Morning found Aerialis practicing its yawn like a choir warming up: uneven, earnest, strangely proud.
Sovereigns drilled on platforms with chalk rings painted around anchor points. Plate crews muttered NO ≠ FEAR to themselves until it sounded like superstition. Saints—now rebranded by Ossa's memo as Community Plate Volunteers, which fooled no one—stood awkwardly beside Crown guards and pretended to take notes. The city did not fall. This was progress that felt like an insult to drama.
"Lesson plan," Serah said on the Inner Lash, staff tucked under one arm. "We teach yawn. Then we teach blink."
"Blink?" Tessel asked, already offended. "Was there a committee?"
"There's a problem," Serah said. "The yawn slows strain. But sometimes you want a beat—a breath where motion is allowed to cross—so you don't build pressure in corners."
"A controlled un-'no'," Jorn translated.
"A yes," Kael said, cheerful. "I love those."
"Not a yes," Serah said firmly. "A blink. Start and finish in no. The in-between is a licensed allowance. Kael shows; everyone else learns without dying."
"You always bury the lede," Tessel muttered. "Fine. Yawn, blink, pray."
They started with saints and riggers at West Spur, where yesterday's wafers had been exorcised with prejudice. Serah drew a thin heat diagram in the air—a figure eight draped across a plate. "This is your blink window," she said. "A hair wide. Tightly timed. If you leave it open, the lattice will think you're flirting. If you leave it too short, you'll bruise the load."
Riggers nodded like men who'd bruised loads and egos.
"Kael," Serah said. "Blink."
Kael stepped up to the plate, bells breaking the lecture into punctuation. The hum under his hands wore his grammar now: polite, stubborn.
Anchor: the yawn's steady no. Path: thin it—pinch a thread through. Release: on the beat and close.
He pinched a breath of motion through the refusal like a needle through cloth—enough for a cable to settle, a rivet to ease, a load to kiss its cradle and stop yearning. The plate took the allowance with a grumpy appreciation. The yawn held. The platform didn't so much as flinch.
"Blink," Serah said again, softer.
He blinked a second beat. The crew felt it like shoulders lowering. The saints flinched and then looked relieved that nothing had happened, which was how you knew something had: courage glued into habit.
Tessel's circlet plotted the cadence and sulked. "I can bottle that," he said, immediately lying to himself.
"You can," Lysa said, "until the field is bored and writes its own blink to spite you."
Jorn clapped once, hard, to set a rhythm. "We cycle crews. We train the stupid out, leave the luck in."
They did. For two hours Aerialis learned to blink. The city took to it like a good student with a petty streak—sassy, precise, alarming when it tried to improvise. Twice a junior Sovereign left the window too long and the lattice leaned; twice Kael snatched the motion and tucked it back like a tablecloth saved from a party trick. Saints started copying the beat with thumb-taps on their belts. By the end of the session there was an audible tick beneath the old hum—as if the city had acquired a pulse.
"Lunch," Serah declared, which was church.
Conclave after lunch tasted of politics and oiled hinges. Ossa chaired with her jaw. Myrene had ash at her cuffs again. Estan wore sympathy like a clean shirt. Pereth sat in a cage of copper lattice dragged into the chamber for the occasion, shackled to patience and an infuriatingly tidy slate.
"We are not parading her," Tessel hissed.
"We are using her," Ossa said. "Her math keeps me from writing letters to families."
Pereth tipped her head to Kael. "You gave me grammar. I gave it back with punctuation. You're welcome."
Kael lifted a finger. "I expect royalties in the form of fewer disasters."
"Done," she said. "A note: your blink needs rails. If they try to run it on the inner markets' plates, they'll excite a harmonic and the soup stalls will leap to their deaths."
"If the soup leaps," Jorn said, "teach it to blink."
"We codify," Ossa cut. "Pereth writes a blink license: windows, intervals, allowable loads. Serah trains. Tessel supervises. Everyone swears they won't freelance."
Estan, helpful as a plague, cleared his throat. "And the matter of the third bell?"
"We visited three thin places," Serah said. "We taught them to yawn. One said his name. He did not sell it."
Myrene's gaze slid to Kael. "And the sunwell's coins?"
"Counting," Kael said, and pulled one from his pocket. The copper disk thrummed against his skin and quieted. "Tessel thinks it's calibration. I think it's pettiness."
"Both," Tessel allowed. "It's pulsing a pattern. Short, short, long, count, rest. If this is a ticket to a 'later,' I would like to decline."
"Decline later," Ossa said. "Accept now. We have a city to keep bored." She rapped the table once. "Dismissed. Pereth stays. Sovereign—keep your fuse out of mouths."
"Hot gossip: I'll try," Kael said.
Pereth caught him as the hall thinned. "Your blink isn't for the Dome," she said. "It's for people."
"Everything's for people," he said.
"Not in my experience," Pereth said, and didn't smile.
Afternoon drills migrated to the North market, because it had nearly sagged into a lesson last night and today deserved mercy. Kael and Serah walked the line while Tessel taught a knot of techs how to hate him productively. Lysa stalked beams. Jorn stood where fools might sprint, the embodiment of no with a good heart.
Saints came in ones and twos pretending to be shoppers. The charm-seller from last night watched with arms folded and sold a legal sun to a child who glared at Myrene's acolyte and bit the coin.
Kael stopped at a stall where a woman poured batter onto a griddle and history into the air. The griddle's heat wobbled against a plate's modest no; together they produced breakfast instead of a fire.
"You want the blink on your stove?" he asked.
"I want your mouth shut if it jinxes my cakes," she said, affectionate.
"I can blink quieter," he said.
"Do it in your head," she said.
He laughed. He did it in his hands instead.
Anchor: the plate's yawn. Path: a tiny corridor through a thermal tick. Release: match the flip of batter.
He blinked. The cake flipped like it trusted him. The woman didn't look impressed; she handed him a piece and turned to the next.
"Payment," she said. "For making the city act its age."
He bit gratitude and burned his tongue and felt religious for a second. The market smelled like patient miracles.
Then someone shouted.
Not panic—instruction. The word "Down!" slapped the square. A cable three stalls over had started to unspool with the steady malice of a deliberate hand. The winch ratchet had been flipped. A crate lifted, swung, stopped—caught in Kael's grammar and trying to decide whether to obey the old law or the new rumor.
"Not mine," Kael said, already moving.
"Blink," Serah said.
He blinked the sway into surrender. The crate settled, offended. Tessel was on the ratchet before the market breathed again. He yanked a wafer out of the hub and held it up, triumphant and murderous. "Old pattern," he spat. "They're still planting. They're trying to make your refusal look like their sabotage."
Jorn waded into a knot of saints and found the boy with fresh paint and a shaking jaw. "Not me," the boy blurted, which was true and useless.
Kael crouched. "You want the city to listen to us," he said, gentle as he could manage, "then stop handing it bad songs."
The boy looked at his hands like they'd sneaked out last night. "He said we needed proof that your blink breaks things."
"Who's he," Serah asked.
The boy glanced at the charm-seller, at a rigger pretending interest in a lamp, at the sky for help. "I don't keep names," he whispered, defeated.
"Then keep one," Kael said, almost kind. "Keep mine. Bring me the next wafer before it kisses a plate. I'll pay you in stubborn."
The boy, unforgivably young, nodded like a vow.
They cleared the square in orderly rudeness. Kael's tongue stopped burning. His bones didn't.
By late afternoon the blink had a page in Tessel's little black book and a column on Ossa's dispatch. Saints had stopped pretending not to watch and started pretending to be unimpressed. This was victory.
Elyra appeared on a catwalk so narrow it insulted shoes. She tilted her head toward the Dome, which was behaving because it had manners.
"You're ready to make a larger mistake," she said, perfectly calm.
"Oracle," Serah said, equally calm, "we collect those on Thursdays."
"It is Thursday," Elyra said.
She led them to a service brace above the Proving Well. The mirror lay in its ring of black stone like a calm that liked judging. Its copper lattice kept good notes. The air there had always smelled like clean metal and lecture. Today it smelled faintly of coins.
Myrene waited with three acolytes and a frown she'd polished. Tessel stood off to the side pretending this wasn't his idea while clutching two portable plates the size of plates.
"The well's been counting more aggressively," Myrene said. "It wants to speak in ticks. I'd prefer truth."
"Truth isn't modular," Maeron said, delighted. "Ticking is."
"We're going to teach the well to blink," Elyra said.
"Absolutely not," Tessel and Myrene said together for different reasons.
"Yes," Elyra said, and nodded at Kael. "You taught a god to yawn. Blinking is ruder. Do it politely."
Serah's mouth flattened. "Auditor," she said. "Anchor him."
Tessel strapped one portable plate to Kael's left cuff, the other to his right, as if symmetry would keep him mortal. The bells wedged between copper and skin and sulked.
Kael stood over the mirror. It lay cool and patient under his palm. The lattice hummed obedience. The count hid inside the tone like curiosity.
"Anchor," Serah said.
He set no into his hands.
"Blink," she said.
He wanted it to be simple: pinch, pass, close. The well wanted it to be math: interval, cadence, ratio. He bent the blink into the count, matched the sunwell's coins, and spoke in a rhythm you feel in your jaw.
The mirror did not like him. It preferred excellence. He offered boredom with impeccable timing.
The blink took.
The well ticked twice, long once—answer—and then paused where the pause belonged, not where impatience demanded. The count slowed by a fraction. It felt like teaching a heartbeat to be a heartbeat and not a speech.
Myrene's frown melted into something approaching awe; she rescued it into disapproval. Tessel's circlet wrote tiny hearts before it remembered itself and drew teeth.
Elyra watched with the interest of a planet eavesdropping on a flower.
"Again," Serah breathed.
Kael blinked on the beat. The well matched him. Coins somewhere in its throat clinked in time with a city on a cliff. The mirror took his handprint like a counterfeit and decided to honor it anyway.
He lifted his palm.
The mirror didn't ask for more. Good. He would have given it anyway. Bad.
"Now what," he asked, light-headed as obedience.
"Now we stop," Serah said.
"Now we don't," Elyra said.
A sound rolled through the Sanctum like a large room remembering its own echo. Not a bell. Not a cough. A laugh, once—not his—and then the air forgot what it was doing and remembered again.
Everyone went still.
The acolytes made the sign of the sun. Tessel's hand tightened on a plate until the etching bit. Myrene's eyes closed for the space of one amen.
Kael looked at the mirror and saw himself as he would be if he ran out of jokes—eyes gone to cinders, mouth a line that meant arithmetic. The reflection didn't move. It wasn't his. It was the well showing him a thing that had already happened to a world that didn't get to keep itself.
He bared his teeth at it the way you do to dogs you can't afford to fear. "No," he said softly. "Blink. Breathe."
The well obeyed his no, and in obeying made the laugh small again.
Elyra exhaled the tiniest laugh of her own, which tasted like victory and something else. "Good boy," she said, and somehow made it neither affection nor insult.
"Don't," Serah said, equally quiet.
"I won't," Elyra said. "He will."
Tessel cleared his throat with the dignity of a man who needed to reset the universe by speaking. "We're done," he pronounced. "We go home, we write this down, we make smaller mistakes tomorrow."
"Agreed," Ossa said from the arch, which suggested she'd been listening since genesis. "Everyone out of my Sanctum before you teach my rails to flirt."
They spilled into evening with the city brighter than the sun would admit. Blink training hit another circle of crews; saints loitered at legal distances; Kole's men tried to look irrelevant and failed. Pereth, in her lattice cage on a truck, was hauled past them under guard toward a workshop with better locks. She lifted her slate against the bars: four dots, a pause, four dots, a pause—count slowed to blink.
"Show-off," Tessel muttered. He couldn't hide his pride.
Jorn nudged Kael with an elbow that felt like a compliment. "You're teaching gods to be tired. New hobby?"
"Safer than knife juggling," Kael said. "Marginally."
The charm-seller intercepted him with a legal sun and an illegal grin and pushed both at his chest. "For the day you don't laugh," she said. "So someone will."
He tucked them away with his carved coin and the memory of a mirror that had tried to show him a future and got a swear word instead.
Lysa fell in step at his shoulder as the Cohort drifted toward their workroom. "You're going to go in," she said, conversational as weather.
"Someday," he said. "When we can afford it."
"You'll go in when you can't," she said. "That's how you buy the bill."
He didn't argue. There are people you learn from by not contradicting.
"Practice your no," Serah said, warm and stern, and flicked the bell on his left cuff. It chimed obey because it was a traitor.
They reached the door. Inside: maps, chalk, a pot of something that had ambitions to be stew again, letters from Ossa that said do this more nicely than you'd expect.
Kael paused with his hand on the latch. Somewhere below, a plate coughed in a familiar rhythm and then corrected itself without him. Somewhere above, a pylon bell rolled only once for inspection. Somewhere far, the third bell did not. A small mercy. A boring night.
He opened the door onto their mess and their work and their faith in boredom.
"Homework," he told the room. "Make patience fashionable."
The bells said trendsetter and try me.
For once, he believed them.