The Lowlight changed when the sermons ended. The city exhaled and pretended it was just tired, not afraid. Vendors rolled out their tarps again. Kids came out to test their luck with coins and bottle caps. Someone tuned a cracked violin until the string snapped and the note kept going anyway in everyone's head.
Kade followed the rain line until it thinned to a mist and the smell of oranges gave way to damp iron. The bridge ribs here made a crosshatch of shadow, and in one square of that shadow a stall hung with threadbare curtains waited like a throat.
A sign above it read whisper laundry in chalk that hadn't seen water in months.
Nyx didn't look up right away. She sat cross-legged on a milk crate, wearing two scarves and a necklace of keys that didn't fit anything. On the counter in front of her lay a strip of cloth with tiny handprints dyed into it. She was rubbing ash into the cloth with the side of her thumb the way people rub holy things to make them familiar.
"You smell like rain," she said, still not looking. "And other people's beginnings."
Kade rested the case at his boot. "I washed in both."
Nyx's mouth made a sideways smile. "Bridge time? Or priest time?"
"Bridge," he said. "Priest time gives hives."
She finally glanced up. Her eyes were light, the kind that look like you've told them a secret they're already bored of. A piece of chalk lived behind her ear. She took it and drew a circle around one of the handprints on the cloth like choosing a country to invade.
"I have something," she said.
"You always do."
"This is different," Nyx said, which is the kind of thing people say when it isn't. But she leaned forward and the keys on her necklace chimed like nervous teeth. "You know the boy who calls himself No-Name?"
Kade didn't move. "He owes me a favor."
"Lucky you," Nyx said. "Because someone came looking for him with a gift."
"Gifts don't come here," Kade said. "They go to real addresses."
"This one came under a different word," she said softly. "Receipt."
She reached beneath the counter and brought up a flat tin wrapped in oilcloth. She set it down gently, like a sleeping animal. The tin's lid had been stamped with a crest—a circle with a slash through it. Not the Archon's seal. Older. Municipal, maybe. The kind of seal used when the city still thought paper meant forever.
Nyx tapped the tin with one black-painted nail. "For your---" she paused, searching "---brother."
Kade didn't let the word land. "I don't have--"
"Language is cheap," she said. "Everyone is everyone else's brother when the bill comes."
He slid the tin closer, deliberate. The lid gave with a shy little breath. Inside lay a card the size of a palm, thick as a coin, made of pressed linen. A single knot had been embossed into its center and inked so dark it almost shone.
He'd seen a knot like that only once. On a counter tall as his chest. In a room that hummed like a beehive made of whispering. He was twelve and too small to be selling anything that mattered. He sold it anyway.
Nyx watched his face, which gave her nothing. "You remember it," she said.
"I remember how they tied it," Kade said. "Seven turns. The last one backwards."
Nyx nodded as if this confirmed a private math. "The Archives," she said. "Someone with old clearance stamped this card and left it with me. They said you'd understand."
"I understand this is bait," Kade said.
"Everything is bait," Nyx said. "Even bread."
He lifted the card. Tiny raised letters ran along the knot's edge—municipal font, clean and pitiless.
RECEIPT OF NAME—ARCHIVE // CLAIMANT: ILERI, KADE // STATUS: HELD
The world narrowed the way a tunnel narrows: not to trap you, but to make you choose which way is forward. The air under the bridge tasted like chalk. The case at his boot got heavier. He read it again to be sure he wasn't misreading hope as print.
Held.
Not lost. Not burned. Held.
His mouth made a shape around nothing, then turned it back into breath.
"What price?" he asked.
Nyx's smile died the way honest things die: without a sound. "They want you to steal something worse."
"Worse than a Name?"
"A Name that belongs to someone else," she said. "A sigil-key. In the same vault that holds your receipt."
Kade set the card down as if it had grown teeth. "Who?"
"They didn't say. They never do when they want to keep the story clean." Her fingers found the chalk and spun it. "They did say the sigil's awake."
"Awake how."
"It will know it's being taken," Nyx said. "It will know you."
Kade laughed without liking it. "Everything wants to talk to me today."
"The city's mouth is open," Nyx said, not as a metaphor. "You going to feed it or take a tooth?"
Kade tucked the receipt back into the tin, closed the lid, rewrapped the oilcloth. He didn't pocket it. He kept it in his hand like a hot stone, letting the heat think it was winning.
"You'll say yes," Nyx said.
"I'll say maybe."
"In Lowlight, that's a yes," Nyx said. "Go see your heretic. Ask her what to do with a knot that ties itself."
He almost asked how she knew about Lumi. Then he remembered who he was talking to. Nyx knew about things the city hadn't thought of yet.
Kade slid a coin across the counter. She didn't touch it. "This one's not for me," she said.
"It's ballast," he said. "So the bridge doesn't throw me off."
Nyx considered, then pushed the coin back. "Keep it," she said. "What you keep---"
"Keeps you," he finished, more tired than he wanted to sound.
He left the stall with the tin in his jacket and the city arguing with itself. The rain had steadied again. He let it touch the back of his neck for three steps and then stopped punishing himself. The heretic would be where Brook said: underrain, oranges on the air, near the old stanchions that had numbers stenciled in a paint that refused to die.
He found a doorway that wasn't a doorway—curtains of plastic strips cut from old shipment sacks—but the temperature changed behind them. The air was cooler, as if the room beyond had learned how not to be bit.
"Don't lift the strip with your right hand," a voice said calmly from inside. "It remembers worse."
Kade froze the way you freeze when a gun tells you you're not the center of the scene.
He lifted the left strip with his left fingers and stepped in.
The room looked like a clock had exploded and the pieces had decided to be friendly. Mirrors leaned on every surface, but they didn't show him. They showed other angles: a back-of-neck that wasn't his, a child's hand releasing a ribbon, the underside of rain. Copper wires spooled from hooks like veins deciding their own route. A woman stood by a table with a basin on it, sleeves rolled, hair braided in a way that said monk first, engineer after.
Her eyes catalogued him and also forgave him for being catalogued.
"Lumi Arden," she said. It wasn't an introduction so much as a setting of variables. "You're late."
"Bridge time," Kade said.
"Bridge time makes saints of liars," she said. She pointed to the basin. "Hands. Left first."
He washed. The water was cold in a clean way. He had a scar that ran from the notch of his thumb halfway to his wrist; the water made it disappear for a second and then return, honest about its limitations.
"You brought a case," Lumi said, looking at the case without interest. "You have a sister. She needs a mirror that doesn't bite. You have a Name you traded. You need a way to hold a fragment without bleeding from the edges."
Kade dried his hands on cloth that had never seen a sermon. "Nyx talks."
"She whispers," Lumi said. "I listen."
He set the tin on the table. "I also brought this."
Lumi didn't touch it. "Open."
He opened it. The knot stared back, peaceful as a noose in a museum.
"Receipt," Lumi said, without inflection. "Whoever wants your hands wants that knot opened first. They'll make you open it with something they already put in you."
"That's dramatic," Kade said.
"Drama is just math with breath," she said. "Let me see your forearm."
He pushed up his sleeve. The mnemonic seal at his inner forearm---thin, inked when he was too young to consent and too old not to---lay quiet like a sleeping rope. Lumi bent close. She didn't touch. Her breath didn't fog the ink.
"Seven turns," she murmured. "Last one backwards. Who tied you?"
"A clerk," he said. "Who cried before I did."
"Good," she said. "You weren't the only human in the room."
She went to a drawer and brought out a little mirror no larger than a saucer. It didn't shine. It held light as if light were a shy animal it had coaxed with a sugar cube.
"This is a cold-mirror," she said. "It reflects intention without heat. If you aim it wrong, it reflects nothing. If you aim it right, it reflects you at the angle you meant."
"Is there a right angle for me?"
"Not yet," she said, and that was kinder than promising. "Hold it. Left hand."
He held it. He didn't see his face. He saw the curve of a counter tall as his chest. He saw a knot tied slowly, kindly, as if kindness mattered. He heard a clerk say, You sure, boy? and a boy say, Yes, the way a person says I'm sorry when they mean I want to live.
He set the mirror down like it was glass and he was a grown-up now.
"It works," he said.
"It works because you're crowded," Lumi said. "That makes you fun to aim."
He showed her the card again. "They want a sigil. In exchange for this receipt."
"They want you to break your own knot for practice," she said. "So the vault will feel like home."
Kade waited for the sales pitch, the price, the but. Lumi poured water into the basin instead. The sound was like breathing once you've decided to keep doing it.
"I don't barter hope," she said. "Bring your sister tomorrow. I'll show you how to aim without burn."
He wasn't used to yes without a trap. It made him suspicious of doors.
"I can't pay a winter," he said.
"You can pay a morning," she said. "We'll spend it together."
He picked up the mirror again before he could decide not to. "Your mentor," he said, because he had Nyx's map, and the map had notes in margins. "He chose erasure."
"He did," she said, and the room got very simple. "So his love for me would harm me less."
"And did it?"
"No," she said, and that was the first time he heard anger in her voice. "Mercy that demands self-erasure is not mercy. It's a math problem with a hymn."
Kade nodded like agreeing mattered. The mirror in his hand warmed, but not like fire. More like a hand remembering another hand.
"Help me steal a sun," he said, as if this were a reasonable follow-up.
Lumi's mouth made a shape that wasn't a smile and wasn't not. "Of course," she said. "But first, we will tie your knot where you can reach it."
Outside, the rain thickened like a decision. Somewhere above, a bell that no longer had a tower found a way to ring.
Kade took the receipt card and slid it into his inner pocket where his heart wouldn't smack it when he ran. He did not run. He stood still long enough to feel something unfamiliar: a rope thrown from one hour to the next.
"What you keep---" he began.
"---keeps you," Lumi finished, not as a motto but as a measurement.
He left the room with the cold-mirror in his left hand and the city at practice in his right. The plastic strips brushed his shoulders like blessing or static. Under the bridge, the Lowlight had started naming its candles. Somewhere a violin found a new string.
Kade walked the line where the oranges smell lives. He had a receipt for a brother he didn't have and a way to hold a name he didn't own, and for the first time in a year the Halo's glow on his cheek didn't feel like a command.
It felt like a question.
And questions, in Eidolon, are what you steal before anyone notices they had them.