The drain owns our ankles and negotiates for our knees.
We move in fours—one, two, three, four—lantern low, shoulders closed, water cold enough to teach bones their names. I pull a narrow ring seam along the lip so boots stop arguing with slime. The wall sweats. The brick listens.
Behind us the mirror ambulance whines through the chute, sound bouncing in the curve. On the water, the glass fleas trail in a polite line like a fake constellation. The shard in Syth's fist throbs key like a violin on its last horsehair.
"Two bends to the weir," Post Hook breathes, pointing with his chin. He grew up down here, in the way a body grows up in the spaces it's afraid of.
We take the first bend. The seam keeps our wrists sure. Stencil shoulders the pack with bowls we didn't have when we left and spoons we didn't earn today but will pay for later. Wool Thread keeps her palm on Syth's sleeve to say I'm here without taking breath from anyone else.
The passage narrows to a throat with a bite. Rusted letters on the wall tell a story no one asked to hear: SLUICE 4A — KNEEBREAKER.
"Kind," Syth mutters.
A short dam waits, two feet of drop and a drop gate braced like a smug jaw. Beside it, a maintenance valve sits under a crust of limescale and someone's lazy curse. Rails, slim and gleaming, parallel the channel—service line for the ambulance's glass wheels, a vein the house expects blood from.
I lay a warm ring lip across the weir, thin as breath, to hold a pulse a heartbeat longer. Kirella nods without looking at me, rope already off his shoulder. Ira braces at the lever. Syth pulls a pepper-mint cone from her pouch and twists the fuse between two fingers.
"On four," Kirella says, thumb finding mine on the lantern handle, steady. "One—two—three—"
"—four," I answer.
Ira yanks the lever. Steel coughs. The drop gate pops its jaw and swallows a lung of upstream water. The ring lip holds the surge for a heartbeat—enough for Syth to flick the lit cone into the rail intake and enough for the wave to arrive as one instead of as gossip.
The pulse slams the rails and the intake at once. Soap from our earlier sins meets mint, meets river, meets rules, and the ambassador of mirrors learning to be a boat hits all of it. The ambulance groans like a polite man forced to sit in a chair he didn't choose. Hydro-lock. It wedges in its own throat and sulks.
The whine behind us drops two notes, then one more, then pretends it meant to be quiet.
Syth lets out breath she wasn't hoarding. Wool Thread laughs once, short and true. Post Hook grins like he got away with a better joke than he told.
"Fleas," Kirella says, still low.
They float past our knees, glitter on the foam—half the swarm we shook with the minute-wall upstairs, half too obedient to give up. Stencil points to a sumped bowl under a broken pipe—an eddy where bad ideas go to spin.
"Here," I say.
We build a little kitchen in a hole. Syth drags a circle with her finger on the stone lip. I pour brine from the flask Lelia insists we always carry. The lantern settles under the bowl on a shelf like a stove recognizes a pot. I pull a keep ring over the surface, thin as a heartbeat on winter soup.
The brine hums. It boils without boiling—heat that is rule, not fire. Wool Thread and Stencil sweep fleas toward the lip with rags. The first wave hits and melts to dull grit. The stubborn ones dive; the ring catches them and turns their light to we-static. Syth hums off-count three to the shard and it holds key long enough to stop the bowl from learning leash.
Kirella shakes his cloak like a rug and the last glitter pops loose. He scrubs wrists, line scars, the slope of his jaw, not delicate, just thorough. He nods once when he finds nothing shining. He does the same for me with the cloth—wrists, cheek, collarbone—his hands careful the way men are careful with porcelain when it isn't theirs yet.
We leave with the bowl singing quiet and nothing false clinging to our ankles.
The passage widens and rises. A stone arch shoulders across the channel with brass letters that like their bones too much: TALLY ARCH — ADMIT MINUTES TO PASS. On either side, minute-chains drip from sconces into a polished plinth. The drip has that smug-rain sound again.
I drop minute-traps along the base and chalk-link them to the plinth. KEEP LEDGER, my thumb writes, small and stubborn. Syth stamps WORD = WAIT on each chain collar with the plate and a smirk. Wool Thread murmurs the bowl-name choruswithout voice—Red Ladle. Steady Hand. Quick Spoon. Little Breath. Blue Apron. Post Hook. Stencil Vein. We pass the names like bread in the dark.
The arch tastes and finds we. The toll drains sideways into dead stone, not forward into system. The gate shrugs a hand-width and then a little more as if too bored to argue. We slide through shoulder to brick. The chain nearest my ear slacks—offended and learning manners.
Light changes ahead—tired daylight turning gray, a dusk made of river and dust. The tunnel opens into a round basin of old brick—Gloam Sump. Water glides out through a slatted outfall and becomes the idea of a canal.
Rings come easier under dusk. I feel it in my wrists: warmth less effort, edges surer. The shard cools in Syth's palm until key sounds like a held breath instead of a scream. Kirella's thumb taps my knuckles on the lantern and the count lands deep, not desperate.
"Bodies," Ira says, habit.
"Six," Syth answers, counting faces like a ledger done by a friend. "Plus two cylinders. Plus one shard. Plus one plan to eat soup soon."
"Approved," I say, and something laughs in my chest I won't let the Maze charge.
We wade to a ladder where rust is a flavor and outside is a rumor. Post Hook shoulders the hatch with both hands and an insult that remembers chains and isn't afraid to use them where they belong. The lid gives.
Air comes down that has known sky. We take it with a care that says we remember what air can cost.
The Gloam Inlet lane is a line of damp brick, laundry steam ghosts thinning in the distance. The Kitchen Walk people see us and don't stare. Good training. A child with green ears looks like he might wave and decides to practice being from here instead. He nods at the lantern. I nod back.
KEEP doors receive us like chairs set aside with a thought of our backs. Chalk on lintels we wrote three days ago still reads like it meant to outlast tantrums: WE KEEP EACH OTHER. A lockwright assistant in a too-stiff coat sees us from the far corner and decides he had errands elsewhere.
Blue Pantry smells like onions and rope and a good decision about heat. Root waits at the threshold, chalk already damp. Lelia stands with salt and mint and a basin like a woman who knows exactly how to love a door.
We hold a Promise Mini-Choir in a voice that is mostly breath.
"We won't pay.""We won't sell.""No names to paper or stone."
Lelia rubs salt-mint on wrists and temples; a finger's worth on the pulse where my jaw learns light; a thumbprint on Kirella that leaves his skin warmer than the sting. I pull a ring mat across the stone for feet to forget fear on. The lantern settles on its hook with that heavy-good sound that means we brought it back full of kept things.
Syth stands in the Commons with the shard cupped and eyes closed like she's listening for mice in a wall. "One glitter," she says. She crosses to Post Hook's belt and plucks a speck the size of a bad memory. It pops in the SORRY bucket like a polite apology learning to be sincere.
Root writes on the pillar—DAY 5/7—and under it, small, D-1 stays put for once.
"Soup first," Lelia says, because she's queen here and rules are rules.
We sip from bowls and taste salt and onion and the Docks. Nim sleeps in a corner with a spoon in their fist like a scepter. Bora's rope hangs on a peg like a shoulder borrowed and promised back. The room holds itself quiet the way a chest holds breath before it becomes song.
"Cylinder?" Syth says, low.
"Safe," I answer. Then, "One."
We rig the bell-jar ring on the table—bowl-glass inverted over a cloth gasket, brine seam around the lip, a tight ring to catch any name that thinks it can run. Lelia draws two kept-knots at the jar's shoulders. Ira sets the jar with a care he pretends he doesn't have.
Syth holds up the first voice cylinder. It is cool under my ring-warm palm like a coin that forgot it pays for lives. I nod. She seats it on the spindle, locks the pinch.
The jar breathes our we back at us once—test. Syth taps the lever. The cylinder spins.
Crackle. Then voice.
"…hand delivery to Suture Theater—yes, yes, red gloves, quit preening—grid tolerances fine to point-oh-four… needle manifest for Needlehouse… ferry window: No-Sky Port, river mouth, moon-rise, tonight—"
The Lockwright, smug even in tin.
Paper shuffles. A second voice slides in, polite like ice. "Bring me MI— intact," the Doctor says, and the jar hum bites the next syllable off as if our ring took offense at the taste of it.
Static. A third voice, clerk flavor, list of serials. Syth clicks the lever and the ring drinks the rest. The jar goes quiet the way rooms do when they learn they're safe enough to be.
"Needlehouse," Ira says, tasting the word with disgust and interest.
"No-Sky Port," Root repeats, chalk already on the map slate we pretend isn't a map. "Moon-rise, tonight."
"After full dark," Kirella says, eyes on me and then away and then back. Dusk lives in him different than in me. "Rings are stronger. Lantern wears night well."
I nod. "Name Bank first," Root adds. "Before the Needlehouse breeds a second throat. We pull teeth, then we cut tongue."
Assignments stack like clean plates.
Ira: ropes, wedges, pry—yes.Lelia: brine, mint, knots—already done.Wool Thread and Stencil: pantry crew—bowls and slips and room discipline—proud.Post Hook: drains—ears on the ambulance, eyes on the tax arches—go.
The room hums low. Promise Choir in practice not performance. We eat the ends of our soup and the fear that wants to finish it for us.
Kirella steps close enough for his shoulder to consider mine and not touch. "If they try to file us," he says, plain, "we write over it."
"In thick ink," I answer, and we are not flirting; we are making future history legible.
The lantern feels deeper in my palm when I lift it for the door ward again. The glass shows our two faint swirls like stitches. Nim stirs and turns the spoon without waking.
The pillar clears its throat.
It doesn't have one. It does anyway. The thin MI— scratch near the base twitches. A new stroke—r—starts to grow like mold in a corner. I set my palm to the stone and pull a tight ring into rock until my fingers feel like a warm plate.
"No names to stone," I tell the pillar. "No names to paper."
The scratch freezes mid-curve, offended.
Something slides under the front door. Not bold—polite, like an invitation. Clean paper, square, with a red glove stamp that thinks it's handsome and is only clean. A dusting of mirror glitter clings to the corner as if five minutes ago this note was glass and only learned to pretend to be paper on the walk here.
Lelia doesn't touch it. I don't either.
I draw a small ring across the threshold that the eye won't see and the feet will feel. The lantern's weight goes heavy-good, the safe heavy, the one that says we brought our people home and the door will remember it.
Syth flips the note with the WORD plate edge. The inside is five words:
PAPER TRAVELS. SO DO DOORS.
Outside in the lane, a soft mirror hum passes, pauses, considers, and moves on like a carriage that wants to measure our house and decides to save the arithmetic for tomorrow.
"Bowls later," Ira says from the table, which means yes to the fight to come.
I lift the lantern and lay a second ring over the threshold so thin it is only a suggestion. The glass warms my palm until the sound in the room changes—less breath, more kept.
Dusk leans in. The city listens. The paper on the floor pretends at patience.
The lantern grows heavier again. Good.
And the chapter closes on that weight—the ambulance jammed two turns below the world, the fleas boiled to we-static, two voices sleeping warm under cloth, a plan for Name Bank and Needlehouse chalked, and a square of paper at our door that means to be clever—while my ring sits across the threshold and says, very politely, no.
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