The Chart-Hall smelled like salt-soaked paper, lamp oil, and glue boiled down to honesty. Lio had always trusted that smell more than he trusted prayers. Paper didn't pretend it hadn't been touched. Ink didn't lie about being permanent.
Outside, Lumenport breathed its usual damp breath. The sea was close enough that the building's stone sweated, and close enough that every map here felt like an argument waiting to happen. The coast shifted a little every year; the Dominion insisted it didn't. Cartographers, in between, were paid to make the world look obedient.
Lio slipped in early, as he always did, because arriving late meant being seen. The clerks at the entrance didn't look at him. That was the smallest mercy the city offered: to be ignored until you weren't.
He crossed the long aisle of desks beneath high windows mottled with salt. The glass wasn't stained like a temple's; it was simply dirty in a way time made official. Light came through anyway, pale and stubborn, and mixed with the lamps to give everything a slightly feverish glow.
He sat at his assigned desk beneath the eastern lamps, shoulders curved forward, elbows tucked in like he could make himself smaller by folding harder. A rolled chart tube rested against his shin. The edge of his apron was black with dried ink. His fingertips were stained to the cuticles, the marks of a trade that never washed all the way off.
At the far end of the hall, Vault doors squatted in their iron frames: A, B, and C, each marked with painted letters, each surrounded by warning plaques that didn't bother to explain what they warned against. Lio knew those letters the way a child knew a monster's name—by repetition, by fear, by the certainty that saying it out loud might make it real.
He'd never been allowed within ten paces of Vault C.
Master Anselm had once caught him drifting too close and said, not unkindly, "That door isn't for boys who want to keep their skin."
Lio had nodded and backed away, heart hammering. He'd been young enough then to think it was a joke.
Now, older, he understood that adults rarely joked about danger. They used jokes to point at it without admitting they were afraid.
He unrolled his current assignment and weighed the corners with small stones: the southern shoreline, copied and recopied, a coastline made polite by decree. The official chart called it Breakwater Point. A neat curve. A clean inlet. A tidy line of safe-water hatching where anyone with eyes knew the rocks waited like teeth.
Lio dipped his quill, tapped it once, and drew the curve with steady care. He didn't correct the lie. He couldn't afford to. The first day Lio tried to "fix" a coastline—added a jag that matched what fishermen muttered about—Anselm had leaned over his shoulder and breathed, very quietly:
We are not paid to be right, boy. We are paid to be consistent.
Consistency was a kind of vow in the Dominion. A vow with no words and plenty of consequences.
Across the aisle, Kerrin Vale worked with the relaxed posture of someone who'd never feared an empty pantry. Kerrin's hair was tied back with a clean ribbon, his cuffs fastened, his nails short and scrubbed. Even hunched over an ugly stretch of coast, he looked like he belonged in a portrait.
Lio had hated him on sight for that. Later, he'd learned it was easier to hate Kerrin than it was to hate the system that produced him.
Kerrin didn't look up when he spoke. "Don't thicken the line," he said. "You're turning the inlet into a bite-mark."
Lio kept his eyes on his own chart. "It is a bite-mark. The sea took it."
"The sea doesn't take," Kerrin replied, tone precise. "It erodes."
"It takes," Lio said softly, and a surprising heat came with the words. "Erosion is just a polite word for theft."
Kerrin's quill paused for half a heartbeat, then resumed. "You talk like you've lost something."
Lio almost laughed. He'd lost plenty. He just didn't always know what the loss was shaped like.
He drew the crosshatching that meant rocks the Dominion wanted sailors to ignore. His wrist ached, the familiar ache of repetition. He didn't mind work. He minded being invisible while he did it.
At the front of the hall, Master Anselm paced between tables with the jittery energy of a man pretending to be calm. He had the sharp, narrow face of someone who measured the world in angles. His vest was clean, his license pin polished. On paper, he was a pillar of public trust. In the flesh, he looked like he'd slept with one ear open for weeks.
Every few steps, Anselm ran his fingertips along a shelf of rolled charts as if checking for fever. His gaze went to the doors more often than it went to the apprentices. He caught himself doing it and tried to hide it, which only made it worse.
There had been whispers since dawn.
Thread-Inspectors were in the South Ward. Thread-Inspectors had closed a Hem-Guild shop on Lantern Street. Someone had been dragged out with their mouth sewn shut by a vow—no blood, no bruises, just silence where speech belonged. The crowd had watched, because crowds always watched, and because watching made them feel less likely to be next.
Lio had heard the rumor from a fishmonger on his way in. The fishmonger had lowered his voice like he was confessing sin. Lio had pretended not to care. Caring was visible. Visible things got snipped.
He'd also heard another whisper, quieter, more dangerous: *They're hunting an Unseamer.*
Unseaming was a word people said like it might hear you. Like saying it could loosen something in your mouth that shouldn't be loosened.
Lio tried not to think about it as he copied the Dominion's coastline with obedient strokes.
The Chart-Hall was built like a cathedral without gods. Vaulted ceiling, tall windows, long desks aligned like pews. Lamps hung in careful rows, each one glass-sheathed and watched by a clerk whose job was to make sure the wicks didn't smoke. Smoke stained paper. Smoke also hid things.
And lately, Lio had noticed something else—something he'd never said out loud. Some mornings, when the air was especially wet and the lamps burned a little too blue, the maps felt… attentive. Not alive, not exactly. More like they were listening for a command and waiting to hear if the city would give it.
He told himself it was superstition. He told himself that because the alternative was madness.
Then a bell chimed somewhere deeper in the building—two slow notes, then a third.
Not the hour. Not the shift-change.
The sound was wrong in a way Lio couldn't name at first. It wasn't just that it hadn't rung before. It was that the bell's tone seemed to settle on the paper like dust, as if the sound had weight.
Conversations died. Quills slowed.
Master Anselm stopped pacing.
Several apprentices lifted their heads with the same expression: practiced blankness. The kind of face you wore when you understood that reactions could be used as evidence.
Kerrin's gaze flicked toward the rear doors. "That's the inner bell," he murmured.
Lio's stomach tightened. "We don't have an inner bell."
"We do," Kerrin said, voice suddenly flatter. "When the hall is to be sealed."
As if on cue, two clerks moved toward the main entrance and slid the thick wooden bar into place. The sound—wood into iron—was quiet but final.
Lio's tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. Sealed meant no one came in. It also meant no one went out.
Master Anselm cleared his throat. The sound carried like a nail dragged across stone. "Set your quills down."
No one moved for the space of a heartbeat. The Chart-Hall's silence became a thing you could feel—wet paper breathing, timbers settling, the far-off sea pressing itself against the city's foundations with patient insistence.
"Now," Anselm repeated, with the brittle insistence of a man trying to keep his voice from shaking.
Quills were laid down. Some apprentices tried to do it quietly and failed; the clack of wood against table sounded like a dropped coin in a chapel.
Lio set his quill down as gently as he could, then placed his hands palm-down beside his unfinished map. His fingers twitched with the muscle memory of drawing. He forced them still. His heart thudded in his ribs like it wanted to run without him.
Anselm reached beneath his collar and drew out a key on a thin chain. The chain had left a pale groove against the skin of his neck, as if he'd been wearing the weight of it too long. He walked to the iron door labeled VAULT C and slid the key into the lock.
Kerrin leaned slightly toward Lio without quite looking at him. "Don't stare," he whispered.
"I wasn't," Lio whispered back, though his eyes had already betrayed him.
The key turned with a dull, reluctant sound. The lock clicked.
Then—very softly—something inside the door answered.
Not a second click. Not a bolt sliding.
A sigh.
Lio's skin tightened along his forearms. He knew the building's noises. The Chart-Hall groaned, creaked, complained like any old structure near the sea.
It didn't sigh.
Anselm pulled the door open.
A cold draft rolled out that didn't smell like mold or metal. It smelled like rain that hadn't happened yet.
"Remain seated," Anselm said, and tried for calm. "This is an audit of holdings. No one is accused of anything. No one is in danger if everyone is honest."
That last part landed wrong, like a note played off-key. Honesty had never made anyone safe in the Dominion. It only made them easier to find.
Three figures entered.
They wore plain dark coats, but the plainness was deliberate, chosen the way a knife was chosen: for lack of ornament. Their sleeves were cuffed with thin silver thread that caught lamplight and held it without shining.
Thread-Inspectors.
Lio recognized them by the way the air reacted. The hall's hush deepened, as though sound itself was afraid to travel too close.
The lead Inspector was a woman with hair cropped close to her skull, her face sharp and calm. No visible weapon. No visible stitch-marks at her wrists or throat—though the best seamworkers didn't show their sutures. Showing was for amateurs and martyrs.
Her gaze swept the desks with a physician's detachment. It paused on Anselm's throat, on the key-chain groove, then moved on.
"The Chart-Hall is a public trust," she said, voice steady enough to be boring. "The Dominion thanks you for your service."
No one responded. Gratitude from the Dominion wasn't a gift. It was a preface.
"We will inspect Vault C," she continued. "We will compare its holdings against the ledger registered with the Hem Licensing Bureau. We will confirm no unlicensed Patterns are stored here. We will confirm no illegal Unseaming artifacts are housed among the charts."
At the word *Unseaming*, the lamps flickered.
It was subtle—just a brief thinning of light—but Lio saw it, and he saw Kerrin's fingers tense around nothing.
Anselm bowed. "Of course, Inspector."
The woman stepped forward. The other two moved like shadows that had learned manners. One carried a narrow case of pale wood. The other carried nothing at all, which was somehow worse—empty hands meant whatever they needed, they could make.
The lead Inspector held out her hand. "The vault ledger."
Anselm hesitated for a fraction too long, then nodded toward a clerk. The clerk rose on trembling legs, crossed the hall, and retrieved a thick book bound in gray hide. Its spine bore a stamped seal: the Dominion's eye over a stitched circle.
As the ledger passed from hand to hand, Lio felt something inside his chest shift, as if an internal thread had been plucked.
He pressed his palm flat on the desk to steady himself. The paper beneath his fingers was cool and slightly damp, as always.
But then it wasn't.
For a moment—one blink's worth of time—the parchment under his palm felt warm. Not the warmth of sunlight. Not the warmth of skin.
The warmth of breath.
Lio froze. Slowly, as if the motion might startle the world, he lifted his hand.
Beneath his palm, faintly visible in the fibers of the parchment, was a line that hadn't been there a second before.
A hair-thin stroke of dark ink, fresh and wet.
His throat tightened. He glanced up instinctively, expecting Anselm to shout, expecting the Inspectors to turn as one and look straight at him.
No one looked.
The Inspectors were focused on the vault. The apprentices were focused on the Inspectors. The lamps were trying not to flicker again.
The ink-line on Lio's scrap paper lengthened.
He kept scrap paper beside him for testing his pen, for wiping excess ink, for practicing letters when Anselm wasn't watching. Cheap, rough fiber. Nothing official. Nothing that mattered.
And yet the line grew as if it mattered more than anything in the room.
It curved—no, it didn't curve. It decided to curve, like a thought forming.
Lio's breathing went shallow. His eyes locked on the motion he shouldn't be seeing.
The line became an outline—familiar in a way that made his stomach drop.
It was the coast.
Not the Dominion's official coast. Not the tidy lie.
The real one.
The coastline of the South Ward docks, drawn with the messy accuracy of lived experience—the angled pier where he'd once cut his foot as a child, the crooked warehouse that leaned like a drunk, the narrow alley that smelled of fish guts and cheap smoke.
The map was drawing Lio's memory.
But Lio's hands hovered above the desk, useless. His quill lay untouched beside his chart.
Another line appeared, darker and straighter.
This one was wrong.
It cut across the dock outline like a seam pulled too tight—straight, purposeful, violating geography. A boundary that didn't exist in the city but existed in… something else. The line felt like an instruction, and Lio hated it on instinct.
As soon as it formed, the skin on Lio's left wrist prickled.
He rolled his sleeve back a finger's width.
Nothing visible.
Still, the prickling intensified into a slow, deep itch, like healing skin beneath a bandage. Like a mark deciding whether it wanted to be seen.
The lead Inspector opened the pale wooden case. Inside lay a slender rod of bone or ivory etched with tiny notches. She held it above the ledger and moved it as if tasting the air.
Lio felt pressure behind his eyes. A thin, unpleasant squeeze, like someone pinching the bridge of his skull from the inside.
The notches on the rod glimmered faintly.
A tremor ran through the hall—not the building settling, not a wagon passing outside. This tremor came from the paper itself, from the countless maps stacked on shelves, rolled in tubes, pressed in drawers.
As if they all wanted to turn their faces in the same direction.
Lio had a sudden, irrational thought: *The maps are afraid.*
The lead Inspector's gaze snapped toward the desks.
For the first time, her expression changed—just a small tightening at the corner of her mouth. Like interest.
Her eyes moved, slow and methodical, scanning.
Not for contraband. Not for a hidden person.
For a *pattern*.
Lio's pulse hit hard enough to make his vision throb. He slid his scrap paper under his unfinished map with a movement so careful it felt like prayer. If he could hide it, maybe it would stop. Maybe it had only been—
Too late.
The itch on his wrist flared into sharp heat.
He bit the inside of his cheek to keep from reacting. Salt filled his mouth.
Across from him, Kerrin's eyes narrowed. Kerrin wasn't watching the Inspectors anymore.
He was watching Lio's hands.
Lio's fingers curled slightly, betraying him. Kerrin's gaze flicked to Lio's wrist, then back to Lio's face. Kerrin's mouth parted as if he'd noticed something he couldn't name and didn't want to name.
The lead Inspector took one step closer to the apprentice desks.
Just one.
The hall's sound thinned again, as if the air had been stitched shut. Lio could hear his own blood. He could hear the faint rasp of Kerrin's breathing. He could hear the sea far below, patient and hungry, grinding itself against stone.
He forced his gaze down as if he could pretend to be nothing but a boy with ink-stained fingers and a harmless life.
But the paper under his map was warm now—undeniably warm—like an animal hiding beneath cloth.
A whisper slid up through the grain of the desk, not through air but through matter:
*Found you.*
Lio's wrist burned.
He yanked his sleeve back without meaning to.
There, on the pale inside of his wrist, was a mark the color of old bruises: a thin circle with a short trailing line, like a needle threaded and ready to pull.
Not ink.
Not a wound.
A symbol that looked like it had always been under his skin and had only now remembered to show itself.
Kerrin's chair scraped back a fraction—an involuntary sound in a room that had become allergic to noise.
The lead Inspector's head turned precisely toward Lio.
Her eyes met his.
They weren't cruel. They weren't kind. They were the eyes of someone who believed in procedure the way other people believed in gods.
Behind her, Vault C—heavy iron, supposedly inert—gave that soft, impossible sigh again.
From inside the vault, something answered.
A single, clear knock.
As if a person stood on the other side of iron and centuries and had just heard Lio's name spoken aloud.
The lead Inspector smiled, very slightly, like someone who had completed a difficult stitch.
"Apprentice," she said. "Stand up. Show me your hands."
The knocking inside the vault came again—this time not a knock but the beginning of a rhythm, patient and sure, like a code tapping itself into the world.
Under Lio's unfinished map, the scrap paper shifted on its own.
A new line drew itself—straight toward the vault door.
And in the deepening hush of the Chart-Hall, Lio realized the worst part:
The map wasn't showing him where to run.
It was showing them where he was