dry cough, breath sour with coal dust. “I’ve seen you, carving your numbers. Counting the carts. Like it matters. You waste skin. Flesh is for the forge. Not for numbers. You think the master won’t notice?” They closed the distance and murmured, “You think she wont?”

  He turned to go, but Ash caught his arm. “Name?” he had asked, his voice entirely flat.

  The slave spat into the cinders, a grimace pulling at his features when he snatched himself away. “Firelighter. Same as you.”

  A rumble, so familiar, yet so long dormant, began to stir beneath them.

  The ground hadn’t shaken in many harvests.

  She stirred—the Womb—her cindervault jaws pried open only by the currency of flesh: forty dead, plucked clean as bones stripped by tide, their names dissolved into the ashen ledger of their master’s dominion. Forty. A number so pristine it split like light through a prism, divisible by the hammers’ twenty-six throbbing beats, the whetstones’ twelve serrated sighs, the Blaze’s four ravenous throats gulping down the slog of time.

  Ash had etched the tally into his own thigh, where numbers marched in sterile columns and whispered back, unhaunted by the wetness of eyes—a drop of red onto white, colder than the Reclamation, irises dissolving into the recess of memory. Corpses mouthed in the black beneath the black, lips parting like wounds, as the Womb’s backward-counting chant shuddered through the line of carts, embers winding ways through the vault’s bowels.

  Firelighter. This title clung to him, a second skin seared through his blazing breaths, his legs trembling with the unslept drift, the unshed screams where the dead had slipped in, numb and absolved, while Ash burned as a living filament where every spark hissed the same truth into zero.

  Ash took up a pair of bronze grabbers, kicked a chunk of charcoal from under his table. It skittered along the dark cinders, bounded off another slave’s heel. The slave offered no reaction, just stared into the hammers’ fire like it was a window onto something he’d seen before and would see again, but couldn’t remember just now. Ash had been watching him, or someone like him, in every station of the forge, and the dead too. More a question than a man, the big fellow; Ash felt certain he’d learn the truth of it when they reached the obsidian cradle. That's where they were going, that's why the others had died. He'd heard it in the galley, over his ration of coal. One hundred hammers marched ahead of them in a line with their backs bowed, their shoulders hunched, and their heads hanging.

  He also learned this: corpses cooled quieter if their tongues were cut preemptively. Departed had theirs out and it was quieter than ever before, but the hammers—no, the hammers defied silence. Twenty-six arms swinging in tandem, twenty-six iron mouths biting ore into submission. Ash once tried to sync their rhythm to his pulse, but by the thirteenth strike, his will had faltered. Now, he counted the after. Afterbirths. Aftermath of Jor, who’d melted like tallow into magma, of the steam that licked his lungs into hide. Tally number one. The start of Her discontent.

  With tongs in hand, Ash knelt in a heap of waste and viscera. Each tongue was stamped with a lead slug, punched through the tip of a rusty hook that hung from the ribbed ceiling of the vault. As the other firelighters loaded bodies into the blazing chutes, they hauled them past, their faces empty of expression and their boots squelching in the morass. They moved like shadows, their faces blank, their hands steady. They didn’t count. They didn’t mark. They simply fed the forge, their eyes empty as the tongues they cataloged.

  Forty, but only thirty-nine tongues were cataloged. The fortieth had dissolved mid-scream, leaving a statistic unresolved.

  His jaw tensed. That wasn’t right. He recounted just to be sure a mistake had been made, as those did not go unnoticed—a fool would pay for it. Ash let his eyes slide through the cindervault, down the line and some way, two fools were standing too still.

  Resolved. Ash had locked in forty and the Womb’s cradle was burning the margin of error at plus or minus two to three. He could report them, let the interrogators drag their boots through coal dust, or he could stay silent and risk the master’s wrath. His fingers twitched—eleven, twelve—as the whetstones gnashed. Twelve slaves fed the grind that shift, their bones milled to chalk. Twelve blinks might case it away, but their names? Irrelevant. The ledger only recognized deficit or surplus. Jor had been a deficit. His melted flesh had gummed the gears. Two and one-half cycles wasted. The Womb demanded repayment; the harvest would set it right.

  Ash’s punishment: recalibrate the pourer. Sweat equity. That’s what the master called it when Ash peeled his tunic from the tacky film on his ribs. His body was a ledger too: grease-stains tallying shifts, scars compounding interest. He had begun to hear the numbers in the steam’s hiss, see them in the soot-swirl above the Blaze, licked a fresh-killed slave’s blood from the floor—salt iron rust—and tasted forty divided by twelve, remainder four.

  He'd heard eighty-two screams now: the eighty predicted, the master's—its blast rattled the fire-scorcher until he bled from his ears. The cindervault gears ground to a slow creep and he saw the corpses cool, twelve tongues curling inward. As an interrogator would drag their boots upon approach. The imperfections of their steps—grinding grit between shoes and shackles—only misled. Black coal marking their every movement, they masked the danger with forced clumsiness. One tongue evaded their grim bite, and the infamous oxymoronic secret guest, outside two files, remained placid. Except once nearing. A wonder allowed before falling quiet at fines laid opaque, caught around empty rib bones, cavities swallowing themselves outward into negative spaces, stale fumes resuming motion.

  If the tally was not corrected, the Womb would revolt, and the forge would collapse. Ash had seen it happen once before—a cascade of molten steel and screaming flesh. He couldn’t let it happen again.

  Ash blocked them and said it plainly, his head parallel with the floor. “A discrepancy. Two slaves. One tongue missing.” His voice was dull, but his hand shook as he pointed to the pair. The interrogator turned, their milky eyes glinting like broken glass in the forge’s fire. Their face was a scar tissue mask, their mouth a lipless slit stitched shut with wire. The interrogator’s metal claws clicked softly and for a moment Ash felt like the accused. But when he glanced up again, the interrogator was gone.

  His mouth dried out, the ache spread down his throat, and in time, the Womb hungered again. It growled within its cage of molten steel and cast-iron teeth, gnashing hungrily at every passing cartload of raw materials bound for forging new blades or armor plates—the very same material which fed into its insatiable maw without fail. Forty more dead meant forty fewer living bodies working precious minerals deep underground. No amount of entreating nor cajoling might release him from this toil—he knew full well why he did so. The other workers did not, or perhaps cared not enough about such things as numbers or timekeeping beyond counting out their daily rations and measuring out their own meager portion. Those matters barely mattered anyway compared to how much they needed each cycle just to keep alive, long enough for the next harvest when the vault would open its jaws once again.

  The Blazemaster’s new decree arrived via bell-chime: “Cycle six-two-eight mandates eight more rounds for Wanderlust.” A derivative, they called it. Not deaths, but units processed. Ash knew the trick: efficiency required staggered atrocities. He found the fortieth in the Iron Lace Hallway—a slave girl fused to the wall by her own ossified ribs. The forge’s heat had welded her skeleton to the pipes. Her tongue was intact by an oversight. Ash’s knife hovered. Margin of error: plus or minus one to two. But her eyes held a variable he couldn’t parse. Fear doubled, maybe, or the root of defiance.

  Her scream clawed up his throat—one raw, jagged sound that dissipated into the humid air before it could even echo. Pathetic. The dagger trembled in his grip, slick with sweat, or maybe blood. He wasn’t sure anymore.

  Ash nearly fell when a crack released some blood-curdling yell beside them, steam bursting a narrowly conical spire of hissing gas from the broken wall, diminishing to a needle's point, until a few men hastened to close it. He counted the wave as it scalded three slaves, counted their scars: fourteen vertical, three horizontal. Margin of error: the blood seeping through. Ten years ago, he’d carved this into flesh: ten hands amputated, five holes plugged, fifteen minds sewn into the asymptote of perdition, where the lost go to die. Still, they roamed, their thoughts rotting, looping, never touching, as a female trapped within the Long Bearing.

  Ash’s ribs ached, though his master would call such the integral of labor. The sum of every flaw beneath his skin, calcified. Shovels wrote said proofs in the slag—ore extracted, volume of revolution, bodies fed to the Womb.

  The smiths knew better as they bent metal edges forever into strips and quenched blades in oil that shimmered with irrational numbers. Golden ratios bled from the whetstones. Once, a smith had forged a perfect fractal axe; it broke his skull into repeating angles, now hung above the abyssal craw as instruction. Another round to and from the veins that spiraled into darkness, a thousand shafts, actually, each corresponding to a vein. They were all one. One mine, one path downward. One place.

  Nowhere did it feel closer, or farther. To follow it up or down, it was both. The way that words once said become forever changed, their meaning new again—no longer defined by the utterance of them, but the trace of the impression left behind. The echo of the voice, and not the voice itself.

  On his way back from delivering the final wet organ, Ash knelt to inspect a dead slave. A curl of fractures in series extended along the man's spine, and his tongue had already been claimed. A lighter came to haul the body away.

  “Forty-one. Forty-one. Forty-one.” The numbers spilled out of him and scalded. He had again forgotten to count his breaths, and terror constricted his chest in tight strings. The blade hovered over his bloodied thigh, searching for its place.

  Bells rung to hail the threshold of cycle six-two-eight approaching. He froze mid-vector, with his tools hovering like an unresolved solution. Two slaves were dragged forward thereafter, placed before the lighters’ tables. Their scars were congruent, their pulses isomorphic. Their crimes? Thirty-nine tongues. A mistake. A failure of count. And lighters did not tolerate failure.

  One body divided into two identical bodies; two bodies recombined into one. The paradox required five pieces, five cuts. Five voids. One firelighter’s cut bifurcated a lung. The second split a femur into dense sets. The slaves did not scream, their pain was a divergent series, spiraling like the trembled knife in Ash’s slick grip, and by the fifth cut Ash held infinity in his hands: two bodies from one, both breathing, both alive.

  Flesh for the forge. Ledger corrected. And the Womb, at last, was fed her due.

  The first time Ash saw a man weep; he thought he was dying.

  Perhaps the man was.

  Choking darkness awoke to him, one of the last clawers, one of thousands hastily dug after the melt claimed three just that tend. The period of rot had bloated the burrow’s walls with pus-like moss, a cold three creeping into his lungs. Aboveground hit a hot nine—the average death threshold for exposed skin. A man’s worth was soil. Unspoiled. Gritless. So Ash dug. Nails tore. Knuckles split. The sepulcher walls squeezed tighter, ribs grinding like mortar. He spat mud, tasted iron, clawed faster, and the ceiling shattered.

  Light stabbed down. Ash’s hand breached first—a skeletal thing, raw and weeping. He hauled himself free, dirt sloughing off in boiled-fat clumps, lungs seared by the glare. Half-born from his cocoon, he writhed, sweat-glue binding filth to skin, until he collapsed beside the burrow.

  Two full drifts in the tomb. Ash stood, brushed off dirt that clung like rot’s own offspring, and stretched. Still alive. For now. Work. Eat. Work. A hammer’s swing bought singe. A singe bought wyrm-loaf or kit-rib broth. A meal bought another swing. Another breath. Another chance to outlast the scorch-scar’s grin. Another cycle alive.