Chương 59: Chapter 60: Discarding The Cover

The heavy mud-brick walls of the abandoned cistern kept out the worst of the blinding Levant heat, but the air inside the ditch remained thick with the scent of stagnant dust and copper. Ethan slid down the loose gravel incline, dropping heavily onto the hard-packed silt floor of the ditch. He didn't speak. He didn't check an interface ledger. He simply walked over to a small, brackish puddle of mountain drainage water trapped in a stone hollow near the cistern base. He dropped to his knees.

He uncorked his remaining water skin, dumping the fresh liquid directly into the muddy pool to clear the surface scum, and then drove his hands straight down into the silt. He began to scrub. He dug his fingernails into his hairline, ruthlessly scraping away the thick, greasy layers of charcoal soot and kiln ash that had defined his character profile for weeks.

He rubbed his palms against his cheeks, his neck, and his forearms, letting the coarse, gritty gravel peel the blackened camouflage from his skin in raw, dark streaks. He washed his hands three separate times until the water turned a murky, opaque black, revealing the clean, un-marked pale skin of his baseline character model beneath. He didn't stop there.

He unbuckled the iron clasps of his stained apron, tore the frayed linen face wrap from his chin, and stuffed the entire soot-blackened outfit into a hollow cavity beneath a loose mud-brick, kicking a heavy layer of flint gravel over the gap until the it was completely buried. I can't use the stonemason identity anymore, Ethan thought, his jaw tightening as he looked down at his clean, wet palms. The moment those wholesale blades started shrieking across the valley, my face became a target.

If I walk down the pass with that ash on my brow, anyone looking to salvage their broken gear will trace the source straight back to my tools. He turned his head toward the dark corner of the ditch. Hilkiah was leaning against the crumbling mudbrick wall, his weak, trembling fingers still white-knuckled around the tattered leather bundle clutched to his chest. The old man's eyes were open, tracking Ethan's frantic, silent scrubbing with hollow exhaustion.

"You cast away the soot of the furnace," Hilkiah whispered, his voice a dry, rasping thread in the quiet cistern.

"You wipe your brow like a man fleeing the avenger of blood. But changing the garments does not silence the cry of the earth." Ethan didn't answer the old man's cryptic theology. He stood up and hoisted the frail priest onto his shoulders with a firm, un-sentimental grip. He couldn't head down toward the main valley roads, and staying in this open ditch was suicide.

He turned his back on the thoroughfares, steering his frame directly up into the jagged, un-rendered limestone cliffs of the upper Midbar —the deep wilderness where the corporate patrols didn't march. He forced his heels into the steep flint gravel, navigating by raw environmental cues until he found a deep, hidden limestone cavern node tucked beneath a massive overhanging shale cliff five hundred metres above the ravine floor.

He dropped Hilkiah gently onto a flat, dry stone ledge inside the cave, letting his basic tools hit the dirt with a hollow rattle. He sat down at the cave mouth, leaning his head against the cold limestone pylon. He was completely broke. His automated units were gone, his wholesale inventory was destroyed, and his real-world sixty-day eviction clock was ticking down in the dark of Room 12-04.

He looked out across the vast, silent expanse of the wilderness cliffs, his fingers subconsciously tracing the edge of his bronze trowel. The soot cover was discarded, but as he looked back at the tattered leather bundle in the priest's arms, Ethan knew his operation wasn't finished. The true shape of the clay was still hidden in the dark, and he was about to dig it out.