The hatch listens like a judge with no face.
Knife and hand stare from the stone—simple carvings, honest chisel marks, the kind you make when your wrist still remembers being human. Above them, the words sit dark and sure:
SPEAK TO PASS.
FEE: ONE NAME.
Behind us, the depot breathes steam down the culvert, and the mirror-bars paint thin lines on the air where the ring refuses to let them land. The Time-Tax taste is chalk on my tongue.
Kirella's palm covers mine on the lantern. "Two breaths."
"Two," I answer, and the ring around our boots hums like a warm belt that knows its job and wants to keep it.
I touch the knife carving. The groove is shallow where the chisel skipped. Whoever cut it was in a hurry or already tired. I slide brine along the line with the point of my needle—not to erase, just to remind the stone of rivers and mothers and choices other than cutting.
Then the hand—fingers spread, palm open. Ira presses a rope wedge into the hairline crack at the base and sets his weight. It's not enough to pry. It's enough to mean held.
"Door wants a name," Syth says softly, eyes on the lintel. "Give it something true that isn't a person."
I unclasp the little echo-stone from the string around my wrist, the one we lifted from the wall back in Blue Pantry—the pebble with mirror dust inside that tapped like a stolen syllable. I set it inside the tight ring, let the lantern warm it. It hums mi in the smallest voice a rock can have, a not-quite-name, a corner of one.
"Not mine," I tell it, and then I tell the door. "Not anyone's."
The hatch repeats, voice like grinding: "Speak to pass. Fee: one name."
"Kept," I say. "Not owned."
I thread rope through the ring and tie a kept-knot Nim taught me—a simple bend with the extra turn that won't misremember itself when tugged. Kirella lowers his hand until his palm covers mine over the lantern handle. Syth slides an empty cylinder into the breath-slot beside the lintel—a toll niche the size of a fist—and holds it there, open-mouthed and expectant. She doesn't give it ink; she gives it breath: two in, two out, the shared rhythm we've been beating into stones since the Kitchen Walk began.
"Bowl-name chorus," I tell the four behind us. "Quiet. Hold on four."
Kirella counts—a thread through a needle. One—two—three—four.
We speak the names we keep, not the ones the paper wants: "Red Ladle. Steady Hand. Quick Spoon. Rope Gate. Tin Ladle. Pale Thread. Ink Nail. Ash Poppy."
The echo-stone hums mi like a moth that learned a new letter. The lantern turns the sound into a we-tone—no I in it, no single throat to tax or trap. Syth angles the empty cylinder so the warmth spills inside. Ira leans his weight into the hand. Kirella keeps my knuckles steady in the brass. The rope knot holds.
Stone is not a person. It still has preferences.
The hatch draws a long, reluctant breath.
"One name kept," it says, and there is something like surprise under the grind. A chalk mark prints faint at the toll niche: KEEP. Beneath it, a second line etches itself with a spiteful little flourish: a warning rune I don't know but understand—flagged.
"Noted," Syth murmurs.
The hatch yields a hand-span, then another—grinding like an insult reconsidered, like a door that remembers it was built for passing, not keeping. Mirror bars strike at the edge of the ring. I keep my eyes floor. Kirella's shoulder absorbs the slice as if patience were a shield.
"Through," he says.
We slip inside in the narrow space the stone gives us, one after another in a rhythm that doesn't want to look like a run. The freed four keep their bowls close, slips tucked like amulets. Ira drags the rope wedge behind and jams it into the inner jamb as a courtesy to gravity.
The toll niche—the "fee office," if you're the kind of person who likes a clean lie—is a tongue of space between outer and inner doors. A little clerk ticks at a desk—wood ribs, paper skin, ledger for a face, a stamp socket where a mouth should be. Its hands aren't hands; they're brushes.
"Good evening," the clerk says in a voice made of chalk lines. "One name owed."
Syth plants the WORD plate on its jaw. WAIT. The letters print into the paper like manners. The clerk pauses with a tick and a confused curl of its brush fingers.
I draw a small ring coin on the floor with the lantern, a circle just wide enough for the freed four to stand inside without breathing the clerk's dust. The air inside warms, smells like soup you wish you had. They step in without being told.
"Hold that," I tell the ring, which is another way of asking it to love someone for a minute.
On the inner wall, a slot opens onto the main conduit—Pipe Mile proper. Between us and it, a barred alcove holds two more people, backs tied to rails with paper straps, collars pleated under the jaw and ink-threaded to a pipe-mounted stamp block. The straps aren't leather. They are declarations that pretended to be bindings and learned they could be both.
We step there as one, everything else forgotten because here is a body and a breath and a choice. Silent Choir only: no words the siphon can tax, no names any stone can keep. Two breaths together. Two in, two out.
The brine needle kisses the pleat seam—not the throat, never—and the paper relaxes like it remembered water. The first collar loosens to wet lace and drops with a sound like a held breath released. The second follows. We peel the paper straps from the rails; they come away sticky with ink that wants to be a law and settles for being mud.
"Bowl-names," I say, low and wrong for stone and exactly right for people. Syth passes two slips through the bars.
The first man—thin wrists, eyes that never got to be careless—reads, swallows, and says, "Latch Reed," as if trying the shape on a tongue that hasn't had a treat in a year. The second, with shoulders bruised with old orders, nods once and tucks Tin Drift into his cuff like a promise he owes himself.
"Into the ring," I say. The coin circle holds them like a kitchen that can be carried.
The clerk twitches. WAIT cracks along its jaw. Its brush-fingers scratch across its ledger face and write ONE TRUE NAME OWED in neat, legal lines.
The air goes dry in my mouth. The ceiling hums a new, mean note—Time-Tax siphon, pulling minutes from any word like a pickpocket with a uniform. I taste chalk hard enough to want to spit and don't, because the room would count the spit as speech if it could charge for it.
Kirella doesn't squeeze. He doesn't have to. His hand stays a lid on mine. My breath stays with his. We don't give the siphon anything it can invoice.
I set the lantern to the floor between us and press until the brass warms my palm. The ring deepens under the coin circle and under our feet in a seam that runs like a thin river. I don't speak the vow. I give it shape.
"We return for three," I say anyway, softly, because sometimes stone needs sound to recognize meaning.
The clerk pauses mid-stroke. On its ledger face, the last E of NAME fails to arrive. The chalk line starts to curl into a P instead. The letters rearrange themselves with a reluctant grace:
ONE TRUE NAME OWED → ONE KEPT NAME LEDGERED (DEFERRED)
The toll niche ticks once, surprised to be reasonable. A ghostly chalk seal appears on the wall: KEEP in a circle, three small dots under it like seeds. The warning rune beside it brightens a shade: flag active. It's not a debt. It's a bond—we return with three, not names but lives.
"Not out of it yet," Syth says.
"Never," I say, and manage not to like the way it sounds.
Ira pulls the inner lever, which is not a lever so much as a stubborn piece of metal that has decided it will be obligated but not enjoy it. The door to Pipe Mile yawns.
The conduit is a long throat with iron ribs and breath gutters along both sides. Mirror sills gleam there—slotted plates polished to throw back light at ankle height, so a person's own reflection can cut their knees out from under them. Distant up-tunnel, something rumbles: wheels, maybe; closer down-tunnel, something hums like a large machine getting ready to be rude. The air smells of wet stone, hot glue, and a century of people who never got to own their voices.
Syth marks the wall with wax chalk—quick arrows that pretend to be careless and are not. → HATCH 9 / → RAINHOUSE MAIN. Ira slings a rope line along the right-hand wall—knots every six paces, the way a man thinks when he wants a future body to have something to hold.
We file in, the freed four and the two new ones—Latch Reed, Tin Drift—keeping to the ring seam I lay along the floor, a warm thread that says we in a grammar the tunnel can't tax.
Behind us, the paired mirrors reappear as reflected drips along the sill—thin crescents that seem like water until they move against gravity. The ring fuzzes them; they sharpen again; they hate being ignored.
"Keep low," Kirella says, voice at the edge of nothing. "Eyes on floor."
We move in a rhythm that has become our accent. One—two—three—four in footfalls, two in breaths. It's enough to be a song you don't have to hear to recognize.
The conduit jitters under our feet. A bell pings somewhere ahead with the bored insistence of a warning that thinks it's part of the scenery. Ira grimaces. "Pressure flush," he says.
"Run?" Syth asks, already half-turned to mischief.
"Not yet," Kirella says. "Hold. Measure."
The hum ahead swells. The first surge licks the floor, a tongue of cold that wants to be a shove. I throw a broad ring down across the width of the tunnel, bones to heels, heel to bone—no elegance, just a fat line of warmth that tells water to behave. The surge hits and spreads shallow; the ring holds. It costs something in my wrist. I pay it.
The mirrors hate it. They brighten in retaliation, bars thinning to scalpels. The nearest one angles up and tries to write my knees with its opinion.
Kirella steps into the line like a man stepping between a child and a cart. It touches his boot and loses interest. He doesn't even look down. He keeps his hand where it has been since the hatch: on mine, on the lantern, on the idea that we agreed to keep each other.
We slip the first surge. The floor vibrates again—longer, harder. Up-tunnel, a wagon lantern flares around a bend, small at first, then growing, a moth that brought its own candle. On the crate behind it, painted big and neat enough to be proud, a sigil shines when the light hits it: a stitched ear.
"Doctor," Syth breathes, and the siphon tries to take the minute from her mouth.
I pull the ring seam deeper; it tugs back like a rope that wants a second hand. Kirella gives it his.
Behind us, the reflected drips gather into neat bars along the sill. The mirror-thrower has learned the tunnel and likes his new toys. The bars creep, not down the middle where we can jump them, but along the edges where ankles live. Ahead, the pressure flush announces itself with a clatter of opened valves and the rush of something that would very much like to argue with our warmth.
"Choices," Kirella says.
"Left ledge," Ira says. "Rope hand—don't look up."
"Stamp the mirrors," Syth says, fingers on the WORD plate. "WAIT on the sills, make them bored."
"Keep them breathing," I say, meaning the six behind us and maybe the two in front of me and maybe the city.
The bell pings again. The wagon jolts nearer. I smell hot glue and perfume and a human thing you shouldn't put in a box.
I take two breaths with the man whose hand keeps mine steady. The ring fattened for the surge. The mirrors thin for the fight. The ear on the crate waits.
And the chapter ends there—our line poised between a flush that wants to drown and a crate that wants to speak in a voice it stole, mirrors sharpening at our ankles, rope waiting for hands, and a warm seam on the floor that refuses to learn the word own.
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