The Bastion at night was a thing of hard edges and softer lies. Lanterns along the parapet threw long, brittle shadows that the tide ate and spat back as a smear of light. From the Bonebridge the fortress looked compact and implacable; from the rocks below it was a ring of teeth, private launches tucked into its lee like sleeping beasts. Aria watched it from the skiff's low prow, the lead-lined case heavy against her thigh, the manifest's wax seal a small, accusing eye beneath the oilcloth. The city's breath was a distant thing; here the sea spoke in a language of ropes and tide and the slow, patient work of men who had learned to keep secrets.
Halv guided the skiff into a narrow cleft between two jagged rocks where the Bastion's sentries could not see them from the parapet. The water slapped the hull in soft, urgent beats. Rell checked the tracer's readout again, fingers moving like a man who read machines the way others read faces. Luna sat with her back to Aria, humming a low cadence that smelled faintly of jasmine and rain. The apprentices crouched under tarpaulins, faces pale and set; they had been given small tasks—false manifests to plant, a diversion to light, a rope ladder to throw.
"We go in two waves," Halv said, voice low. "Rell and I take the lower quay. Aria, you and Luna take the tidal rocks to the east. We meet at the vault's service lip. Quick in, quick out. No heroics."
Aria's fingers closed on the hilt at her hip. The Tidebind aftershock from the Gate Duel still sat in her muscles like a bruise; her hands were steadier than they felt. She had learned to carry costs like tools—count them, account for them, make sure they did not fall on one person alone. Tonight the cost would be heavier. The Bastion's outpost was not a vault's quiet seam; it was a place where patrons kept muscle and pride in equal measure. If they failed here, the manifest would be buried and the donor line would curl away.
They moved like shadows. The tidal rocks were slick with algae and moonlight; the skiff's prow bumped and Halv's rope ladder uncoiled like a practiced thing. Aria climbed with the economy of someone who had learned to make the city's bones do the work for her: a foot finding a notch, a hand reading the rope's give. At the top the rocks opened into a narrow ledge that ran along the Bastion's outer face, a place where the sea could reach and the parapet could not. The air tasted of salt and old oil and the faint metallic tang of sigils.
Two sentries paced the lower quay, their lanterns bobbing like small moons. They were broad-shouldered men with the easy arrogance of those who had been paid to make themselves invisible. A private launch rocked at the dock, its crate wrapped in oilcloth and stamped with a donor token. The spiral glinted in the lantern light.
"Virelle," Rell breathed, and the word landed like a stone.
Aria felt the ledger's thread tighten. The manifest had led them here; the registry imprint had been coaxed from seams and treatises and market stalls. Now the ledger's margins wanted a face. They had to take the crate or the donor mark would be folded back into private hands.
Halv's signal was a soft tug on the rope. The apprentices moved like practiced shadows, a false crate pushed into the courtyard as a distraction. The sentries' eyes slid to the crate and then to the apprentices; curiosity is a currency as old as hunger. One guard rose to investigate and the other turned his back for a heartbeat.
That was when Aria made the choice she had rehearsed only in the Loom's dim rooms. The tidal rocks offered a geometry the Bastion's muscle did not expect: a narrow, dangerous path that could be used to flank the quay if someone could move like the tide. The Tidebind Lunge was a battlefield motion—fast, brutal, and costly. It bent the tide's pull into a human strike and left the body hollowed afterward. Tonight Aria would use it to secure an exit on the rocks and to anchor a ritual focus that would let Halv and Rell pull the crate free.
She breathed, felt the sea's tug at her ankles, and launched.
The lunge was a blur of motion: a step that took the skiff's slight drift and folded it into a momentum that nudged her across slick stone and into the sentry's blind. Halv's rope sang and the apprentices' false crate clattered like a staged accident. The sentry's head turned and then turned away, the distraction holding. Aria's shoulder slammed into the first guard's ribs and the man went down with a surprised curse. The second guard spun, blade flashing, and the rocks became a narrow, treacherous stage for a duel.
The Tidebind's geometry gave Aria a moment's advantage. She moved with the economy of someone who had practiced the motion until the cost was a ledger entry she could feel in her bones: a shove, a redirection, a fold that used the tide's pull and the rock's slickness. For a breath she had the angle; the guard's balance faltered and his blade flashed wide. The ritual focus—Halv's small brazier set into a carved stone at the quay's lip—throbbed with a faint, steady light.
Then the aftershock hit.
It was not immediate in the way a wound is immediate. It came as a slow, searing fatigue that began in her shoulders and spread like cold through her limbs. Her muscles answered late, a fraction of a breath behind her intention. Her fingers fumbled the rope's knot; a coil slipped. For a heartbeat she felt the world tilt—her hands moved as if through water, her foot missed a notch, and the ladder's rung bit into her palm.
"Aria!" Halv's voice was a rope thrown. Rell's hand closed on her elbow and steadied her. Luna's hum braided around her like a net, a teacher's cadence that steadied the edges of perception. The apprentices froze, eyes wide.
The guard pressed his advantage with the economy of someone who had been paid to make a spectacle: a feint, a step, a blade that sought to disarm rather than to kill. He wanted the crate to leave the quay intact, the donor mark to be private again. He wanted the ledger's margins to be folded back into the Bastion's pockets.
Aria met him with desperate, clumsy parries. Each motion cost her more: a delayed wrist, a hand that did not close when she wanted it to, a foot that answered late. The guard's blade nicked her forearm; the sting was sharp and immediate. The rocks were slick and the sea's spray made every hold treacherous. For a moment she could not tell whether the world was spinning from the blow or from the fatigue that had hollowed her.
Luna's voice rose then, a thin, bright thread braided into the teachers' chorus. She did not stand at the brazier; she stood at Aria's shoulder, a hand on her arm, a cadence that steadied the ritual's edges. The teachers' hum tightened into a net and the brazier's flame pulsed with a stubborn light. The ritual focus wanted witness; it wanted someone to be the hinge between public truth and private power. Aria had to be that hinge.
The duel moved toward the rocks' edge. The guard tried to shove her into the tide; Aria twisted and used his momentum against him, a small, practiced prayer that sent him stumbling. For a second she had him—then he reached into his coat and produced a glass shard, an echo-scraper tuned to reflect a teacher's cadence back at its source. He slashed at the brazier's flame, aiming not to kill but to sever the ritual's thread.
Luna's hum braided with the teachers' chorus and struck the shard's scrape like a bell. The shard's edge hit the brazier and the flame sputtered. For a moment the ritual's thread thinned like a rope under strain. Aria felt the focus want to slip.
She moved because she had to. The Tidebind had left her body a ledger of its own—muscles that remembered a motion and a mind that had paid for it. She lunged again, not with the grace of a practiced strike but with the raw, animal force of someone who would not let a public truth be stolen. Her shoulder slammed into the guard's chest and the two of them went down onto the rocks in a tangle of limbs and blade and salt.
They hit the tidal lip and the sea took a breath. The guard's blade flashed and nicked Aria's cheek; blood mixed with salt and the taste of iron filled her mouth. For a moment she could not tell whether the world was spinning from the blow or from the fatigue that had hollowed her. Her hands fumbled for the brazier's rim and found it slick with oil.
Halv and Rell were at the quay then, moving with the practiced certainty of people who had learned to make a building tell its secrets. Halv's crowbar found the crate's seam and Rell's tracer hummed as he fed the filament into the manifest's wax. The donor token glinted in the lantern light like a small, accusing eye. Apprentices formed a human chain and hauled the crate free while Halv kept the quay's mouth clear.
The guard tried to rise and the world tilted. Aria's legs trembled and her hands shook; the motor impairment made every motion a negotiation. She felt the ledger's arithmetic in the way her fingers would not obey with the same precision. The Tidebind's aftershock was not a thing that could be ignored; it was a physical law.
Then the guard did something that made the air go thin: he spat a name and a threat and, with a quick, practiced motion, he reached for a sigil-etched bead at his throat—a broker's mimicry of a Codex technique. He had been trained to weaponize reflection, to use a Mirror Rip to send a teacher's cadence back at its source and to make the cost land where it would hurt most.
Aria saw the bead flash and the shard of memory she had been guarding—one small, named thing she had kept like a coin—slid like water from the shelf of her mind. It was not a grand memory; it was a name, a small domestic detail she had kept private. The Codex Echo the guard had tried to trigger found purchase in the seam's reflected cadence and the cost landed on her: a named memory blurred, a ledger entry erased.
She staggered, the hollow where the name had been like a coin she could not find. Panic rose, quick and hot, and she tamped it down with the practiced calm of someone who had learned to hold a line. The guard's face went blank for a second as if he had expected a different result; the bead's lattice had been imperfect. Halv's crowbar found his wrist and twisted; Rell's tracer snapped the bead's lattice with a bright, mechanical note.
The crate was free. Halv shoved it into the skiff and the apprentices hauled it aboard with the careful speed of people who had rehearsed this exact choreography until muscle remembered what the mind could not risk forgetting. The donor token glinted in the lamplight like a small, accusing eye. The manifest's wax had been read; the registry imprint had been sealed. The ledger's thread had been pulled taut.
They did not celebrate. The cost was a raw place inside Aria, a hollow where a named memory had been blurred by a Codex Echo's backlash. The Tidebind's fatigue sat in her muscles like a bruise; her hands trembled and her fingers fumbled the knot she tried to tie. Luna's hum braided the skiff's air into a thin net and the Thornkin's briar—called earlier as a diversion—had been paid with a memory that would not return unchanged.
On the skiff back to the Loom's safehouse, Aria sat with her hands folded and felt the hollow where the name had been like a small, private wound. She could not call the name; it hovered at the edge of her mind like a coin she could not find. The ledger's arithmetic had been paid in pieces of herself and in the teachers' small sacrifices.
Luna sat beside her and took her hand in both of hers, fingers warm and steady. "You held the exit," she said, voice low. "You gave them a chance to see. That matters."
Aria let the words land like a small, fierce thing. She had wanted the ledger's truth to be public; she had wanted witnesses to be heard. She had not wanted the cost to be this personal, this raw. She had not wanted to feel a name slip away.
Halv's laugh was short and humorless as she checked the crate's seals. "We have the manifest," she said. "We have the registry imprint. We have a line to the Bastion's vault."
Rell's tracer hummed and fed the readout into the Loom's ledger. The donor mark resolved into a string that matched the manifest and the treatise's marginalia. The Salted Bastion's vault was no longer a rumor at the end of a rope. It was a place with a name and a time and a manifest that could be followed.
They moved through the Bonebridge's waking market like a tide, careful and deliberate, carrying the crate and the knowledge that a name had been paid for the exit. The packet's reading at the Bonebridge had already begun to ripple through the city; the Council's envoys would be watching, and patron houses would marshal counsel and muscle. The ledger's margins had been pried open and the city would have to decide whether to stitch the wound or let it fester.
In the safehouse's dim light Luna unwrapped a cloth and pressed it to Aria's cheek. The salt and blood tasted like a ledger's ink. Aria closed her eyes and let the exhaustion take her. The Tidebind's fatigue was a heavy, honest thing in her bones. She had paid a price and the ledger's thread had been pulled taut.
"You didn't have to do it alone," Luna said, voice soft. "You chose to."
Aria's laugh was a small, broken thing. "Someone had to," she said. The words were a blade and a truth. "If we don't pull the ledger's margins into the light, who will? If we don't hold the exit, names will be buried."
Luna's thumb stroked the back of Aria's hand, a slow, steady motion that felt like a promise. "We'll count the cost," she said. "We'll make sure you don't carry it alone."
Outside, the Bastion's launches limped back to their moorings and the Bonebridge hummed with the residue of the night's work. The Salted Bastion's vault waited at the end of a rope; the Loom would follow it at dawn. For now, the crate's donor token glinted in the safehouse's lamplight like a small, accusing eye, and the ledger's thread ran on—bright, dangerous, and paid for in memory.