They left the room the way Abel left any place that had held him too long, as if he could make departure look incidental by refusing to look back.
Silas walked a half-step behind him until the corridor widened into the registry's main hall, then he drifted to Abel's side with a quietness that suggested intention. Abel disliked how quickly he had begun to accept that positioning. He also noticed, with a separate irritation, that he had not asked Silas to do it.
The hall smelled of paper and wax. It always had. The smell was not comforting. It was the odor of a life that insisted it was normal even while it rearranged itself.
Abel's body kept finding small errors.
A table edge was nearer than his hand expected. A doorway felt farther than it looked. The corridor's length seemed to stretch and contract as he walked, not by sight, but by sensation, as if the room wanted him to misstep and was offended when he did not.
He breathed through it, shallow at first, then deeper. He had learned in the last day that breathing was not only for staying alive. Breathing was a way to keep the world from taking advantage of panic.
At the far end of the hall, the bell rang. It sounded normal. That unsettled him more than if it had not.
Clerks did not stop. They did not flinch. They moved in small predictable ways, hands tightening around ledgers, shoulders aligning toward duties, feet turning toward the next task. The bell did not command them loudly. It reminded them of what they already believed.
Silas watched the clerks rather than the bell tower. "You spent years in here," he said. "Did you ever notice how the bell does not tell anyone what to do. It only tells them when it is acceptable to do it."
Abel kept his eyes forward. "That is what bells are for."
"That is what this bell is for." Silas's voice remained mild. Not gentle, not harsh. The voice of someone who liked ideas more than conclusions. "It is an important difference."
Abel wanted to argue, then felt his stomach lurch at a slight distortion of distance and chose silence instead. The bell's normality pressed on him like a clean cloth pressed to a wound. It did not soothe. It covered. They reached Abel's section.
The side passage that led to his desk had been roped off, a thin cord tied between two hooks that had never been used for anything meaningful before. Abel stopped, then forced himself to step closer. The cord looked childish. It still functioned.
A young clerk in a neat coat appeared at the corner, as if he had been waiting to be seen. His hands were ink-stained in the way of someone who worked rather than posed, but his eyes were too attentive. He did not look surprised to find Abel here.
"You can't enter," the clerk said. Abel stared. "That is my desk." The clerk's expression remained polite. "It is being reviewed." "By whom."
"By review," the clerk said, as if the word itself were a person. He lifted a thin stack of paper from a nearby table and held it with both hands, careful not to bend it. "If you require personal effects, you may request retrieval."
Abel felt his jaw tighten. "I will retrieve it myself." The clerk's politeness did not change, but his gaze flicked briefly to Silas and back. "You may not." Silas spoke before Abel could. "We will request retrieval." Abel turned on him. "No."
Silas did not look offended. He looked patient, which was worse. "You want the thing," Silas said. "Or you want the principle."
Abel swallowed hard. He hated being seen. He hated being seen accurately. "I want my notebook."
Silas nodded once, as if conceding a point in an argument he had not started. "Then request it."
The clerk slid a form across the table. The paper was thin, the ink fresh. Abel saw a stamp at the bottom, and the stamp's shape made his stomach tighten. Too exact, too purposeful, like a tool used to press reality into a particular outline.
Custody Acknowledgement. Retrieval of Personal Effects. Abel read it once. Then again. He told himself he was being careful. He knew he was stalling. The form had a space for an intermediary. The line was already filled. Matthieu.
The ink looked paler than the rest, as if written quickly, as if added after the form had been prepared for use.
Abel stared at the name until the letters began to feel unreal. He tried to summon an image of Matthieu writing it. He could not. He could summon the idea of Matthieu doing it, which was the same thing as blame, and that made him feel sick.
Silas's voice came quietly. "That is not an accident." His throat constricted. "Did he put it there." Silas's eyes stayed on the paper. "Does it matter." "It matters." Silas's mouth twitched, almost a smile, then stopped. "Good," he said. "Keep that instinct. It will hurt you less than the other one." Abel picked up the pen.
He hesitated, then signed. He told himself it was only a signature. He told himself he was not harming anyone. He told himself that if the system was going to use Matthieu, it would do so regardless of Abel's handwriting.
The thoughts were quick. None of them were clean.
The clerk stamped the paper. The stamp landed with a soft thud that sounded larger than it should have. The clerk wrote "notebook, leather-bound" in a neat hand and nodded as if the matter were settled. "Wait," the clerk said.
He vanished through the roped passage. Abel watched the cord sway slightly behind him and felt the urge to tear it down. He did not. The urge was childish. The cord would remain. A torn cord would become a story.
Silas leaned against the table edge, casual in posture, alert in eyes. "You signed fast," he said.
Abel stared at him. "You told me to." "I told you to request it," Silas said. "Not to stop thinking." Abel's face tightened. "Then explain. Explain why that name is there."
Silas looked out across the hall where clerks moved in obedience to the normal bell. "Because records prefer handles," he said. "Because blame wants a person, and the registry always has extra persons."
Abel's stomach rolled. The last day had taught him that nausea could be caused by more than illness. It could be caused by comprehension.
The clerk returned carrying Abel's notebook.
The leather was scuffed and familiar. The seam at the spine had been repaired by Abel's hand months ago, and the thread he had used was too thin. He had promised himself he would redo it properly. He had not.
The notebook looked unchanged. Abel knew better than to trust that. He took it with both hands. The weight steadied him for a heartbeat. The steadiness felt obscene, like relief purchased with someone else's risk. "Leave," Silas said. They did.
The hall tried to return Abel to its rhythm as he walked through it. He refused. He moved with shorter steps, the way a person moved on ice without admitting the ground was dangerous. He kept his face composed. He did not look for Matthieu. Looking would make him feel responsibility more sharply, and he did not know what he could do with that feeling yet.
At the doors, cold air met him and stung his lungs. He stood on the threshold until his body stopped trying to retch. The world tilted slightly, then corrected.
Silas watched him without pity. "You are learning," he said. Abel swallowed. "I would rather not." Silas's voice remained mild. "I understand. That does not change anything."
They took side streets rather than the main road, not because the side streets were safer, but because the main road was too obvious. Abel understood that now. Obvious routes were the routes the city had already prepared for people it intended to manage.
A small shrine sat in a wall niche. Someone had pinned a strip of paper beneath it with a nail, the paper curling at the edges. Abel wanted to read it. He wanted to know what kind of prayer a paper strip carried in a city that loved stamps.
He did not stop. Stopping was how the city found you.
Someone argued farther down the street. Abel could not hear the words, only the pattern of speech. Short sentences. Repeated. Neither voice willing to stretch into anything longer. He walked on without trying to listen more closely. Listening too closely to other people's disputes had never helped him.
Silas's gaze moved over windows, corners, doorways. Abel noticed the way Silas's attention treated the city as an adversary rather than a setting. It made Abel feel small. It also made him feel slightly less alone.
The smell reached him before the docks did. Water and fish, old wood soaked too many times to remember the first.
When the dock came into view, Abel felt a thin relief. Not safety. A change of rules.
The planks flexed beneath his weight. The sound was familiar enough that he did not look down. Looking down while walking the docks had never helped him. He kept his pace even and let his steps fall where they always had, until they didn't.
A board dipped under his foot, lower than he expected. His knee jolted. Pain ran up his leg in a bright pulse. He stepped around the dip and continued, irritated that he had forgotten something so small.
It would dry. It always dried. He had always relied on that. He had relied on time to correct small mistakes.
He saw the dip again ten paces later, and his irritation sharpened into unease.
The gaps were wrong.
Not the planks themselves. The spaces between them. The pattern. Abel could not have described the correct pattern on paper, but his body knew it. The gaps should have been consistent enough that you could walk without thinking. Here, they widened, then narrowed, then widened again as if someone had rearranged the dock's bones.
Silas watched Abel's face. "You feel it," he said. Abel did not answer. He did not want to admit that his body was now the first thing to notice lies.
The ink seller's stall was there. He noticed it before he meant to. The bottles were closer together now, nearly touching. The crooked line had been straightened. The glass still varied in thickness, catching the light unevenly, but the plank beneath them was clean.
Too clean.
Abel slowed without meaning to. Silas said, "Do not buy anything." "I am not," Abel said.
Silas nodded as if that satisfied him. It did not. It only proved Silas was watching, which meant someone else might be watching too.
Two men stood near the eastern berth counting crates. They were not the usual men. Their clothes were plain and serviceable, but newer than most. One called out numbers while the other wrote them down. They paused often, checking the count more than once. Abel watched until one of them shifted his stance, then looked away.
He told himself the men were none of his business. He had told himself that for years about many things.
A ship bell rang out over the water, low and steady. Abel watched the way bodies on the dock adjusted to it, as if the bell's sound had arranged them. A rope was lifted. A cart was turned. A gangplank was widened.
The bell did not sound threatening. That was the threat. Between masts Abel saw the Peregrine Quiet.
It did not look impressive. It looked prepared. Its gangplank was slightly wider than others. Handholds had been bolted where other ships relied on rope alone. The rope spacing near its berth was irregular in a way that looked sloppy until Abel watched a sailor choose the wider gap without thinking.
The ship looked like it had learned to live with wrongness.
On the deck, a woman stood near the rail, not working, watching. Her posture was relaxed but attentive, like someone listening to a conversation in another room. She glanced across the dock and her gaze passed over Abel without lingering, then returned again, briefly, in a way that felt like measurement rather than curiosity. Cysa.
Abel did not know her name yet. He only felt the effect of being seen by someone who did not blink first.
A laugh rose from farther along the deck. A man moved a crate that would have taken two dockhands. He did it with ease, then adjusted his grip as if the crate were awkward rather than heavy. He was enormous. His laughter sounded out of place, bright where everything else sounded strained. Rubezahl.
Again, Abel did not know the name. He only saw the shape, and the ease, and the way people near him moved as if his existence altered what was possible.
Silas watched the ship without staring. "That is your route," he said.
Abel's voice came out tight. "Then we go." "Not yet," Silas said.
Abel turned. "Why not."
Silas's expression remained mild. "Because you want to treat boarding as escape," he said. "It is not escape. It is a different system. If you arrive under attention, you bring the city's system with you."
Abel swallowed. He looked back toward the counting men. One had closed his ledger. The other had tucked his pencil behind his ear. They were no longer working. They were waiting. His stomach tightened into a hard knot.
He did not know if they were waiting for him. He only knew they were waiting for something. A dock bell rang sharply.
It sounded normal. The dock did not react like a room startled. It reacted like a room trained.
Bodies shifted. A cart rolled into a lane Abel had been unconsciously considering. A sailor stepped into the narrow gap between barrel stacks. The route that had existed a heartbeat ago ceased to exist.
Silas said quietly, "Keep walking." Abel walked.
They moved away from the Peregrine Quiet, not because Abel wanted to, but because he could feel the dock's lanes narrowing each time he considered a choice. He kept his pace even. He kept his eyes forward. He tried to look like someone with no urgency. Urgency leaked anyway.
Near the warehouse wall, a figure stepped from behind stacked nets. Matthieu.
Abel stopped so abruptly the world tilted. Nausea rose hard and fast. He steadied himself by placing his palm against the warehouse wood, rough under skin.
Matthieu's collar was buttoned too high. His hair was combed, but damp at the temples. His hands were clasped in front of him as if he had been told not to gesture.
He looked like a man trying to be harmless. "Abel," Matthieu said.
Abel heard strain in the name, as if Matthieu had used it too many times today.
Silas stayed silent. Abel knew Silas was listening. Abel knew Silas was also watching the dock.
Matthieu swallowed. "You should not be here," he said. Abel's jaw tightened. "Who told you that." Matthieu's eyes flicked toward Abel's notebook, then back to Abel's face. "He came back," Matthieu said. "He," Abel repeated.
Matthieu did not need to clarify. "The visitor," he said. Abel felt cold spread through him, slow and deliberate.
Matthieu's voice dropped. "He is asking questions. He is writing. He is making it look routine," Matthieu said. "If you speak to him, it can be done cleanly."
Abel stared at him. "Cleanly."
Matthieu flinched at the word as if he regretted using it, then forced himself to continue. "If you run, it becomes…" He struggled. "It becomes deliberate." A dock bell rang. Matthieu's shoulders tightened instantly.
Abel saw the reaction before Matthieu could hide it, and understood with a quiet dread that the bell's control reached farther than Abel had ever admitted.
Matthieu whispered, "He is coming." Abel's grip tightened on the notebook until the leather creaked. Silas spoke at last, voice low, almost conversational. "Matthieu," he said. "Did you write your name on Abel's custody form." Matthieu blinked. "What." Silas did not raise his voice. "The intermediary line." Matthieu's face drained of colour. "No," he said. "I did not." His stomach dropped.
Matthieu's eyes widened slightly, not with fear of Abel, but with fear of comprehension. "Abel," he whispered. "What did you sign."
Abel opened his mouth and found nothing. Behind them, the dock rearranged itself again with soft obedience. The bell's vibration faded.
Someone's boots approached on planks that flexed as if the dock were breathing.
Matthieu looked past Abel toward the wider lane and went still. Silas shifted his stance, subtle, placing his weight where he could move quickly. Abel did not feel ready. The city did not care.
The visitor stepped into view as if the dock had made room for him. And Abel understood, in a single silent pulse, that this chapter was not ending in departure. It was ending in constraint.