Morning had a different edge when the city was hungry for answers. People moved like they'd swallowed knives and forgot how to hide the taste. Aminah felt it in the way the militia shifted—more watching than sleeping, a nervous cadence to the clatter of armor. The token sat on her table under a small square of glass Meren had insisted on. It looked harmless like a worry stone, but she didn't need to touch it to feel its weight.
Meren was already there, sleeves rolled, looking like a man who'd been up for days and decided he preferred it. He pushed a small metal tray across the table with samples on it—ash, a sliver of the kiln tag, Joss's bandage.
"It interacts with iron," he said without ceremony. "Not magically, not in the charming storybook way. It catalyzes a reaction. A binding. Flesh and sentence."
"Sentence?" Hasb asked. He kept his words blunt like weapons; it helped him not feel the hollow in his chest.
"A pattern," Meren said. "Say you write a vow on a page and then find a way to make the paper bite. The ash is the bite. With enough of it, that binding can force compliance—slow, subtle. You won't twitch; you'll do. Not through domination but through a kind of rewired habit."
Aminah swallowed. "So it's less demon, more discipline."
"Both," Meren said. "In the worst possible mix."
She thought of Joss and the hollow look in his eyes, and a new kind of anger braided through her. The kiln, the north hold, the merchant—this wasn't random. This was manufacture.
"We need to cut the market," she said. "Find the buyer chain and choke it."
"And the token?" Meren asked.
"Keep it locked," she said. "No one but me and you. If someone gets it, they'll know where to aim."
He nodded. "I'll write to the abbey. Quietly. Ask for a man who knows old bindings. If there's a class of old rites that mix with slag, he'll know the recipe."
A courier arrived with news that smelled like wet rope and sudden panic. Dzeko's face said someone else had tripped a wire.
"They moved a crate through the north hold at dawn," Dzeko said, breath tight. "Two men, one woman. They left with three seals blanked. They paid in coin that smelled like kiln waste. One of them had an edge scar on his forearm—looked like a branded mark. The foreman recognized the mark. Says he's seen it on smugglers who do the old digs."
"Any names?" Aminah asked.
Dzeko dropped his voice. "They used the name Venn. Carver Venn's people. But the woman—she wore a scarf with a half-cut knot. It was... odd. She looked like she knew the city."
Hasb made a low sound. "So they use our marks, hire local men, and vanish. The hole's inland."
"Then we go inland," Aminah said. "Small teams. Quiet. Nina, Leto, you take the west lane and circle the old kiln roads. Hasb takes the north gate and pins their exits. Dzeko and I handle the wharf lane. Meren, keep Joss alive."
Nina looked up like she'd been waiting for action. "We'll be ghosts," she said, more bravado than promise. "We'll find the women with the scarf and ask her why she has our names."
She left with a grin that didn't feel light to Aminah. Bravado could break into courage and bone just as easily.
Night came with a wind that tried to talk people out of sleep. The west lane smelled of damp brick; the old kiln roads felt like the backs of hands—rough, useful, the sort of place that remembered labor. Nina's team slipped down alleys that leaned into each other like gossip.
They saw men with halting steps, a watchman who looked skittish, a carpenter who'd been taking odd orders. At the market of used goods an old woman sold pots and kept her face like a coin she didn't trust.
Nina trailed the woman and noticed the scarf—no, a scrap with a half-knot—tucked into the stall's edge. The scrap matched the description Dzeko had given. Her pulse thudded in the small of her neck. She stepped closer like someone who'd been learning to bend without breaking.
"Old things sell cheap," she said, voice low. The woman looked like someone born with the smell of coal in her skin. Her eyes were flat, practiced not to give.
"You interested in old things?" the woman asked back. She made no attempt at civility.
Nina kept her face neutral. "Some of us are." She flashed a coin as if to buy trust. The woman made a small smile that didn't reach her eyes and tugged the scrap free.
"You're clever," the woman said. "Most kids don't notice the knot."
"Teach me," Nina said. It was a bluff in a bluffer's voice.
The woman's smile folded. "If you're clever, leave. Clever people die slow by curiosity."
Nina laughed, not a bright sound but a thin edge. "Not tonight."
The woman blinked and for a heartbeat something like grief crossed her face. She jerked a thumb toward the kiln roads. "There's a cellar by the old brickworks," she said. "They bury things there. People come. People leave. You won't like what they sell."
"We'll see," Nina said. She wanted to be insolent and useful both. The woman only shrugged and went back to weighing pots.
They found the brickworks by the smell—hot clay and old smoke—and a narrow door half-hidden behind a collapsed wall. Leto tested the jamb and then eased the door. It released odors like a mouth that hadn't been opened in years: dry, moldering, the faint dryness of something that had been long sealed.
Inside, someone had made a room in the basement. Crates sat in rows like quiet soldiers. The air was thick with a metallic dust that made their teeth catch.
Nina crept with the patient energy of someone who knew caution but preferred to flirt with danger. She saw a figure by the farthest row—woman, mid-thirties maybe, face half-turned, hands moving like she'd practiced making knots on a loom. A small lamp lit her face with a warm, almost human light.
"Hello," Nina said, too loud. The woman didn't start; she just turned and offered a smile that asked for nothing and judged everything.
"You're young," the woman said. "You don't know to be afraid."
"Teach me then," Nina said again, because she had to press. She kept her voice careful now, softer, like a blade wrapped in cloth.
The woman set a slender box on a table and untied it. Inside were bundles of ash wrapped in neat paper, each stamped faintly, not with the kiln mark but with the mimic sigil—one line of an eye carved into its seam. Nina felt her throat go dry. The ash glinted like powdered bone.
"What do you call these?" Leto whispered.
The woman looked at them like they were children and said, "Promise."
"Promise?" Nina asked. The word made her feel like the sky was a glass she could smash.
The woman nodded. "You use a promise written on the right skin and you sprinkle this where the body remembers to obey. It's not magic that screams. It's one that hums. Cheap and loud for the desperate. Expensive and quiet for the tidy."
"Who buys it?" Leto asked.
The woman's mouth tightened. "Men who want to build a city with hands that don't ask questions."
Nina's stomach turned. "Who gave you the family mark?"
The woman's face changed. For a second she looked like someone who'd been punched. "Don't you get it?" she said. "They stitch themselves into your walls. Leave your mark and someone dies soft."
"Who?"
The woman reached into a corner and produced a scrap of paper folded several times. She opened it and slid it across the table toward Nina. The handwriting was a quick, ugly scrawl—Aminah's family name, but abbreviated and signed with a single inked initial.
Nina's hands twitched. She recognized the brush in the ink like someone recognizes a voice. Her mouth went dry. "This says—"
The woman shrugged. "They sell it as foreign. They plant it as familiar. It gets the right hands to move. You've got a city that trusts marks. They sell marks. The smart ones buy our ash with their own sigils and get obedience stamped neat as a coin."
Nina looked at the others. Leto's face had gone pale. Farra swallowed hard.
"This is a set-up," Farra muttered. "They want us to look guilty."
"And if we show this to Aminah?" Leto asked. "She'll tighten. She'll point fingers."
"Then you show her the buyer," the woman said. "Or you shut up and walk away." Her voice was flat as metal. "You can do one or the other. People like you make choices. Which do you take?"
Nina felt something bright and ugly in her chest: anger that smelled like a raw wound. She had options, but the list of what to do right forever was short. She cupped the scrap of paper like something that could burn and whispered, "We have to tell her."
The woman's eyes narrowed. "You tell her and the kiln pays more. You don't and the city burns slower."
Nina folded the scrap into her palm and hid it. It felt heavier than the coin in her pocket.
They left the basement with two bundles of ash they pocketed like contraband and a little paper of accusation. The night air hit them like a hand. They moved fast, quieter than they'd come, until the brickwork collapsed back into night and the world smelled like rain and old clay.
Nina hated the way her chest tightened. She walked with her head down until a shape shifted in the alley and someone stepped out to block the path.
It was a man in a hood. He had the soft outline of a local—nothing noble, nothing frightening at first glance. His hand came up slow and simple. She recognized the braided badge on his wrist in the lamplight—militia braid, the same pattern as the cloth they'd found. Her skin went cold.
"Thought you'd leave a message?" the man said, voice casual, practiced. He smiled like he'd done this before.
Nina's instinct was to run. Her body moved and the man moved faster. A rope circled her wrist like a vine. She felt a prick at the base of her thumb—almost a sting, then a bloom of numbness that ran up her arm. She tried to scream and her mouth filled with the raw sound of breath gone wrong.
Leto lunged but the world blurred and his legs hit nothing. Farra grabbed at the man and he slipped like someone wet. Nina's knees folded and the alley tilted. The rope tightened.
"We don't need noise," the man whispered into her ear. "We don't like noise. It breaks the orders."
She could smell the ash on his hands. A small, satisfied thing moved in his smile. He tugged the rope and she felt herself dragged into shadow, the alley swallowing their shapes.
Before she lost the world, before panic took the shape of thought, she saw it: a tiny token clutched in the man's other hand. It was polished as if it had been rubbed for luck, and the mark on it was hers and not hers. Her chest slammed. She knew that mark.
She tried to spit the scrap of paper free from her palm but the numbness ate her fingers. Her tongue tasted metal.
"Mother," she breathed, because names are cogs and sometimes they fit in strange locks.
The man's laugh was quiet. "Sleep, child," he said. "We have a ledger for you."
He hauled her toward a cart shadowed by a tarp. The world narrowed to the scrape of rope and the slap of wet cloth and a token that looked like home and smelled like betrayal.
The alley closed around them. The city pretended it didn't hear, but someone at the kiln had read a name and smiled, and someone at the wharf had folded a crate and locked a secret.
Nina's last clear thought before the numbness dragged her under was not courage and not planning. It was only the terrible, small worry of a daughter: if they were using her family's mark, who else would they call by the right name?