They took the half core, the ringed-dot mirror, and a stack of questions to the East Annex. Luth Orain listened with his hands folded until the room ran out of talking.
"Good," he said at last. "Now we stop chasing boys and start chasing paper."
The archivist slid a cloth map across the table, Ash Lane at the center, little red marks spreading like a rash. "Ringed-dot sightings. Mirrors stamped in the last two weeks. They hop. Three blocks one night, five the next. Whoever runs this hates patterns but loves corners."
"Drop points?" Fenn asked.
"Behind mirrors," the archivist said. "Slots cut into old brick, oiled so slips don't snag. Runners flash the stamp, a hand pushes paper out, nobody sees a face. It's a ledger that's learned to walk by crawling through walls."
"Tonight," Luth said, tapping three marks in a crooked line, "I want it to limp."
He dolled out jobs with a bookkeeper's speed. "Fenn, you own the sweep. Drenn, Jore, outer watches. Myrren, with Kaelen. You'll take Brightmarket Baths." He didn't smile. "Runners love steam. People mind their own business when naked."
Selra coughed a laugh. Fenn ignored it.
The archivist pushed a tin across the table. "Trace powder," she said to Kaelen. "Tastes like chalk if you breathe it. Don't. Paint a finger on a ledger slip or a cuff. It drinks light. Later, show a soft beam and it answers."
Kaelen pocketed the tin. Luth's eyes flicked to Ashveil. "You, no floods. If the ledger notices you, it writes your name."
"I'm learning to stop," Kaelen said.
"Learn faster," Luth said, and dismissed them with that small economy he called kindness.
Brightmarket at dusk was steam and gossip. The baths squatted in brick and iron, windows fogged, dozens of lanterns hung from hooks to keep patrons from breaking toes and modesty. The side alley smelled like wet stone and boiled herbs. A stamped mirror hung crooked above a service door, dot ringed.
Fenn put them in the shadow across the lane. "Caps down," she murmured. "Eyes open. If a hand gives paper, we take the hand later. Kaelen, feel for bends."
He breathed slow, let Ashveil warm without opening. Light had weight in this city; he'd learned that. It pooled in doorways, slid along rails, avoided places where it had been told not to go. Here, by the mirror, it did something worse: it behaved too well. Every lantern in the alley put a clean edge on its glow and then, at the last second, shaved a sliver off toward the frame.
"Routed," he whispered. "Tiny mirrors in the grout."
Selra grinned. "Rude."
Bootsteps. A boy, sixteen, maybe, walked into the alley with the nervous calm of someone who had practiced being invisible. He wore a porter's jacket, a cap tipped low, clean boots paid for by dirty work. He knocked twice on the mirror's corner. A slit showed, a gloved hand came through with a square of paper. He took it, slid something back, payment in the form of a stamp on his palm, and turned.
Selra moved when he did: not to grab, to drift into his path as if she'd stepped wrong. Her shoulder brushed his. "Sorry," she said brightly, and dropped her coin purse. Coins rang. The boy flinched, bent to help, and Kaelen lifted the corner of the slip long enough to touch the back with a fingertip of trace powder. He felt the powder drink a breath of light and lay down to sleep.
"Thanks," Selra said. "You're sweet."
"Not sweet," he muttered, and left too fast.
Fenn's eyes said good without wasting a word. "We don't spook the wall. We follow the boy and find the ledger's mouth."
They shadowed him through Brightmarket, past vendors lifting the last trays, past children banging paper fish on poles, past a beggar asleep under a lamp that had decided to be generous tonight. The boy walked like a number: the fastest safe speed, straight lines with small detours for doors that looked like walls.
He cut into a weavers' arcade and disappeared in steam from dye vats. Fenn frowned. "Selra."
Selra lifted her lantern just enough to whisper a thread. Not a beam, trick-light. It split into a dozen tiny glints that looked like dust and rode the steam. When the boy moved, a few glints stuck to the edge of his cap and floated with him. Selra smirked. "Now he glitters."
They came out in a narrow court where three buildings formed a dead end. The boy slipped between a pair of stacked crates to a fissure in the brick. He tapped a rhythm on the mortar. A slot opened. Paper went in. Paper came out. He left with new speed and a smaller face.
Fenn waited for him to go, counted thirty, then stepped to the wall. Kaelen and Selra flanked. The fissure looked like nothing. Up close it looked like someone's patient hobby.
Fenn knocked the rhythm back. The slit opened a grudging width. Nothing offered a hand.
"Archwarden said no faces," Selra whispered.
"Good," Fenn said. "I don't like faces." She held her palm under the slit. "Ledger," she said softly, as if calling a cat. "Give me a quiet page."
A breath of air. No slip. No hand. The wall did nothing. Which was something. Kaelen looked with the feeling, not the eyes. Light ran to the crack and stopped like a dog at a fence. Not a person behind it. A tube into another wall, another lane, another hand.
"Redirect," he murmured. "They moved the ledger mouth one wall away."
Fenn stepped back. "We don't smash brick in a market. We mark the seam and come back with permits."
"Permits?" Selra whispered. "We're the permits."
"Not tonight," Fenn said. "Tonight we take the boy."
They found him at a tea stall, pretending to be tired. He was too ready to run. Fenn took him without a fight because she chose the wrist he wasn't ready to lose. She walked him into a side street and leaned him there like a broom.
"Slip," she said.
He hesitated a sliver. Her hand touched the bone between thumb and finger where nerves tell truth. He winced and gave it over.
Selra unfolded it with her eyes, not her fingers. "Drop, midnight, tannery culvert. Bring mirrors. Payment in halves."
Kaelen tilted the slip and blew the smallest breath. Trace powder woke, shining like thin milk.
"Good," Fenn said. She folded it again and tucked it back into the boy's jacket. "Deliver it. But if you see a man with a ring around a dot on his seal, you forget how to walk."
He nodded too fast. "Yes, Warden."
"And if anyone asks who you saw—"
"No one," he said. "A lamp flickered, I sneezed, the page fell out."
Fenn let him go. He ran like a man who hated what his legs were for.
"We take the culvert," Fenn said. "Quiet until it isn't. Vorrik gets the Annex. Luth will want eyes on the ledger mouth by the end of the bell."
Kaelen felt the city's hum answer the plan with its usual indifference. He checked Ashveil's cap and knew two things: the ledger moved, and it liked to move toward him.
He kept walking anyway.
Midnight took the tannery lane and made it damp. The culvert grate sweated. The air tasted like coin.
Fenn put them at the lip of the stairs. "Same rules," she said. "Caps down. We want paper more than blood."
They went under. Water whispered. The wall's wards showed in chopped lines, silver worn to gray by years of fingers touching what they hoped was helpful. Kaelen kept Ashveil warm enough to feel seams. Selra walked a step behind, trick-light ready. Jore carried rope. Fenn carried the plan.
The meeting chamber was like the last: a room that shouldn't exist, mortared by someone who didn't ask permission. This time there were two runners, not four. Both had that fixed calm that gets taught by fear. The palm mirror sat on a crate, ringed dot gleaming.
A hood waited in the near dark, a slender figure holding a ledger book bound in black oilcloth. It wasn't a person's ledger. It was a thing: metal skinned with leather, corners reinforced, spine studded with a strip of mirrors the width of a thumb.
Kaelen's skin went cold. Light touched those mirrors and didn't come back the same. It bent, fed into the binding, and the ledger's edge glowed faint as if it had swallowed a page of dawn.
"Payment," the hood said, voice blurred by cloth.
"Half now," a runner said, showing a bag that clinked the wrong way. Not coin. Glass.
The hood dipped the ledger's corner to the palm mirror. The mirror flashed, and a slip curled from under the cover like a tongue. The hood didn't write. The book had written for them.
Selra breathed one soft thread. It touched the slip, tasted powder, and glowed, trace waking. Kaelen locked his shoulders to stop himself stepping in too soon.
Fenn marked time with two fingers against her thigh. One. Two. Three, she moved. Her first pulse took the bag-carrier in the knees. Selra's thread twinned and snapped the palm mirror out from under the ledger's edge. Jore hauled a rope low, tripping the second runner before he decided to be brave.
The hood didn't run. They lifted the ledger like a shield. Light slid off it and came away sharp. Fenn's arc hit and curved, shaving stone. The ledger drank a sliver of the impact and the mirrors along its spine brightened like teeth.
Not a book that moved. A book that fed.
"Bookman," Fenn said, not loud. Naming a thing sometimes made it worse. This time it just made it real.
Kaelen stepped sideways and cut a low line. The hood expected high and missed low. His arc took their boot laces and a piece of dignity. They stumbled, the ledger wobbled, and Selra's thread slipped behind it to paint the binding with a thin wash of trace. The mirrors drank it and tried not to admit it.
"Drop it," Fenn said. "Or we break your hand through your toy."
The hood's head tilted. The voice came calm and amused. "You brought the boy who says please to crystals."
Kaelen's jaw clenched. He didn't answer.
The hood flicked a thumb. Three tiny mirrors popped from under the ledger's strap and clung to the ceiling. Light bounced wrong. The chamber filled with false edges. The runners bolted for the slot no one had seen a second before.
Vorrik's voice came from the tunnel, crisp and late by design. "Line." His beam drew a clean bar at the exit. The first runner hit it with his shins and remembered honesty. The second tried to roll and met Jore's rope instead.
The hood saw their moment vanish and chose a different trick. They slammed the ledger's spine to the wall. The mirrors along it flared, and a new slit opened in the brick as if the book had convinced the wall it had always had a mouth there. Cold breathed. The ledger tilted toward it, hungry.
Kaelen moved before the rest of him decided whether it was wise. He pressed his palm to the ledger's edge and thought no. Not loud. Not holy. The kind of no you use on a pan that will fall if you look away.
The mirrors along the spine went dull for a heartbeat. The slit forgot how to be a door. The hood hissed, not human, not not. Fenn took the opening. Her cut came short and mean, clipping the ledger's strap. The book fell.
The hood didn't try to catch it. They dissolved backward into the smaller dark, a step that wasn't a step, leaving a smear like cold breath on glass. Gone.
Silence hit the chamber with them. Runners groaned. Rope held. Selra bent and scooped the ledger with both hands like it might bite. It didn't. It just felt heavy with other people's plans.
Fenn didn't touch it. "Bag it," she told Selra. "Jore, tie feet. Drenn, stop enjoying yourself."
Vorrik didn't answer. He was smiling, a neat, sharp thing, but his hands were steady and the line he'd drawn held where it had to.
Kaelen stood very still, palm humming where it had said no. The ledger lay quiet in the cloth. The mirrors along its spine showed nothing. Then, very softly, the lowest mirror clouded and spat a slip into the bag.
Selra yelped and almost dropped it. Kaelen caught the paper on reflex. The letters were neat. The stamp at the bottom wore a ringed dot.
—
Reassignment.
Target: Kaelen Vire.
Acquire intact.
Deliver to Heart.
Window: two nights.
Payment: ledger clearance.
—
A breath later the slip smoked and tried to eat itself. Kaelen pinched out the warmth with the same stubborn trick he'd used on the core. The words held. Selra's eyes met his and widened.
"Into the bag," Fenn said, very calm. "Then to the Annex. No one else sees it."
Vorrik stared, composure cracking a hair. "They put his name on a contract."
"Then we tear pages," Fenn said.
They moved. The culvert felt smaller on the way out, like the wall had learned a new secret and didn't enjoy keeping it. At the grate, Kaelen looked up at the towers throwing planes of light into the night and thought of a voice in a box that had whispered mine.
He didn't say no this time. He saved it.
Back in the Annex, Luth read the slip twice, then held it to the archivist's lamp and watched trace powder answer in dim milk. He didn't swear. He didn't breathe bigger. He put the paper down like the table might break.
"Good," he said quietly. "They made an error. They wrote a name."
He looked at Kaelen. "Now we make the ledger come to us."