The fork waits like an argument with two good lies.
Left is air and a dock that might forget to be watched.
Right is the drum—the bones of the show—and the way back to we.
"Right," I say.
I drag a thin ring seam across the stones with the edge of my boot, a warm line for feet to remember. Water kisses my ankles and decides not to judge. Ira shifts the second captive higher on his shoulder; the first lies curled on a blanket of rope, breathing small and stubborn. Above, iron grinds where shutters learned pride.
"Positions," Syth hisses through the grate. "On my count—one: wedges. Two: brake. Three: let the water roll. Four: breathe."
"Copy," Kirella answers. Calm, even. I can hear the cloak in his voice.
We run the corridor to the wheelhouse—gears stacked like teeth, drums fat with rope, a brake wheel sweating grease. Ira shoulders a lever. I set a hand to the wedge under the drum lip and feel the boat's heartbeat through iron—boom, boom, boom—the steady lie of percussive courage.
"One," Syth calls.
I pull the wedge. Ira pries the other; it resists, then agrees to be reasonable. The drum shifts a hair—the kind of motion only men who love machines notice, and we love this one only enough to make it misbehave.
"Two."
Metal screams; the brake bites like a teacher who ran out of patience. Above, wood complains. The stage tilts the way a voice does when it forgets the next line.
"Three."
I step back and let the thin flood roll, the water we pulled earlier with our pretty sin. It washes the pit lip and nudges the world a finger to the left. Somewhere in the amphitheater, a slate slips its pride and thinks about a swim.
"Four."
We breathe. The mirror lattice's hum drops a tone, wounded ego. The polite alarm graduates to a bell with opinions. The shutter above us huffs, then lifts a hand's width as pressure equalizes.
"Go," Syth says. "We made space."
Ira hauls the rope; I climb first, palm slick on the ladder, ring-stones I set on the rungs warming under my boots—one, three, five—a small poem of permission. At the top, a strip of light like a coin on edge; Kirella slides through the gap with a twist of shoulders and good sense. Syth follows, shard in her teeth, braid stuck to her neck with effort. The rim marshal finds time to regret everything in quick succession as Kirella's cloak wraps his wrist and introduces his face to a wall, not hard, just final. Two orderlies step, try, learn, sit. We do not hurt them. We do not owe them that version of us.
"Together," Kirella says, which is a map.
We herd our two saved bodies and our four unsaved ones (us) along the service artery that runs like an apology under the amphitheater. Red glove banners hang limp; lamp oil rides the air with the sharp of phenol. Somewhere above, the chant tries to gather itself and fails because it has forgotten the tune.
He steps out of a side theater with the hush of someone who makes rooms quieter by entering them.
Myor.
A fresh host wears him: a lean man's frame, red gloves buttoned tight like manners, a polished mirror harness blooming on his back—petal panes nested, thin glass filaments threaded up his sleeves to the backs of his hands. He smiles the way a scalpel might if it could. The harness catches the lantern glow and throws it back as polite threat.
"The lantern's girl," he says, pleasantly. "If you please."
Orderlies move first—always the men who believe in lines. I step to meet the first and make his baton less proud with a shaft bind, a hip turn, and a tap to the knee that resets his relationship with standing. The second tries to flank. Ira checks him with a shoulder that has never believed in speeches. They sit. They will have excellent bruises.
Myor does not hurry. He lifts his hands and the filaments whisper outward, bright hairs cutting the air into thin, obedient stories. Kirella flares the cloak; I slide under then up, scythe short, and shear the glass threads where they are most in love with themselves. They ping, fall, try to be insults; the blade pays a finger's length to clear the last—the sting runs through my palm into my elbow like a line of cold written in a different script.
"Beautiful," he says, and it's not cruelty. He means it.
The harness shivers. The mirrors look at me the way a mouth looks at a word it hopes is its own. Something in the pressure of the air pushes where my name lives.
Say it.
No voice, just urge, the kind that slides under skin and dresses up as your idea.
I plant a ring coin under my heel and stand where the floor understands we. The pressure thins, not gone, but less sure of itself. I could sigh from relief if my throat were not busy swallowing a name it will not give.
Syth's eyes flick to the harness's flank. "There," she hisses. "Tether feed. Right wrist brace."
Myor's gaze slides past her and lands on me as if we share a joke we don't. He flicks his right hand, and a fan of small mirrors bursts from his sleeve like a card trick that knows your birthday. I step in hard, sideways, nick the leather at his wrist with the scythe's kiss—no blood, just pride. The harness shivers again, and the mirrors stutter on their way outward as if a conversation they expected to have with gravity got awkward.
A vent above us clacks. A stitch-chimp pours itself down, joint where joint should not be, blood where someone decided to pretend there was. It dives for the lantern like habit.
I greet it with a tiny, almost-apology cut to the forearm as it reaches. One—two—three—four. On four, I pull. The thing folds into itself and slides under a table like it remembered it had a different appointment. Clean. Quiet. Over.
"Spend small," Kirella breathes. I nod, breath steadying with his count the way ropes steady in good hands.
Myor advances, calm. The mirror harness sings, wanting to be a door in the worst way. I take one step back and then another, choose a beam that looks like it forgot why it was made, and let the scythe take one handspan more than it wants to give. The length arrives with a sting in my palm and a small, unpretty tremor in my thumb.
"Careful," Kirella says, the word a steady plank.
I staple the tail of Myor's coat to the beam—cloth, not skin, held there by a red crescent that refuses to be polite. He looks down at his pinned hem with actual delight, like a child discovering a new way to ruin a shirt.
"Oh, excellent," he says.
Kirella's hands are already on his forearm, lock and turn, a joint listening to a truth it does not want. Syth slaps WORD=WAIT on the harness latch with a quick crack; the latch thinks about rules and obeys them for one breath. Ira steps in with the grace of a broken door and checks Myor's shoulder; the man rocks—not much, enough.
"Hold," Syth says, and I hook the blade under the tether line that feeds the harness its clever. Brine seam along the glass binding—careful, hungry. The line wilts a fraction, loses pride. One more push; the tether severs with a sound like a thread remembering it was once water.
The harness stutters. Lamps along the artery flicker as if their oil forgot what fire is for. Myor laughs, not offended—delighted.
He twists, unhuman quick inside the limits of human bones, and sheds the coat tail like a snake forgiving a skin. Our holds hold; his coat does not. The harness, freed of its good manners, flowers—petal mirrors unfurl and line up into a door cut from someone else's reflection. Cold breath spills from it, sea-cold, fen-light, a whisper of salt and a noise like canvas hurting in wind.
"Mid-Light waits, little red," he says, and steps backward through himself. It should be ugly. It is not. It is a movement practiced, a vanity perfected, a rudeness made graceful by repetition. The door narrows to a pale seam, then to the memory of glass. A ticket—slick, red at the edge where his glove brushed paper wrong—flutters to the floor at my feet.
A stylized needle over waves gleams on its face, stamped in cheap silver.
"Black Sea," Syth murmurs.
"Later," I say.
Alarms find new lungs. Above, the chant strangles itself and quits. The mirror lattice gives up the attempt to matter and goes back to being beautiful and useless.
"Out," Kirella says.
We take the artery to the supply quay—a low door, a short dock, a coil of rope dreaming of knots. Boots pound the planks on the far side of the crates. Voices—search cadence, men who think they own the idea of looking. Dogs bark—not excited, methodical, the kind trained to love the smell of mint and salt because the city told them those were the odors of trouble.
"Here," Ira says, and shoulders a salt closet door into interesting. Inside: stacked brine sacks, the good dry dark, a mop that hates its job. We fold into it—two captives first, then Ira, then Syth, then Kirella, last me because my stubborn refuses to go first into any small room.
Syth lays KEEP under the threshold with the plate and kisses a WAIT up into the jamb. The door closes as if it consented. The lantern drops its voice to a kitchen hum. Outside, boots and dog claws chatter on planks. A leash jingles. A handler says "Steady," like a promise he hopes is true.
I realize my hands are shaking.
The Scythe knows it before I do and asks for length the way bad habits ask for company. I tell it no. It obeys. The tremor stays because hands are not blades.
Kirella doesn't speak. He cups my wrist with a palm that never forgets to be warm, fits his thumb over the pulse point as if the beat were a door he can open more gently than most.
"One—two—three—four," he breathes. No hero words. No slogans. Just count.
My breath listens, then remembers. The tremor eases like a bell calming after being rung without malice. He starts to step away because he is a decent man who knows how to be a wall without being a cage.
I catch the front of his cloak and pull him in. It is not elegant. It is close. My forehead finds his cheek with the accuracy of someone who has trained their body to know the geography of another's without maps. For one second the room is just his shoulder and the smell of wool and a clean sweat no sermon could make a sin.
"Thank you," I say, and do a foolish thing I don't regret: a small kiss at the corner of his mouth. Not an ask. A thanks.
His breath catches like a rope answering a load it wants.
"We share the number," he says, and I feel the words along my mouth where the kiss landed, the way one learns a street by walking it.
We part because walls have ears and dogs have better ones. The captives stir. The first—Spindle Hand—whispers a little bowl-name to themselves like a mantra. The second is awake enough to answer when Syth leans close and asks, "What should we call you that paper can't steal?"
The voice from the blankets is hoarse, scared, proud. "Blue Thread."
Syth smiles in the dark, and the shard in her palm winks like it agrees.
Outside, a handler's voice moves nearer. "Check the salt," he says. A dog noses the bottom of our door and sneezes at the brine dust. Good. Brine tells too many stories for noses that like simple ones.
I crouch and lay the ticket on a sack where the lantern can see. The stylized needle over waves shines in our small light. A smear where Myor's glove bled on paper dries to a brown that will be history by morning. On the back, a neat line: MID-LIGHT NEEDLE — EVEN TIDE — DOORS OPEN AT FIRST BELL.
Syth sketches two little symbols in the salt dust at our feet with the tip of a nail. On the left, a boat—crude, a line with a triangle that looks enough like a sail to count. On the right, a ring—thin, stubborn, the Kitchen Walk's promise. Between them she draws an arrow and then scuffs it out because she refuses to tell the future out loud.
"Sea first," she whispers, "or land—wolves."
"Sea is Myor," Ira says. "Wolves are cover."
"Both are trouble," I say.
"Trouble is the job," Kirella answers softly.
The dogs stop at our door. A handler's knuckles tap the wood—exploratory, curious, confident. Salt dust lifts and settles in the lantern's slow breath. Spindle Hand squeezes Blue Thread's fingers. The brine sacks crowd the space like quiet witnesses who will not testify.
Someone outside chuckles. "Bless your names," he says to the dog, as if the animal needed a priest. The dog huffs and sits and then, because the universe loves us in clumsy ways, sneezes again with enough drama to reset its nose. The handler moves on, boots scuffing, leash ringing a language we do not speak.
In the closet's small dark I stare at Syth's two chalk-quick icons—boat and ring—and let the lantern warm my palm to remind me choices can be kept.
"Tomorrow," Syth mouths, tapping the ticket. "Even tide."
"Before that," Ira says, tilting his head toward the city. "The Walk needs us."
The closet breathes with us and then with the river and then with the boat and then with our own small lives not bought tonight. I press my lips where the count lives and taste a promise I did not plan to make.
Outside, a second search team steps onto the quay.
The salt on the jamb crackles the smallest yes.
The lantern goes low in my palms, ready to be quiet or bright. We are two again, and many, and the boat and the ring wait like good arguments, and the door knows which word to love if pushed.
And the chapter ends there, with boots and dogs at the wood, a ticket shining needle over waves, two bowl-names half-asleep on rope, two choices drawn in salt, and my scythe resting short while my hands learn how not to shake.