Night tastes like metal and sugar—the city's small comforts trying to hide the sting of what's been taken. The ledger lies open between us, pages ringed with quick ink and careful cipher. We've doubled redundancies, taught lullabies as passwords, and scattered tags into pockets people never think to check. Still, the warnings come like weather: inevitable and persistent.
System: Advisory — Elevated risk of deceptive procurement. Suggested task: Verify provenance chain. Reward: 2,200 XP.
We ignore the System's incentives and focus on the human labor: listening, watching, and teaching people to notice the little lies that make up the Trust's new tactics.
The Trust's reaction to exposure is subtle and cruel. They stop only when it's unavoidable. Their new method is mirrorwork—create convincing reflections of legitimacy, then use those mirrors to show the city a version of reality where the Trust is the protector, not the predator. Fake advisories, forged custody receipts, and supposedly independent auditors with amusingly fresh résumés appear in the margins of civic life. They buy hearts through staged charity and then pocket the memories they decide are saleable. It's elegant, and that makes it dangerous.
We respond the only way we know: clutter their mirrors with truth. We plant witnesses who can testify to coercion; we feed journalists threads that make auditors ask questions; we teach keepers to demand two witnesses and a safeword before handing over anything that looks like provenance. The ledger's margins swell with procedural checklists—small bureaucracies designed to be inconvenient to dishonest men.
Jeong runs a courier loop that looks sloppy on purpose, baiting opportunists. He carries a small box marked with gardener-style markings but filled with trivial useless junk and a hidden recorder. We hope the Trust will send a fetcher; the fetcher will think the job is easy; our recorder will make their movement loud.
It works, but not cleanly. Midway through the run, Jeong slips past a shadowed figure who steps from a doorway with the too-friendly grin of someone who once knew him. The grin cracks into a mask of professional cordiality and Jeong freezes for half a breath—an error we cannot afford. He finishes the route, but his face is pale and the recorder stops earlier than planned. Later, Min analyses the files and finds gaps: an intentional cut, a blind spot where a man's hand could have removed context.
We realize then that the Trust has learned to mirror our tactics. They send polite agents who are friends first, collectors second. They ask for favors they don't intend to return. Someone inside our orbit is willing to answer their knock.
Suspicion is a corrosive instrument; used too long it eats trust. We do not tear ourselves apart. Instead, Hae‑In and I set a soft counter—an exercise in gentle deception that aims not to break people but to find where the leak runs. We plant two different decoy leads: one outwardly valuable and noisy, the other small and almost tender, both carrying invisible signatures known only to Ja‑Yeon's cipher. Whoever lifts either lead will reveal their preference. The mole will show where their loyalties lie.
The bait we choose is personal: a ledger page that looks like a loose, vulnerable confession—an exaggerated prayer about the missing name, enough to look raw on a market table. The other is a tiny tin labeled in Ja‑Yeon's hand and seeded with a personal scrap that would charm thieves and sentimentalists differently. Mariel moves one decoy into the broker stream; we tuck the other where a mid‑level procurement liaison might find it.
Two nights pass like long stitches. On the third morning the mirror cracks. The broker—clean jaw, polite hand—slides a photo across to Corin with the sort of apologetic shrug people use when they sell other people's secrets. He had been given a ledger page and a glint of possible profit. He thought it a safe bite. He is not the mole; he is a middleman who misjudged appetite. We let him go, instructing him to breathe and forget how to covet.
The real leak shows itself more quietly. A courier we trusted, the one who once brought us to an ambush and then returned shaken, disappears for an afternoon and returns with pockets full of new bluster and a story about a small favor he did for "friends who needed a ride." We keep him close the next day and ask a careful question about a favor. His answer is smooth until the ledger's cipher signature is read aloud—Ja‑Yeon's phrasing, an odd sequence of consonants the gardener taught me to ask for. At the sound the courier blinks. The courier's fingers fidget. We do not accuse; we watch.
Later, in the yard's thin light, he confesses in a voice that breaks in places where courage once lived. He had been frightened, offered a quiet return for a night's work, told it would be harmless. He passed on a lead that looked like an orphaned node. He did not know it was a trap until the men came too fast. He is remorseful and useful, but he is compromised in ways we cannot ignore. The mole is not easy to cast out because fear makes people do business with devils.
We do not punish him cruelly. We reroute his rounds to low‑risk work, we teach him to watch for the Trust's mirrors, and we give him the ledger's small kindness: a chance to fix what he broke. Redemption here is not dramatic; it is a schedule of tasks and apologies measured in hours and simple faiths.
Meanwhile, the Trust's mirrorwork escalates in public. A glossy flyer appears through the city claiming the Trust's "memory recovery initiative" saved dozens of orphans' mementos. The flyer is bold, the photos doctored, the language civil. It could fool anyone who only skims headlines.
We answer with less glamour and more grit. Min leaks an internal procurement memo to a journalist who cares about the slow truth; Hae‑In publishes a carefully redacted dossier of coerced sellers; Ja‑Yeon and a line of keepers prepare to testify at a small, unspectacular hearing that will not make headlines but will make record. Our goal is not to win applause; it is to make the mirrors reflect so poorly that donors start to ask why their money looks like theft.
The week ends with a small victory: a mid‑level procurement liaison is suspended pending inquiry after witnesses corroborate forced sales. The Trust's mirrors begin to tilt. It is not a collapse, only a wobble, but wobble is leverage in a market that trades in certainty.
That night I sit with the ledger and the gardener's tin. My fingers find a folded, half‑obliterated scrap tucked deep inside the tin—paper soft with age and a single, clear fragment of a name: two syllables, one I have felt like cold metal against my teeth in dreams. It is not the whole name, but it's the edge of it. The scrap smells faintly of the greenhouse—peat and old sunlight.
The memory that follows is not a revelation but a compass: a woman's laugh caught mid‑song, a syllable sliding in the dark, a small hand placing a tag. I do not have the whole bridge back yet, only a planked step. It is enough to make the ledger's ink sting.
I close the tin and the ledger, laying both on the table like talismans. Ja‑Yeon stands across the yard, hands busy with seeds and eyes older than the photograph. She sees me look and nods once, small and sure. "They will keep breaking mirrors until they can see an image they like," she says. "We will keep making things harder and truer."
We have a mole scared into cooperation, a Trust wobbling in public, and the faintest edge of a name to hold like a compass. Mirrorwork will continue; so will we. The ledger breathes with the city's small mercies and the hard work of people who refuse to let memory be currency.