His side gave a hard warning when he stepped over a split conduit. He stopped long enough to breathe through it, teeth together, then kept going. Mara had no patience for his limits, but she kept her pace where he could follow. Every twenty steps she paused, crouched, touched something—a wire tie on a trunk, a scrape on metal, a knot of cloth snagged in roots.

“We need speed,” Elias whispered.

“We need not to die in a lane someone else built.” She ran a thumb over a scratched tag fixed to a pipe elbow. “Kellen buys and sells. That doesn’t mean he knows what he bought.”

Elias came closer. In the algae glow he could just make out three cuts on the tag, one deep, two shallow, and a dark smear beside them.

“Blood?” he asked.

Mara shook her head. “Paint. Fresh enough to shine. They want a scared eye to read it fast.”

Elias looked up from the painted mark. “Read what?”

“That something bled here. That something waits ahead. That you should turn around and run where they can count on you running.” She rose and kept moving. “Lower hunters do this in old growth. Noise, signs, little stories in the dark. Keeps surface drifters out. Keeps our own people penned to the routes they’re allowed.”

A shape hung from a low branch to their left. Elias flinched before he could stop himself. It was only a bundle of insulation wrap tied around a length of pipe, but from a distance it had the size and sag of a body.

Mara saw him look. “Exactly.”