Chapter 199: Jiang Destroyed the Voice That Still Called Him Human

"Please, Aylin. Let me out."

Jiang heard the plea through his shoulder.

He was still braced beneath Kaul’s blade, feet sliding on the root wall while the current pressed him against the open joint. The thorn cage floated beside his face. Each time the cloth moved, his old human voice traveled through the water and entered his bones.

"You know me," it said.

Aylin’s answer came from the root mouth. "I know what that voice was taken from."

The copy went quiet.

Jiang wished it had sounded monstrous. He wished it had laughed with someone else’s mouth or promised him power. Instead it sounded tired, frightened, and almost embarrassed to need help.

It sounded like him on bad nights.

That was why the choice hurt.

Kaul’s blade shifted above Jiang’s shoulder. Black-green tissue squeezed around the metal, closing the seam one wet fiber at a time. If the blade came free, the feeder could return to Kaul’s living strand. If they left it buried, the current would pull Jiang deeper with it.

Aylin held the carrier rope in one hand and the rider’s cracked spar in the other. Blood ran from beneath her reopened shoulder seam.

"I am not going to ask which body is you," she told Jiang. "I am asking whether we save the proof."

Neris gripped the copper lip behind her. "That bundle is the only piece we can carry to anyone who says Skykeel never stole a living voice."

Kesta kept both injured hands inside the sleeping-net loops. "Kaul is also the man who built the place that stole them."

No one offered an argument.

Kaul remained folded over the center frame, breathless and gray. His pale adult bell clung beside the feeder with one limb bent beneath its body. It had chosen him before, during, and after his worst choices. That loyalty did not rewrite what he had done.

Kesta looked at him for a long time.

"He put his own throat in it," she said. "That does not erase the cages. It does not give this root the right to finish him either."

The copied voice returned. "Aylin, I am still in here."

Aylin kept watching Jiang.

He thought of hands.

His own hands had opened his mother’s messages, held train rails, rubbed sleep from his face, and reached for Aylin in the alley where this began. He still dreamed of them. Sometimes he woke trying to close fingers that were now black flippers against the ice.

The voice inside the thorns belonged to that grief.

It did not belong to his future.

Jiang struck the carrier rib twice with his beak.

His meaning was unmistakable: destroy it.

Aylin lowered her gaze until her next breath came. Then she looked up without addressing the voice.

"I can hold the cage against the current," she told Jiang. "I will not hold you in the root. If you need out, leave it."

He touched the release knot hanging loose from the carrier. Then he pressed his breast against the cage and waited.

Aylin understood his answer.

She wrapped the carrier rope around her forearm.

That was her hold, offered with the escape still open.

Jiang bit through the first thorn.

Black-green wood cracked between the damaged edges of his beak. The copied voice cried out with his human throat. That cry could not turn wood into flesh or make the pain false.

Current seized the cage.

Aylin’s arm snapped straight. Her boots left the center floor, and the green-sailed rider caught her belt before she entered the root. Neris locked both elbows around the rider. Beras braced Neris at the waist. Kesta threaded the sleeping net around them all without pretending her hands could carry the load alone.

No order passed between them.

Each person chose what to hold.

Jiang drove his beak deeper.

The chipped tip split along its old break. Warm blood entered cold water and vanished toward the white points. He twisted his neck, using the cage rib as leverage, and tore the innermost wrapping across its seam.

Thorns spilled around his face.

Some carried fragments of the human voice. One whispered his mother’s first syllable without knowing her name. Another released the start of his penguin cry. A third made only the sound of someone inhaling before a confession.

The feeder tightened around all of them.

Its joint opened wider.

"Now!" the green-sailed rider shouted.

She drove the edge sideways through the pale joint. Jiang put both flippers against its spine and let the current take his body.

For an instant, he became a black-and-white lever between the knife and the ruined cage.

His bad shoulder tore under the force.

Metal shifted across the joint.

Pale fibers separated from the root wall. The feeder recoiled, dragging the loose thorns with it. Jiang released the knife before it could carry him farther, rolled through the dark water, and caught the carrier rib with his beak.

Aylin still held the rope.

"I have it," she said.

Jiang shook his whole body.

The carrier snapped against the current. Its crushed cradle rib broke in the middle. Wet cloth opened like a split sail, and the remaining thorns struck one another in the feeder’s tightening coil.

Jiang bit through cloth again.

His beak closed on the thickest splinter, the one that had spoken with his full human voice. The wood resisted until Aylin leaned backward and gave him tension through the rope.

They broke it together.

The voice did not scream.

It said, "I don’t want to disappear."

Jiang closed his beak harder.

Wood split inside his beak.

His old voice broke halfway through the word *human*.

Every loose thorn went still.

For half a breath, the root held nothing but Jiang’s blood and the ruined cloth. Then the severed feeder convulsed. Its cut end whipped past him and vanished into the thicker black-green wall, taking the last splinters with it.

No sample remained in the carrier.

No copied human word remained within reach.

Behind Jiang, Kaul breathed.

The first breath barely moved his chest. The second entered the center root and came back through Skykeel as water bursting from a hundred copper mouths. Streets heard no command, apology, or name.

Only a man choking on air.

Kaul’s adult bell released the severed feeder and returned to his wrist. Its damaged limb dragged across his sleeve. Kaul tried to speak to it and produced nothing beyond wet breath.

His words had not come back.

Aylin pulled the broken carrier toward the center. Jiang caught the trailing cloth and swam after it, every stroke cutting across his shoulder. The rider withdrew Kaul’s blade from the root wall.

The seam did not close.

Without the familiar thorns pulling the feeder outward, the thicker root contracted around its empty center. Its walls drew back from Skykeel’s copper lip. The opening widened faster than the city could turn away.

Foreign current struck the center chamber broadside.

Neris lost the rib she held. Beras caught her coat. Kesta’s sleeping net tore free from one wall and became a sail full of dark water. Aylin wrapped the loose end around the rider’s waist before it could pull anyone into the throat.

Then all of Skykeel moved.

Not one street or chamber. The entire city lurched toward the opening that had swallowed its cistern, its voice evidence, and Jiang’s blood.

Pale roots scraped along black-green walls. Empty roofs broke away and vanished ahead. Residents dropped through their new floors into water, caught one another, and kept moving because there was no structure left behind them to return to.

Jiang reached the copper lip.

Aylin caught him under both flippers. The impact hurt them both, but her grip did not become a cage. She set his feet against the center rib and kept one hand open beside him.

Together they watched the last view of the Bellmother’s ceiling sea narrow behind Skykeel.

No pale root reached back.

The black-green throat closed around the city’s wake.

Skykeel entered the star-water with no fixed way home.