We decided to strike where the ledger lived. The committee kept copies of important agreements in a vault below the Old Court, a place of stone and humidity where pens had once been dipped in gold. The vault's key was not iron but favor; it was kept by the magistrate and a few of his closest allies.
I thought about burning everything down. I thought about the oath I said at my brother's grave. I thought, too, of the faces of the people who had been unwittingly caught in the web: the student who had been bought to study the pitch of the wind, the child whose father had vanished after speaking against the syndicate. Vengeance, I was learning, would not be clean.
Mei and I entered the vault the night of the autumnowls. We moved like thieves in a play that had been written by a fate that loved dark rooms. Yù waited above, perched on a parapet and listening to the drum of the city. Inside, the ledger's copies were numerous and thick with the sort of handwriting that looked official because it had been practiced until cruelty seemed like a kind of refinement.
We took what we could and burned the rest. Fire, I discovered, has a celebratory sound. Its noise hides small regrets. The documents blackened and curled like leaves remembering summer. We left copies taped to the door of the magistrate's house and slipped away.
The next day, the city tasted like ash. The magistrate's house was full of men with polite throats and apologies ready for mouths that did not mean them. The court convened emergency meetings. Qiao's ships were searched. The Sindicate's foreign partners sent envoys with silk and sugar and veiled threats. The ledger's disappearance caused fissures, and those fissures spread in dangerous directions.
People spoke of justice. People also spoke of ruin. In the space between the two, chaos took a breath and exhaled