The kite's shadow slides over our bow like a coin buying a rumor.
The name-thread hisses as it drops. It wants the warm line I drew across the water—the faint KEEP the lane remembers because we taught it.
"Count," I say.
"One—two—three—four," Kirella answers, voice low, steady, the sound a roof makes when it decides to hold.
The wolves spring up together, each catching a corner of shade cloth in their teeth. They rear and snap the cloth into the light, a quick flap that smothers the harshest glare. Lupa doesn't look up; she looks ahead and sets the line the thread will try to take across our deck, then shifts a belaying pin half an inch so the path it thinks it wants becomes the path we decide it can have.
The kite dives, all gleam and tidy hunger. A tiny bell trembles under its chest, eager to learn the word me.
"Bell," Kirella says.
He reaches up on the balls of his feet and touches the WORD plate to the bell's striker as it passes—just a brush of iron, a kiss of instruction.
"WAIT," he tells it.
The bell obeys. It gives a single cough-polite and then remembers manners.
The thread still comes. Threads don't listen; they insist.
"Wet it," Stone-Reed says.
He flicks the brine spritzer and sends a fine salt mist up along the line's slope. The droplets hang in the air like a net stitched out of patient weather; the thread runs through them and loses its pride. Name glue that might have held to skin or seam turns slick; the line sheds the idea own and keeps only the idea touch.
I rub name-salt—salt, mint, pepper—across my wrists and the hood hem without looking. The smell sits in the air like a lesson and slides the thread's want off where it would have stuck.
The kite adjusts. It always does. It tilts to catch a new wind and brings the tether ring over our prow. Metal, thank all old kitchens. The world persists in leaving a hinge where a hinge belongs.
The short scythe settles into my palm. Only the curve. One handspan is a law I made for myself and keep because breaking it would be lazy.
"Count," I breathe.
"One—two—three—four."
On two the hook slides under the tether ring's split-ring—metal only—like a ladle slipping under fat. Palm sting bites. On three the ring argues. On four I lift a finger's width and feel the tiny ting in my bones when the coil gives.
Lupa has the line already. She doesn't grab. She guides, feeding it around the pin she set there, then through a release-knot that looks like it grew out of the rope. The thread thinks it has a hold; the knot thinks about letting go soon and means it.
"Bitter end," Kirella murmurs.
He flicks the tail of the thread to his hand and ties a quick kept-loop that will give the line back after it has learned why pulling isn't a personality. The kite takes its own wind and eats it—rises, then stutters, then rises again with its bell WAITed and its tether honest instead of hungry.
The name-thread no longer wants my seam because there's nothing left in it to want. It becomes a length of tidy string attached to a boy's hobby with paperwork stitched on.
"SORRY?" Lupa asks.
"Let it go high," Stone-Reed says, watching the escort boats. "Polite things make good skies."
The kite climbs until it is a glimmer. It will write a neat line on some ledger that says delay, then go home embarrassed. The thread's end sits in Kirella's kept-loop, learning to wait its turn.
"Back to work," I say.
Two more boats hover at the mouth of the corridor—a baker's skiff with a stove box and a man whose hands are scarred with honesty, and a narrow punt with a woman in a shawl that used to be a curtain. Their eyes are big with the kind of fear that makes bad math.
"Bowl-names only," Stone-Reed says, never raising his voice.
"Spice Thumb," the baker says, half laugh, half apology.
The woman swallows. "Patch Shawl," she whispers.
I draw a thin ring coin under the baker's bow so his boat recognizes the lane's warmth; he finds it with his toes and settles. The punt yaws. I sketch a fingertip seam from my knuckle to her rail—audit-quiet—and the water remembers left instead of fear. The wolves hop forward, nudge the shade cloth to keep faces in a room that isn't a wall.
The Warden of Measure doesn't move. They watch the world the way a well watches a bucket—careful, impartial, full of reason to be patient.
Behind us the Mirror Barge pretends to have learned humility. It hasn't. It shrugs and slides a small thing off its starboard quarter: a ledger raft no bigger than a door, mirror top and tidy bell wick tucked along the rim. A leash of varnished thread links it to the barge's stern like a rumor on a string.
"Tracker," Lupa says.
"Mooring shackle," Kirella says at the same time.
We slip out of the lane's lip and walk the raft as if it had manners. The leash's shackle is a pretty thing; pretty things hide simple pins.
"Count," I say.
"One—two—three—four."
I set the boat hook under the shackle's split-pin and give the scythe one handspan—metal only. Palm sting flares and subsides into count. The pin lifts. Stone-Reed spritzes brine into the throat of the shackle so the seal forgets who it works for. Kirella taps the raft's bell's striker with the plate—WAIT—and the bell decides to try indoor voice for once.
The leash slides free. The raft drifts. It could follow if it knew the difference between a lane and a line, but it doesn't; it follows wind instead. Wind is an honest liar.
We let it go until it kisses a patch of calm and sits to think about its choices.
"Save the token," Kirella says, nodding to his pocket. He doesn't have to remind me; I can feel the little weight even from here. Two uses left is a number the future already asked for.
We slide back to the seam. The KEEP corridor holds, faint warmth under the bow like a string between teeth. The baker goes first; the punt follows; the kid in the first skiff salutes the wolves again. The wolves pretend not to see because professionals don't wag on duty.
"Up," Stone-Reed says again, softer.
Over the barge's bow, the mirror slabs begin to shift. The deckhands work a set of hidden runners; the plates slide to make a narrow slit in the air just above the waterline. Inside the opening is white-cold like the inside of a clock, a corridor of light that throws no heat and promises to think for you.
"Doctor's route," Stone-Reed says. "No-Sky."
The slit widens, then narrows, then widens again, testing the world's patience. The barge noses toward it with the shy boldness of a thief who already knows where the floorboards creak.
My knees loosen a fraction. The work shakes out after the work is done. Kirella leans in, forehead to temple, one breath that turns trembling into the idea of four.
"Four," he says.
"Four," I answer, and the ring warmth under my feet steadies like a pot taken off the boil and set where it can rest.
We still have boats.
A blown-out ferry with a crane-wristed woman at the oar drifts crooked at the edge. Her jaw says she will not ask. Her eyes say she wants to. I draw a finger-seam along the lane's lip toward her bow; she feels it under her toes and pretends she knew it was there all along. Pride is a neighbor you learn to live with. It sometimes borrows salt.
The Warden tips their chin one degree again, which is a smile in the language of math.
The Mirror Barge finishes arranging its sins. The mirror slit is fully a door now. The auction throat strapped to its deck is quiet and obedient and will open at a better bid. The pilot glances once at our lane and once at the slit, then chooses the kind of courage that comes with a receipt.
"They're going in," Lupa says.
Of course they are.
"We have time for one more," Stone-Reed says, eyes on the far end of the corridor where the gray opens into gray. "Then the wind shifts and the seam thins."
I nod. I do not look at the lantern on the threshold stone. It is not mine to look at. It is mine to be kept by. The compass thread on its glass points toward the barge and toward everything else at once and refuses to help me cheat.
"Us first—then the rest," I say out of habit and maybe also out of love.
The wolves growl, soft, like a pot that wants to suggest you stir. Lupa's hands open, palms steady. She is already the shape of follow.
The last waiting boat is a flat fish sled with no proper bow. Tin Lid stands in it like a man in a coat too thin for winter and gives me a look that says I know what you're going to choose and I would make the same bad choice. I choose to not be insulted by being seen.
We set him on the seam with a little ring coin and a softly lied "easy". He believes the lie because the ring is honest. He drifts into the corridor with his kid under the tarp and doesn't look back because some men were taught that looking is the same as asking for help.
The mirror slittightens. The barge's prow tilts and slides into the white-cold the way a name slides into a ledger line and pretends the pen is a friend. The air around the opening hums with the kind of clean that isn't kind.
"Go now," Lupa says. "We'll never catch the cut if we wait for manners."
"Hold the lane," Stone-Reed counters. "Break it and we're a story they can sell."
The Warden watches me the way a scale watches an apple. They will not touch the choice. That is what makes them useful and what makes them cruel.
"Two uses left," Kirella says, as if the number were a prayer. His hand hovers near my shoulder without being a hand on my shoulder. I learned that, too. He never tells me where to go. He reminds me where my feet are.
The ledger kite is a dull coin against the cloud now, its bell still WAIT, its thread honest. The ledger raft drifts, bored. The KEEP corridor hums low and warm, a helper that will go away after dark because that is how help stays clean.
The mirror slitnarrows by half. The barge's stern is a heartbeat from disappearing into the kind of corridor that teaches you to forget the word sky. The auction throat on its deck quivers. A smell like cold antiseptic and new iron ghosts across the water.
We are at the bow. My short scythe rests under a deck catch pin that has nothing to do with this choice and everything to do with reminding my palm what enough feels like. The wolves stand. Lupa is already tilted toward move. Stone-Reed balances a peg on his fingers and looks where numbers go when you don't like them. The Warden counts nothing and everything without moving their mouth.
Kirella begins the count he always begins when there's no law to hold us except the one we made for ourselves.
"One—" he says.
I draw breath.
"Two—"
I look at the slit and the lane and the boats and the world I want and the years I promised us.
"Three—"
It is one breath to decide.
And the chapter ends there—with the mirror sluice closing like a polite mouth, the Mirror Barge sliding into white-cold, the KEEP corridor warm and thin and faithful under a last chain of bowl-named boats, the Warden unmoved, Stone-Reed's peg ready for whichever world I choose, Lupa already set to turn movement into work, the wolves bristling without bark, Kirella's count in my bones—and my answer curled in the breath that will become four.