Battery Crate purred like a small, house-broken animal. The LED stripe laid a soft ruler across the table. Kael kept one hand on the ledger and the other flat on the wood as if he could feel the day's alignment through grain. Mira was already awake with the knife under her palm, eyes on the seam. Nox rolled one shoulder, then the other, checking that his joints would not lie. Renn sat up in the chair too fast, winced, then smiled without apology. Isa and Tom were due on the hour. Aunt Mara had promised patience. The child slept inside a taped square because safety likes geometry.
"We do not need to be brave," Kael said.
"We need to be correct," Mira answered.
Nox: "And heavier than the mistake."
Renn: "And on the dots."
[System: Day Plan]
- Mission A: scout south route during the 07:00 and 19:00 shoulders; identify and mark an Anchor-4 candidate.
- Mission B: build a funnel at RN-6 south alley mouth: two shelf-wings, one ankle snare, one dumb light on off-beat, one smoke can for Seer sight-break.
- Mission C: recover sheets, blankets, and two doors from the south tenement for dormitory use if safe.
- Mission D: establish Door Receipt cards inside A1/A2/A3 listing last hinge/bar checks; teach Isa/Tom anchor ritual.
- Observation: Blue posters near the long brick read CROWN FEEDS; parade drainage likely to spill south by night.
- Contingency: If Seer appears with a choir, deny sight lines, peel followers with Dumb Light, and collapse funnel by signal.
- Reward: +2 PC for Anchor-4 secured; +1 PC for effective funnel; +1 PC for dorm stock; +1 PC for discipline upgrades.
PC available: 55.5.
Kael lifted his pencil. The sound of graphite on paper steadied the room. The first duty was naming things before they could name you back.
---
South map
The block map on the pegboard showed a red-dotted corridor south that did not yet exist. Today, it would exist the way doors exist after screws decide to. Kael added small squares where he imagined wait points, tiny dots where the street broke the wind clean, a circle at the long brick where sound lied to passing ears. Anchor-4 would sit in the tenement with the corner storefront and the second-floor window that faced a wall and therefore minded its own business.
"Two doors to harvest," Nox said, eyes on the drawing. "One for the dorm, one for the gate."
"Plus blankets," Mira said. "Blankets make rules easier because bodies obey warmth when they will not obey nouns."
Renn rubbed the scar at his hairline that maps out when he is thinking too hard. "Blue pasted new things on that corner," he said. "CROWN FEEDS with arrows. I do not like being pointed at."
Kael wrote: CROWN FEEDS posters - ignore, dilute with receipts later - do not engage language in the field.
---
Door Receipts
Before they left, Kael cut six index scraps from a cereal box and ruled them: Door Receipt - Hinge Check - Bar Seat - Strap - Pebble Curtain - Last Audit - Initials. He hung one inside each Anchor door with string and a pencil on a thread.
"We make maintenance visible," he said. "If it does not have a date, it does not exist."
Mira initialed hers with a practiced line that looked like discipline. Nox wrote an N that could have been a mountain. Renn drew two hash marks that meant I was here, and the door forgave me.
[System: Discipline]
Door Receipt cards installed A1/A2/A3; audit habit posted.
+0.5 PC.
---
Preparations: a funnel is a kind of argument
Anchor-3's bench hosted a small war council of parts. Two shelf brackets, a busted closet rod, three nails that were not proud, a bungee with more life in it than anyone expected, a coil of wire, and two smoke cans that smelled faintly of cardboard and alchemy. Kael sketched the funnel: shelf-wings hinged on wire so they would fold to let friends through and snap back to narrow the lane; snare at shin height; Dumb Light ahead of the pinch to bring idiots forward; smoke can on a trip that would cough a gray curtain thick enough to insult a Seer.
"Smoke will stink," Renn said.
"Stink is honest," Nox said. "Stink says this is not for you."
Mira tied the trip line twice and frowned at her own knot until her hands apologized. "Pins," she said to Isa when she and Tom arrived. "Long in. Rope arm. Short in. Shelf set. Reverse to sleep." Isa nodded and finished the sentence with her hands. Tom held the rope like it might confess something if he touched it correctly.
[System: Build Plan]
RN-6 funnel parts prepared; trip logic rehearsed; operators briefed.
Kael slid the coils and shelves into one of the laundromat carts. The cart rattled once, then learned humility when he quieted its wheels with tape and felt. The roof relay would watch from A3. Stripe had promised a diagonal sweep when the clinic's shoulder told the city to hush.
---
07:00 shoulder - southbound
The morning's envelope rose like a tide that had learned manners. They moved when it was thick enough to carry their noises away. Mira at point, Kael at her shoulder, Nox behind with weight and the cart, Renn at the rear with the broom handle and the mirror in his pocket. Isa and Tom held the apartment flank. Aunt Mara sat with the child and the Dot Game: step, step, freeze, story.
The south alley was colder than the north. The long brick wore frost like a shrug. A broken fence leaned two degrees toward giving up. The tenement corner's storefront had been a hardware kiosk once; its window now held a poster that claimed to feed people with crowns. Someone had taped three bean tins to it as if crowns could be currency in legumes.
Mira held a hand up: square. They waited on the dot they had invented for this. Renn listened with his eyes, which is a trick he has, and tapped the air twice: clear.
Kael chalked RN-6 on the alley wall at hip height and marked a dot below it for memory. He set the shelf-wings in their hinges, lashed the rod across at chest height for humans and neck height for fools. He fixed the dumb light on a stick five meters ahead and tested the pulse against his own conscience. It was the right kind of stupid.
The smoke can he taped to a nail with a pull cord that would catch a shin. He turned the fuse ninety degrees and wrote a small note with the pencil base: DO NOT BE HERE WHEN THIS HAPPENS.
Nox tested the width with his shoulders. "I like it," he said. "It reminds me of a door that learned to be a hallway."
Mira ran the rope through her fingers and nodded once. "We make everything into a door," she said. "Even the outdoors."
[System: Node Established]
RN-6 funnel installed; dumb light forward; smoke can staged; shin snare set to safe.
Effect: +denial south alley; +peel on packs.
+1 PC pending field test.
---
The tenement - A4 candidate
The tenement door gave to Nox like a bad plan giving to a better plan. Inside smelled of dust, iron, and the kind of quiet that comes with no more arguments. The stair creaked at the second tread, then learned not to. On the second floor they found a corner unit with a window that faced a blank wall and a closet whose door still had hinges that apologized slowly. There was a couch that would become rope, a shelf that wanted to be a bench, and a bed frame that wanted to be a gate.
Kael walked the perimeter and tapped the walls with his knuckles like a doctor with bedside bricks. "Studs here and here," he said. "Bar seat there. Strap to that pipe. Pebble Curtain behind the jamb." He paced the distance to the stair. "Seventeen of my steps. The elbow is soft. We can make it sing."
Mira marked dots from threshold to window, squares at the two safe corners. She hung a piece of cloth on the handle and flipped it to HERE.
"This can be A4," Kael said, and the room agreed because some rooms want to be nouns more than others.
They harvested two interior doors from empty rooms and eyed a third that would require Nox to argue with a wall about screws. They rolled two blankets and stuffed them in the cart, along with a folded shower curtain because plastic is worth more than pride when rain is an enemy.
[System: Anchor Candidate]
A4 identified and marked; materials staged; no living neighbors discovered; Blue markings absent inside.
---
Return and watch
They returned during the shoulder's fall. The funnel waited like a trap that cared. Kael left the dumb light on a lazy blink to bait any shufflers into wasting their enthusiasm while the team crossed the last stretch. Nothing came. Good traps prefer boredom.
Back at A1, they logged the first pass and sipped water like a sacrament. Stripe sent a diagonal sweep from the clinic relay, followed by two short flashes: ready and go for the evening shoulder. Kael answered with one. The relay baffles showed only a polite glint and then slept face-down.
Quiet Court at mid-morning was brief and arrogant in its simplicity:
- RN-6 funnel installed; parts tested safe; dumb light staged.
- A4 corner unit selected and marked; doors and blankets staged.
- Door Receipts posted; initialed entries.
- Blue CROWN FEEDS posters noted; no contact.
- Doctrine: repeated.
"Afternoon we rest," Kael said. "Evening we move a bed frame and a shelf. If we are not wrong, we sleep an hour in A4. If we are wrong, we do not sleep at all."
Mira stretched her hands and checked the rope. Nox ate the last third of a peanut bar as if paying himself. Renn closed his eyes and saw corners with his ears.
---
Signals: the kind you hear in bones
At 18:47 the pipe in the stair sang a small note like a throat clearing. By 18:55 the hymn's envelope rose. The ear LEDs wrote an honest shoulder. Kael sent a single flash to Stripe. She returned with diagonal friendly, then hold. Clinic west was louder tonight. Fine. Noise on that side was a blanket for this side.
They moved the cart out like a boat launched into a tide. A2's cloth tag flipped to WATCH. Aunt Mara kissed the child's hair and said the prize would be two stories when they got back. The child solemnly declared he would invent a new square in their honor.
RN-6 was empty. That made Kael nervous in a way full would not. He set the snare live. The dumb light pulsed like a small heartbeat far ahead. He pinched the smoke can's pull cord to his own belt in case he needed to become a fuse.
"Move," Mira said. They moved.
---
The Seer arrives
They were two doors from the tenement when the street practiced theology. A figure walked into the frame at the long brick and owned the space without asking. Tall, unhurried, eyes milky and attentive. The Seer from before, perhaps the same, perhaps a cousin; they do not wear name tags. Three shufflers orbited like lazy moons. Behind them, further out, a runner tested his calves and decided they belonged to someone else. The Seer stopped, turned its face toward the alley where RN-6 waited, and then toward them. Its head tilted. Light did not glint, because their mirrors were asleep, but angles have their own language. It understood some. It began to walk toward them with the calm of someone collecting a debt.
"Back to RN-6," Kael said, voice low. "Funnel. We collapse it on my word."
Mira moved first because she can move backward correcter than most people move forward. Nox turned the cart with a muscle laugh. Renn glanced once to set the distance in his head and then did not waste more glances. The Seer did not hurry. The moons found new orbits.
At RN-6 Mira took the pin sequence faster than she liked but not careless. Long in. Rope arm. Short in. Shelf set. Kael tugged the dumb light rhythm off-beat to pull the moons innocently forward. He hated that it worked. He was grateful anyway.
"Smoke on my count," he said.
The Seer paused ten meters out, as if sniffing math. It raised one hand an inch. The runner stutter-stepped forward, then back. The moons drifted sideways toward the alley mouth, as if the Seer's hand were a magnet and their ankles were filings.
"Three," Kael said. "Two. One."
He yanked the cord. The smoke can coughed and then committed. Gray filled the pinch in a breath. The Seer did not like being denied geometry. It stepped quicker. The moons marched without poetry.
"Go through," Mira told Nox and the cart. He went through, shelf-wing brushing his sleeve. Renn slipped past, set the ankle line to live. Isa and Tom would be watching the far squares with mirrors sleeping, faces turned away. Kael stood at the hinge and became a hinge.
The first moon hit the snare and blessed it with surprise. The line kissed shin, tightened, pulled the ankle into a tidy conversation with the rod. The second moon stumbled into the first. The third found the shelf edge with its hip and regretted its angle. The runner picked the worst line a runner can pick: inside another's stumble. He met the wing with teeth. The Seer stopped at the smoke and tilted its head, offended by weather.
Nox reached through, grabbed the first moon by the collar of its ruined jacket, and lifted just enough to shift the knot. Mira cut the line with an exact kindness only she gives to traps when they have earned it. "Reset," she said.
Kael risked looking. The Seer took a small step to the left, then to the right, measuring wind as if it were a ruler. It did not push through the smoke because the smoke made the world a room with no walls and Seers like walls. It raised its hand another inch.
"Collapse," Kael said.
Mira pulled both pins at once with a twist and the shelf-wings fell inward with a sound like a polite door closing implacably. The cart became a barricade by accident and then by intention. Nox put his weight on the rod. Renn palmed the broom handle and jabbed a moon's knee until it remembered to fall down. The runner tried to vault and met the shelf edge with his shin. His brain wrote a bad letter to his leg. He folded.
The Seer stepped into the smoke finally, as if deciding that insult was too expensive. It came slow, feeling air with its face. Kael hated that it looked almost human when it did that. He lifted the second smoke can from the cart, sparked it with a match pulled along the shelf edge, and let it cough into the first. The smoke thickened, ugly and wet. The Seer stopped again, two meters out of the cone.
"Back," Kael said. "We pull to the tenement. If it pursues, we give it angles and make it hate us more than it wants us."
They fell back dot to dot. The Seer did not charge. It wanted to see. It could not. It waited and listened. Behind it, the runner made a sound like a complaint about gravity and then nothing at all. The moons pulled at their lines as if the world owed them. It did not.
[System: Encounter]
Seer denied LOS at RN-6; followers peeled by Dumb Light; funnel collapsed on collapse signal; no breach. +discipline.
They reached the tenement door. Mira set pins inside the jamb in a sequence the door had not yet learned but accepted gladly. Nox slid the bed frame through. Renn fetched a blanket as a curtain against the hall for later. Kael resisted the urge to post a sign that said THIS IS NOT YOUR HOUSE and instead tightened a hinge that had not asked him to.
"Hold," Mira said. They held.
The Seer appeared in the street beyond and looked at the tenement as if reading it. It did not step closer. It lifted its face and turned slowly like a lighthouse that forgot whose ships it was for. Then it left, offended into caution.
Renn let out a breath like a man who had rented air expensively and just paid the bill. "I keep thinking it will learn to hate smoke enough to go through anyway," he said.
"It will," Kael said. "So we change smoke. Next time we use a different rhythm, different density, different smell. We do not worship procedures. We update them."
Nox peered down the alley and grunted. "We made a mess," he said, satisfied. "The best kind."
---
A voice from the stair
They were halfway through strapping the bed frame for the return when a voice drifted from the far stair. Not a Blue voice. Not a Seer. Not a shuffler made human. A human who had not forgotten how to put questions inside words.
"Kael?"
The name was said with a tone that had once held laughter and now carried sand. Mira's knife rose a millimeter. Nox turned his pipe into a reason. Renn became a diagonal.
"Who asks," Kael said, keeping the question flat so hope could not crack it.
"Kael Ward?" the voice tried again. "It's Eli. Eli Nadir. From before. You owe me a socket set and a sorry."
Kael's heartbeat became a ledger. He stepped to the stair well and kept his face behind the angle. "Step into the square I am going to mark," he said, and marked one. "Then tell me the name of the dog you did not keep because your landlord was a coward."
A laugh came, one Kael had not heard since there were bars with trivia nights and broken air conditioners. "Rook," the voice said. "You said it was a chess joke and I said it was a bird joke and we both won."
Kael allowed the shape of a smile to visit and then leave. "Come slow," he said. "Hands high. No jackets that look like friend to teeth. If you brought teeth, leave them."
Eli stepped into the corridor: thin, beard like a dare, eyes that had found too much and kept it. He held his hands up and put them down when Mira let him with her eyes. His left sleeve had a yellow stripe painted on and then crossed out. His right sleeve had no loyalty painted at all.
"I was west with Brass Street for a week," Eli said. "I did not like their nouns. I like yours, from what I heard through rumors that sounded like screws. You still count on paper?"
"We ledger," Kael said. "And now we add Eli."
Nox made a noise that meant relief disguised as a threat. Renn grinned like he had stolen a sunrise. Mira did not smile but she would later and Kael already knew how it would look.
"Proof-of-life," Mira said anyway because love does not erase procedure. "Two details and a gesture."
Eli scratched his nose with his ring finger by habit and said, "You once stole a shopping cart for me and said it was for physics, not theft. And we got lost going to a party because you argued with a street that had moved since your map had been printed, and I forgave you because you bought tacos from a truck that tasted like religion." He tapped twice, half, twice on his thigh. Correct.
"Welcome home to a place that is not that," Kael said.
Eli swallowed something ugly and nodded. "I brought a tool roll and two meters of copper wire I did not confess to anyone about," he said. "I also brought a problem. South-south, past the laundromat, there is a Blue preacher with a megaphone that works without power. He has a crown on a stick and a choir that is not all alive. He is telling people that smoke is a lie and mirrors are sin. His people will come to take both before dawn."
Kael did not look at the smoke can still wisping outside. He looked at the bed frame and at Eli's hands and at the ledger in his imagination.
"We will teach them that mirrors are grammar and smoke is weather," he said. "They can have sermons. We have doors."
[System: Ally Joined]
Eli Nadir recovered; prior connection verified; skills: tools, electrical sense, sarcasm. Status: hungry, intact.
Eli looked at the strapped bed frame. "I see you are still stealing doors for physics," he said.
"We are rescuing them," Kael said. "They were prisoners in dumb walls."
---
Return under a thinner shoulder
The hymn ebbed. Time charged interest. They rolled the cart back under a less generous sky. RN-6 still smoked in a sulk. The snare lay limp but proud. The long brick watched and did not tell on them. The Seer had moved on or chosen to be a rumor elsewhere. They crossed the last fifteen meters with the careful speed of people who know that running is loud.
Inside A1, the bed frame stood like a promise leaning against the wall. The blankets landed on a shelf like two minor victories. Eli accepted water like a person signing a treaty.
Stripe flashed a diagonal from the clinic and then two flashes that meant go ahead. Kael answered with one that meant ready and no talk, then turned all the mirrors face down. He did not feel superstitious about Seers. He felt practical.
---
Anchor-4, initialized
They did not wait to seed A4. When the 23:00 shoulder bent the city again, they moved only Kael, Mira, and Eli with the bed frame carried like a canoe between two stubborn rivers. Nox stayed to hold A1 and A2 because weight must be assigned. Renn watched the relay with a mirror that slept.
In the tenement they set the bar seat, the strap, the Pebble Curtain twin, and the Door Receipt blank that would stop being blank in the morning. Eli found the right drawer to cannibalize into a shelf and laughed quietly because drawers do not like being looked at as wood. Mira chalked dots. Kael wrote A4 on the jamb and felt the letter travel down his arm into the building.
"We sleep an hour," Kael said. "We do not deserve it but we purchase it with ritual."
They lay in rotations. The house of A4, which was not yet a house, watched them like a dog that has not decided if it is allowed to love again.
---
Blue night voices
A voice bled down the avenue near 02:00, enlarged by a plastic horn. It spoke the kind of certainty that has never had a conversation with physics. "Crowns feed! Mirrors lie! Gather!" The sound was wrong in the hymn. It ignored the shoulder like a drunk ignores a step down. It traveled badly and therefore stabbed better than it should have.
Eli sat up, face gone flat. "That is him," he said. "Megaphone apostle."
Mira closed her knife with a click that sounded like doctrine. "We do not fight sermons at night," she said.
"We do not fight sermons with sermons," Kael said. "We fight them with receipts. Tomorrow we post that we moved Aunt Mara, that we brought water, that we tightened hinges. We make generosity louder than his nouns."
Eli nodded, then tilted his head at the ceiling like a man listening to weather. "You use the pipes," he said, impressed without flattery.
"We let the pipes use us," Kael said.
They slept the second hour like thieves who had finally found a chair they were allowed to sit in.
---
Morning audit
They returned to A1 at gray light with A4 feeling less like a rumor and more like a fact. The child clapped without volume. Aunt Mara pretended not to cry and failed kindly. Isa and Tom reported no pushes at A2. Stripe sent one flash that meant ready and friendliness.
Kael opened the ledger and wrote until the page looked more like a table than a diary.
- South route scouted during morning and night shoulders.
- RN-6 funnel installed; field tested under Seer pressure; smoke denied LOS; followers peeled; collapse cleaned.
- A4 corner unit selected, pinned, and minimally outfitted (bar seat, strap, Pebble Curtain, Door Receipt).
- Bed frame, blankets recovered; two interior doors staged for future use.
- Door Receipts installed A1/A2/A3; first entries written.
- Ally Eli Nadir recovered and verified; skills added; intelligence gathered re: Blue preacher with megaphone.
- Blue CROWN FEEDS posters noted; no contact at night; sermon heard at 02:00.
- Doctrine: repeated.
[System: Audit Complete]
+1 PC (funnel effectiveness), +2 PC (Anchor-4 secured), +1 PC (dorm stock), +1 PC (discipline), +1 PC (ally recovery).
Total PC: 60.5.
Advisory: With 60+ PC, unlock options widen: Bio/Chem T1 Antiseptic Gel; Info T1 Line Relay (heliograph range); Engineering T1 Masonry Drill Discipline; Energy T1 Charge Control. Threat forecast: Blue preacher and possible attempt to seize mirrors; Seer variant learning smoke patterns; parade spillover south. Recommendations: draft Anti-Preacher protocol (receipts wall expansion + quiet counter-signs), smoke pattern rotation, and A4 noise map.
Mira tapped the ledger with one finger, the way judges used to tap wood before sentences. "We add a rule," she said. "Do not answer sermons with your mouth. Answer with what your hands moved."
Kael wrote it where it belonged. Eli smiled like a man who had found a language he already spoke with tools. Nox set the bed frame against A1's interior wall and pretended it had always been furniture. Renn traced RN-6 on the map with a pencil and underlined it twice the way men underline favorite mistakes they refused to repeat.
Kael placed his palm on the ledger. "We do not need to be brave," he said.
"We need to be correct," they answered.
Outside, the megaphone lied with volume. Inside, receipts wrote an honest whisper. The Seer would learn smoke differently next time, because smoke would be different next time. A4 waited like a door about to become a house. The city practiced being survivable, if instructed with chalk, shelves, and schedule. And the Souverain of Iron that did not yet exist made a tiny, invisible mark somewhere deep behind ribs, promising to become the shape of safety in a place that hated shapes.