Root draws DAY 5/7 on the pillar and boxes D-2 so hard the chalk stutters. The room listens like it did something wrong and hopes we don't notice.
"Route," Root says.
They sketch a loop: Pantry → Market → Wharf → Pantry. A thin chalk line, a thicker world behind it.
Nim lifts their spoon. One—two—three—four. The little swirl etched in the lantern's glass flickers once, like a heartbeat admitting it exists.
"Two breaths," Kirella says at my shoulder.
"Walk with me," I answer.
We lift the lantern together. Its weight goes deep-heavy, the good heavy, the way a pot feels when the soup is right and everyone will be fed.
Lelia sets out little bowls of salt and mint along the doorjamb—stops on a route that will need breath. She tucks folded chalk slips into my palm, quick as a card trick.
"Bowl-name kuponları," she says. "If they want a name, give them a bowl."
Syth ties a length of rope at my waist and at Kirella's—loose enough to be ignored, tight enough to mean we.
"Kitchen Walk," Root says. "We keep each other."
We step out.
---
The street wears yesterday's steam like a tired shawl. Down the lane, three paper doors pretend to be respectable: fresh pleats, fruit-sweet ink, SIGN raised across their throats.
"Not today," I tell them.
"Promise Choir," says Kirella.
One—two—three—four.
I hum where the chalk dust lives. Lelia speaks clean: We won't pay. Bora answers, steady as a hand on a heavy pot: We won't sell. Syth kisses the first fold with the WORD plate—WE KEEP EACH OTHER prints through like a thumbprint under wax. Root writes the same along the threshold in brine-chalk and knots the pull with a kept-knot that judges liars by shin.
SIGN washes to WAIT, then KEEP settles like a pan on a trivet. The lantern approves. I feel it in my fingers.
The second door sighs and gives up its game faster than the first. The third almost has manners by the time we reach it. People behind us begin to speak without being told, like a neighborhood learning a song it always knew: We won't pay. We won't sell. Their mouths learn the rhythm before their minds can talk them out of it.
The rope at my waist tugs once, not because I'm drifting, but because he is there. I don't look back. I don't need to.
We turn onto the Ash Market's ribs. The Auction Ground sits sulking and perfect in the middle like a badly cleaned tooth. Above it hangs a new net: pale threads, tiny mirrors nested like fish eggs, a little bronze bell tucked under a banner that promises DISCOUNT for anyone who SPEAKS.
Syth points, mouth thin. "Name-forfeit. Say your name, lose a piece you didn't mean to sell."
"And get two copper off a spool of rope," Bora mutters. "Bargain."
"Bowl-name chorus," I say. My voice comes out steady. Inside I want to punch the bell until it forgets it belongs to anyone.
We seed the stalls with Lelia's chalk slips—BOWL-NAME ONLY—and stand where the ring can find the most feet.
One—two—three—four, Kirella counts, no louder than a kitchen before dawn. I take the low line, the hum that knows where a pot will boil if you wait. Nim shows three children how to step four without tripping. Lelia lays down a salt coin under the net's middle knot like she's paying a toll to a river who will take the money and mind its own business.
The first buyer lifts his chin to call himself proper. Lelia flips a slip into his hand so clean the air applauds. He reads: BOWL-NAME ONLY. He tries it on like a borrowed coat.
"Brown Apron," he says, half-laughing. The net gropes for true and finds ours. The mirrors inside it blink as if bored.
The bell under the banner thinks about ringing. It doesn't.
Another buyer: Spindle Hand. A third: Sweet Lime. A dozen more. The words are ugly and good, too big and wrinkled for pride, just right for a market learning its mouth.
The net sags to WAIT.
The city assessor arrives in a jacket that refuses dust. She draws a chalk line around the stage and writes MIRRORS BANNED INSIDE RING with the neat fury of someone who has done the math and found it insulting. The lockwright leaning against a post smiles the way men do when they lose a game they rigged and want you to think they didn't care to play it anyway.
We move, because a walk that stops becomes a parade, and we don't parade. We deliver.
---
Between Market and Wharf, the stone floors go slick with rumors. A kid runs past with a fish bigger than his arm and says "Little Breath" so proud that Nim blushes and forgets to blush, both at once. A rope seller taps the kept-knot on our waist tether and nods as if grading it. A dye woman wipes the WAIT we wrote on her lintel and says, "It stayed," like she found a coin in a winter coat.
Then the pipes groan. Flood feint. We feel the water rise a finger in the old bones of the city.
"Breathe," I say.
"Four," Nim answers, solemn, spoon lifted.
The thin pepper-mint chimney Ira rigged earlier wakes like a cat who knows where the cream is kept. The first cough of scent slaps at a smear of mirror smog snaking off the canal and scatters it like a lie remembered mid-sentence. I pull a narrow ring strip across the quay stones until its warmth sits at the lip of the water, saying not here in a language rivers respect.
The flood remembers it is a rumor and goes back to being one.
Ira meets us at Quiet Wharf with rope on his shoulder and approval tucked behind his teeth where only people who earn it can see. Between Post Saint and Post Dummy the ring-stones we placed yesterday throw a faint path on black water—a stitch you should step on, not over.
"Secure," he says.
We finish the loop. Pantry is back where we left it, pretending it never worries when we're gone.
---
On the way in, there's a box on the Commons table that wasn't there when we left.
It is small and green like envy. On the lid, neat letters: BLESS YOUR NAME. A ribbon hole yawns in the latch, innocent as a throat.
"Adama kısmet," Syth says, meaning trap.
"Salt first," I say.
We draw a circle on the board and pour a thin ring over it so the air forgets how to hurry. Kirella rests his palm on the lid, warm and firm.
"We won't pay," he tells the hinges.
"We won't sell," I tell the pins waiting to drop.
Syth picks the latch with a bent needle she treats like a dear friend.
The lid comes up.
Inside: name-tally teeth greedy for syllables, a braid of echo filament that wants to learn your breath, a scent wick rubbed with a trying-too-hard perfume. Under the felt, a second skin of paper with drawings on it.
The teeth do not fall. The wick does not crawl up our noses to live there. The echo learns the ring instead, poor thing, and hums we so happily it embarrasses itself and goes still.
We tip the pins into the SORRY bucket until they stop pretending. The wick gets a bath and sulks. Syth peels the false bottom and flicks water off the paper like she does from her eyelashes when she pretends not to like rain.
A sketch of the Auction: a side entrance with a tiny scent tunnel that hides behind a banner, a run of small pleat hinges that make the stage's throat purr when it thinks no one is listening.
"Thank you for your homework," Syth says to the absent hand that drew it.
Bora shoulders rope. Ira takes a pry bar he wasn't holding a second ago. We leave Lelia with Nim and the bowls and the pan lid and the list of who needs soup now and who can wait four.
We walk like people on an errand anyone would understand if asked: fetch, fix, return.
---
The side entrance is a proud little secret that thinks it will never learn shame.
"Work time," Kirella says, which is another way of saying we.
Syth climbs under the awning lip where pride keeps its dust. The scent tunnel is a neat bronze throat meant to suck voices off the crowd and turn them into flavor. She pulls the cap, packs crushed mint and pepper until the duct learns that inward is smarter than out, and reseats the lid with a twist that says obey. The first breath of the wrong perfume it drinks later will make it choke on itself.
I kneel by the pleat hinges and paint brine into the joints with a brush Lelia swears is for pastry. Paper remembers water is its mother. The glue drinks. The fold goes stiff. The throat that likes to purr learns shy.
Ira strings a rope ring around the stage, a quiet KEEP no one can pretend they don't understand. Root scuffs a small WAIT near the stair where men who hurry will step on it and feel silly then angry without knowing why.
A lockwright watches from a shadow with the attentive boredom of a cat faced with a mirror. He can't smell anything wrong because the wrong has learned not to stink. He smiles like a man who thinks games end when witnesses leave.
They don't.
We don't wait to be thanked by a stage.
We finish the circle and go back to Pantry, because walks end, routes continue.
---
By the time we return, the Commons feels like a pot wearing a lid. Hot, quiet, almost boiling.
Root marks the loop complete on the pillar with a simple O. Lelia has three new bowls on the board and a child under the table learning to tie a kept-knot with serious fingers. Nim taps the spoon—one—two—three—four—and the lantern's swirl repeats it, proud.
We hold a mini-choir by the door to set the day on its hooks.
"We won't pay."
"We won't sell."
Root adds, and the room says it with them like grace. "No names to paper or stone."
We hang the lantern back. It settles on the hook with a sound like a full belly finding a chair it trusts. A third faint swirl ghosts the glass beside Nim's, as if the lantern has learned a second breath it kept forgetting all winter.
"Hat oturdu," Lelia says. The route sat. It did. The stones know where to say we now.
I am about to sit, the kind of sit that turns into a fall if you let it, when the pillar clears its throat without clearing its throat.
D-2 moves.
At first it is a trick of tired. Then the chalk slides. The square around the number narrows, the two crooked edges straighten, the digit rolls over into a 1 as if ashamed of being a 2 in public.
"Don't," Root tells the wall. The wall listens like all walls pretend to when told.
"Paper moth," Syth says, already on the ladder with a knife. She peels back a sliver of the layer where dust keeps secrets. Nothing skitters out. That is worse.
Bora points his chin toward the Wharf. "Hear that?"
At first I don't. Then I do. A silence with a pulse. A rumor that remembers it is a heartbeat. A human voice too careful not to be one.
A caravan whisper.
"Name-collars," the whisper says, miles thin but urgent, as if it came through a throat made of string. "Tonight. Wharf to east sluice. Two carts. Small guard. Names bought in advance."
The rope at my waist gives a patient pull that means ready without saying it.
Kirella doesn't look at me. He looks at the lantern, which is a way of looking at me without making it about eyes. His hand finds the handle and then my hand on the handle.
"Two breaths," he says.
"Tonight we walk the whole city," I answer.
He nods. "Us first—then the rest."
The lantern goes deep-heavy enough to make the hook complain. Outside, a door that learned WAIT earlier today tries to decide if it is KEEP yet and settles stubbornly where we put it.
We lay out the chalk. We count the rope. We fold the bowl-name slips. We eat what's hot and pack what will be hot later. Nim practices four under their breath, eyes proud like a small flag that knows it's a flag.
I look at the D-1 on the pillar and the faint MI— still sulking in the stone and think of a road that insists on being a circle until someone loves it enough to make it a map.
"Bowls later," Ira says from the door, which means yes.
And the chapter ends there, with the loop warm under our feet, the Auction's throat glued quiet, the market net bored enough to sleep, D-1 chalked in a new square, and a whisper moving along the canal like fire along a fuse: two carts, name-collars, tonight.
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