The forger's den smelled of hot metal and old glue, of oil and the faint, stubborn sweetness of varnish. It sat behind a false bakery on a crooked lane—an oven that never cooled, a back room where men and women bent over stamps and presses and the slow, patient work of making things look like what they were not. Apprentices called it the Gray Hearth; brokers called it a nuisance; the Loom called it a node. Tonight it was the place where truth and counterfeit met in the same breath.
Aria crouched in the doorway and let the room settle into her bones. The forger's benches were a forest of tools: tiny hammers, sigil punches, a rack of heated irons, a tray of acid that ate ink into a new age. Sparks leapt like small, obedient stars when a press struck a plate. A woman with a sleeve rolled to her elbow—hair braided tight, a line of silver at one temple—lifted a donor token from a tray and held it to the light. The spiral stamped into its rim caught the lamp and threw it back as a small, accusing eye.
"You're late," Halv murmured at Aria's shoulder. Her voice was a rope of habit. "We don't have long. The market's already full of fakes."
Aria's hand found the lead-lined case at her hip. The shard's marginalia had led them here: a donor spiral that had been copied, stamped, and sold until the city's margins were a blur of imitations. Forgeries were not just coin and craft; they were a way to launder names, to make a donor mark mean whatever a patron wanted it to mean. If the Loom could recruit a master forger to authenticate a true plate in public, they could expose the ring that had been turning the Pale Codex into a commodity.
The woman at the bench looked up. Her eyes were the color of old brass. She wiped her hands on a rag and smiled like a blade. "You're the Loom," she said. "You come into my hearth and ask for honesty."
"Ilyas," Aria said, because names mattered and because the forger's name had been a rumor in the margins for months. "We need you to tell the city what's true."
Ilyas's laugh was short. "You want a forger to authenticate a plate? You want me to tell the market that a thing is real when I can make it look real myself?"
"We want you to show how they fake it," Halv said. "Show the difference. Teach the city to read the marks."
Ilyas's fingers flexed around a small punch. She set it down with a care that made the tool sing. "You know what that costs," she said. "If I stand in public and say a plate is true, patron houses will come for me. They'll burn my hearth. They'll buy my silence with coin and threats."
Aria met her eyes. "We'll protect you," she said. "We'll make the packet public. We'll make sure witnesses are anchored. We'll not let them bury you."
Ilyas's face was a map of small decisions. She had been a forger long enough to know how patronage worked: a house with coin could buy a silence that lasted a lifetime. But she had also been a forger long enough to know the difference between a true plate and a copy. Her hands had learned the language of pressure and heat; her eyes could read a donor spiral's microfractures like a man reads a face.
"All right," she said finally. "I'll do it. But I choose the place. I choose the plate. And if anyone tries to make me lie, I will show them how a lie is made."
They left the Gray Hearth with a forger's nod and a small, private plan. Ilyas would come with them to the festival—an annual market rite where merchants and patrons paraded their wares and the city's eyes were wide and hungry. The Loom would stage an authentication ceremony in the festival's center: Ilyas would demonstrate, in public, how forgeries were made and how a true donor plate carried a pressure no counterfeit could hold. The public would see the difference; the ledger's margins would be pried open.
The festival was a riot of color and sound. Lanterns hung like low moons; stalls overflowed with salted fish and lacquered toys; a brass band played a tune that made the crowd sway. The Loom's table was a simple plank beneath a banner that read LOOM: PUBLIC AUTHENTICATION. Apprentices set the tracer's lattice across the table and Rell fed the manifest's readout into the machine. Ilyas stood at the center with a small tray of plates—some true, some false, all polished to the same hungry shine.
"You sure about this?" Luna asked, voice low. The Mass Cadence they'd used at the Bonebridge had left teachers thin at the edges; Luna's throat still carried the echo of that strain. "If they try to weaponize reflection again—"
"We'll be ready," Aria said. She felt the ledger's thread like a rope in her hands. "We have witnesses. We have forensics. We have Ilyas."
Ilyas's hands moved like a woman who had been born to the press. She set a true plate on the table and then a counterfeit beside it. The crowd leaned in, curiosity a currency that could not be bought. Rell's tracer hummed and the lattice crawled across the true plate's rim, teasing out microfractures and pressure lines that read like a fingerprint. The counterfeit's lattice answered with a different pattern—smoother, flatter, a pressure that had been manufactured rather than grown.
Ilyas spoke as she worked, her voice a teacher's rasp. "A true donor plate carries a history," she said. "Not just a stamp. The metal remembers the heat of the press, the angle of the punch, the tiny burrs left by a hand that was present when the donor signed. A forger can copy the spiral, but not the memory of the hand."
She demonstrated with a heated iron, pressing a spiral into a blank plate. The crowd watched the smoke curl and the metal bloom. Then she took a counterfeit and showed how a press could be tuned to mimic the spiral's shape but not its microfracture. She held the two plates side by side and the difference was a thing you felt in your teeth: one plate's rim sang with a faint, layered tone when struck; the other answered with a single, flat note.
The brokers in the crowd shifted. A man in broker black—too quick, too practiced—moved at the edge of the festival like a shadow. He had the look of someone who had been paid to be invisible and had learned to enjoy the practice. He watched Ilyas with a smile that did not reach his eyes.
"You're making enemies," Halv murmured.
Ilyas did not look away. "I make enemies every day," she said. "Better to make them with witnesses."
The demonstration was working. Forensics recorded the tracer's lattice; apprentices copied the patterns into the Loom's ledger. The crowd's mood shifted from curiosity to a kind of hungry comprehension. People began to murmur about donor marks and patron houses; a vendor spat and then fell silent as the implications landed. The festival's color dulled into a ledger's gray.
Then the brokers struck.
A handler flicked a Shade Hare from his sleeve and let it brush a vendor's palm. The vendor's laugh thinned and then snapped; a face in the crowd blurred. The Hare folded into the market's noise like a smear. Ilyas's hands did not stop; she kept the demonstration moving, but the crowd's attention wavered. The brokers' handlers were practiced at this: a small theft of memory here, a thinness there, enough to make witnesses unreliable.
Aria saw the handler's motion and moved before the Hare could find purchase. She stepped between the man and the vendor and caught the pale thing with a practiced hand. The Hare was smoke and the handler's sleeve was quick; the broker's men were many. The festival's edges frayed into a press of bodies and blades.
Ilyas's voice rose then, not in fear but in command. She slammed a plate down on the table and the sound cut through the market like a bell. "Enough," she said. "You want to see how a lie is made? Watch."
She took a counterfeit and, with a few quick motions, unmade it. The press she used was not the slow, patient thing of a master forger but a set of quick, precise strikes that revealed the counterfeit's seams: a heat line that had been forced, a burr that had been filed away, a pressure that had been faked. She showed the crowd the tools—acid, a heated iron, a press tuned to a single note—and then she did something else: she showed them how a lie could be turned back on its maker.
A man in broker black stepped forward, blade flashing, and the festival's noise rose into a roar. He wanted spectacle; he wanted to make the Loom's demonstration look like a provocation. He moved with the practiced arrogance of someone who believed muscle could buy silence. Ilyas did not flinch. She set a plate between them and met the man's eyes.
"You want to test me?" she said. "Then test me."
The duel that followed was not a duel of blades so much as a duel of craft. The broker's man lunged with a blade; Ilyas parried with a press, a motion that used the table's edge and the plate's weight as a fulcrum. Sparks flew where metal met metal. The crowd pressed in, a living wall of breath and lantern light. Aria moved to help, but Ilyas shook her head—this was her fight.
The broker's man was fast and practiced; he wanted to make the demonstration a spectacle and to discredit the forger. Ilyas answered with a rhythm that was not violence but a kind of choreography: a press that deflected a blade, a step that used the table's edge to unbalance an opponent, a small, precise strike that sent the man stumbling. The duel narrowed to inches and timing.
Then the broker's man tried a trick the Loom had seen before: a Mirror Rip, a shard flashed at the edge of the crowd meant to reflect a teacher's cadence back at its source and to make the cost land where it would hurt most. He slashed at the table's brazier, aiming to sever the tracer's lattice and to send the forger's demonstration into chaos.
Ilyas's hand moved like a thing of habit. She slammed a plate down and the brazier's flame flared. The shard struck the metal and the sound was a bright, terrible note. For a heartbeat the tracer's lattice wavered and the crowd's attention thinned. The Mirror Rip had found purchase.
Aria saw the shard's flash and did the only thing she could. She stepped forward and used a countertech she had learned in the Loom's darker rooms: a short, codex-adjacent redirect that inverted a reflected cadence for a single, decisive moment. It was not a full Codex Echo—she could not risk that—but it was a rule-bending act that required a sacrifice. The technique would take something from her: a small, private memory, a coin the ledger would accept.
She felt the cost like a cold coin sliding from her chest. A name—small and domestic, a laugh she had kept like a talisman—slid away as if someone had turned a page and removed a paragraph. The world narrowed to the arc of her motion: a step, a wrist twist, a redirection that sent the shard's reflection back into the broker's hand. The shard shattered on the table and the Mirror Rip collapsed like a cut rope.
The crowd gasped. The broker's man staggered, his advantage gone. Ilyas moved in and disarmed him with a single, clean motion. The duel ended not with a killing blow but with a binding: the man's wrists were looped in a rope and the festival's crowd closed in like a tide.
Aria staggered and Luna's hand was at her shoulder before she could think. "What did you lose?" Luna asked, voice low and fierce.
Aria tried to call the name and found only a hollow where it had been. Panic rose, quick and hot, and she tamped it down with the practiced calm of someone who had learned to hold a line. "A small thing," she said. The words tasted like metal. "A memory. It's gone."
Luna's fingers tightened for a heartbeat and then softened. She wrapped a teacher's hum around Aria like a hand and steadied her. "You paid," she said. "We'll count it."
Ilyas stepped back from the table and faced the crowd. Her hands were steady; her eyes were bright with the kind of fierce satisfaction that comes from having shown a trick for what it is. "You saw how a lie is made," she said. "You saw the difference between a stamped spiral and a plate that remembers a hand. If you value your names, you will not let them be bought."
The festival's mood had shifted into something like a verdict. Vendors shouted and then fell silent; a militia captain barked orders and men in leather belts moved toward the Bastion's docks. The brokers' handlers melted into the crowd like smoke. The packet's echo—Virelle's donor mark, the manifest, the forger's demonstration—would not be easily smoothed away.
They packed the tracer's readout and the authenticated plate into the lead-lined case. Ilyas accepted the Loom's protection with a small, private nod and then slipped back into the Gray Hearth's shadow, her hands already stained with oil. The apprentices gathered the witnesses and moved them to safehouses; Halv barked orders and the Loom's net closed like a hand.
Aria sat on the table's edge and let Luna tend the hollow where the memory had been. Luna's fingers were warm and steady as she pressed a cloth to Aria's temple. "It will come back in fragments," Luna said, voice soft. "Sometimes memories return like fish to a net. Sometimes they don't. But you did what you had to."
Aria let the words land like a small, fierce thing. The ledger's thread had been pulled taut; the forger's hand had shown the city how to read a plate. The Origin Engine's whisper—an artifact that pointed to a core—had been authenticated in public. The Loom had forced a patron house's margins into the open and had paid for it in memory and muscle.
When the festival's lanterns dimmed and the market's noise thinned to a low hum, Aria and Luna walked the Bonebridge together. The night smelled of salt and varnish and the faint, impossible sweetness of a lullaby. Aria's fingers found Luna's and held on. The partnership had been tested in public and in private; it had been paid for in small, private sacrifices.
"We'll follow the line," Aria said, voice small and fierce. "We'll find the Origin Engine's core."
Luna's thumb stroked the back of Aria's hand, a slow, steady motion that felt like a promise. "Together," she said.
They moved through the festival's afterglow like two people who had chosen to carry a ledger together—one costly step at a time.