They left before dawn, when the city still smelled of dock tar and the ledger's rain‑colored cloth could be moved without too many eyes. Packing was a quiet liturgy: Seo‑yeon folded manifests into waterproof sleeves; Hana tucked the paper‑knife ward into a hidden pocket; Derrigan wrapped the ledger in the cloth and then in a plain linen shirt, holding it close enough that he could feel the book's faint warmth through the fabric. Haeun carried the wooden horse in both hands as if it were an offering; Minji fumbled with a small coin purse and a scrap of cloth she had claimed as hers.
Seo‑yeon's decisions were practical and final. "We don't notify anyone. We go light and slow. I'll file a delayed manifest that makes it look like the ledger left with a courier and not us. It will buy us three days before anyone notices." She slid a stack of false receipts into a small chest and snapped the lid shut like a verdict.
Derrigan, who preferred immediate answers, packed rope and wire and a leather gaiter for his forearms. "We can't stay," he said. "They'll come again and with better men. Moving is not cowardice—it's arithmetic."
Hana nodded and offered a single contact: an innkeeper in the next city, a seamstress who ran a backroom for travelers and spoke little. "She keeps records; she knows faces that can be trusted and those who should not be trusted," Hana said. "You tell her a price and an accent, and she gives you beds and an odd job."
They left the warehouse in staggered pairs—Seo‑yeon with Haeun and Minji hidden beneath a shawl; Derrigan with the ledger and a crate that smelled of salted fish as a decoy. Hana walked with them until they reached the city gate, then melted back into the morning market where she had business. The road smelled of bread and the thin reek of animals; the countryside was a net of hedgerows and half‑kept fields, the sort of small‑town corruption that took coin at a warrant window and pretended it was a favor.
By noon they were in a different city altogether: a mid‑sized place whose name sounded like a promise of distance. It had an inland market and a sprawl of terraces; its councils were dull and slow and therefore useful. The innkeeper—thin, precise, named Anja—took one look at Seo‑yeon's false manifest and the linen bundle and agreed to a price. Her backroom was a narrow room above a seamstress's shop: small, practical, and already smelling faintly of starch and mending oil.
"You stay quiet," Anja said, voice like measuring tape. "I have rules. No trouble. No ledger talk." She showed them the safe places—an underfloor crawlspace beneath a sewing bench, a false bottom in a chest, and a small trunk that she kept warded for especially private things. "If anyone asks, you're traveling clerks," she said. "You stitch papers. You fold cloth. You earn a quiet day and a quiet night."
They took jobs that fit their new lives and covered the ledger with the dullness of ordinary work.
Seo‑yeon apprenticed at the municipal registry under a clerk who liked tea and small bribes. She learned the rhythm of bureaucracy—how to fold a complaint so that it landed on the right desk, how to make a case sound technical rather than personal. Her hands, which had already learned to do a ledger's careful loops, now learned the language of benign forms and the patience of sitting through red seal waits. Her face became the face of someone who measured time in stamps; she filed her false manifest into the right stacks and began, slowly, to build a paper trail that would make the household look like ordinary travelers tied to ordinary work.
Derrigan found work as a contractor for a small guild that took shallow gates for salvage runs. The guild's jobs were not glamorous: they paid to retrieve minor artifacts and the occasional small creature trapped just beyond a gate. The work let him be outside the eyes of city notice—hauling crates at dawn, riding a cart to a farm gate where a caller would pry a seam in the world and toss up a rope. The fences in this city took scraps and small trinkets and paid in coin that smelled like smoke and was perfectly usable. Derrigan learned to enter and exit quickly, how to read a gate's muscle (some closed slow, like tired hands; others snapped like a trap), and how to make a small salvage look like someone else's haul.
Hana set up as a seamstress's night specialist—mending cloaks by lamp and offering runic quick‑fixes to patrons who did not ask too many questions. She did small ward work for the well‑to‑do and a private circle of merchants who preferred to keep ledger‑adjacent things off the books. Her work bought them tools, offered information channels, and let her muscle a few favors out of people who liked expensive stitches.
Haeun and Minji were enrolled in a small dayroom for children where they learned to pronounce the local vowel shifts and trade in common games. They were kept close; their new lives were meant to look ordinary. The girls practiced names, brushed hair that was no longer ash‑smeared, and learned to walk the market with hands tucked safe in pockets.
For weeks they practiced invisibility. The ledger stayed under the false floor, wrapped in linens and warded trunks. The paper‑knife ward softened its hum into a background note only Hana and Derrigan could feel. They took small precautions: different morning routes, shifted meal times, and an agreed code of signals for immediate flight. They taught Haeun and Minji how to answer strangers—short, plain phrases—and made sure the children had stories to tell if any nosy neighbor asked.
Blending in required compromises. Seo‑yeon paid small unofficial fees to the registry foreman to keep certain papers offline; Derrigan sold a portion of his salvage to a fence who wore polished shoes and an amiable smile; Hana worked a favor for a merchant who, in return, pointed them to a quiet lane where curfew was lightly enforced. None of it felt like selling the ledger—only like buying time.
The city's petty corruption was useful: a constable could be softened with a loaf and a wink; a market master could overlook a ledgerless trunk for a night. Those small compromises were a cost analysis Derrigan accepted if it meant keeping Haeun and Minji safe. It was the arithmetic of living that preserved them.
They rehearsed exits and practiced burdens. Derrigan took night runs to the closest gate with a pair of guild hands and learned the rhythm of shallow entry: a push, a breath, a grab of loot and then back. He learned which gates spat out animals and which ejected ruinous weather. Hana taught him to sense runic eddies and taught Seo‑yeon to fold manifests that could hide the true intent of a run. Seo‑yeon, meanwhile, learned to argue a pothole into oblivion at council meetings—the sort of civic muscle that kept people distracted and bureaucratically occupied.
Tension threaded the small days like a seam that might split: anonymous couriers still came through the market with questions asked in casual tones; a merchant's button flashed briefly familiar runes that made Hana's skin spark when he passed; someone left a single stamped seal on the lane—an old mark no one should have used. Once, an old woman at a stall watched the ledger‑bearing group pass and whispered a single word to Seo‑yeon—"accounts"—then kept walking.
They did not tell anyone about the ledger. They did not show their faces at the docks. The new city was kind to ordinaries and lethal to those who drew attention, and so their lives bent toward ordinary things: a table in a yard, a wicker basket with laundry, a neighbor's tea. It was humbling and precise work, and it helped them sleep.
Still, they kept a small network running. Hana traded quick wards to a fence who could find doors; Seo‑yeon kept a two‑page list of sympathetic clerks who could sign off a false certificate; Derrigan kept an exit route mapped on the inside of a crate. All these things were insurance—what they would use if the ledger became dangerous again.
On the sixth night after they arrived, while the city slept and the ledger lay under the false floor, Hana felt a consistent, small tug in the wards like a finger tracing a seam. She checked the trunk and found nothing obvious, only a faint, wet smudge on the band of the cloth—a mark that smelled faintly of the harbor and tide. She stared at it and felt, as if in a surface dream, a sigil flex in the ledger's margin beneath the linen. The book was alive enough to remember travel; it remembered the salt. She said nothing, but she added a thin stitch of protection around the trunk just the same.
They settled into the city's rhythms: two women in different uniforms walking separate routes home, the ledger quiet beneath a mattress, a wooden horse kept on a windowsill like a secret. They took jobs, they learned a trade, they became good at being invisible.
But the ledger had been fought for, and fights do not end as easily as bruises. News traveled the smaller channels: a broker looked for ledgers; a sampler in a tavern brought tales of a contested book in Dock 9; faintly, someone in a guildhall muttered about a ledger answered. For now the city slept on, indifferent. For now the ledger rested.
They had bought time and a kind of anonymity. They had also set in motion a longer journey—one that would require them to move from hiding to guardianship again, and to make choices about who they would become if the ledger ever needed to be carried into danger.