Rain took the roof into its confidence; the arcade took the rain. Stalls exhaled sleep. Stone columns remembered how to be bones.
Thomas returned alone before dawn because edges prefer you to come back without an audience. He moved down the arcade with the politeness of an apology. The pillar where the two shadows had agreed still remembered. Rolled tarps left darker seams; a lantern-hook held a soot-kiss. The marks made a geometry the eye respects even in the dark.
He put the key in his palm again. The brass made a small cool truth on his skin.
"Witness?" he asked the morning. It offered pigeons. The oldest cat in the arrondissement gave him one open eye's worth of approval. A watchman's boots said which brick they preferred; the watchman nodded and withdrew. Witness enough.
Thomas set his hand where shadow met shadow and invited the door to be. Not an order—an invitation to keep a promise made by hour and angle.
The seam softened. Flatness decided to have a back instead of an elsewhere. The door opened not by swinging but by changing its opinion about space.
He stepped with Breath-Then-Step, the corridor's old arithmetic. The air beyond held river-cold without water, like the idea of being underwater had moved into new real estate.
He did not go far. Good practice. He stood just inside and let the door forget it was open. The world settled like a table set for more than the people present.
Inside: a service lane no one had designed. The walls were the backs of the arcade—plaster, pipe, chalk-lines of forgotten measurements. Half-erased figures had been drawn and rubbed in a tidy hand. Dames' work, if chalk could have manners.
At the lane's end, a woman in white stood facing the wall.
He did not think ghost. He thought host. The fabric did not touch ground. The hair did not belong to an era with ready bread.
"You are late to a place that has been waiting," she said, not turning.
"I am early to a place that prefers late," he replied, which is the correct answer to most Paris negotiations.
She turned and was not terrible to look at. The Dame Blanche wore severity like a kindness. Her hands were ringless. Her eyes loved ledgers and disliked excuses.
"Some Syndics are squirrels with libraries," she said. "They will make nests from paper and call it law. They will need doors that open the other way when they are too proud to use the ones given."
"I don't sell keys," he said, letting the brass rest where she could see it.
"You shouldn't," she agreed. "Squirrels bite."
She gestured, smallest motion, at chalk half-erased on plaster. Lines formed a map of underneath: not quite Catacombs, not quite municipal. Passages with names: Lys, Verre, Chant. And one bolder than the rest: Eau.
The river's current pressed his breath. Someone had made an agreement with water. Someone else had tried to make a better one on top.
"The Syndics?" he asked.
"They prefer for water to have a ledger," she said. "They bill it for disobedience to drains. Water does not obey invoices."
"No," he agreed. "It prefers topography."
She almost smiled. "A meeting here soon," she said. "After-hours again. They will walk the map toward Eau and ask it to move where it does not wish. They will name the move public safety and pretend the river answered to it. They require witness."
"Me," he said.
"Or someone like you," she allowed. "Bring the woman with ink on her fingers. She carries rectitude disguised as sarcasm."
"Michelle," he said.
Names matter when people try to tell water what to be, said the room without words.
A rattle shook the lane. Pipes objected. A drip became a trickle where a seam tried pride. The chalk's line of Eau brightened, not in light but in idea.
The Dame's eyes went ledger-sharp. "Prices are due," she said. "Pay small ones on purpose or the river will collect larger ones by accident."
From the split seam, something stepped through that wasn't water and claimed to be.
(…to be continued)