Curfew pulled the street taut.
Rain thinned to wires. The Bloom's ribs hummed a single note. The siren held its low key like a finger on a glass rim. Across the block, Kade's CLEAN TRIBUNAL banner fluttered under a halo-cam as if it could declare a verdict on the weather.
"Window shrank to eight," Nyx said, satin over wire. "Pharmacy guard rotation jumped early. Policy Fine will stack if you go off-feed again. The Saint will tip. The War King is a coma patient."
"We're not waking him," Leon said.
He put the Civic Ledger on the hood of the stalled sedan and drew the plan as boxes and beats instead of sentences: shutter, drip, whistle, lift. He wrote a tempo in the margin: slow 4/4.
Mae read it over his shoulder, her breath steady. "Two carts," she said. "Antibiotics first, then masks." Her voice did math without showing its work.
Brutus adjusted the clinic-blue patch on his coat as if it were a weight he wanted to sit right and looked down the corridor that had learned to be a muscle. Sister Irena planted the Blue Lamp by the clinic door like a candle.
Oren Dawes slid a coil of wire off his shoulder and tapped the traffic signal UPS he'd vivisected earlier. "I can give you pulses," he said. "Every two beats I'll blink the lamppost at the pharmacy corner. That's your metronome."
"Tamsin," Leon said, to the runner whose gait made stairs flinch. "Bowl between you and Kite. You move on the blink. No faces."
"Copy," she said, turning the bowl in her hands until it sat like a heart.
Leon looked up at the pharmacy: a squat, fatigued storefront with a roll-up shutter on the front, a back entrance with a hinge bent last year by a delivery guy's enthusiasm. On the roof, six plastic soda bottles lay on their sides, mouths pierced, waiting. On the power line behind the sign, a single pest whistle hung in a clip like a tiny cruel bird.
"We do this like we've rehearsed it," Leon said. "Even though we haven't."
Nyx made a noise that could have been a laugh. "You're going to choreograph an armed robbery," she said. "Make it art."
He touched his pen to the Ledger. Tap once to steady. Tap twice to warn the need for applause to stay seated.
"Cut Clinic Corridor feed," he said. "Ambient only. Soft music. Overhead at pharmacy—no faces, no inside angles."
"Done," Nyx said. "Policy is sharpening their little knives. The Saint is bringing a chair."
[Off-Feed Mercy: Active (stacking)]
[Policy Fine: Favor −10% → −20% for next 2 episodes; Ad-break Length +01:00]
[Audience: 36,902 → 35,880]
[Glass Saint: "Observing."]
[War House: "Idle."]
They moved.
The corridor exhaled them like a blessing. Hiccup lampposts blinked in Oren's tempo: blink—two—three—four—blink. The Bloom ribs left seams that remembered hands. The bowls turned eyes into rules.
At the corner, a Dawnshield microdrone drifted low to test its face-finding against blue plastic. Tamsin lifted the bowl and the drone hesitated, confused, then bobbed toward Kade's banner where faces stood like candles on a cake.
"Two beats," Oren muttered, fingers on the UPS belly as if it were a drum. Blink. "Go."
Leon reached the pharmacy's back door and slid his shim into the lock's throat. The spring he remembered from another life sighed. The door opened on a breath of cold storage and despairing mint. Inside: shelving. A cooler with a padlock. He kept it in the corner of his eye and did not step through.
"Front," he said.
They circled to the roll-up shutter. The front lock was the fancy kind that believed itself a personality. Leon ignored it and crouched at the base where the metal met the grips he'd chalked earlier to catch friction.
"Latch!" he called, not raising his voice, and the man who had been humiliated with a brush appeared from the clinic steps with a mop. Hew, blocky and zipped, followed with a dust pan and hands he had learned to keep visible.
"You sweep the clinic?" Leon asked them, still crouched, hands busy on the shutter's manual release.
Latch held up his palms as if they might have words on them now. "Two hours," he said. "And I learned I hate gum."
"Good," Leon said. "You're going to hate it here too."
He pointed at lines he'd chalked on the ground and at the row of soda bottles lying on the roof edge, their pinholes aimed at the gutter like patient snakes. He moved the pest whistle on its clip a finger-width. The tone changed, a knife you felt in your molars more than your ear.
"On my count," Leon said, "drip."
Nyx purred. "Three minutes to ad-break. If you want to punctuate, do it on twelve."
Leon didn't answer her. He pressed his shoulder to the shutter. Oren took the other side. Brutus set his palms under the lip without gripping—hands visible—and prepared to make weight look like consent.
"Ready," Leon said. "And—"
Blink.
The shutter rose like a curtain on a stage where no one had paid to sit in the good seats. A guard inside flinched, then set his jaw as if he could hold the city up with his teeth. He reached for his sidearm out of habit, eyes searching for the camera he had rehearsed for.
He found a bowl.
Tamsin stepped into the doorway, bowl up, Blue Lamp ring reflected in the shutter's metal, eyes on the guard's hands, not his face. The pest whistle above the sign told cockroaches to go home. The soda bottles tipped in sequence and poured thin ropes of water down exactly where a man would put his swaggering foot if he wanted to look good on camera.
He lifted his swaggering foot and performed not slipping. The performance opened a seam in his dignity. He glanced past the bowl for an audience to approve of his recovery. There wasn't one.
"Hands where the cameras can see them," Brutus said, voice flat and uninflected. He didn't move forward. He was a wall that allowed exits.
"Who are you?" the guard said, trying to make his voice a badge.
"Faces last," Sister Irena said from behind the bowl. "Hands first."
Mae set the cart's front wheel in the door and braked it as if she were parking an ambulance. The guard made a decision he would later call "de-escalation," though it felt like something that had happened to him rather than a thing he'd done. He lifted his hands, palms out. His partner in the back lifted his too after a longer, slower piece of math.
"Two minutes," Nyx said. "You're doing a ballet of refusals."
Leon stepped to the cooler. The padlock was newer than its bracket. He slid his shim in; the spring resisted with the sulk of a cheap diary. He popped it. His mask fogged a hair and cleared.
Mae checked lot numbers. "Intact," she said. "Doxy, amox. Four sleeves each." She looked at Leon. "Put two back."
"Two back," he said, and the words felt like a religion he was learning to say without looking at a congregation.
Kite, solemn with his armband too big, took two sleeves out of the stack and put them back with care a priest might envy.
A ripple moved under the Bloom. Not grid. Bones. The soda drips trembled into thinner threads.
"Blink," Oren said through his teeth. The lamppost obeyed. "Go."
Tamsin rolled the cart back by inches—no show, all muscle. Brutus backed with her, hands visible. Latch and Hew stepped forward with mop and pan like stagehands who had decided to stay for the play, sweeping the water from the drips into a sheen that made a slick lane only if you tried to perform in it.
The guard swallowed an objection because he couldn't find a camera to speak it to and because the bowl made his mouth feel like a place he should keep shut. He pointed his chin. "You have receipts?" he tried, softer.
"Always," Mae said, and tucked a hand-written slip into the inside of the doorframe where anyone could read it later. "Posted price. Interest paid."
[Merit: +20 (Antibiotics retrieval — orderly)]
[Trust: +2 (Clinic + Neighborhood)]
[Craft House tipped +150 Favor: "Choreography under scarcity."]
[Glass Saint tipped +400 Favor: "Elegance under threat."]
[War House: −100 Favor: "Dance without blood."]
"Ad-break in 00:30," Nyx said, almost pleased. "You can land on twelve with a cadence if you want to insult me by doing it without a cut."
Leon glanced toward the banner across the way where Kade's minor filter was still "broken." He didn't say the name. He didn't need to. He turned his head enough for the mask to clear and spoke low: "We pass laws here," he said, like a tempo. "We keep receipts."
The pest whistle tone shifted—Oren turning the clip with a practiced finger. A man in a bomber jacket at the corner, not a guard, decided to test the slick he thought he could make look good. He slid, not much, just enough to perform his own balance and turn his performance into an admission of gravity.
RabbleKing: slip = content
Saint'sChalice: Restraint as rhythm. Acceptable.
"Out," Leon said. "Bowl up."
They moved like a diagram someone had done in pencil first. The cart tracked along chalked lines that weren't there anymore because the rain had eaten them, but muscle remembered where pencil had been. The Blue Lamp's ring made a path out of air. Brutus's hands remained visible and empty. Latch and Hew swept commas of water into clauses.
A second guard appeared at the back door as if sprung by a timer someone else had set. He raised his hands. "We're good," he said, something like relieved. "Just—don't make me look like I lost a fight."
"You didn't," Brutus said. "You honored a bowl."
"Ten seconds," Nyx said.
Leon didn't speed up. He didn't slow down. He let the cart hit the lamplight at the corner exactly on the blink and pushed it into the corridor that was a law.
The ad took the edge off the scene; when it came back, tea steam curled under teal lanterns, and the CLEAN TRIBUNAL banner across the way showed a verdict soaking in rain like paper. A child's face had gone stiff from being brave for a camera that should have blurred her.
Leon felt his mask fog. He tapped the Ledger once to calm himself and then again because he didn't trust the first tap. He didn't say a name.
[Off-Feed Mercy: Completed]
[Policy Fine stack locked: Favor −20% (next 2 episodes)]
[Merit: +20 (Corridor + Retrieval)]
[Trust: +3 (Clinic + Market)]
[Glass Saint tipped +300 Favor: "Refusal with grace."]
"Heat," Nyx said, gentle and businesslike. "Bloom is at four of five. Entropy at three. You owe the world a mop on camera soon or the world will pick its own moment."
"Council will mop," Leon said.
Mae touched the list on her clipboard, ticked antibiotics, ticked masks once they were loaded into the clinic's back vestibule and swallowed by a door that had learned to refuse cameras.
"Good," she said, low. "The mother with twins who live under the stairs won't have to roll dice with a fever."
"Receipts," Leon said, and wrote two names under LAMPS: +1 because people had carried something heavy without making it into a show.
Oren leaned his shoulder against the lamppost and listened to the street's bones. "Soon," he said, again, as if the word had to be used three times to draw the thing closer.
Brutus stood in the clinic doorway, hands open, and let the lamplight turn his presence into a promise. Kite shook his jar of blue buttons and the sound was rain on tin roofs from a summer that felt like someone else's story.
A kid in a stolen rain jacket—the Quiet Choir's runner—appeared like an apology and held out two batteries that had lived past their labels. "We don't cut clinics," he said, and looked everywhere but at the bowl.
"I know," Leon said. "We cut eyes together."
The kid nodded, once, and was water again.
Nyx's voice came back with a clean edge. "Council," she said. "Now. Dawnshield's CLEAN TRIBUNAL is already 'rendering historic consequences' across the way. Trickster is warming up pies. Policy Office sent a memo about 'habitual dead air.' I'm going to hang it in the ombuds box with a ribbon."
"Put it in Thanks," Leon said. "They gave us their tells in bold."
Sister Irena set the Blue Lamp on the mailbox like a chalice and smudged her thumb over its shade to make the light gentler. "The Council will be messy," she said. "Messy is good."
"Messy is receipts," Mae said, and propped the Council Minutes board against the laundromat wall. Kite tapped his X. People gathered because they had been told to speak and had found themselves wanting to.
"Nyx," Leon said, as they crossed the last seam of the Bloom toward the board, "show only the hands that hold the pen. When people talk, we listen. No faces."
"Copy," she said. "Ambient stenography. Producers will gnash their dainty teeth."
"Let them," Leon said. He breathed on the inside of his mask and it fogged and then cleared and it felt like prayer but with receipts.
They were nearly at the board when the ground rolled again—not a hiccup, not quite a shake. The lamppost leaned and corrected. The Bloom's ribs shivered and settled. Down by the subway vent, something big and patient turned in a narrow bed and tested slats.
Oren looked that way and said nothing, which was more eloquent than guessing. Brutus's shoulders asked for a fight without words and were told "not yet" by a bowl.
Leon set the Ledger on the crate, tapped his pen once, then once again because habit had become ritual. He lifted his head.
"Council," he said. "Motion: Blue Lamps exemption. Motion: Due Rations. Motion: Market Holidays. Public comment on tolls—"
Nyx cut him off, delighted. "We're live in three, Architect," she said. "Make your city a show it can stand."
And across the block, under a banner that promised CLEAN, Kade lifted a hand with a verdict in it and a child behind him like punctuation.
Leon didn't turn his head.
The bowl threw a ring of blue on the Minutes board. The pencil sat at the X like a metronome. People stepped toward it as if they had rehearsed this kind of speaking their whole lives and had simply been waiting for a table to be put in the street.
[Cliff: Council opens; Trickster eyes the minutes; tremors deepen; Bloom Heat 4/5 — maintenance episode due]