Steam claws at the world and takes the edges first.
Our rope jerks short, hurls us outward into white, and for one long second the Laundry Yard is only noise: sheet-snap, vent-roar, a polite machine-whine under it like a smile that doesn't blink.
"One—two—three—four," Kirella breathes against my ear. His thumb taps mine on the lantern handle—steady, stubborn. I drop three ring-coins with my free hand—short throws, warm flares that burn through fog on a far catwalk: one, two, three small suns where feet can learn courage.
"On four," he says.
We swing. The line arcs. The first coin slides under us—missed. The second rises to meet our boots like a promise that refuses to be subtle. We plant hard, knees down, weight forward. The third catches Syth and Stencil a heartbeat later; Ira bodies Post Hook into the coins with a gentleness that insults gravity.
We tumble onto a rolling rack and ride it like a stubborn animal. Wheels screech. Heat licks my shins. Eyes floor, because the holy-glass mast across the yard is a knife in a suit and I am a throat that prefers to decide what it swallows.
"Count," Kirella says, hand over mine on the lantern, adding weight, not direction.
"Counting," I say, breath, not voice. One—two—three—four. The rack bleeds momentum and kisses a post. We end upright by will and luck pretending to be skill.
Quick check: Wool Thread—there, rope-burned palms, grinning like she stole the idea of grins; Stencil—alive, eyes glass-bright but pointed at us not away; Post Hook—cussing in a polite whisper, which is progress. Syth's fist locks around the shard; the hum holds key, thin as a violin string in winter. The two voice cylinders lie wrapped against my ribs where the ring keeps them sleepy.
The holy-glass mast on the roof throws bars through the steam, testing cheek, testing eye. It doesn't own the yard yet. It thinks it will.
"On three," Syth mouths. She tilts the shard and breathes—one, two, three. The mast's grid flickers like stage light sniffing a better show.
I flick brine up in a neat arc. It beads on the mast's porcelain insulators, runs like sweat, then gnaws at pride. At my feet, I draw a KEEP seam from the mast base to an exhaust rail coupler—little marriage of metal and rule. Ira lashes a guy-line from mast to vent post, then yanks with a whole back's worth of patience. The guy-line groans; the mast skews a clean handful of degrees.
It points at empty sky. The knife becomes a fork. The grid loses interest in my face.
The mirror ambulance noses fully through the gate, door testing open-close like a courteous carnivore. I lay a ring strip across the yard rail—a warm ribbon. Syth jams the grid fuse we stole into a junction with a wrist-twist that says "obey," and Ira kicks a soap vat valve open with joy. Suds fount. The rail floods.
Glass wheels meet warm ring + soap slime and discover humility. The ambulance crawls, door stuttering like a mouth caught considering an apology.
"Hands!" someone shouts. Not a marshal—a worker. A woman in a blue-streaked apron stands on a vat lip, steam turning her hair to a halo the city can't tax. She sees us and not just trouble; she sees Wool Thread and remembers folding beside her. Her chin lifts.
Syth's arm is already moving. BOWL-NAME ONLY slips scatter like clean cards. Wool Thread snatches one midair and hollers, voice rough and perfect: "Blue Apron!"
It takes one. Spindle Hand follows—then Steam Palm, Rinse Hook, Line Shoulder. Names too big for paper, just right for mouths. A dozen, then two. Someone hums the Promise Choir off-key and right:
"We won't pay.""We won't sell.""No names to paper or stone."
The yard answers itself. The air learns a different use. Sheets drop like nets—Ira kicks poles; lines spill—white walls in motion. Two stitched patrols vanish in linen; a marshal's staff claps a sheet and loses its beam to damp.
Minute-chains tick along the walls behind us, piping time toward plinths we did not approve. I crouch by a column and seed minute-traps at the base: one coin, then two, then the seam to a lintel sigil scratched with my thumb:
KEEP LEDGER.
The chain above slacks like a spine that forgot pride. From a vent somewhere dry, the Doctor's voice arrives mild and pleased—accountant-flavored: "Accounting irregularities (escalating)."
"Send soup," Syth says without sound. I almost laugh. I don't, because laughter is billable here if you let it.
Exits: the roof stair is blocked by a polite barricade with holy-glass nails; the yard gate has an ambulance practicing appetite. Steam rolls. Sheets slap. Workers chant like people who found a use for their throats that wasn't surrender.
"There," Syth signs. The shard tugs her wrist toward a cast-iron hatch stamped WASTE / COLD RINSE. A dye chute. Fast, nasty, survivable.
We run. Ira hauls the hatch; hinges bark, then remember they are paid for and open. Cold chemical air breathes out—black and sharp, like a river that learned inventions. Kirella ties our rope to a ladder cleat, checks the set twice by habit and once for me. I paint warm footholds along the chute lip: little ring-steps fingernail wide, big enough for courage.
"Threes," I say. It isn't a superstition anymore; it's a lane.
First down: Wool Thread, Stencil, Post Hook. Syth shows them how to sit and not fight the slide; Ira lowers them the first breath; the chute does the rest.
A thin storm of glitter drifts from the yard vents—silver motes, too regular to be dust. "Glass fleas," Syth mouths—trackers. The shard warms in her fist, unhappy.
I circle my thumb on the lantern's rim and pull a small keep-bowl up into air—thin ring, stubborn edge. The fleas drift into it like gnats toward a candle, hit the warmth, and fall inert—half of them. The other half learn we are rude and keep coming, brighter, keener.
"Again," Kirella says.
"Later," I answer, because the ambulance is finally chewing through soap.
It frees a rail length with a noise like a sigh. Syth sprints three steps and slaps WORD = WAIT on its threshold. The door stutters—half-open, as if remembering a rule about not walking into kitchens without being invited. Ira sprints the other way and drops the guy-line he stole from the mast across the rail, snubs it around an iron post. The glass wheels hit rope and rehearse the concept of boundaries. Kirella tips a lit pepper-mint cone into the intake. The ambulance coughs light with exquisite manners.
"Go," I tell Syth. "Ira next. Cylinders with you."
She drops, braid and shard and all, into dark. Ira follows with the wrapped canisters lashed belly-high like a memory he refuses to misplace.
The law of stories says I go last. The law of us says I go with him. So I do.
We sit. The cloak comes around my shoulders—shade that smells like rope and sap and the patience to be useful. The lantern lowers to my lap; my hands wrap it like a bowl someone else will need. Kirella's hand finds mine on the handle; our thumbs touch and agree to be brave.
"Count," he says.
"Shared number," I answer.
We push off.
The chute takes us like a throat that forgot to be polite. Cold chemical foam punches the breath out of my chest and gives it back petty. The world narrows to ring stripes I throw ahead—thin bands of warmth skimming along black walls, steering the slide around bends with a touch and a prayer. My teeth chatter with the echo of our speed. Somewhere above, sheets crack like flags; somewhere behind, a machine rehearses catching up.
We shoot past a sluice window where the Laundry Yard is a pale painting—white, steam, shouting—then the curve closes, and we are nothing but impact math and the smell of dye that doesn't care about names.
Syth's shard vibrates ahead, sound bouncing through pipe—key / leash / key in quick, guilty stutters. I breathe on four and call his off-count three in my head so my bones remember we can be both rude and correct.
The chute drops steeper—thighs burn; shoulders sing. A crossfeed opens and dumps a cold wave over us that tastes like iron and mistakes. The lantern hunkers down and refuses to drown; the ring stripes hold like stubborn ladders no one can see.
At a fork, a marker gust blows from the right—silver motes riding it, fast as apologies. I thumb a second keep-bowl into air; it catches some, not most. The rest stick to the foam and ride us like stars you don't want to wish on.
"Soon," Kirella says, breath under breath, and squeezes my fingers. It means: we'll deal with the fleas when the world stops being a slide.
"Soon," I say, agreeing to be two people—one who slides, one who plans.
A square of light appears below—grate—and then vanishes as we shoot past. Relief has to wait for proof.
The chute bends again and gives us a gift we didn't ask for: a flat. Speed dies enough for choices. Ahead, the pipe narrows to a mean mouth; above, a maintenance hatch insists on pretending it can be dignified.
"Left!" Syth's voice bounces from the dark ahead—first word I've heard since Blue Apron. It lands clean. The shard isn't humming now; it's pointing—tiny heat in the left-hand seam.
We haul at the wall. The ring stripes slide left with us. The chute scolds our hips. We follow the shard's heat through a skew joint and pop into a broader run that smells less like dye and more like clean cold river thinking about compromise.
Behind us, the ambulance's whine grows again—faint, wrong, but steady. The glass fleas cling to foam in a neat constellation, faint lights in our wake.
"Counter?" Kirella asks.
"Hungry wall," I say.
I thumb a minute-trap coin flat on the chute wall as we slide, then a second, then a third, linking them with a fast chalk seam that wants to be elegant and doesn't have time. I slap a title where a camera eye could read it later: KEEP LEDGER. The fleas veer—half to the wall to get counted like minutes, half stick to us in case we don't pay at the window.
"Half is plenty," Syth calls. "Let the rest make us look complicated."
"Which we are," Ira adds from somewhere further down, and I hear the smile he won't admit yet.
The chute drops again—steeper, meaner. The lantern rings the curve; the world becomes water and willpower. My skin prickles—some light from above found a seam and wants to practice cruelty. Kirella shifts his shoulder into it, a quiet insult offered to a god that will have to learn to be a tool.
"Eyes floor," he says.
"Floor is speed," I answer, and the joke keeps my jaw from shaking.
Then, at last, the pitch changes. The roar becomes a hollow. Air ahead smells like algae and cold stone and a kind of outside. The chute throat opens into an outfall—wide, low, edged with grating that has seen too many apologies.
Syth and Ira drop from the mouth first—splash, curse, laugh; they're alive. Wool Thread whoops like someone who wasn't sure she was allowed to and decided yes. Post Hook mutters a prayer that might be thank you and might be more cussing.
We shoot out behind them—lantern first, ring stripes skipping the surface of shallow black water, carrying us into a drain tunnel where the ceiling is made of tired brick and the light is made of nobody's business.
We hit, roll, cough, live. Cold climbs my spine and decides to stay for a minute.
Kirella pulls me to sitting with hands that never forget people are made of soft things pretending to be bones. We're chest to chest a beat, not because romance wants it—because balance does. His thumb finds mine on the lantern again; we count out of pure habit.
"Bodies?" he says.
"Six," Syth answers, breathless and unbroken. "Plus two cylinders plus one shard plus six hundred invoices the Doctor thinks we'll pay."
"Ledger closed by covenant," I tell the tunnel and chalk it, small and stubborn, on the nearest brick because words like to live somewhere that isn't a throat.
Ira lifts the cylinders from his sash and sets them on my ring-warm lap like bread that made it home. Wool Thread peers at the glass like a woman ready to throw it in a river just to watch a bad thing drown. I cover them with the cloak's edge. "Not yet," I say.
A faint whine crawls down the chute behind us, wrong and patient. The ambulance hasn't given up. The fleas glow like a false constellation across the foam eddying around our ankles.
Syth raises the shard. It hums low—key, barely.
"Which way?" Post Hook asks, chest heaving, eyes not choosing panic.
"Down-river, then left," Stencil says small and certain, surprising himself. "There's a maintenance spine that runs under the dye houses. I got lost there on my first week and swore never again."
"Today we swear again," Syth says, almost smiling.
We wade. The water comes to mid-shin and bites bone. I lay a narrow ring along the tunnel lip so boots stop arguing with slime. Promise Choir mutters behind us from the Laundry Yard through slatted drains. The words warp in water and still do their job.
At the first turn, the walls bloom with chalk and knife-scratches from older runs—names the city charged and maybe paid for. I brush my palm across them, not to erase, only to say seen. The lantern hums we under my skin.
Behind, the ambulance voice grows, a polite complaint learning to be a threat. The glass fleas gather into a neat line on the water and float like obedient minnows.
"Turn," Syth says.
We do.
The tunnel narrows to a spine, then opens to a drop—not long, but fast. Below—black water moving east with the city's secrets. Above—chute mouth glowing, ambulance tone closer than I like, glass fleas thickening like snowfall.
We stack rope, check knots—threes, even now: Wool Thread with Stencil and Post Hook first; Ira and cylinders next; Syth and shard; then us. Kirella leans on the drop and tests the air like a man considering a house he might live in. I lay a ring coin on the edge where a foot will decide and forget.
"It'll smell worse," Post Hook says kindly, as if offering weather.
"It'll be ours," I say.
We begin the descent.
Water spits in our faces; brick breathes on our necks; the shard in Syth's hand quivers again—key thin as thread, leash one insult away. Above, the ambulance door tests open and closed, open and closed, patient, certain, ready.
Ahead, the drain bends toward a lower dark that promises exits and introduces new debts. The fleas glow on the surface like a lie that got good at swimming.
"If you won't speak," the Doctor says tin-small through a grate we pass under, so many floors up it could be the sky, "I'll follow what you don't say."
"Follow this," Syth says, and cups the shard into my ring so our breaths are the only map it cares to read for the next ten heartbeats.
We keep moving.
And the chapter holds there, with sheets like wings snapping somewhere above our heads, a mast pointing at empty sky, an ambulance chewing soap and rules behind us, two voices warm under my cloak, glass fleas choosing between walls and us, and a drain that lowers into a dark the city pretends not to own—mid-descent, mid-count, key still ours by a hair.
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