The mirror-net shuttle in the knife slot holds itself proud, bell arm cocked, catch pin bright as a smug idea.
"Count," I whisper into the grid.
"One—two—three—four," Kirella answers without looking up, because good sound doesn't need eyes.
On two, the short scythe finds the pin—metal only—and the sting in my palm learns its corner of the number. On four, I lift a handspan of manners.
Ting.
The shuttle sits down on its own brake like a child told chairs are for sitting. Its net slackens. The knife slot becomes a corridor again, ordinary and useful. Somewhere, a clerk's confidence loses half a shoe.
Below, in Service, Lupa doesn't move. She is a door. The wolf holds shadow in its teeth. MYOR lies under our cloth, pulse stubborn, straps staged as if obedience were a hobby we enjoy.
The voice in the hall—key-man—doesn't knock. He turns his amusement against the wood and waits to see if doors respond to mood.
They often do. This one doesn't.
"Blessed day," he says to the corridor as if it were a person. "A miracle of good behavior."
Kirella strokes the door's bell with the plate so lightly that sound decides to respect itself.
"WAIT," he tells it. The syllable sits on the wood like a warm plate cooling.
I crawl the grid toward the gallery over Stitchery Core. The lattice breathes a thin heat—Sunline—but I have already taught two joints to nap. The third waits like a yawn.
Under me the Core opens: a long room stitched with echo filaments and auto-arms, two side stages (A & B) dressed like pulpits, a timing drum ticking the arrogance of D-0. On the north wall a rack of masks that want to be faces watches a chalkboard where men with coats have put math into squares as if numbers made mercy.
Between stages stand two mirror orderlies and a stitch tech with wrists already apologizing. The orderlies' horns drowse on their chests, mouths wet for reasons that have nothing to do with rain.
At the gallery's elbow the bypass pin hides like a fish in reeds. I thread the boat hook in, seat the blade.
"Count."
We share it like a good loaf.
"One—two—three—four."
Ting.
A breath of shade returns to the Core, just enough to make the light honest.
I draw a thin seam along the gallery rail with two fingers. Warmth finds iron. Rooms like to behave when they remember their bones.
Back in Service, the latch does not remember anything. That is to its credit.
"Routine," the key-man says, still to the corridor. "We adore routines."
Lupa smirks so slightly the air would need better manners to notice. "We do," she answers under her breath. "We keep each other."
The route strip over the intake run flickers its indifference: Theater → Core. Third watch approaches like a priest with a schedule. We are early enough to write a different liturgy.
"Extract now," Lupa mouths to the grid without sound, eyes cutting to MYOR under the cloth. "Or chart Core and come back with a bigger spoon?"
My hand is already moving—two small circles on the lattice with the pad of my thumb, yes and later, both true. The city hates when both can be true. That is how we live.
I mark the Core: six auto-arms per stage; echo posts anchored to floor plates stamped with tiny WAIT runes someone meant as inspections and never taught to listen; a side door marked Return with a mirror ledger sulking above NAME TO PASS. I count rings for the walk we will lay tomorrow if tomorrow forgives us: post, faucet, turn, door—four.
The timing drum coughs a hard click. D-0 tightens one notch.
"Move," Kirella says, soft, to the grain of the door. Wood likes being told to do what it prefers.
He strips two strips of cloth off his sleeve hem and knots a kept-loop on the stretcher rail—three honest pulls to loose later, slack enough that MYOR looks correctly trapped if men who enjoy looking happen to look. Lupa sets the stretcher in Service weather: wheels on our seam, cloth right, rails muted with a sigh of brine over the bearings, nothing changed to the hurried eye.
"Inspection," says a new voice outside—orderly timbre, too neat. He rattles a horn against his chest to remind his ribs he owns a tool.
"Not here," the key-man purrs. "Here is tidy."
He leaves his amusement at the jamb like a tack and walks on. His steps don't sound like boots. They sound like locks thinking.
I lower myself from the grid, hands smelling of warm metal and dust. The wolf noses my ankle once—count?
"One—two—three—four," I tell it. The tail writes a small sentence the floor decides not to read.
We push.
Through the Service door, across our seam, into the intake run proper: shadow holding us, glare biting at the cloth and then becoming bored, bells practicing their dignity and succeeding.
At the knife slot, a clerk with a clipboard glances up, sees three people moving like work, and looks back at his squares. People who trust boxes are a kind of blessing.
We take the long way around a conversation about disinfectant and guilt. The mini Sunline we taught to nap stays drowsy. The inspection mouth blinks at our cloth and learns nothing.
"Left," Lupa says, and we turn into a linen bay where the smell of hot cotton and lukewarm water sits like a small apology. A bored spinner hums. Return chutes yawn with the hunger of useful holes.
"Hide here?" Kirella asks.
"Stage here," I answer.
We set the stretcher in the warm breath off the spinner. Heat makes echo filament gossip faint. Good. I tuck a ring-coin under the spinner's foot; the hum shifts half a note, remembering we.
On the wall a hand sink sulks. I stroke WAIT along its lip with the plate so that anyone who comes to wash will feel like staying to think. Over the door I chalk a thumbprint KEEP where pride can't reach it to erase.
"Two breaths," I tell MYOR—still to the band, not the man. "We return for three."
"Three," Kirella says, answering me instead of him, because grammar is also a promise.
Footsteps weave past the bay—busy, indifferent. Somewhere a mirror-net shuttle clears its throat in the distance and decides not to sing. Neat men talk about numbers like soup you can chew.
"Map done?" Lupa asks.
"Enough for one," I say. "Not enough for everyone. Yet."
"Then we take one and come back for the rest," she says, as if it were the obvious shape of the day.
We start our back-loop to Service—scouting at the edges, counting bells, touching vents ¼ inward, teaching brine to be polite and seams to stand in for floors that never learned to be kind. The city doesn't fight; it sulks. Sulking is easier to outwalk.
A mirror orderly cuts across the corridor and stops, seeing not us but our weather: cloth, corridor, wheels at a careful cant. He blinks. His horn stays asleep. He watches the door to Core for the next routine. He sees boxes. He does not see we.
"Good day," he says to the air, because people practice ritual on the wrong gods when the right ones don't bill them.
"Blessings," Kirella says, and means bread.
We turn the last corner to Service.
Something small and dark rolls under the door as if it has opinions about hinges. It stops against my boot and pulses once like a wrist learning grief.
"Echo-stone," I say.
The key-man has left a listening rock the size of a thumb under our latch. It ticks like a moth remembering flame. This one's mirror dust is fresh; it will learn a room if the room lets it.
Lupa does not kick it back. She lifts it with two fingers, delicate as a cracked egg, and sets it into the SORRY pouch among name-pins and other ideas that forgot how to behave. The pouch hums and the stone goes embarrassed and still.
"Thank you," I tell the door, and it opens like it heard that correctly.
We bring MYOR in. The bay breathes KEEP. The mini Sunline in the corner regrets ambition. We set wheels on the seam. Brine on the rail. Cloth right. Knots gentle. No bragging.
"Now?" Lupa asks.
Now is a thin stage where heavier and lighter futures balance. The timing drum ticks the next indignity. My palm pricks a thought—pimler, değil boğazlar—pins, not throats. Good.
"We make a Laundry Run," I say.
It isn't a lie. It is a weather report.
Kirella walks to the corridor and lifts a folded sheet off a cart with the grace of a man who has stood in too many rooms where cloth was taken from people who needed it. He drapes two layers over MYOR—not to hide him from eyes; to hide him from habits. Laundered things pass. People notice people. Cloth teaches them to notice less.
The wolf trots ahead, mouth full of shade cloth to eat glare in bites. Lupa takes the head end of the stretcher, hips low, shoulders loose, ready to become a wall and a floor and a hinge in the same second.
We push.
"Red Ladle."
"Steady Hand."
"First Fang."
SIGN → WAIT → KEEP. Doors forget opinions. Bells hush out of pride.
We pass the knife slot—the shuttle we taught manners sulks on its brake, making a case to itself for patience. We pass the inspection mouth—cloth and shadow show it a picture in which we are not the subject. We pass the linen bay—heat approves our lie by making it comfortable.
At the end of the run, the corridor widens to a cart court where wheels meet wheels and men with coats meet the idea that things move regardless of their schedules. A mirror-net hangs above the arch to the dumbwaiter lobby—pale threads, tiny mirrors pretending to be glass flies, a bell with a clean appetite. A banner claims SPEAK TO PASS in a font that believes in itself.
"Name-forfeit," Lupa mutters.
"Bowl-name coupons," I say, and Lupa smiles in a way that is not kind to nets.
We seed the crowd with slips as if we were flicking blessings—BOWL-NAME ONLY—into hands that were taught to raise fists or pens, not bowls. People try names that taste like kitchens. Brown Apron. Spindle Hand. Milk Steam. Wheel Thumb. The net gropes for true and finds ours. The bell wants to sing; Kirella lifts the plate.
"WAIT."
The net discovers boredom. It sits. Men with coats mutter on the edges of their mouths and decide to pretend they planned patience.
We push through, wheels on seam.
At the dumbwaiter, a clerk with sleeves rolled the correct length says, "Manifest?"
"Laundry," Kirella answers, holding up the folded sheet the way a man holds up an umbrella in a desert just to see who remembers water.
The clerk sees cloth, sees appointment, sees balance. He stamps the air with his eyes and nods.
"Bless your names," he says from reflex.
"We keep each other," I answer, because it isn't a name, it's a door.
The dumbwaiter throat is a wood-lined cube that smells like soap, hemp, and apologies. Its bell sits with its tongue politely tucked. The rope run is honest—pull, rest, pull. We have used worse stairs.
"Down two," the clerk says.
"Down two," Lupa echoes, setting her hands.
We ride.
The box descends into Quiet Wharf air—not our wharf, another, under the building: a service quay where carts shyly meet boats through a row of arches pretending to be windows. The river's breath noses in, cool and old. In the middle distance a ring-path lies faint on black water—Ira's work lives other places too, it seems.
Two porters lean on pikes they do not enjoy. One glances at our cloth, at our wheels, at our not-importance, and looks away. The other chews a thought and spits out the husk.
The service quay bell lifts its chin. Kirella shows it the plate.
"WAIT."
Dignity descends like dust.
We roll off the lift and into shade. The wood boards under the wheels say yes in their seams. The river gives us coughs of cold that smell like iron and stories we didn't write.
"Left arch," Lupa says—she means the one the light likes least.
We slide under it. Name-salt on my wrists turns the air's mouth away. I kneel and draw a ring seam across the threshold. The warmth meets wood and stone and water and finds a family resemblance.
"Boat?" one porter asks, but he doesn't mean, Do you have a boat? He means, Will I need to care?
"Laundry," Kirella says again, and it is both true and also what this porter knows how to carry in his head without creating a reason to shout.
We ease the stretcher onto a service scow—flat-bottomed, ropes muttering, low enough to kiss the quay when the river breathes. The wolf jumps aboard as if born to boats. Lupa steps down and becomes a keel with shoulders. I follow, and the seam I dragged across the arch warms my toes through leather like a blessing I don't deserve and accept anyway.
We push off with a boat hook kiss to the quay. The boards let go. The river accepts us in the way rivers do—first a joke, then a promise.
For three strokes the only music is rope on wood, water on idea.
Then above us the key-man's voice travels through stone like smoke trained to speak.
"Blessings upon your routine," he says to no one and us. "Tell me, did the door behave?"
Doors love being asked about their manners. This one says nothing. I like it more.
A mirror-net on the upper arch shakes itself awake, thin threads tasting for realism. Bowl-name slips drift downwind from hands we flicked earlier and stick to the net like leaves to cobweb. Brown Apron. Wheel Thumb. Blue Rag. The net invents patience. The bell coughs twice and decides not to gossip.
We slide under the wharf and into a service tunnel of brick and soggy ambition. The river darkens politely. On the wall a chalk hand has written WE KEEP EACH OTHER → in a script I could swear is Root's and also not. Families of letters migrate. It's good to see.
"Bow," Lupa says. She means bend.
We duck under a chain of name-collars hung like a wind chime made by someone who thinks songs have to hurt to be real. I touch three with brine as we pass. Two remember shame. One will need more time.
The scow noses into a sluice pocket—a fat notch in the wall where water forgets its job and rests. Here a narrow maintenance door waits with NAME TO PASS stitched into a ledger that looks bored already.
We say the poem because it keeps working.
"Red Ladle."
"Steady Hand."
"First Fang."
SIGN → WAIT → KEEP. The plug of wood in the wall remembers the tree it was and decides not to argue.
We do not go in.
Not yet.
We tie off to a ring and breathe the kind of breath that cannot be bought. The ring-coin under the spinner upstairs warms the seam at my feet through water and distance, thin as thread, sturdy as bread.
"Choose," Lupa says, almost smiling, because she knows I already have and wants to watch me meet it with my mouth.
"Stage here," I say. "Core tomorrow. Everyone tomorrow."
Kirella's hand finds mine on the rail. It is not heat or magic. It is a room.
"Two breaths," he says.
"Two," I say, and the river repeats it like a quiet bell.
From the tunnel behind, oars click. A mirror scull noses into our pocket—thin boat, thinner men, polished patience. At its prow a paper lantern glows with no warmth at all. On its rib a little catch pin gleams like a scalp.
I laugh, and I don't mean to, and it comes out clean.
"Pins," I tell the water. "Pins behave."
The scull's oar bites again. The catch pin turns to show off.
I set the short scythe along the rail so quietly the wood decides to hold its breath.
"Count," I say, and the river loves a good rhythm.
"One—two—three—four," Kirella answers, and Lupa is already a wall where a wall is needed, the wolf a shadow with teeth where shadows need teeth.
And the chapter ends there—with the wharf above behaving out of pride, the Service door keeping like a saint who dislikes compliments, the Laundry Run weather holding, MYOR's pulse stubborn under clean cloth, the Core mapped enough to promise a bigger spoon, the tunnel's chalk hand pointing us through water we remember, the mirror scull showing off its little pin, Lupa braced, the wolf bright with quiet, Kirella's count steady—and my short scythe low and patient, one breath before we teach a boat how to mind its manners.