Akari invited them to a room that smelled faintly of lemon and old paper.
Not a formal meeting place. Not a guild room. A cramped attic above a bookshop she said was "friendly to people who keep odd hours."
They climbed narrow stairs two at a time. Shinra found himself close to Yuna, shoulders almost touching, a quiet comfort.
The attic was a patchwork of light. A single bulb hung over a low table. Stacks of books made little walls. On one shelf lay a neat row of notebooks, each tied with a faded ribbon.
Akari set a kettle to boil and moved with the effortless economy of someone who had done similar rituals a thousand times.
"You didn't have to bring the whole team," she said, voice small but not shy.
"We thought it safer," Mizuki answered. "And more honest."
Akari didn't object. She poured three cups of tea and handed one to Shinra with a careful, practiced motion.
He took it. The tea tasted like chamomile and rain.
"So," Kaizen said, settling into a crate-cushioned chair with a grin that tried to be casual and failed, "what's your plan, Keeper? Charm us into forgetting how to track motifs?"
Akari smiled, but it didn't reach her eyes. "I don't want to be a part of stirring trouble," she said. "I want to keep things from getting used as weapons."
"And what makes you think someone will listen?" Riku asked, blunt.
She set her cup down and folded her hands. "Because names are stubborn. People who keep names do not usually work alone. They have networks. Little safe places. Trades. Rules."
Mizuki unfolded her tablet and tapped into a small list Akari had carved on paper. It was a list of places—bookbinders, shrine-keepers, an old watchmaker who "keeps time when it refuses to be kept."
"You belong to a circle?" Shinra asked.
"Not exactly a circle," Akari said. "More like a web. People who save memories, who hide relics, who keep songs in basements. We call ourselves—well, we didn't give ourselves a name. Names invite attention. Names can be stolen."
"You did tell your grandmother's story in the lab," Shinra said. "She taught you patterns and songs. Did she belong to this web?"
"She started it," Akari replied softly. "She used to say, 'There will be times when the city forgets and times when it remembers. Keep a ledger for both.' She wrote names as bookmarks. She taught me to read the bookmarks by the smell of the glue."
Mizuki's eyes were intense, up close. "How many people?" she asked.
Akari hesitated. "Enough to matter. Not enough to be obvious."
"Who runs it?" Kaizen asked. The question felt blunt and necessary.
"No single person," she said. "We have custodians. People who trade favors. Someone in the train yards—he fixes signals and pockets small things that are too dangerous for public eyes. An old woman in the market who stitches pages into coats. People who keep names because names keep them anchored too."
Shinra listened to that list like a map being read in a language he was only starting to understand.
"So you know how to hide things," he said. "And you know how to find them."
She nodded. "Which is why I noticed the spirals. They smelled like a fingerprint my grandmother once rubbed on a prayer cloth."
"Fingerprint?" Riku echoed.
"Patterns repeat," she said. "People copy what they remember. When someone wants to make a mark that a name responds to, they use a symbol people will remember."
Mizuki tapped the screen, sending a soft ping. "If there's a web, we can map it and use it as an intelligence net."
Akari's jaw flexed. "You could. You could also burn every little safe place and make the web scatter."
"That's not what we want," Shinra said.
"No," Akari agreed. "I keep the maps so that when a place is threatened, we know where to move the things."
Her eyes met his, and there was something like a question there. Something that asked if he would believe a private ledger more than a public protocol.
He thought of Ryou's promise: not a law, but a man's word. He thought of the shard's call. He thought of the man who'd closed the seam without leaving a name.
"You trust people who keep names more than people in suits?" Kaizen asked, not unkind.
"No," she said. "I trust people who keep things long enough to give them away."
That answer settled into the room like a small, stubborn truth.
They worked through a list.
Akari showed them safe-houses where relics could be hidden and hands that could be trusted to keep them.
Sanctum cataloged them.
Mizuki cross-referenced, marking reliability with colored dots.
A network emerged—small, human, scruffy at the edges. It was not a military chain. It was not a guild registry. It was a hospitality of memory.
"You're not making soldiers," Akari said when Shinra objected to one of the suggested moves. "You're asking neighbors to stop burning their attics."
He accepted that.
"We'll protect the nodes we can," he said. "We'll watch and we'll not hand them to Authority without cause."
Mizuki made a note: Protocol: Local custody. Emergency transfer only under multi-party legal and consensual criteria. Ryou clause: personal oversight agreement.
Akari read the note and nodded. "That will at least buy time."
"Time to do what?" Yuna asked.
"Time to find who uses names as GPS," Akari said. "Time to find who teaches the root to listen."
Mizuki's gaze sharpened. "Your network—do you have anyone who deals in people instead of objects? Someone who maps movements?"
Akari's face tightened, then softened. "We have one contact at the docks. He's not fond of Authority and worse of watchers. He can track movement by smell and routes. He's old and he owes us favors."
"Bring him in," Mizuki said. "We need human intelligence to match our sensors."
Akari hesitated. "He's stubborn. He won't like being recorded."
"He won't be recorded," Shinra said. "We'll ask him to speak to us first in person. No logs unless he consents."
Akari's shoulders loosened. "He'll come if you pay with food and a story he hasn't heard."
Kaizen grinned. "I can tell stories."
Riku muttered something about bribing with ramen.
They left the attic with a loose agreement: Sanctum would aid the keepers. The keepers would aid Sanctum when memorial nodes were at risk. They would try, together, to starve the root of clean targets.
Outside, sunlight slotted along the street. The city did its small, prosaic tasks: deliveries, gossip, a woman sweeping stairs with motions like prayer.
Shinra's overlay came like a memory sniffing the air. A boy turned a marble in his palm and hummed, and for the briefest instant the palace corridor flashed behind the shopfront.
He breathed, using Mizuki's rhythm. It steadied him.
Akari walked beside him a little while. "Do you ever want to know your name?" she asked.
He studied his reflection in a darkened window. For a moment he thought of the hollowness where a syllable should be—the missing sound that Arios could not summon.
"My name," he said slowly, "has a weight. When I know it, I might change how I move."
She nodded. "Names point you toward things. Knowing is both gift and burden."
They walked in silence a block, two.
Then she stopped and turned.
"I do not want you to be used," she said simply. "If you become a ledger, people will write in your margins."
Her honesty was a small blade.
"I won't let them," he replied.
She looked at him like someone who'd been asked to guard a fragile bird.
"Then let us keep small things together," she said. "So when the root looks, it finds confusion instead of paths."
He considered that and felt a cautious alliance form—not of swords and badges, but of little safekeeping.
Back at Sanctum, the team ran the new leads.
They visited the docks contact—an old man with fingers like knotted rope and a grin that suggested he had survived by being clever and unreliable.
He knew routes and habits. He could tell you which ferries hid parcels and which warehouse owners trusted midnight trades.
He offered one piece of grain: three weeks ago, someone had been asking about a pattern—spiral marks on discarded flyers and who might recognize them.
"They come in soft," the man said, chewing on a toothpick. "Not loud. They smell like old paper and colder nights."
"Do you know their faces?" Kaizen asked.
The man squinted. "Not faces. Hands. Hands move like the weather. Some people leave sigils to call names that are old. Folks like that are ghosts. Trouble tends to follow them."
He shrugged. "But if you want names, you go to the bookbinders under the old bridge. They mend pages when the city forgets the lines."
Mizuki recorded, fingers flying.
Riku poked the man with a grin. "So you'll help us?"
He snorted. "Depends. You got decent tea?"
They paid him in tea and a story Kaizen told poorly but with gusto. The man laughed and gave them a narrow, tired smile that felt like an ally made in a small way.
When they returned, Shinra found Yuna waiting by the courtyard gate.
"You look tired," she said.
"I am," he answered. "But better than last week."
She studied him. "You're remembering more."
"Yes," he said. "But it's not just memory. It's context. That's new."
She blinked. "Context makes danger mean something you can stop."
He smiled faintly. "That's the plan."
She reached out and brushed his hair from his forehead in an absent motion born from long habit.
"You do know," she said, "that if you get too wrapped in the past, you'll forget the people in front of you."
He looked at her and felt something steady and human anchoring him more than any name could.
"I won't forget," he promised.
She didn't smile. She nodded once, like someone marking an agreement they would enforce by hand.
Arias hummed, thoughtful. Networks are forming. So are counter-networks. We will watch both.
Shinra closed his hand around the promise of a cup of tea and the scent of lemon and old paper.
They did not have names for all the things they guarded.
But they had a map of people who kept small things safe.
And for now, that would be enough.