The first buckle thinks it's a mouth.
I put the short scythe to its hidden split-pin the way you lay a finger to a lip.
"Count," I breathe.
"One—two—three—four," Kirella answers, steady as wet rope.
On two, steel nestles under steel—metal only—and the sting in my palm joins the number instead of fighting it. On four, I lift a handspan of faith.
Ting.
The strap forgets to be a leash. It slides off with a soft hiss, embarrassed to have tried.
Across the bay, a mini Sunline square brightens—proud of being day in a room that doesn't deserve it. The auto-arms tilt their glass beaks and sniff for names.
"WAIT," Kirella tells the bay bell without touching it. The tongue learns courtesy. The light holds.
"Next," Lupa says, already shifting her weight to become a wall if gravity tries me.
I slide the blade under the second strap pin.
"One—two—three—four."
Ting.
Two down. The stretcher breathes easier, a sigh in linen. On its corner a stamp reads MYOR with the confidence of a man who believes paper is a god. Paper likes believers.
A third strap hides its pin deeper, smug in a fold. I ease the scythe in sideways, angle my wrist so the pain goes to a place it can't bother me.
"Count."
"One—two—three—four."
Ting.
The auto-arms drop two finger-widths, not enough to strike, just enough to be a suggestion. Their glass tips carry a reek of clean cruelty—antiseptic and mint and wrong.
"Grid," Lupa murmurs, eyes flicking to the upper lattice. "If it flares, you crawl for the bypass. I take the arms."
"I'll handle both," I say, and hear the lie in my own mouth. I let it go the way you let go of steam.
The last strap lies across the hips, buckle tucked like a secret. The room leans in. Even the echo filaments draw themselves tighter, hoping for a note.
"Count," I say, and the word steadies my hands.
"One—two—three—four."
On four, I lift.
Ting.
The buckle droops like a bored fish.
The auto-arms decide it is time to matter.
They purl forward in a pretty arc, glass tips cocked, polite as executioners. The bay bell quivers with the delight of being useful. Kirella's WORD plate catches the striker's thought.
"WAIT."
The bell wears dignity like a borrowed coat and stays still.
"Arms," Lupa says.
She slips through their reach with a curve of shoulder that shows each beak a promise it would prefer to keep—then redirects wrists to elbows, elbows to rails, rails to compliance. One arm remembers how to hang. The other trembles, confused by gravity used with intent. No bones break. No glass screams. Lupa treats the machine like a drunk uncle at a wedding and seats it where it cannot hurt anyone on purpose.
I hook two fingers under the stretcher frame and feel the weight—person weight, not crate. A pulse wakes under linen, heavy and patient.
"Myor," I say, because reading a name and meeting a body are different. The ring-coin I left two halls back warms in my pocket as if to answer we.
"Shift," Kirella says.
He plants one hand at the frame's foot, one at the mid-rail, breath steady on four. Lupa takes the head end with a softness that would surprise anyone who watched her handle arms a moment ago.
We slide the stretcher down, under the waking beaks, not away from them but through the story they thought we were going to tell. If you move with a machine's rhythm without believing its purpose, it can't find your throat.
The mini Sunline above the bay flares—white like a thin lie. Heat doesn't arrive. The insult does. In the lattice elbow a bypass pin gleams, small and proud. I mark it with my eyes and keep moving.
"Left," Lupa says, chin toward the shadow seam where the bay lip meets the floor—our ring seam lives there now, warm as a placemat. We set the stretcher's wheels to the quiet line and let the warmth carry.
A mirror orderly blinks himself back into conviction and reaches for a wall rope that might be a horn for men who need louder ways to be wrong. Kirella's plate lifts without hurry.
"WAIT."
The rope remembers it is twine.
We push.
The Voice-Graft Theater foyer gives up room grudgingly, posts and chairs pretending to be in the way by accident. The echo filaments pluck themselves once, pout, and settle. The confession lenses at the inner jamb purse their lips and inhale their own perfume. Name-salt sits on my wrists and collarbone like clean seas.
We hit the threshold and say the small poem again because small poems keep doors better than force.
"Red Ladle."
"Steady Hand."
"First Fang."
SIGN → WAIT → KEEP. The lintel lets us forget we ever cared about its opinion.
Inside the intake run proper, the floor is smoother, the lights less proud, the cruelty tidier. A route strip overhead whispers Theater → Stitchery Core in clerk-hand. The wall breathes the hard way—vents taking in air like orders.
"Seam," I say, and draw a narrow ring along the inner wall so our wheels don't learn to speak the wrong language. The stretcher rolls cooperative.
Halfway down, the corridor narrows to a knife slot with a glass inspection mouth set high. I can feel eyes behind it—someone's job is to watch without skin.
"Shade," Lupa says.
Kirella tips the cloth up the wall with the calm of men hanging laundry. Shadow eats the inspection mouth's glare. The eyes behind it blink and see nothing but a corridor that chose to be ordinary.
"We need a corner," I murmur. "Not an ending. A fold."
Lupa nods to a side door marked Service in a hand that believes words like that make a hallway need less courage. No handle, only a small mirror ledger with NAME TO PASS trimmed prim across the lip.
We answer, because the city has taught us which tricks it cannot refuse.
"Red Ladle."
"Steady Hand."
"First Fang."
SIGN → WAIT → KEEP. The door remembers it's wood. Wood remembers it's tree. The panel gives.
Inside, a narrow maintenance bay: a sink on a sulking plinth; a stack of folded gurney pads; a slatted grate into a crawl of ducts above; a mini Sunline square in the ceiling corner, not yet proud, ready to be.
We nose the stretcher in and let the door breathe closed and then keep. I set a ring-coin under the sink plinth; the stone warms like a kept promise. Lupa wedges the slat of the upper grille with a peg as if accident lived here. Kirella lays the shade cloth across the stretcher's lower half and ties two kept-loops with slack enough—three honest pulls to loose, one panicked jerk to do nothing.
"Pins back?" Lupa asks, chin at the straps.
"Not yet," I say. "Arms may count their mistakes if they see nothing changed."
She agrees with her shoulders and goes to the door to be a hinge.
"Manifest," Kirella says. He means Myor.
I lift the corner of linen, just enough to see wrist—banded, inked, pulse stubborn. The mark on the band reads MYOR in the same hand as the frame. The skin under the band is whole. A second mark I don't like sits like a bruise that learned how to spell. I lay two fingers on the pulse and tell it a room I know by heart: a kitchen, heat at ankle height, beeswax on wood, a spoon's tick against a pot. The pulse alters half a beat, as if someone dreaming turned their head to a quieter pillow.
"We come back," I say to the band, not to the man, because men in cages shouldn't have to do any more work than breathing.
A door down-corridor releases a polite click that thinks it's an order. Footsteps practice authority. A bell tries to wake and finds manners where it left them.
"Upper," Lupa whispers.
"Upper," Kirella echoes.
He moves to the slatted grille and peels it, gentle. The mini Sunline square in the corner makes up its mind to be day. I see the bypass pin hiding like a freckle in metal.
"Count," I say.
"One—two—three—four."
On two, the short scythe slots under the ring. On four, I lift.
Ting.
The little day gives up its pride. The shadow that remains remembers to be an ally, not a threat.
"Up," Lupa says to me, meaning grid, not good-bye.
"I won't leave you," I say.
"You aren't," she answers. "You're making a ceiling that forgets to hate."
She is right in the way she usually is—sour and warm. I climb into the grid with Kirella's hand a roof at my boot and the wolf's breath a warm hinge at my ankle. The space above the maintenance bay is a long crawl of wires and pipes and regret. It leads toward the Stitchery Core, where we need maps we don't own yet.
"Two breaths," Kirella says, passing me the boat hook like a candle.
"Two," I say. We is a good ladder.
Through the grid I can see the intake run again—the bay we left neat as a lie, the corridor's knife slot, the inspection mouth yawning into ordinary. The stretcher under our cloth looks like something the room would ignore if it were smarter.
Footsteps stop outside Service. A hand tries the latch that isn't there. A bell clears its throat and remembers the word it has agreed to say.
"WAIT," Kirella whispers through wood, and the sound obeys.
"Good manners," says a voice I don't like. Key-man—that dry amusement. It leaks under doors like cold.
Lupa's shoulders settle. She wears humor like a bad scarf—tolerated, not loved.
Up in the grid, the lattice turns me toward the Core. Under the next panel a Sunline strip begins its sermon. There's the bypass, hiding in the joint's elbow, smug.
I work the hook through the thin space, find the ring, angle the scythe.
"Count."
"One—two—three—four."
Ting.
The sermon quiets.
I crawl, seam at my knee, seam at my palm, a small we that keeps growing every time we keep it. Ahead, the grid opens above a gallery—men in coats talking like pens, a mirror ambulance twin arriving from another throat, a rack of molded masks that want to be faces.
"Core," I breathe. It smells like lemon and letters and fear.
Below, the Service latch rethinks its life and doesn't move. Lupa says nothing. She is a door when she wants to be.
The key-man laughs softly. "Manners today," he says to someone he likes. "We must be blessed."
Another bell, further away, tries to learn the wrong word and remembers WAIT instead.
I mark the bypass on this gallery's grid, set the scythe, and ting. Light loosens. A panel of glass lowers its chin.
"Map?" Kirella asks up to me.
"Working," I answer.
I trace the route strip the clerks keep for themselves—Core → Voice → Return—and roll it into a line I can keep behind my eyes. A timing drum ticks an arrogant measure—D-0 nearer than it has any right to be.
Under me, the stretcher shifts, just a fraction, as if a body on it turned its face toward kitchens and let its jaw unclench. The ring-coin at the sink answers we as if yes were the only soup.
"What's your call?" Lupa asks, quiet, to the ceiling—to me.
"Two breaths," I say, and it isn't an answer so much as an invitation to share the work.
"Us first," Kirella says.
"Then the rest," I say.
"Then ten quiet years," Lupa adds, and the wolf pushes a soft puff of air through its teeth that the stone mistakes for a laugh.
From the corridor, a mirror-net shuttle hums into the knife slot and stalls, like a cart that found a hill it can't climb. Its bell arm lifts, the catch pin bright.
I smile even now. Pins are just small promises, waiting to be argued into better manners.
I shift my weight, set the hook, angle the blade.
"Count—" I begin.
And the chapter ends there—Service door breathing KEEP, the Weir behind us on house-breath, the bay's Sunline humbled, MYOR under our cloth with a pulse that has learned a slower hymn, the corridor trying to be brave, the key-man's dry humor at the threshold, the gallery of the Core mapped in my head, the shuttle waiting with its pin like a smug truth, Lupa braced, the wolf holding shadow in its teeth, Kirella's count ready—and my short scythe poised yet again under a small idea that thinks it can rule rooms.