They said the city swallowed people quietly.
It was a rumor until it happened to Alen.
He wasn't important — only that made his disappearance worse. Alen had been the Ninefold's runner for small favors: he knew a little of locks, had a face that didn't register on most lists, and carried messages between pockets of fugitives. He was the sort who could be missed for months and then remembered as "that helpful kid who used to smile." They'd liked him because he moved like a shadow and because he laughed when Kest told stupid stories.
On the morning it happened, he brought them bread wrapped in stiff paper and a grin. The shard was still wrapped and hidden under Raal's cloak; the piece's dust had gone into the seams of the cloth, a faint blue smudge like a bruise. Alen sat with the twins, telling them of a shortcut through old service halls where the Guild rarely looked. He mouthed the map with his fingers, reciting turns as if skipping stones across water.
They took him seriously. You take a man like that seriously when you are counting steps between safety and a blade.
Raal sent him out with a list: a cartridge of thread for the younger twin, a spare bandage, and instructions to watch for men who moved like shadows. "If you see the iron dogs," Raal said, "don't stop. Not for anything."
Alen stood up, kissed the boy on the forehead in a way that felt like a benediction, and walked into the morning that smelled of smog and frying oil.
Two hours later, the boy was back at the door, breathless, with a story that started like a joke and ended like a wound.
"I walked the tunnels," he said, voice high. "I took a turn where the pipes sing. There was a—" He groped for the word, swallowed, and his eyes went wide. "A doorway. Like a door out of a book. I went through and there was…a market. But not the market. It was empty. Like the place was remembering a market that wasn't there. I saw a man with a green scarf—"
He stopped, and Lirra's fingers tightened on the cloth she was mending.
"And then?" Raal asked, careful.
Alen blinked and looked at his hands. "I turned to go back and the hallway wasn't there. I turned again and it was different. I ran, okay? I ran and I slammed into a wall that wasn't supposed to be there and then I—" He made a little choking sound. "I felt clean. Like something wiped the mud off me. I pushed, pushed, pushed, and when I came out there were four more steps to the cellar and the boy who'd been sweeping looked up and said, 'We thought you were someone else.'"
Silence sat on them like wet cloth. Then the cellars' lamp guttered and the boy with the spheres hiccuped, as if his throat had caught on a different song.
"Where's Alen?" Mael asked.
They expected the runner to come back. He'd done it before: vanish for half a day, come back with a grin and an extra loaf. This time the front door opened and a man stepped through — not Alen.
He wore Alen's jacket, his hands, his gait imitated with too-neat precision. But the eyes were wrong: flat, reflected, like light from a lamp frozen in a puddle. He smiled with the same teeth but the smile was measured to the wrong rhythm.
"You're late," Raal said, throat tight.
The man — Alen — tilted his head. "I found the way you asked for." The voice matched, but there was a half-second delay at the end of every sentence, as if someone had buffered his words.
Lirra's hand went to her blade.
Alen moved like a shadow that had learned to be polite. He set the bread on the table. His fingers left no grease, no flour. The boy with the spheres watched him like someone watching a trick they didn't understand.
Raal thought of the alley. He thought of the smear of oil where a man had been. He thought of the device. "What did you see?" Raal asked, but his voice sounded small.
Alen blinked twice, and for a second his features blurred. Then he smiled. "I walked a memory," he said. "I walked what wasn't claimed yet."
Lirra's blade sang. She lunged.
The thing moved with a speed too precise to be human. Lirra's blade passed through cloth and air like complaint. The imitation Alen didn't bleed. It staggered as if struck, then repaired itself as if stitching a sleeve. It spoke again, calm and polite.
"You are warm," it said. "Do you know your names?"
Raal strove to throw a thread, to wrap the thing and drag it apart. The thread braided along the air and met a mirror of itself — the echo-threads folded back, and a small snap of pain hit Raal's fingers as if a wire had bitten bone. The thing drew its head back and repeated, in that same buffered voice: "You are warm."
Kest crashed a table between them, burning wood and dust scattering. The imitation Alen passed through the block as if it were suggestion, leaving only a cold where the wood had been. It stepped back and opened Alen's mouth: "Tell them I walked on both sides," it said. "Tell them I chose the empty lane."
Alen — the real one — did not return that night.
They searched the tunnels until the city began to cough with late afternoon workhorses. The smear on the alley had expanded into a ring of gray dust, a small circle like a missing tooth in pavement. There were no prints, no blood, no sign that a person had been taken. Only the echo-mark — a shallow burn pattern in the stones that hummed faintly when Raal leaned over it, as if remembering a footstep.
Afterward, they did what scared people do best: they assigned blame. Whispers slid along the walls. Someone said the shard called for company; someone else said the city had finally found a place to keep what it loved. Mael said nothing then — only when they were alone, after the lamps were dark and the boy's spheres were quiet, did he put his palm on the faint ring of gray dust.
He closed his eyes, feeling the vibration under his fingers. The dial under his sleeve thrummed in reply. For a second his hand twitched — the tremor sharper, like a second drumbeat.
"Not a person," he said at last, voice low. "A mark. A claim."
Raal swallowed and felt sudden, very sharp fury.
"It took him," he said. "It took Alen."
Mael's face was blank, almost clinical. "It took something the shard wanted to test. We did not understand the terms."
Lirra spat a curse into the dark. "We steal a heart and the city eats a mouth."
"We keep moving," Mael said. "We do not stand in the places it wants to remember."
They buried the idea of rescue in chores. The boy wrapped a blank band around a chair in Alen's memory. The twins carved a name into a crate with the blunt end of a knife and stabbed it once for emphasis.
They wrote the runner into the ledger of things that the city had learned to live without. The echo-mark on the alley hummed at night like a small, patient animal, and sometimes, when the moon was thin and the pipes sang, the team would wake and find that the mark had shifted by an inch or two — as if remembering a different walk.
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