The city forgot how to cast shadows at noon. Light sat in the streets like a guest who wouldn't leave, and yet corners stayed dark as if the day refused to enter them without invitation. People walked more carefully. I did too.
I move in old routes: grain quarter, tally-house, the alley where the apothecary keeps vinegar and secrets, the wall that remembers my shoulder from younger years. Shen Yue keeps a pace I can hear without looking. Somewhere behind the breastbone, the bridge hums like a taut string being tuned by a hand I cannot see.
We find a purse in the market that is not a purse. Coarse leather, dyed cheap; the cord is silk hidden in hemp. Inside: coin stamped with new He Lian grain on one side and, embedded faint as breath in the rim, a second mark you'd need to love to notice—the shallow half-circle of my father's old signet. The same purse has paid a scribe for pamphlets against Wu Jin, a butcher for cheap meat to feed the poor, and a captain for ten men to quietly arrest the scribe and the butcher.
"Both sides," Shen Yue says.
"Both hands," I answer.
The bridge inside me murmurs approval. I hate that it approves.
We leave the purse where it can be found by someone who cannot afford to ask where bread comes from. We take only the thread: a sliver of silk fine enough to tie a bell to a gnat. I wind it around my finger until the skin whitens, and only then do I feel the old ache in my palm — the place where my father taught a boy that gripping a blade too tight makes it shake.
Zhou arrived with politeness and geometry.
Their counting-priests traced squares that breathed and circles that hummed. Their engineers coaxed the northern road to behave by singing the same note until stone remembered it had agreed to carry wheels once before. They offered tea to the mountain and measured its answer with strings.
Wu Jin met them at the half-made gate with a smile he had sharpened overnight. He wore no crown. The envoy noticed and approved. Men who leave their symbols at home believe in their own faces.
"You will record your measures at our Hall of Weights," Wu Jin said pleasantly. "This is not an occupation. It is an instruction."
"We prefer the word 'aid,'" the envoy said.
"And I prefer the word 'agreement.' You will find both engraved on the door."
He walked them through the avenue where banners pretended to be still air. Petitioners lowered their eyes and counted steps; soldiers kept their hands outside their sleeves; ministers learned their expressions by watching their reflection in windows before they spoke. In private, Wu Jin said to the envoy:
"Please don't heal us too quickly. I need the people to think recovery is something I allow."
The envoy bowed as if to compliments. "We march at the pace your city deserves."
Their priests listened to walls and wrote numbers on tablets that did not seem to hold ink. Their generosity tasted like copper. Their ledgers did not smudge when tears fell on them.
In the Lotus Hall, a clerk delivered three notes to the throne. One was a complaint about grain; one a petition to hang a seditious poet who had started writing in sums; and one a single sheet containing five names of men who could be sacrificed to convince the city that mercy had teeth.
Wu Jin read the first two and passed them to the minister of day-noise. He held the third in both hands as if weighing it would make it lighter. He did not ask who had delivered it. He already knew which door no one admitted had swung open to let it in.
He burned the list. He wrote the same five names from memory five minutes later. He signed that list. When the ash fell, it formed a single character on the tray as if the fire had meant to write all along:
未.
Not yet.
He swept it away with the back of his hand.
At Hei Fort, the Lord Protector visited the tower with no stairs.
The masons glanced up and then down, in the way of men who have been paid enough to agree but not enough to understand. The tower rose a little each night. Its walls were thick enough to carry a new thing: a sound that would reach not only ears but decisions.
"Stone," the old man said, resting his palm where the mortar had not yet hardened, "learn this name."
He did not say the name aloud. He did not need to. He had named mountains before by telling them where roads would eventually demand they crouch.
A runner from the north waited with mud drying on his ankles. The old man took the letter wrapped in plain cloth. No seal. No formal hand. Four lines.
粮入西巷.
吏买冬盐.
桥在下,钟未鸣.
父教子手——先左,后右.
Grain enters west alley.
Officials buying winter salt.
Bridge beneath, bell unstruck.
Father taught the hand—left first, then right.
He read it once and smiled, but only with his breath. "He remembers," he said. "Even when he thinks he is forgetting."
"Which son, my lord?" the runner asked before shame could stop him.
"The one who asks after knives," the old man said. "Not the one who tries to feed the table."
He dismissed the boy with coin and silence. He touched the tower again. It did not yet know what it would be. He did. That was enough.
Shen Yue and I let the night carry us as if we were two leaves that had decided to float together. We move where the city leans.
A woman with a burn scar asks me to bless her child. I am not a priest. I touch the boy's hair anyway. It smells of smoke and soap, which is to say it smells like survival. I tell her to keep a pot of water boiling before dawn and to count breaths backwards from a hundred when the bells do not ring. She thanks me as if I had given her rice. I have given her a method. Methods are crueler and more reliable than gods.