"Four."
We split on the word.
Stone-Reed stays with the KEEP corridor, oar tapping the count into wood—one—two—three—four—as if a street could be taught like a child. The wolves glance back once. One peels with us. The Warden stands as still as a good rule.
Kirella's cloak becomes a moving room. Lupa plants her foot on the prow like a promise. I set my palm to the rail, feel the ring warmth, and we step—clean—off the known water and into the mirror sluice before it finishes making up its mind to close.
The inside is white-cold. Not temple burn—measure chill that slows breath to a counted thing. The light makes no shadow. That means we bring our own.
Kirella's cloak lifts and tilts like a sail. Shade pours over my cheek in a curve I've learned better than my own handwriting. I lay a thin ring seam along the deck where our feet will fall. It warms just enough to tell the world we meant to be here.
"Count," I say, because my lungs want permission.
"One—two—three—four."
On two, my pulse stops trying to sprint. On four, it agrees to walk.
The barge is different from the outside. Neater. Quiet the way paperwork is quiet: that pretend kind that thinks silence is the same as mercy. A narrow catwalk runs the barge's spine, flanked by stacks of crates with tidy dents where hands shouldn't have been. Scent ducts crowd the ceiling like brass throat-worms. A set of runners glint under the mirror slabs that make the sluice's roof.
A man in a gray coat steps out of a recess with a glass-tipped staff and a bell hidden in his sleeve. He has the careful face of someone hired to notice how you breathe.
His wrist twitches—bell about to learn my name.
Kirella's hand moves faster. The WORD plate bumps the bell's striker with the softness you use when waking a child. "WAIT." The bell tries an opinion and coughs polite instead.
Lupa is already inside the man's reach. Wrist, hip. She steers his balance into a seat on the catwalk's rail, then peels his hand from the staff without making a story of it. He blinks the way men blink when their bodies remember weight and their minds remember no one asked for permission to sit.
"Kept-loop," Kirella says.
I hand him line. He ties the orderly with a knot that respects wrists and humiliates no one, loosens on the third honest pull. The staff he sets across the man's knees as if he might need it later to walk out of a life he didn't choose carefully enough.
"Token," I say.
We pass an EMERGENCY STOP bracket bolted to the baluster—red paint rubbed thin by hands that never meant well. Kirella hooks the measure token through the bracket's eye and ties a short, plain knot. The air within fifty steps changes—horns and bells in this stretch of white-cold remember manners they never believed in. I hear a far-off striker try to clear its throat and decide it has a cold.
"Two uses left after this?" I ask anyway.
He squeezes the knot once. "One, when we take it back."
We keep moving.
A catch pin gleams along a sliding rail—inside gear for the net wing. It thinks it's safe because it lives indoors. Metal is a habit I have learned to love.
"Count," I say.
"One—two—three—four."
On two, the scythe is already in my palm. Short. Only the curve. On three, I slide under the pin's split-ring—metal only—and on four I lift a finger's width. Ting. Palm sting nips and settles into the count like a spoon cooling in a bowl.
Kirella drives a wedge into the mast rail—two small, decisive knocks. The carriage considers moving and chooses dignified stall instead.
"Duct," Lupa says, chin up.
The scent throat above us is set to breathe out, to pull voices off people and feed the grid like a hungry god. I pop the cap, give the mouth a thumb of brine, and reseat the lid with a twist. Inward, now. The next wrong perfume will choke on itself like a bad joke told too often.
We come to the crates. Not many—enough. The stencils say HOSPITAL SUPPLY in a font invented by liars. Under the top lid—name-collars in neat rows, thin bells tied to thin clasps, a strip of scented paper in each slot to make agreement smell like good bread.
"WAIT," Kirella tells the bell with the plate. It obeys without pride.
There's a brine-trough under the catwalk—a maintenance bath to keep mirror edges polite. It hasn't learned which side it's on. We teach it.
"Count."
He gives it. One—two—three—four.
We tip two small crates into the trough, let the brine creep into the tiny hinges and the scent wicks. The glue forgets it's special and remembers it's paste. The bells hum polite and then quiet. The collars sink like coins someone meant to spend and decided not to.
Lupa's nose wrinkles. "Two is what we can do and still leave a door open," she says, reading my want. She's right. The sluice hates noise. We are not here to find out how much noise makes a permanent room.
A rack of papers hides behind a pane near the pilot's window—rolled manifests tied with ribbon stripes. I reach with the boat hook, hook a ribbon, and draw one into my hand. The paper is slick, the ink eager to run if I make it. I dab the edge with brine—a fix that keeps the letters where they chose to be.
I unroll enough to see:
> REQUISITION — MAZE 3
Subject: Myor \— transfer of components; lockwright escort; priority: moderate; route: No-Sky; deliver by D-1 before Auction reset.
The letters want to stand up and preen. I make them sit. The stamp at the bottom is crisp with authority that believes itself.
"Doctor's Maze, third stack," I say.
"Myor," Lupa repeats without decoration. Her face is the shape of an old scar in a new mirror.
We put the manifest back where it has to be to be found missing later by the right hands. I slide a ring coin under the rack so anyone who lies at it will feel their heel warm and hesitate.
A flutter starts in the ceiling—soft, many, smug. Mirror moths waver out of slits, tinsel wings tasting air for names, tiny clamps blinking open under their throats.
The wolf snaps the shade cloth up and out. The moths hit shadow and lose the habit of staring. "Brine," Stone-Reed would have said if he were here. I mist the air above them. Their eyes learn salt. Metal clips gleam at the joints where their clamps hinge. Short scythe under split-rings—lift a finger—drop. One by one they fall into SORRY, bells polite enough to make a teacher proud.
We mark a Service Ladder panel on the port bulkhead—white paint over old letters pretending not to exist. I touch a ring coin to the floor at its base so it remembers feet, then thread a thin line through the padlock's shackle.
"Three honest pulls," Kirella says, tying a kept-knot that will open later for anyone who learned patience. "Not now. Later."
We go to take the token back.
Kirella lifts it from the EMERGENCY STOP bracket as if unhooking a baby from a coat peg. The air around us loses its manners with a sigh and then remembers we're leaving and fakes them a bit longer.
"One use left," he says, pocketing the knot-pin.
The orderly on the rail clears his throat like a man who has something to confess and wants to be thanked for how brave he feels about it. Lupa touches his shoulder, not hard. "Three pulls," she reminds him, and his mouth closes around the idea that choices have taught him enough today.
The sluice hums shift key. Out through the narrow window of mirror, I catch a wedge of the outside world: Stone-Reed tap-counting the last boat through the warm seam. The Warden inclines their chin a millimeter, the math of approval. The corridor holds. The wind hints at changing.
We slide toward the service panel to ghost back out.
Something glides through the slit ahead of us—low, careful, quiet—a mirror ambulance, an ugly, useful frame with a glass casket strapped where a patient goes. It rolls on rubber feet along a track that has never learned to squeal. A lamp on its head throws white-cold forward, spilling a corridor on the corridor.
On the side of the casket, tucked under a mesh and a polite strap, a packet of papers shows its top face through a clear window. Not much. Enough. The stamp is a mouth I already know.
> Myor — requisition to Maze 3
Intake: approved. Parts: collected. Escort: billed.
The ambulance hums like a promise kept by someone you wouldn't dine with.
"Follow," Lupa says, already bending her knees to move, the wolf bristling into ready at her heel.
"Hold," Stone-Reed's voice will be saying outside without being here at all. "You break a corridor, you feed a market."
The mirror slit ahead narrows by a neat degree, polite as a well-mannered mouth that has learned to close on a lie.
Kirella doesn't touch me. His hand hovers where my shoulder will be if I decide to go forward. "Four," he says, breath and word and roof.
The token is a weight in his pocket that tastes like one use left. The lantern is good-heavy on the threshold stone, nowhere near here and everywhere I keep it.
The ambulance slides deeper into the No-Sky with a hush like a ledger turning a page. The corridor behind us is still holding its warmth like a secret taught to a river. The Warden is still not blinking. The orderly on the rail is thinking about being a different kind of man later. The wolf is one muscle away from a leap. Lupa is already cut into the shape of pursue.
"One—" Kirella says.
My lungs fill with cold and count.
"Two—"
I look at the slit and at the seam and at the stamp that thinks Maze 3 is a destination and not the inside of a coffin.
"Three—"
We can make either choice and keep our faces. We cannot make both.
And the chapter ends there—with the mirror ambulance sliding toward Maze 3, the sluice mouth shrinking, the KEEP corridor warm and thin outside, Stone-Reed's tap-count holding ordinary lives to a line, the Warden impassive, the orderly sitting where Lupa put him, the wolf coiled, Lupa leaning, Kirella's count steady in my bones, the measure token a last clean favor in his pocket—and my hands opening toward either the white-cold ahead or the warm seam behind.