The shard hums like a tooth that knows which door we're about to bite.
Syth holds it between forefinger and thumb, not tight—like you hold a match you want to last. We're in the back lanes of Gloam Inlet where brick forgets to be proud, noon slanting hard enough to make my skin think about quitting.
"Here," she says. The shard warms toward a seam nobody uses: lime-washed wall, hairline crack, a mended drain stain. Nothing a city would brag about.
Kirella lifts his cloak so the edge shadows my cheek. "Eyes floor."
"Two breaths," I answer, knuckles under the lantern handle. I draw a thin keep-arch on the stone—small, careful, a promise drawn in butter on hot bread. The hum rises a tone. Syth tilts the shard and we breathe on four. The seam ripples like someone just remembered their real name inside the wall.
It opens the way mirror doors always do: wrong, and then practical. A narrow slit, two at a time. Inside, etched neat as a dentist's smile: ENTER SPEAKING; EXIT PAID.
We go silent and step through with the rudeness of people who refuse to loan a house their breath.
Glass Triage is a gallery of light pretending to be medicine.
Holy-glass panels grade the air in squares. Grids pulse—bright, dim, bright—like a heartbeat trying to set rules. Rings thin under them the way soup thins when a cook has to stretch a pot and hates it.
Kirella moves with me, cloak up, a traveling patch of shade. I run a sash ring along the floor, shallow but true, a path for soles and stubbornness. Syth presses WORD = WAIT against two sensor seams; the letters drink the command and pretend it was their idea.
An orderly glides toward us: linen skin stretched too smooth, sutures inked at the jaw like a dotted line, tray balanced, three pledge quills gleaming with black nibs.
He offers the tray the way a waiter offers a menu that only has one item.
"Names," his mouth says without using a voice, just a shape. He nods at the quills, then at a ledger on a stand: ADMIT YOURSELF TO CARE.
I take a quill like I might take a snake. Syth taps my wrist; I dab brine under the nib quick as a lie. Kirella nudges the ledger closer with a knuckle. I stroke the nib where the book wants SIGN.
The quill writes KEEP instead and looks offended at its own manners.
The orderly tilts his head, confused by politeness he can't charge for. Syth slips a bowl-name slip onto the tray—Rope Gate—and pats the linen wrist like she's calming a dog. "We're admitted," she mouths. The orderly accepts the slip like it's a diagnosis and slides away, relieved to have paperwork.
We move.
The Confession Corridor is narrow, a throat with grilles along both walls. Letters stenciled over each grille: CONFESS TO PASS.
The vents exhale a thin mint that isn't meant to calm; it's meant to pry. Words left in the air here would stick to the metal like grease; the Maze would lick them later.
Kirella taps 1–2–3–4 on my wrist. I set a minute-trap chalk coin on the floor every six paces, little kept saucers for time to fall into and learn not to bill. The grille nearest my shoulder vibrates like a cat pretending not to purr.
An orderly with a softer face than the last steps from a wall crack and feigns a cough in my direction—just enough to trick my throat into answering.
Syth hits the grille's lip with WORD = WAIT; Ira wedges the slat with a short bar. The cough goes back into the vent that coughed it like a joke that died on the way out. I smother a smile, which is the correct way to honor small victories in a corridor that wants to tax laughter.
A door with a round window waits two turns on. Inside: a rolling frame, belts, a girl half-collared—metal nestled at the hollow of her throat, the paper pleats under it bare and hungry. Her eyes track us, solvent-bright, hopeful only because hope got in the habit and forgot how to leave.
"Wool Thread," she whispers when I hold up the slip. The collar tries to drink the sound. I put brine to seam and ring to lip. Paper remembers river. The pleats wilt. The collar falls to the tray like a bracelet that learned manners.
On the stand beside her, a jar sits primed—a pleated throat clasped to glass, MI— scratched faint on the label as if to practice my beginning.
I cup a tight ring over the jar mouth. It hums mi—, tastes the warmth, then blurs to we— as if embarrassed in public. Syth dots the lip with brine and stuffs the jar's rubber cap back like shushing a drunk friend.
Wool Thread steps off the frame with the slow legs of someone whose body hasn't been hers in a while. She reaches for Syth's sleeve without deciding to. Syth lets the sleeve be a hand.
"Deeper," Wool Thread says, almost no voice. "They took a rope man down. Big wrists. Laugh like—" She stops, shakes her head; the laugh won't come back for the metaphor.
"We'll find him," Kirella mouths, and means it with a steadiness that makes muscles believe things before brains can.
The Name Bank antechamber hums like a choir trying to remember the tune it was paid to sing.
Jars line both walls in honeycomb shelves, each glass mouth wired to the stone like a kiss you regret later. The hum climbs toward mi— and holds there, waiting for a conductor.
Syth lifts the shard and tilts her head. "Listen," she mouths. The shard answers with a faint, exact note. We play hot-and-cold through the hum until a cylinder shelf to our right goes sympathetic. The serial on its brass rim rhymes with the rub Syth chalked on her sleeve last night.
I set a tight ring under the shelf so the wood remembers a kitchen warmth it never actually owned. Syth touches brine to the pleated throats clipped alongside. They sag. The jar chorus wilts a half tone.
We pull one cylinder—our serial—from its nest, wrap it in cloth, tuck it under the ring in my satchel where the warmth will make it lazy. On the ledger hook, a slip waits with the Lockwright's spare vanity:
—cyl 3B-77 checked forward by Mr. K— to Suture Theater.
"Forward," Syth mouths, and is correct and angry.
A mirror gurney squeaks into the hall outside the antechamber, pushed by two stitched orderlies whose hands are too clean. The ceiling grid brightens—holy-glass thins my ring like a critic. My knees consider mutiny.
Kirella folds the cloak over my shoulder, firm, the way you pack a traveling loaf so it arrives bread and not story. Ira meets the gurney with the side of his shoulder—no heroics, just physics. Syth tucks a pepper-mint cone into the wheel well and snaps a spark. Smoke climbs. The orderlies cough without lungs and look offended. Ira moves them into a nap with his forearm and a tenderness that leaves no bruises he doesn't have to.
We keep moving because the Maze is a host who pretends you're late even when you arrive early.
We find Post Hook on a dais shaped like a question that expects you to apologize.
Straps cross his chest; each time he tries to speak, they tighten a click. The plaque on the dais reads: TELL THE TRUTH AND BE CLEAN.
He sees us and flinches, not because of us—because flinching learned him and is using him for practice.
Silent Choir only. I warm the stone at his feet until it says stay to the straps. Syth flicks brine to the buckles. Ira lifts with two fingers and an insult only leather understands. The straps go slack like a tired idea. Post Hook drops into Kirella's hands and breathes like air owes him money.
"Back way?" Syth signs.
The wall where we came ripples flat. The entrance scar glosses hard and seals. The shard in Syth's palm heats, pleased and cruel.
"Forward," Kirella signs, and means deeper.
A voice arrives down the pipes, pleasant and practiced, like someone who learned bedside manner from a mirror.
"Bring me your beginnings," the Doctor says, warm as a clerk. "I will file them for you."
Arrows light along the floor in a path that thinks it has taste—thin lines of cool white pointing toward a door at the far bend. The shard hums the same way a leash might if it were clever enough to be smug.
Root's chalk memory sits low on the jamb we pass: IF DRAGGED DEEPER, FOLLOW WE SIGNS; IGNORE TRUE. Their hand loved the stone hard enough for it to remember.
Syth spits on her thumb and draws a small → WE over the Doctor's arrow. The arrow looks offended and then honestly confused.
We choose down.
I link the minute-traps with a keep seam along the center of the hall. The seam carries the little stolen minutes like a bowl line carries soup. The vents whisper confessions that aren't ours. We pay with breath withheld and words unmouthed, which is the cheapest we'll ever get out of a bill like this.
The corridor widens, then rounds, then stops pretending it isn't a throat.
A landing opens over a circular room: straps and tables below, a mid-light needle hung like a cruel ornament over a chair. The air is clean to the point of insult. On a tray gleams the second cylinder—the Lockwright's prize. Beside it lies a glass scalpel with edges so thin you hear them hum before you see them.
Suture Theater.
The shard in Syth's hand goes hot enough to make her flinch. It stops humming and starts singing—a single line, held, like a string pulled too tight over a violin that will forgive you this once.
"We're the key," she mouths. Her eyes say the rest: and the leash.
The Doctor clicks a switch somewhere thoughtful.
Holy-glass shutters iris wider in the ceiling above the Theater. Light spills down like polite winter. My ring thins to thread. The seam under my boots shivers.
"Eyes floor," Kirella says, close. His thumb taps the ridge of my knuckles. One—two—three—four.
"Two breaths," I say, and pretend the ground cares.
Beneath us, the mid-light needle wakes—a thin glow like a rumor. The floor at the landing's edge finds a hinge it forgot to confess. The lip we stand on tilts with the meek assurance of a trap that wrote letters to itself congratulating its engineering.
Post Hook grabs Ira's arm. Wool Thread clutches Syth's sleeve and refuses to apologize for it. I widen the ring thread and it squeals like a violin that hates this piece.
The Doctor's voice rides the ductwork in a tone that could sell sugar to a river.
"Speak, little red," he says pleasantly as the landing tips toward the Theater. "If you won't give me your beginning, let me help you find it."
The room moves. Gravity puts on the white coat. The needle brightens. The shard sings.
We slide.
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