The landing decides it's a kindness to tilt. It isn't.
We slide.
I slap my palm down and pull a broad, slick ring along the ramp—thin warmth, shallow as a glaze, just enough to turn a fall into a chosen path. Kirella's rope hisses against the wall dog as he flips a loop and anchors mid-slide. Ira braces the boom post with his shoulder because he doesn't have the patience to ask it to be gentle.
We land where we choose, not where the room throws us—angled, quick, knees bent, soles finding the ring's grip at the last finger-width.
The Suture Theater is bright the way winter can be bright—polite, merciless. A holy-glass grid blooms overhead. In the middle hangs the mid-light needle from a swiveling boom, its tip hunting my face with a patient interest that would be flattering if it weren't surgery.
Floor drains thread toward a time plinth. Jar vents in the walls hum mi— like a choir that prides itself on pitch and not on mercy.
"Eyes floor," Kirella says, cloak shouldering the cheek-bar that tries to find me. His thumb taps the ridge of my knuckles on the lantern. One—two—three—four.
"Two breaths," I answer. The count drops anchor behind my ribs.
Syth cups the mirror shard in both hands and tilts it like a tuning fork that remembers it used to be a leash. "On three," she mouths.
We breathe. One—two—three. The shard hum slides a half step. The grid above stutters, losing the exact place it meant to hurt me. The needle flickers as if second-guessing its angle. Good.
I paint a diagonal ring sash beneath the boom's pivot, a shallow arc that teaches metal what WAIT feels like without humiliating it. Ira tucks a wedge into the yoke with two sure taps. The boom hesitates—hungry, but suddenly on a diet.
"Plinth," Root would say. Root isn't here. I drop minute-trap coins around the time plinth and connect them with a chalk seam to a pillar where I thumb a title:
KEEP LEDGER.
The plinth tries to bill our breath. The ring charges the wall instead. Books can be taught.
On the table under the needle, someone is strapped in a nice, clinical way. Bare arms, inked suture marks along the veins—orderly trainee uniform under the sheet. The placard at the headboard reads: Stencil Vein.
"First you bully them into helping," Syth mutters with her mouth closed, "then you help them into obedience."
The straps cinch on every half-breath. Silent Choir. I set warmth under Stencil's soles. Syth drips brine along each buckle and seam. Ira leans his weight on the ratchet and gives it a look that says don't. The leather loses confidence. Straps slacken. Kirella lifts Stencil with forearms, careful of the IV needles that are actually two small lies.
On the instrument tray beside the table, the second cylinder gleams—the one the Lockwright fed this house like a tithe. A stitched orderly lunges for it with the calm of a man paid to get hurt.
Kirella folds him neatly, no broken pieces. Syth palms the cylinder into cloth; I ring the tray so it hears our we and stops humming to another's program. The glass goes quiet in my hand, the good quiet that keeps.
The needle swings back toward me—slow now, sullen. Syth crouches, slides a pepper-mint cone into the needle's cooling slots and lights it with a scratch. Smoke threads inward. Machines hate remembering they have throats. I draw a tight keep-ring around the pivot bearing and Ira rolls the yoke half a turn—just enough to make the boom lock off-axis, pointing at a patch of unremarkable floor.
The pipes speak, mild as tea. "Detuning voids warranty," the Doctor says.
"Return to sender," Syth whispers, and stamps WORD = WAIT on the boom collar and then twice on the nearest jar grilles. Appetite stalls. The room tabs its tongue.
The jar vents answer by climbing a pitch. The grid brightens a notch. I feel the count tug at my knees. Kirella's thumb taps 1–2–3–4 until the light remembers it is a tool, not a god.
"Bowl-name?" I murmur with no voice, just breath, to the trainee blinking up at us, still half expecting to be punished for being rescued.
Stencil's mouth shapes it like a secret he can afford: "Stencil Vein."
The straps think about tightening. I glare at leather until it considers a different career. Kirella transfers Stencil to Ira, who carries with the casual competence of a man who can lift and still see all exits.
"Jar choir north," Syth signs with two fingers and a tilt of head. "We broke its pitch in the antechamber. It's trying to find mi— again."
"Find us later," I sign back. "We have now."
Two stitched orderlies step from a slot in the far wall, mirror gurney between them. Their faces are too polite; their hands are too clean. The ceiling iris twitches, looking for angles. My ring threatens to thin to string.
Kirella feints with the cloak—no drama, just shade. Ira shoulder-checks the gurney into a useless path. Syth slaps WAIT across one orderly's jaw seam—his whole body freezes half-motion, surprised by grammar. The second remembers combat and earns a brief, corrective nap. Non-lethal. We have uses for men who will choose us later.
The shard burns in Syth's palm. The hum wants to be a leash again. I set both our hands inside a small ring drawn right on the tray rim and breathe the bowl-name chorus into the circle without speaking:
Red Ladle. Steady Hand. Quick Spoon. Rope Gate. Little Breath.
Brine smear along the shard's edge. Syth tilts on off-count three again—one, two, three—and the shard's tone shifts. It stops pulling and starts pointing. A side wall answers with a clean click; a maintenance panel unlatches a finger-width.
"Key," Syth mouths, relief and suspicion sharing a cup.
A mirror ambulance whines somewhere in the bones of the building, not here yet, but coming along a service rail that thinks it's a vein. The pipes purr. "Keep your beginnings," the Doctor tells us. "I'll invoice the endings."
"Run," Ira says cheerfully, as if suggesting soup.
We stack evidence quickly—Syth snags a slim theater ledger (serials, service intervals scratched in a clerk's precise misery) and a glass grid fuse that might be a tooth in the big jaw. I chalk → WE arrows where the floor can see them and be ashamed later if it forgets.
Two more orderlies block the unlatched seam. Kirella steps to the left, cloaks right; they bite at shade and miss men. Ira's hip decides one of them should sit down and consider other careers. Syth stamps WAIT on the seam of the other's throat and he learns stillness like a good winter.
We tip into the maintenance chute—narrow, steel ribs, the feel of a throat. Air runs the wrong way. That's fine; I've argued with worse.
Behind us, the grid flares. The detained needle manages one scorched exhale at the empty spot it now points to; it sounds like a man blowing on soup he doesn't deserve. The Doctor sighs in the pipes, patient as sin.
The chute curves. We run with the count, not because sprinting is glamour, but because breathing in fours is a tool that makes stairs into rope and fear into furniture.
"Left fork," Syth calls with her wrist, not her mouth, the shard acting compass instead of collar for now. The tone leans. We bank.
Behind us, a metallic whine catches up—the pitch of a mirror ambulance engaging on the service rail, glass wheels riding unhelpful light. The tone at our backs is the exact key the shard used to hum.
"We can outrun a vehicle?" Wool Thread signs, eyebrows fierce and foolish and correct.
"We can make it choose," I sign back.
The chute widens into a glass gut—two rails, a catwalk the width of honesty, a dim light the color of old coins. I pull a ring sash along the catwalk so the floor knows whose feet to love. Ira sets a thrown wedge at the rail junction— not to break, to delay. Kirella keeps me in shade and the count in my bones.
The ambulance noses into view—door folded like a throat, facets wrinkling like paper that cannot decide between mirror and skin. No driver, just the idea of one.
"Shard," I tell Syth.
She holds it out. It vibrates, traitor and tool in one breath.
I set the shard inside a tight ring on the catwalk grating. The lantern makes the ring deep-heavy. We breathe on three. Syth tilts, brine flicker along the shard's chipped edge. The hum wobbles, skids, slides lower by a clean fraction.
The ambulance shudders. Its door hesitates. It wants to obey that tone. It practices stopping.
Behind us, Stencil Vein's breath stutters and then steadies. "I almost signed," they whisper, because confession is a good habit if you do it to people and not to walls.
"Sign later," Syth says, almost kind. "To soup."
The ambulance recovers a little. The whine climbs. It chose us once; it wants to again.
"Bridge," I tell the floor, and lay a short ring between the rails—warmth like a low step. The ambulance hits the warmth and remembers a story about doors that are kept and rails that wait. It slows the wrong way, pleased with itself.
"Go," Kirella says, hand on mine at the lantern, not to steer—just to be with.
We go.
The gut kinks; the catwalk becomes a set of ribs; the ribs become a ladder that pretends to have always been there. Wool Thread is first because she is not letting go of Syth's sleeve and Syth thinks this is leadership. Post Hook follows with Ira's hand on his belt. Stencil, lighter than anger, goes on Kirella's shoulder like a vow.
The ambulance gnaws the bend. Its door opens and shuts and opens, practicing hunger. The shard in our ring stutters: key / leash / key. I add a minute-trap under it so every indecision costs the Maze something that can't be billed to my throat later.
The pipes argue with themselves and choose the Doctor's voice again. "You're very competent," he says pleasantly, which is how men compliment a storm that has the good manners to ruin someone else's roof. "Let me relieve you of the burden of yourselves."
"Invoice declined," Syth says, and kicks the thrown wedge free into the rail on purpose. The ambulance chews it, chokes, spits shards of polite glass down the chute and loses half a length.
We haul up into a service loft where dust has the dignity of age and the light sits out of the way like a guest who knows their host is poor but proud. The catwalk ends at a door with the sort of handle that believes in procedures. Stenciled on the steel in letters that like their own bones: STAFF EGRESS — SIGN TO EXIT.
Syth looks at me; I look at the word; the word looks at our ring. We primed this trick earlier.
Brine on nibs. Ring on line.
Kirella plants his palm on the handle anyway because he is a person and sometimes you honor doors with the dignity they deny you. I guide the quill under his hand and write KEEP where SIGN was supposed to live.
The latch decides we count.
The door gives, but not far—an inch and a promise. Beyond it, an angle of stairs that might go up and might go wrong.
The ambulance roars behind us in the quiet way precise machines roar—no drama, just capacity. The shard thrums in the ring, undecided. If I pick it up wrong, it will sing the ambulance through us.
"Two breaths," Kirella says, voice careful, thumb steady at my fingers.
"Two," I say. It means: I hear you; I'm not heroic; I am exact.
I lift the shard inside the ring. It keeps the key pitch—a hair off the leash, not safe, not owned.
We wedge the door on our side with a bar that was busy being part of the wall a breath ago. Ira finds leverage in insult. The gap widens. Beyond the crack, the air tastes like dust and old linen. Up.
"Go," I tell the kept. Bora would insist on threes; Bora isn't here. We mimic him anyway—Wool Thread, Stencil Vein, Post Hook—our third of three paid forward.
Syth slips through after them like a rumor. Ira goes next with a look that promises to return if the door grows teeth. Kirella and I remain at the hinge with the lantern and the not-quite-tamed shard and a count that we refuse to loan to a grid.
The ambulance noses into the loft mouth. The door learns enough to look like a throat again. I lay one last ring coin on the threshold—a tip left for a future us. The ambulance reaches.
The shard vibrates, arguing with itself.
We slip through the gap and drag the bar home. The door shuts with a sound I like: a full pot settling on a trivet, confident.
On the other side, the ambulance kisses steel. The kiss is not gentle.
Stairs wheel up. The light is thinner here, tired of itself. I hook the lantern to my belt so my hands can learn rail. Kirella stays by the bar a breath longer, fingers on the steel as if he can hold a machine off with the part of his body that refuses to admit it's soft.
"Come," I say, because bravery is sometimes just the grammar of moving before fear conjugates you.
He comes.
We climb.
Below, the door sighs and stiffens. The shard warms against my palm—key for now, leash if we forget our breath. The pipes sniff and sulk. The Doctor's voice recedes into administrative certainty.
"We keep each other," I tell the stair in case it wants a rule to live by.
The stair holds.
And the chapter ends there—with the mid-light needle pointing at the one patch of floor that deserves it, a cylinder wrapped in our warmth, three rescues breathing like debt paid in a currency we invented, a mirror ambulance gnashing at a door that sided with us for a change, and a shard in my hand that hums ours only so long as we mean it.
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