The barge inhales.
All the little bells under the holy-glass hood open their throats at once, wicks glistening like tongues waiting for a word. The first breath pulls the air out of my mouth, and for a heartbeat the world forgets how to be mine.
"Here," Kirella says, and his count is already under my ribs. One—two—three—four. The lantern is good-heavy between our palms. The coins under my feet glow warm as bread.
"Close," Lupa says.
We go close because close is where their big tricks can't remember how to stand up.
Our rope-ring prow kisses the barge's flank, and Stone-Reed hooks the rail with a wedge and a look that tells iron to behave. The wolves spring to the fender walkway—soft, low, nothing for a bell to brag about. Lupa climbs the ladder rungs like truth going upstairs. A deckhand turns, startled, and gets a lesson instead of a scar: Lupa takes his wrist, turns his elbow, lays him along the deck boards with a neat pin and the single word that fixes more people than orders do.
"Breathe."
He does.
The lattice lifts for its second breath.
"Strikers," Kirella says, already on the service rung that runs beneath the bell crown. He drops the WORD plate to the long striker bar and presses. WAIT enters the metal like a slow idea that refuses to leave. He ties a kept-loop on the pull chain—three honest tugs to wake, not one.
I reach with the boat hook; the tip wears brine like a secret. A quick flick across the first name-wick, then the next, then the next—each little throat gags into politeness. The lattice tries to sing. What comes out is a cough and a sulk.
Moon-hot glass hums above us. I sweep balm along the hood's seam with a practiced wrist; the shine muddies, light turning from sermon to breath.
A second deckhand lunges past Lupa toward a lever. She catches his belt, rotates, and sets him down in the generous space between pride and pain. "Breathe," she repeats, calm as a bowl on a table.
"Rails," Stone-Reed calls from the barge flank. He has his hand in a nest of couplers where lamphouse and barge kiss the water with machinery. "There's your throat."
The mirror rails run under the surface like veins—clamps here, pins there, a gut of iron and math. A coupling pin sits smug and vertical beside a painted arrow. Men like this paint arrows for themselves, so they remember who they are.
I set a thin ring seam along the coupler housing—audit-quiet so the boat won't jump when metal chooses new manners. The scythe lives short in my hand, a curve of red glass that is mostly will.
"Only metal," Kirella says without looking, because he knows where I want to spend myself and where we can't afford it.
"Only metal," I promise.
I give the tırpan one handspan of extension, no more. It tastes like copper and work. The hooked spine slips under the pin cap, and I lift the way you open a child's fist without making them cry. The pin rises with a little scandalized sound. Stone-Reed slides a peg into the gap; Lupa feathers a nearby lever to give us slack without drama.
The rails murmur. The barge shivers like a horse remembering its own legs.
"Second coupler," Stone-Reed says.
"No," Kirella answers, eyes on the lattice. "One is a courtesy. Two is theft. We're leaving them a lesson, not a wreck."
The lattice tries for its third breath. The kept-loop refuses to be flattered; the wicks choke gently on brine; the striker keeps the word we gave it. The bells fail in a way only the guilty notice.
I set a small ring around the base of the lattice column—just warmth, just manners. I place a thumb-stone on the deck and let the bowl-name chorus unfurl soft as steam:
We won't pay.
We won't sell.
The deckhand under Lupa relaxes another half inch. The one by the wheelhouse stops reaching for the thing he was about to pretend he had to do.
"Tag it," Kirella says.
We leave WE KEEP EACH OTHER → chalked low under the wheelhouse lip where a grease hand will see it later and argue with its own habits. Kirella nests a three-visit release on the crown's lever guard. I lay a whisper seam along the control box. Stone-Reed taps a peg into a slot that asks for noise and gets craft instead.
"Through," Lupa breathes.
Kirella drops to our hull, catches my elbow, brings me with him without making it about rescue. One—two—three—four. I leave the hood's edge with one last brush of balm and a prayer that is not a prayer.
We push off into the shade our hands have taught into the world. The rope-ring prow hums keep. Wolves low. Oars feather. The barge stays mannered out of stubbornness rather than fear, which is my favorite kind of politeness.
The channel opens. Dawn lifts another notch and my skin complains. I tuck deeper under the cloak. The coins under my boots answer: we, we, we. For a breath, I believe this little boat is the kitchen we promised.
A winch below us groans again.
"Under," Stone-Reed warns, and we all look back.
The Temple Barge doesn't chase. It pivots, slow as a teacher turning to a new slate. The hood re-closes to a half-open yawn. The rails we uncoupled where it kissed the Lamphouse gape like a snapped zipper, and water eats the gap with pleasure.
Farther out along the channel, three skiffs nose through the watered-down day, lights blinking the careful code of men who want to do their jobs without becoming the story. They will arrive soon and find a barge that forgot how to order lunch.
"Left of the loud," Stone-Reed says again, because it keeps being true.
We set for the dark seam where kelp braids the water. The rope-ring prow nods, pleased. The boat slides into the hush that green makes for friends.
"Name?" a new voice asks.
We all freeze the little bit a body can afford. The voice doesn't come from deck or hood. It comes from wind, skinny and eager—the whine of something high, tight as wire.
Lupa's eyes already found it. "Kite," she says.
A mirror kite rides the early wind: a rhomboid of paper lacquered with gloss, a small eye set in its heart, a thread you could cut with breath unless the breath keeps shaking. The eye looks at us, and the low sound it makes tastes like ledger ink.
"Down," Kirella says, and our boat obeys, but boats can't duck and still be boats.
The kite's thread sags and then drops. It wants the prow ring. It wants to write us onto something that thinks it's a map.
The scythe twitches in my hand, greedy for usefulness.
"Short," Kirella warns, which is how he says I want you later more than I want you brilliant now.
"Short," I echo, and I mean it.
The tırpan stays small—no more extension, no more drama. I stand into my two little coins, breathe through the count, and lift the thread with the back of the blade. It feels like spider silk that read law. I twist the hook so the thread drops between ring and wood instead of around it, and the boat hook's tip—tar-sticky—catches and holds.
The kite jerks, surprised, as if it thought obedience was a kind of weather. The thread snaps against tar.
The kite fishtails and rises, whining to a hand onshore that will think the leash merely slippery. Good.
The skiffs beyond the barge notice us again, finally, the way men notice rain—you can't be angry at it and be sensible at the same time. One raises a hand to signal. Then he drops it, because the lamphouse sweeps stay dusk, the barge bells stay polite, and sometimes work is easier when reality misbehaves.
"Row," Lupa says softly.
We row.
The channel throat opens into water that isn't a place yet, just an argument between distance and memory. The Mid-Light Needle pricks the horizon, thin as a lie someone told for a good reason. It makes my chest hurt the way wanting does.
"We won't reach it today," Kirella says, not scolding, just reminding me of tide and blood and bones.
"I know," I say, and I do.
We slip past the last of the stilts and rails and into a low field of sea glass buoys—pale, almost pretty, each with a nail-bell hung from its belly. A chain connects them under the skin of the water, making a fence that thinks it's clever.
"Bell chain," Stone-Reed says, and almost smiles. "Somebody loved a pattern and then believed their own story."
The wolves' hackles lift, then settle. Lupa's fingers curve around the prow the way you hold a sleeping child when you have to move them and don't want them to wake wrong.
"We could cut the chain," I say, and my scythe thinks that is a good sentence.
"Later," Kirella answers. "We leave this learned, not ruined."
Patterns prefer manners to force if you surprise them into saying yes.
I wet my thumb with brine and touch the nail of the nearest bell as we drift by. It wants to ring. It remembers WAIT without me stamping it—perhaps because our day has been full of doors learning to be doors again. We pass through the line one bell at a time, small polite circles of sound that never finish being a note.
"Which is kinder," Lupa asks, "teaching a bell to be quiet or teaching a man to listen?"
"Yes," I say, and she grins without showing teeth.
When the last buoy is behind us, the wind shifts. The barge's hood re-lifts a finger's width as its crew try to remember their instructions. The lamphouse sweeps consider being helpful again and decide against it. The skiffs drift, confused into safety.
We take the seam left of the loud and the seam takes us.
For a dozen breaths the world is only oars, kelp shadow, wolves breathing, rope complaining softly, and the thin line of the Needle a thing my eyes can stand to look at without flinching.
Then the sea answers.
Not the Leviathen, not yet. A lower, simpler voice—tide remembering where the old city drains, a long suck through hidden culverts. The boat shivers as if someone touched its spine. Far out, something like fog begins to stand up—a band of black mist too straight to be natural, too quiet to be honest.
Stone-Reed squints. "Barge smoke never learned black that clean," he says.
"Doctor?" Kirella asks.
"Not his perfume," I answer, and my neck tightens anyway, because the world keeps inventing new kinds of wrong and selling them as tools.
The black mist holds the horizon like a ruler. The wind brings a smell like cold ink and old birthdays. Between us and that line, the water darkens with troughs—not waves, exactly—lanes where the sea has been taught to offer.
Lupa studies it the way a wolf studies a trap she respects. "We don't take lanes someone else writes," she says.
"We make our own," I agree.
Kirella looks at our little boat—tar still damp at the prow ring, rope honest, ribs pegged like a remembered song. His mouth becomes the kind of line a man uses when he is about to ask the world to be better than it is.
"Kitchen first," he says. It's not a plan. It's a law.
We angle away from the offered troughs and into a stripe of nothing the tide would not have recommended. It feels like trespass until it feels like clever. The rope-ring prow hums keep. My coins underfoot keep being brave.
Behind, a skiff bell finally finds a note. It pings, once, twice, then stalls into polite as our tag on the barge yaws it into the path of its own pride. Men wave hands. Nobody dies. I breathe.
"Food," Stone-Reed says, as if remember to say the word will conjure it. Lupa grunts the shape of a yes.
We hold the lane we made until my bones stop shouting about dawn and start whispering about breakfast. The cloak becomes a smaller room I can stand to live in. The lantern's heat returns to the part of my hands that want to be useful.
Only then do I let myself look full at the Mid-Light Needle again. It is still a thorn. It is still a lie I want. It is also a point, and points are where maps learn to end their sentences.
"Not today," I say again, to it and to myself and to the part of me that wants to spend everything at once to buy a thing that can be bought slower.
"Today we float," Kirella says. "Tonight, we keep. Tomorrow, we argue."
"Always keep first," Lupa adds, and a wolf sneezes like punctuation.
We slip on.
The black mist holds its line. The barge shrinks back into lamphouse shadow, subdued into usefulness. The city behind us breathes bad habits with less confidence. The sea ahead breathes possibility and a little bit of insult.
The wind takes a corner of my cloak and lifts it like a question.
And the chapter ends there—our hull riding a lane we made ourselves, the bell chain quiet behind, the Temple Barge gentled without blood, the Lamphouse wearing dusk like a compromise, the Mid-Light Needle a thin promise far off, and a new straight wall of black mist waiting on the horizon with the patience of a door that learned manners and still might slam.