The purge turns from rumor to rain as we squeeze through the mouth.
Steam lashes the threshold we just beat; it hits my ring and scatters to mist, hissing like a scolded cat. Kirella bodies the opening until the last set of shoulders clears. Only then does he slip in sideways, his palm never leaving mine on the lantern handle.
Air in the culvert is thin, the kind cut into quarters and taxed. We move single file, bent backs, bowls clutched like charms. Nim isn't here to count. Kirella taps 1–2–3–4 against my wrist with two fingers, the quietest metronome in the city. My breath learns it; the lantern weighs it.
The stone tube bulges wider without warning, the way a throat finds its swallow. We spill into a long, low overflow gallery—arches, slick brick, a floor shallow with cooled scald that already wants to forget it was cruel. On the far wall, letters chiseled before anyone learned to be clever catch the lantern's glow:
PUBLIC WATER KEEPS PUBLIC BREATH.
Syth reads it under hers. "Old oath," she says. "Pre-lockwright. You can override a toll with a kept carry and a shared ring."
"Bridge," Ira says, already paying attention to iron dogs in the masonry where rope could learn to mean rail.
The gallery drops into a gutter three paces wide, the kind that makes ankles and pride both nervous. On the far side, a service walk waits, dry and smug.
"Three first," I say, because the wall told me how to keep my word and I intend to listen. "We pay our bond with people, not paper."
Ira slings rope through the iron dogs and knots a rail with a care you only see in men who know what weight feels like when it's not their own. I kneel and draw a narrow, deep ring in staggered ovals across the gutter: step-stones of warmth, low and patient, a path as thin and stubborn as a promise. The ring hums to the oath on the wall. The oath doesn't sing back exactly; it nods.
"Pale Thread, Tin Drift, Blue Soot," I say to the frailest three. "You first. Sling carry. Don't argue; I'll out-stare you and we haven't the minutes."
They don't argue. Ira loops the sling under Pale Thread's arms; Tin Drift and Blue Soot take either side; Kirella shows them the Bora carry in two gestures—lift on the count, step on the warmth, eyes floor. The rope rail kisses their palms; the warm ovals kiss their soles. They shuffle. They breathe with the count they borrow from our wrists.
As Blue Soot's heel leaves the last oval for the dry walk, the oath on the wall ghost-glows—faint, then gone. Beside me, a chalk sigil appears where there wasn't chalk: KEEP (3) SETTLED. The dots under it are seeds again, only now three are inked in. The stone remembers.
We ferry the rest in pairs. No words; the Time-Tax lives in ducts we can't see. We breathe the vow instead. The ring doesn't need grammar to keep; it likes done better than said.
Kirella adjusts my hood where steam beaded it into a darker red. "Two breaths," he says, careful and unnecessary and perfect.
"Two," I answer, not for stone, not for anyone's ledger. Just for him.
Ledger Nail—the boy—points down a chalked service line at the far end. "Hatch 9 is an inspection spur," he whispers. The ceiling tastes the syllables and tries to bill him for them. He grimaces and keeps whispering anyway. "Silence toll. No spoken words. Hold breath for four, press knife and hand, release together."
Syth taps her sleeve, quick inventory—WORD plates, mint, brine, wax chalk. She also pats the SORRY bucket lid where the Doctor's pleated throats sulk under a handful of kind lies. "We'll mark arrows," she says. "And plug ducts with pepper if something starts to listen with its nose."
We move.
Halfway to the spur, the corridor squats back into itself, sideways—a recessed layby stitched off from the main run. Rails diverge here into a pocket too short for a wagon and exactly the right size for an audit that never wanted a witness. A mirror perch sits folded against the wall like a spider pretending to be furniture. Beside it, another plaque, smaller than the overflow oath and written with a blunt tool:
HANDS THAT CARRY THREE PASS ON THE CITY'S BREATH.
Syth taps the plaque and looks at me like a math problem that wants to be a song. "This is how we cheat their cheat," she says. "Old covenants outrank new contracts if we behave like a city."
"If we keep," I say.
The satchel at Syth's hip twitches.
We both stop.
Inside: the Doctor's vials, cushioned in cloth and warmed by ring when I could bear it. Now one wakes—a thin sound needles up from wax and glass and paper lip. Not loud. A syllable that pretends it doesn't care whether you hear it:
Mi—
My beginning, far away, trying to arrive here.
"It's coming through Pipe Mile," Syth breathes, eyes gone narrow as knives. "Ducts amplify. He's calling your name with a jar."
I set the satchel inside a tight ring so close the brass kisses the leather. "No jars," I tell the circle, which is stupid and works anyway. I draw breath on four with Kirella and let it out with the ring. We hum a bowl-name chorus without using our mouths:
Red Ladle. Steady Hand. Quick Spoon. Rope Gate.
The jar's lip beads like a glass about to cry. Syth dots brine along the edge. Salt and warmth together teach it embarrassment. Mi— blurs to we— and then to a sound the ducts don't care to carry.
"Your voice is not for their jars," Kirella says, as if casually. The words choose to be a bandage and succeed.
The spur to Hatch 9 is a right-angled elbow. The hatch itself waits in a little shrine of damp brick. Someone, once, had the decency to scratch a lie out: SPEAK TO PASS is scored over, ugly and honest. Under it, new letters with a mason's patience:
SILENCE TOLL — PASS ON HELD BREATH.
Two familiar carvings flank the jamb: knife and hand. The grooves are deeper here, either from use or from a stonemason who believed in verbs.
Ledger Nail pantomimes the ritual—palms here and here, breath held to four, release together. "If you cough," he signs with a miserable shrug, "they bank the minute."
"Demonstration," Syth says.
Kirella sets his left palm on hand; I set my right on knife. We catch each other's eyes, then let the lids lower to floor so the mirrors in any secret slit can't write a command neither of us will obey.
His thumb brushes the back of my knuckles—one.
We inhale, quiet. Two. Three. Four. The muscle at his jaw ticks something I would kiss if this were a different city. We release together. The hatch hums. Not a groan. A decided sound. The seam loosens.
"Pairs," I tell the line behind us, and Ledger Nail grins a crooked grin that makes him look like a boy again; he's watching how kitchens turn rules into rituals and realizes they're the same thing when they save people.
We cycle the group through—sleeves and fingers on carvings, breaths knit across twos. The hatch obeys because we give it a choir instead of a coin.
Reflection slithers along the wall on a bead of water. Not bars anymore. Drip mirrors: lazy, sneaky, already smart. They colonize the moisture that the purge left and make it meaner.
Syth flips the folded perch down and stamps WORD = WAIT on the joint. Ira palms brine along the seam and the hinge answers old loyalties; it re-wets, sulks, and stays. I lay a broad arc of ring-light where the slither wants to learn walking. The reflection fuzzes and threatens to be bored. Good.
Beyond the hatch, a dim corridor opens like a mouth that chews quietly. Ledger Nail lifts his chin at the far end. "Bypass node," he says. "There's a clock there. If it runs to dawn, Rainhouse finishes pre-process without the Auction and only pretends doors matter."
"How do we jam it?" I ask.
"Break its ear first," he says, not meaning the sigil, meaning the line that listens.
The last pair presses knife and hand and holds their breath on four, then releases with a relief no toll can bill. The hatch unlatches the final finger-width.
The corridor beyond is cool and mean. A time disk glows on the far wall—amber numbers that don't tick so much as breathe. The sound under it is a slow heartbeat: patient, sure it is on the winning side. On the door beyond the disk, painted faint and easy to miss if you want to, the stitched ear pulses like a vein.
We file into the dim—Tin Ladle first, because he insists and because he's right. Pale Thread touches the oath chalk on the gallery wall as she passes, not superstitious, grateful. Blue Soot clutches the bowl-name slip tighter than the sling that carried him. Ledger Nail keeps close to Syth, muttering map facts to her sleeve because the ducts cannot tax a whisper that is more breath than word.
The SORRY bucket glares at me from Kirella's other hand like the city's worst picnic. The pleated throats inside shift, then think better of being interesting. The ring line I lay across the floor is thin and tense—a violin string with too much night in it. It asks for two hands again. Kirella gives it his without asking me to be brave in any way I'm not ready for.
The drip mirrors hate the arc I left them and try the ceiling instead, making little moons in beads that refuse to fall. Syth dots three seams with brine in quick, rude punctuation. Ira finds another iron dog and ties a kept-knot that will insult a man who tries to untie it with hurry instead of learning.
The heartbeat under the disk goes from patient to pleased.
"Dawn's close," Ledger Nail says. Chalk licks his tongue for saying it out loud. He winces, then grins at his own mistake like a boy who tripped and remembered not to pretend he meant to.
Kirella glances at the time disk, then at me. "Two breaths," he says, not as comfort, as arithmetic.
"Two," I answer, because I won't let a clock own how I count.
We stand three steps from the node, the ring seam warm under our boots, the hatch behind us listing SILENCE PAID, the overflow oath far back in the gallery still faint-warm where the wall kept faith with us and we with it.
A whisper tries the ducts again, thin as a splinter. Mi— It dies against the tight ring around the satchel, which learned enough tonight to be rude on my behalf.
The time disk brightens a shade, smug. The stitched ear on the far door pulses as if someone is pinching it from the other side and telling it gossip. The heartbeat says: almost.
"Break its ear first," Ledger Nail says again, truer this time.
I lift the lantern. It is heavy with all the we we've made tonight. It will be heavier before dawn. Good.
We walk toward the glow.
And the chapter ends there—with Hatch 9 breathing behind us, KEEP (3) SETTLED chalk warm on the stone we loved into listening, drip mirrors sulking under brine, a jar that failed to finish my name, and a bypass clock ahead that thinks it knows what miles and minutes are for.
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