The light comes fast, a blade run along the edge of the world.
It finds the crooked mirror wing behind us and jumps from facet to facet, a chain of bright squares all racing toward our lane. The air sharpens the way a knife sharpens bread. My skin prickles. The ring warmth under my feet thins like soup spread too wide.
"Room," Kirella says.
He throws his cloak so it becomes a double-hood, a moving roof that knows my face. The wolves catch the corners of the shade cloth in their teeth and lean to hold it taut. I drag a thin ring seam along the hood's lip with two fingers. The wood under my palm warms. The seam learns to travel when we do. The rope-ring prow hums keep, small and stubborn as a prayer you only say when you mean it.
One—two—three—four, Kirella counts. The lantern sits good-heavy between our hands, weight that says stay.
Stone-Reed is already reading the water. "Left of loud. Gray pocket just beyond the buoy line." His voice is calm as rope.
I drop two ring coins to the deck where the balls of my feet know them. Step-stones. When the world goes dangerous, you make a floor you can trust.
The sun seam hisses toward us, a bright sheet drawn with the arrogance of noon. I thumb the brine spritzer and mist the air in front of our hood. The droplets make a dull film where the seam wants to bite. I pinch pepper-mint between two fingers and flick it into the sheet—tiny scent spines that make the glare lose appetite. I take the little tin of moon balm, swipe it once along the hood rim where the seam's edge will lick; the wood takes the lesson and shines back indoors.
The water heaves a good swell from somewhere deep—the path the leviathan dove, maybe, or a mercy from the river that hides beneath the sea. "On two," Stone-Reed says. "We hop the worst of it."
"Count," I say.
"One—two—three—four." His rhythm climbs into my ribs.
On two the oars feather hard. The bow hops. The hottest edge of the sun seam slides under the hull like a bad idea you refused. A shard of light clips the cloth; the wolves lean into the corner they hold and turn the blade into a sigh.
We land in the seam's pale after-talk. The coins under my feet glow warm again. The cloak is a little room where breath doesn't panic.
"Gate ahead," Lupa says.
Across the mouth of the gray pocket, a string of paper buoys lies smug as a fence. Each is painted with SPEAK TO PASS in clean bureaucrat letters. Little mirror wicks peek from the crowns; tiny bell nibs hide in the thongs. The line looks peaceful and is not.
"We don't cut wages," Kirella says, reading the same thing I do: someone was paid to watch that line. We don't feed the guild more stories.
"Open a gate," I answer.
The boat kisses the lead float. I slide the boat hook under the nearest split-ring that holds a drop chain—metal only—and lift. Palm sting nips; count makes it obedient. The ring pops half free. The mirror wick blinks, confused. Lupa leans out and redirects a jealous hook head with two fingers, the way you ease a child out of a kitchen, not a thief.
Kirella moves buoy to buoy as if he were walking down a list. He touches each bell's striker with the heel of the WORD plate; WAIT soaks in. He ties fast kept-loops in each bell rope so a panic pull becomes a thoughtful one. The wolves hop to the lead float and drape a shade cloth over its mirror like a napkin tucked for soup. The mirror sighs and decides to be furniture.
"Center rope," Stone-Reed says. He eases a palm under the main line, finds the knot that wants a friend, and lifts. The line rises. The buoys tilt, see reason. The fence becomes a gate the size of our little world.
I chalk WE KEEP EACH OTHER → low on the lead float where hands and boredom will read it later. Kirella ties a three-visit release on the center cleat so they can reset after three honest tries when they tell their tale. No one's family eats worse because we passed. No one's god gets to brag we stole.
"Row," Stone-Reed says.
We slide the gate. I paint a thin KEEP seam along the gap so the water remembers the shape of we after our boat is a rumor. The gray pocket breathes in front of us—wind-shadow, haze, a door that never wanted to be holy.
Something cool passes through my chest.
It isn't wind.
It comes from the line of the horizon where the Mid-Light Needle pokes the day like a pin. The pulse is even and true, not a sermon, not a whip, just a measure. The lantern answers with a soft counter-beat. On the glass, a faint hairline thread appears—no flare, no blaze—just a direction that feels like a string from our hand to the Needle's bones.
The ring warmth thickens the way soup does when you hit right on the salt.
Kirella's cloak shades my cheek. His forehead grazes my temple, just once. I don't know if he is steadying me or reminding himself to hold. It's the same job, really.
"Four," I say into the fabric.
"Four," he says into my hair, and our boat believes it.
Behind us, the crooked mirror wing sulks into distance, the Ambulance horn still polite enough to sell to a grave. The skiff spins in a circle that insults geometry. Under us, a long shadow keeps its promise to be somewhere else.
"Listen," Lupa says.
At first there is only water. Then there is something braided through it. Not a song. The hint of a song a glass might hum if you told it a name and made it promise to keep the secret. High. Clean. The kind of clean that isn't honest.
The gray pocket is changing.
Mist threads thicken in slow-motion curls. Light finds them and does not reflect—it scatters. The air grows facets. The world near our bow irises into a Prism Fog Gate—panels of not-quite-visible arranged like a mouth that would prefer you say please.
"Light's making a maze," Stone-Reed says, the way a teacher points at a quiet student who's about to misbehave. "Bearings will scatter."
"Bells again," Kirella says, and he is right: faint as moth teeth, tinkles arrive from nowhere in particular. No hand pulls the bells. That's what I hate about them.
"Rules," I say, to remind myself what my hands know. "Scythe short. Metal only. No names to paper or stone. We keep each other."
The fog gate breathes in. I feel a pressure the way I feel a room when someone important enters without saying hello.
"Door hinges," Stone-Reed murmurs. "There. There. There." He points with his chin at three places where the mist's fabricure overlaps itself and makes invisible joints.
"Peg the hinges," Lupa says, as if doors were doors whether they wore glass or wood.
The sun seam we outran licks the back of my hood, late and petty. The seam breaks on the moon balm and slides off offended. The cloak makes a room as patient as a kitchen. The lantern sits good-heavy, its faint line to the Needle tugging my hand left a finger width, then stopping to see if I learned.
I didn't come here to love a lighthouse. I came here to stop being owned. But the body is a map too. It hums yes at true measure.
"Promise Choir?" Lupa asks without looking away from the fog.
"Quiet," I say. "We'll teach the door manners first."
The first hinge is to port—a seam where two veils of mist cross-woven over a warmer stripe of air. I set the scythe's hook in my palm. Short, always. I reach with the boat hook and touch the split-ring of a utility buoy tied into the fog line I can't quite see. There is metal there, of course there is. There is always metal where paper pretends to be God. I give the scythe one handspan of extension and lift the ring off its little peg. Palm sting flares and eases into count. The seam breathes out. The panel sags a hand, like a curtain deciding not to try so hard.
"Second," Stone-Reed says.
Starboard this time. The hinge lives under a bell wick someone left too proud. Kirella reaches with the WORD plate and kisses the bell's striker. WAIT warms into the little clapper like a commandment written in soap. The bell thinks about tinkling and coughs-polite instead. The hinge loosens enough for Lupa to slide a peg into nothing and make it something. The fog remembers what a door is.
"Third," Stone-Reed says, and then he stops.
Because the glass-song is not far anymore. It is right in front of us and around us and under the idea of us. It sings in a register that wants teeth. It sings like a person who practiced saying a word until the word didn't mean anything except that they could say it.
"Little red," the song suggests in a voice I don't know and know. "One syllable for shelter."
"We won't pay," I say, low.
"We won't sell," Kirella says, as if we were setting a table.
The song tries three flats and a smile. The fog gate shifts, re-sets, tries again to be in charge.
"Third," Stone-Reed repeats, and I see it: a jaw seam dead ahead where two panes of mist meet on a line you'd swear wasn't there. The jaw will close if we prod. It will open if we ask.
I lay a thin ring seam across the bow, exactly on the line the Needle thread holds. The seam warms through wood, through rope, through my fingers.
"Keep," I tell the gate, not like an order, like a recipe.
It is not enough.
The fog breathes in and the jaw tightens. The faint bells left and right answer the glass-song with polite chimes. The path we want to take flickers into a wrong angle.
The wolves growl as if someone slid a plate they didn't ask for under the table. Lupa widens her stance, a wall made of practice. Stone-Reed has another peg between two fingers. Kirella does not let go of the lantern. I do not let go of the thought we.
"Count," I say.
"One—two—three—four."
On one, I press the boat hook's fork under the invisible split-ring I feel more than see. On two, I give the scythe's hook a half-hand—no more—and feel the metal catch. On three, I lift. On four, I breathe the lantern's small line into the seam until my hand warms with the idea of direction that is not a command, only a keep.
The ring climbs off its peg with a ting like a spoon realizing it is useful. The jaw loosens a breath. The Prism Fog Gate turns its face a fraction to be something a kitchen can walk through.
The glass-song leans in, sugar-cold, patient. It is a human voice done up like a god. It isn't Myor's tenor; it isn't the lockwright's ink. It is someone's hired kindness.
"You look tired, little red. Let the door name you and you can rest."
I think about the auction boards back in the market that tell people the price of one beautiful death. I think of the horn that wants to log me kept because it thinks ownership and protection are cousins. I think of nights hunger found bones and left poems.
I am tired.
I am also busy.
"We keep each other," I say, and chalk the arrow in my mouth.
The lantern answers with a low pulse that is not light, is not sound, is something a floor can understand. The thread on its glass tugs a hair right. I shift the seam. The boat listens.
Behind us, faint and grateful as a rumor, the leviathan turns under the fog. It does not strike the gate. It swims along it. The water it moves sends a neutral wake across the third hinge. The hinge decides to be less ambitious.
We aim the bow into the made gap. The seam holds. The cloak makes a room. My skin remembers night even while day pretends to be priest. We don't flare. We stack what we already have: rings, coins, cloth, count. The boat moves like soup off a ladle.
That is when the siren glass-song stops being polite.
It drops a note and a truth I don't like. It starts to sing in Kirella's voice.
"Mirelle," the mist says, pitch-perfect. "Four."
I don't look at him because I have spent a life saving lives by not looking when a liar wants eyes. I look at the seam. I look at the line on the lantern glass. I look at the split-ring I might need again and slide the scythe back short so my hands remember their vows.
Kirella's real mouth is right by my ear. "Four," he says, the voice that makes walls trust him, not a horn's memory of a man. His breath is salt and wood and whatever a kept kitchen smells like when it learns it is a ship.
"Four," I answer, and on one we go.
The fog gate irises wider, pretend-gracious, pretend in charge. The bells on either side try to tinkle and remember WAIT. The glass-song slides away from Kirella's voice to a gentler, hungrier alto I don't know. The panels shift, not enough to close, enough to warn.
Ahead, the gray is darker, better. Beyond, the Mid-Light Needle pricks the day and looks like work, not salvation. I prefer work.
We put the prow in the gap.
And the chapter ends there—with the Prism Fog Gate half-open and thinking about regrets, the glass-song trying on voices the way paper tries on laws, far bells coughing-polite instead of ordering, the Needle drawing a thin line through my palm, the wolves braced and unbiting, Lupa wide and steady, Stone-Reed's next peg ready, Kirella's count under my skin, the cloak a moving room, the ring seam simmering quiet under the hood—and my short scythe tucked beneath a buoy's split-ring I might have to steal again if this door forgets who it works for.