The water lifts like a chest filling with a bad idea.
Our bow rises. Paper-scaled lips surge up the port side—black lacquer pages stitched to hide, each barb seated in a small metal collar where glue met salt. The eye rolls under us, dull and mirror-flat, hunting a name it can spend.
"Close," Kirella says, and his voice is a rope thrown exactly where I can reach. One—two—three—four.
The rope-ring prow hums keep. Two ring coins glow under my feet—warm as bread, stubborn as promise. I take one breath, then I let the scythe slide into my hand like it grew there. It stays short, just the curve, just the hook. I do not give the part of me that loves problems permission to be clever. I give her permission to be correct.
The first barb collar drags along our rail with a noise like a staple regretting its career. I slide the hook under the collar's lip, lift, and feel metal tell the truth to itself. Kirella's count steadies the sting that bites from my palm to my elbow. I tilt a thumb of brine from the vial; it kisses the joint. The barb recoils—not in pain, in memory—and the lip of the maw flutters open a hand's width.
"Good," Stone-Reed says softly behind me—the kind of praise you give a knot.
The eye rolls up, full on me. It tries to catch my reflection. For a beat I see a girl under a hood with a mouth set to survive and I feel the old pull—MI— like a hook in chalk—but the pull skids off the ring coins, off the bowls we taught our mouths to speak instead.
"Moon balm," I say.
A wolf presses against my calf, warm, patient. I smear a line of balm on the pad of the shade cloth and pass it to Lupa with the back of my hand. She reaches up on the very edge of the surge and slaps the cloth across the eye the way you throw a towel to a friend who forgot they were naked. The mirror goes dull, not blind—mannered.
The maw breathes in.
We don't.
Air turns into math. Our hull thumps forward with the quality of an invitation you should refuse.
"Angle," Stone-Reed murmurs, and he is already there—hip to the thwart, foot to the brace, a sure peg driven into the seam between rib and thought. "Twenty-five."
Kirella gives one hard feathered stroke and one gentler, and the bow yaws into the pull so the rope-ring prow sets against a soft fold inside the mouth—the place where flesh, glue, and an old decision meet. The hum of keep runs from prow to hand to lung. We become a stitch someone meant well when they tied.
The maw pulls again. Our boat moves a hand, then half a hand, then decides to be an argument.
"Right barbs," Lupa says, balanced low. The wolves flatten, claws finding rail, bodies set to no panic.
A second row of metal collars lifts at starboard—teeth turned into paper tabs with iron throats. "Wait," I tell my hand, which loves to impress, and keep the blade short. I slide the hook under the next collar, lift, and Kirella stamps the WORD plate to the ring of metal with the heel of his palm. WAIT warms into the barb as if it remembered being a hinge before someone called it a weapon. Stone-Reed taps a wedge into the gap, holds it open. The barb stays polite, jaw unsquared.
The maw thinks about closing in annoyance. The eye, dulled under the cloth, shifts—a cat trying to see around a curtain.
"Still hungry," Lupa says.
"For our shadow," I answer.
The boat lurches in a way that turns the stomach honest. Vacuum. Beneath the paper-lips, a tongue like an index, wide and ridged, cups the water into a suction bell. We are a page it wants to shelve.
My head goes light at the edges. I taste copper behind my teeth. The coins under my feet push back, hot as truth.
"Floor," Kirella says.
"Not glass," I say back. It steadies the part of my spine that keeps my knees from reenacting history.
The maw drags us half a breath deeper.
I hate what I am about to do. I do it anyway.
One drop. No more.
I nick the inside of my forearm with the back edge of the scythe—not the blade—just enough to pull a bead. The bead hangs, bright as a tiny fruit. I flick it into the water and teach it a shape with the same impatience I use on lies: four short silhouettes that barely deserve the word people—gölge forms, no faces, no bones, just a rumor of fleeing shoulders.
The eye below the cloth jerks. The index-tongue pivots toward the decoys, suction turn-ing like a sleepy door. The silhouettes skitter along the edge of the maw and slip away like minnows that know a kitchen floor better than a net.
Cost comes fast. The world tips; the strings go loud in my hand. The scythe tries to be heavier than it is.
Kirella's palm closes around my wrapped hand. He anchors me to the handle of the lantern—not a rescue, a shared job.
"Keep me on four," I whisper.
"Always," he says, and the count falls into my ribs like a heartbeat remembering its job. One—two—three—four.
The decoys dart. The maw follows. The suction loosens half a breath. It is enough to turn angle into action.
"Through the dikiş," Stone-Reed says.
I lean out over the bow until the ring seam I laid there a dozen moments ago meets the water. The warmth travels through skin to wood to rope to the little world we made out of boat and vow. "Here," I tell the prow, and it believes me first and physics next.
We slide, not forward—along. The boat's nose finds the tiny valley between index and tooth. I feel the seam catch like a needle finding the hole it meant.
"Brace," Lupa says. One barb snaps up from under the lip, trying to be important. Lupa redirects it with a two-finger smack at the pivot, just enough to guilt it into waiting its turn. The wolves clamp jaws on the rail and ride the start of the acceleration with the kind of faith I want to earn.
"Second collar," Stone-Reed points with breath, eyes on the motion inside the maw.
I see it. I slide the hook under the next metal throat, give the scythe one handspan of extension—only this once—and lift. Searing palm sting—hot, bright, brief—tries to turn the deck soft under me. The count keeps the boards wood. Kirella sets the WORD plate to the collar mid-lift and presses. WAIT enters the ring like a slow decision; the collar hesitates. Stone-Reed pegs the space and the barb hangs there, open, undecided, accessible.
"Unbind point?" Kirella asks.
"Throat," I say. "Where it cheats its own breath."
The index-tongue shudders to turn again. The decoys thin to mist—short-lived by design. The eye remembers me. Its hunger is not personal. Its paperwork is.
We don't have time to be philosophical.
I slide my hand farther along the bow until I feel a vibration under the seam—a deeper metal ring hidden under pulp and glue. Someone fed this creature into its own trap.
"Here," I say, and tap the wood.
Kirella's free hand had already found the release line he tied from spare rope when the day was still a plan. He nods once.
"Count," he says.
"One—two—three—four."
On three, I hook the scythe under the hidden boğaz kolyesi—a hydraulic collar that cinches the mouth's pull. On four, Kirella yanks the release-knot home, and Stone-Reed drives a wedge into the hinge so it will remember what open feels like.
"Brine!" Lupa snaps, and I'm already there—vial mouth to collar seam. A thin silver line runs around the ring. The collar gags like a joke that wasn't funny. The suction—that tempting, cheating emiş—breaks.
The leviathan makes a sound I have only ever heard from men who get told no by someone their money failed to buy. It's not a roar. It's an öksürük—a cough of water and glue and stupid habit.
The sea in front of us empties a breath. Our hull falls into that absence like a coin into a cup. The rope-ring prow sings keep—loud, pleased, brief—and we shoot forward along the seam between tooth and tongue into clean water that is not sure it wants to be that for long.
"Two," Kirella says, and we give two strokes—quiet, hard, precise as surgery. Feather out. Feather in. The hood breathes. My head steadies like a plate settling on a shelf.
Behind us, the maw folds over the place we were and closes on its own WAITed barbs. It bites nothing and does not like the taste.
The decoys—what's left of them—pop like bubbles under the gloom of the moon balm cloth and are nothing at all again. The eye looks around, embarrassed by its own appetite.
We keep low. The world widens. The gray noon is back, judgy but manageable. My hand shakes once—because it can—and then holds the handle with the certainty I want to die with someday, not today.
Lupa tilts her face to the wind, reads the next page. "He'll dive," she says. "Then try a side-swipe."
"Left of loud," Stone-Reed says, because sometimes the answer to genius is the same proverb you used on a door.
We angle. The rope-ring prow agrees. The boat glides from wake to hush.
A scratch of sound rises from under us—metal on metal, not ours. The hair along my arms prickles.
"Ray?" Stone-Reed says sharply.
The leviathan disappears, not quietly, but with commitment. The sea smooths like a lie. Just when meanings could pretend to be over, something tugs at our wake—deliberate.
From the left edge of the fog, a low craft noses out: a Mirror Ambulance—sleek, ugly, painted with the pride of men who treat tools as friends. Rails run beneath its belly like hooks. The smell that rides it is the smell of a room where someone writes things down and calls it mercy.
Under the water, those rails catch—I feel it in the line of the sea the way a cook feels a simmer turn vindictive. The rails snag the boğaz kolyesi we loosened. They do not free it.
They tow.
The sea hunches. The leviathan is dragged by its own bad jewelry toward us like a dog reined by a cruel chain. It moves wrong—pulled and aimed, not hunting out of hunger but out of someone else's will.
A teneke boru melody floats across the water from the Ambulance's speaking horn—a cheerful tune shaped like policy.
"Ad yaz, deniz sakinleşsin," it sings in a market jingle voice. Write your name; the sea calms.
My mouth goes dry. My hand warms on the lantern handle until good-heavy becomes **