The RDC medic taped the last butterfly closure across Voss's back and stepped away. Three parallel cuts, shallow, already clotting. The medic had wanted to take him to the hospital. Voss had said no.
"You were inside a reactivated barrier." The medic — young, nervous, couldn't have been more than a year out of training — kept glancing at the dome behind them. It had fully dissolved twenty minutes ago. The emergency response teams were still on-site, scanning for residual mana. "Protocol says you need a full workup. Mana contamination screening, cognitive assessment—"
"I was behind a corpse when it reactivated. The thing came up through the ground, I hid until it lost interest, and it died when the barrier cycled down." Voss pulled his shirt on over the bandages. The fabric stuck to the tape. "Cleanup report will show a seventh monster unreported by the clearance squad. Subterranean variant. That's their paperwork problem, not mine."
The medic opened his mouth. Closed it. Voss's tone hadn't changed — flat, technical, the same voice he used for core extraction reports. But something in the steadiness of it made the medic stop pushing.
"Sign the refusal form," the medic said.
Voss signed it.
He collected his kit from the perimeter station. Both blades were inside, cleaned by the response team's automated processing. His collection bags were gone — confiscated as evidence from the barrier anomaly. Four wolf cores, four hides, eighteen minutes of clean work. Gone. No pay.
The response team's lieutenant stopped him at the tape line. A woman with captain's bars and tired eyes. "You're the Carver who was inside?"
"Yes."
"Describe the seventh entity."
Voss gave her the description he'd rehearsed on the walk from the barrier to the medical tent. Seven feet. Eyeless. Subterranean emergence. He left out the threads. Left out the strength. Left out the part where he'd killed it with two short blades that couldn't cut through anything tougher than D-rank hide.
The lieutenant wrote it down without expression. "You killed it?"
"It was disoriented from the barrier cycling. I got lucky with the brainstem." He touched his back. "Not lucky enough."
She studied him. Carvers didn't kill monsters. That was the whole point of their classification — non-combat personnel, F-rank by definition, assigned to post-clear environments only. A Carver killing a monster was like a janitor putting out a building fire. Technically possible. Deeply suspicious.
"We'll need you for a follow-up debrief," she said. "Report to District 22 RDC office tomorrow at oh-eight-hundred."
"I have a shift at oh-six."
"Skip it."
Voss didn't argue. Arguing with officers was messy. He took the appointment card and walked to the transport station.
---
The transport home was empty at midnight. Voss sat in the back row and held his hands in front of him.
They looked the same. Same scars. Same calluses. Same short, clean nails. But underneath — under the skin, in the muscle fibers and the bone density and the tendon strength — everything had changed.
He made a fist. Squeezed. The seat's metal armrest deformed under his grip, the cheap aluminum crumpling like foil. He released it immediately and folded his hands in his lap.
Twenty-five percent. That was his best estimate. Twenty-five percent stronger than baseline, distributed evenly across his body, acquired in the span of minutes from golden threads that rose from dead wolves like steam from a hot meal.
Plus whatever the dark threads from the eyeless thing had given him. That was harder to quantify. The dark threads hadn't felt like strength. They'd felt like heat, and the heat had settled somewhere behind his eyes, in a place he couldn't name anatomically. His vision was sharper but that wasn't quite it. There was something else. A peripheral awareness, like catching motion at the edge of his sight except there was no motion. Just a sense that something was there. In everything. Under everything.
He needed to test it. Needed controlled conditions, a systematic approach, a way to measure what he'd gained and understand its limits. Mira would know how to structure the experiments. Mira would ask the questions he wasn't thinking of.
Mira was asleep in a hospital bed with frost crawling through her nervous system at a rate of one-tenth of one percent per day.
Voss looked at his hands.
For twelve years he'd been a Carver. Since age twelve, when the Awakening scans had classified him as F-rank — mana sensitivity detectable but combat ability null. The lowest possible classification. The kind of result that got you a sympathetic nod from the testing officer and a brochure for support trades. Carving. Supply logistics. Equipment maintenance. The backbone of the RDC, according to the recruitment posters. The bottom of the food chain, according to everyone else.
He'd accepted it. Not happily — Voss didn't do anything happily — but practically. F-rank was F-rank. You could train, cultivate, meditate, and pray, and an F-rank stayed F-rank. The mana channels were what they were. Combat ability either awakened in you or it didn't.
Except now he had threads of stolen power woven through his muscles, and an eyeless thing was dead because he'd cut its brainstem with a tool designed for skinning wolves.
The transport stopped. His station. Voss got out and walked the four blocks to his apartment.
---
He didn't sleep. Couldn't. The new strength hummed in him like a current, and every time he closed his eyes he saw the threads. Gold filaments rising from dead tissue. The most beautiful thing he'd ever seen inside a barrier, and he'd been inside barriers since he was sixteen.
At three AM he gave up on sleep and sat at his kitchen table with a notebook. The same type he used for carving logs — cheap, gridded, the kind you could buy in packs of ten from the supply depot.
He wrote down everything.
The threads. Their color — gold for the wolf stat threads, darker for the eyeless thing. Their anchor points — rising from specific anatomical structures, not random distribution. Muscle threads from muscles. Bone threads from bones. Core threads from cores. The correspondence was clean. Logical. Like the monster's body was a diagram of its own power, laid bare in death.
The time limit. He hadn't measured precisely, but the threads from the first wolves he'd encountered — dead six hours — had been barely visible. The freshly killed eyeless thing had threads so bright they cast shadows. Somewhere between fresh and six hours, the threads degraded. Dissolved. The window for harvesting was finite.
He wrote: *Freshness requirement. Time limit unknown. Minutes? Hours? Need more data.*
The absorption process. Physical contact required. Grab, pull, thread snaps free and enters through the hand. Each thread produces an immediate, measurable increase in the corresponding physical attribute. Strength threads from muscles. Defense from bones? He wasn't sure — the bone threads had been mixed in with the muscle threads during his frantic grabbing. He needed to be more precise. More selective.
He wrote: *Absorption = contact + intent. Stat boost immediate. Seems permanent — strength increase has not degraded in 3 hours. Need longitudinal data.*
The dark threads. Different category entirely. Not stat enhancement. Something else. That peripheral awareness. The sense of something hidden in everything, just below the surface.
He held his pen still and tried to access that awareness deliberately. Closed his eyes. Focused on the strange new sense behind his optic nerve.
Nothing. Just darkness and the sound of his own breathing.
He opened his eyes and wrote: *Dark threads — unknown function. Requires further investigation. Not stat-based. Perceptual?*
Then he wrote the most important line: *Source: dead monsters only. Power comes from corpses. My specialty.*
He underlined it twice.
---
The RDC debrief at oh-eight-hundred was perfunctory. The lieutenant from the previous night had been replaced by a bored sergeant who asked the same questions and wrote the same answers. The barrier anomaly had been classified as a monitoring failure — the seventh monster, the subterranean variant, had been present during the original clear but had burrowed deep enough to avoid detection. The clearance squad would receive a formal reprimand. The Carver who'd been trapped inside would receive hazard compensation.
Twenty-eight hundred credits. Plus a medical waiver he hadn't asked for.
Voss took the money and went to work.
His regular shift at the Carver's Guild was an E-rank barrier in District 9. Two shadow lurkers, dead three hours. Routine.
He went in with his kit and his blades and his eyes open.
The shadow lurkers were small — four feet long, low to the ground, built for ambush. Black fur that absorbed light, oversized claws, vestigial eyes. They hunted by vibration and heat signature. Easy kills for any competent squad, but their hides were valuable for stealth equipment.
Voss knelt beside the first one and looked.
Not with his normal vision. With the new thing. The awareness that sat behind his eyes like a second lens he hadn't learned to focus.
He concentrated. Pushed against the sense the way you'd push against a door that might or might not be locked.
The door opened.
Threads bloomed from the shadow lurker's body. Dozens of them. Gold, thin, rising from the dead flesh like luminous roots pulled free from soil. Each one anchored to a specific structure — these were finer than the wolf threads, more numerous, pulsing with a quick, nervous energy that matched the lurker's nature.
He could see them. In daylight, in a cleared barrier, without the adrenaline and terror of last night. Thread Sight. That's what the dark threads had given him. Not strength. Not speed. Vision.
The ability to see what the dead were made of.
Voss checked his position. The barrier entrance was forty feet away. No one was watching — the clearance squad had left an hour ago, and the other Carver assigned to this barrier was working the far side. He was alone with the dead.
He reached out. Touched a thread rising from the shadow lurker's hind leg. It was different from the wolf threads — faster, lighter, vibrating at a frequency he could feel in his fingertips. Speed. The lurker was built for speed.
He pulled.
The thread snapped free and poured into his hand. The sensation was different from strength — not heat but electricity, a tingling that raced up his arm and distributed through his legs, his spine, his feet. His whole body felt lighter. Quicker. Like the air had less resistance.
Five percent faster. From a single thread.
He pulled another. And another. Five speed threads before the fatigue hit — a sudden, crashing exhaustion that dropped behind his eyes like a curtain. He'd hit a limit. Not the lurker's limit. His.
Five threads. Five percent each. Twenty-five percent increase in base speed.
Combined with the strength threads from last night, Voss was now twenty-five percent stronger and twenty-five percent faster than any F-rank Carver had a right to be.
He sat beside the shadow lurker's body and watched the remaining threads fade. Dissolving into nothing as the freshness window closed. Minutes. The window was measured in minutes, not hours. Last night's wolves had been too old — the threads he'd seen had been the last remnants, almost gone. The shadow lurker, three hours dead, had shown more threads but they were already degrading. Fresh kills would have the most. Fresh kills within — he checked his watch, estimated the lurker's time of death from the clearance report — within ten minutes of death.
Ten minutes. That was his window.
He wrote it in his notebook, packed his kit, extracted the lurker's cores and hide with his normal tools, and walked out of the barrier.
The second Carver was waiting outside. An older man, balding, named Pohl. "You look pale," Pohl said.
"Bad sleep."
Pohl shrugged and went in for his half of the work.
Voss stood outside the barrier and looked at the sky. Gray. Overcast. The kind of sky that sat on the city like a lid.
He had a power now. A real one. Not combat-grade, not yet, but a way to get stronger that no Attuned had ever reported, because no Attuned would be caught dead kneeling beside a monster corpse with their hands in the cold meat.
That was the irony. The power was in the bodies. Always had been. And the only people with the skills and the access and the stomach for the work were the ones at the bottom of the chain. The Carvers. The janitors. The people nobody watched.
He needed more data. He needed Mira's brain. He needed controlled experiments, systematic observation, and access to a variety of monster corpses at different freshness levels.
He needed to keep carving.
Voss reported to the Guild board and took the next available shift. E-rank barrier, District 14. One of the clusters Mira had flagged on her corkboard. Seven barriers in three weeks where the average was one per month.
The Guild clerk handed him the assignment without looking up.
"Any yellow flags?" Voss asked.
"Clean clear. Standard entry."
He took the assignment and headed for the transport. His back itched under the bandages. The three claw marks from the eyeless thing were already closing — faster than they should have been, faster than normal human healing could account for.
Another data point. He added it to the notebook in his head.
The threads were still out there. In every dead monster in every barrier in every district. A library of stolen power, written in light, readable only by him.
All he had to do was get to them before they faded.
