The ink was alive again.
It slithered along the feather-cracked quill, thick and clotted like a scab not yet ready to fall off. It clung to the parchment with a stubbornness Rin could feel in her molars. She dabbed the pen's point against the blotting cloth once, twice, thrice, but it still bled wide and angry when it met the next line in the ledger. The symbol, a triple-crossed tidehook, spread like rot through the paper's fibers.
Callun would notice. Callun always noticed.
She pressed her thumb against the edge of the parchment, smearing the left margin to hide the blotch. Her thumbprint left a crescent-shaped black smudge. When she lifted her hand, a faint red glimmer peeked through the ink. She'd split a cuticle again.
Behind her, the room groaned, wood swelling and contracting with the damp, and somewhere beyond the window, the salt-wind howled through Drownpost's skeletal wharves.
The counting house was a long, low room fashioned from warped shipwreck timber, bolted together and repainted so many times the walls resembled bruised barnacles. It had once been a holdfast for plague vessels, you could still see the rusted quarantine latches embedded in the floorboards, painted over but not forgotten.
Twelve desks crammed shoulder-to-shoulder, all stacked high with parchment, sea-charts, knot-coded manifests, and the ever-dripping gutterlanterns used to sear Crown marks into the vellum.
Only three of the desks were occupied.
One was Rin's. The second belonged to a boy with glassy eyes and a wrist tattoo of Crown tides, he copied quickly, soullessly, and reported anything you whispered to the overseers for a dry biscuit. She didn't know his name. He didn't offer it.
The third desk, nearest the broken window, belonged to Sarrha, a Varnari girl no older than sixteen, whip-thin, high-cheeked, with eel-black eyes and a missing left hand. She worked faster with one hand than most did with two, looping her brush-script in elegant lashes despite the constant reek of mildew and rainwater.
Varnari were reefkin, shell-born, humanoid but ocean-touched, with coral-glint veins and skin in tones of worn stone or sunless pearl. Sarrha's scales peeked faintly at her throat when she was frustrated. Varnari indentures were common in places like Drownpost; they weren't considered citizens under Crown law, temporary assets until they broke or drowned.
Sarrha never spoke unless spoken to. She also never looked down while writing, only ahead, like she was chasing something just beyond the ledger's edge.
Rin respected that.
Her own desk slouched in the back left corner, beneath a dripping slate beam that warbled with each breath of sea wind. Her stool was uneven, one leg propped by a folded page of an outdated salt-tax census. It was always slightly tilted, like the world was trying to slide her off it.
Beneath the lip of her desk, worn down over years of stolen moments, was a symbol Rin had carved with a paper-knife tip in her first month here: a swirling sail glyph. She'd seen it once on a dockhand's shoulder, an outlaw brand known as "storm-seeker." Supposed to mean those who chased freedom, not safety.
Her thumb found it now, tracing the spiral without looking.
One breath. Two. She let the pressure steady her pulse.
"Six crates of riverglass, marked under fictive trade," she muttered, copying from a water-wrinkled slip of parchment onto the main ledger. "Origin falsified to Sallahar. Recipient: Venn Drygoods. Approval mark…"
She squinted at the Crown glyph shaped like a backwards fishhook. "Sigil of… 'Importation Deceitfully Rendered'?"
"'Routinely Redirected,'" said a voice like wet driftwood from the next desk over.
Callun, of course.
Rin's spine tensed. She hadn't realized he'd come in.
Master Callun moved like old rope through water, slow, smooth, but always taut. His gray-and-yellow robes looked like mold growing across a noble's castoffs. He wasn't a large man, but somehow he took up the whole room. Especially when he hovered.
"You copy with the grace of a chafed clam, girl," he said, stepping behind her. "That blotch looks like someone bled a squid through their teeth."
"I'd apologize, Ssir," Rin said, dipping her quill again with exaggerated care, "but I'm afraid apologies aren't considered taxable."
He leaned in. His breath smelled of sea-vinegar and cheap ink. "Your smart mouth won't spare your fingers. Crown doesn't own your voice, just the rest of you."
She smiled, keeping her head down. "Of course, Ssir. Long live the ledger."
Callun didn't strike. He didn't need to.
Instead, he reached past her shoulder, plucked the half-good quill from her fingers, the one she'd nursed back from splintering for weeks, and replaced it with a warped one from a box near the radiator. It was frayed at the nib and bled like a ruptured eel.
He dropped it beside her parchment with a gentle finality.
"Show me the difference between adequacy and ambition, Rin," he said, and drifted back toward his desk.
Rin stared at the replacement quill for a long moment.
Then she picked it up, turned to a fresh sheet, and began again, each stroke deliberate, dragging the ink like it was blood drawn from stone.
Behind her, Sarrha hummed a shanty under her breath. Rin couldn't make out the words, but the water in her inkwell rippled, once, as if it were listening.
"Enough," said Callun, his voice as smooth and sour as dock vinegar. "Deliver the copy to Dock Six manifest. If it curls in the fog, I'll have your fingers."
Rin stood, made a slow mock-curtsy that wasn't quite insubordination, more like someone wiping mud off a boot, and slid the ledger into the stiff rawhide case.
As she passed Sarrha's desk, the Varnari girl paused in her writing for the first time that morning. Her head tilted, just slightly. One long-fingered hand lifted, her one good hand, and she hummed a single phrase of the tune from earlier. Low. Precise. Just four notes.
Rin didn't hum back. But her fingers twitched with the rhythm all the way to the door.
The counting house groaned behind her as the latch clicked shut.
Outside, the Gut was worse than usual.
The fog didn't move so much as loom, heavy as boiled milk and twice as sour, turning ropes into ghosts and buildings into leaning silhouettes. Rain misted in slow, sideways slaps that clung like fungus. The boards beneath her boots squelched with every step, soft from decades of sea-salt rot and dead barnacles.
She adjusted her grip on the ledger case and made her way downslope, toward Dockline Six.
Even with the scent of mold fresh in her nose, she preferred it to the ink-sweat reek of the counting room. The open air carried new flavors: bloodfish oils, burning brine from shrimp crates, damp kelp. Somewhere nearby, someone boiled sea cabbage in rancid pork broth, the unofficial stew of indenture kitchens.
As she rounded a rust-stained piling, two boys pushed a barrel past her, straining against a slope slick with fishgut jelly. One wore a tag-plate collar etched with the Crown's brand: 617. He looked about seven. The other, older boy had rope burns fresh across his knuckles.
"Mind your knees," the older one muttered, not unkindly. The younger never looked up.
Rin let them pass.
She reached Dock Six just as a bell tolled from the fog, four slow notes, a quarter measure each. A work shift's end. Already, figures were filtering into view: loading crews, marshrunners, bargehaulers with their weighted staves. She kept her eyes down.
At the end of the dock, beside a stack of cracked eel-jars, sat a man coiling rope in time to his own song.
He wasn't part of any crew. His coat was sea-worn but unmarked, stitched at the collar with blackthread seams and a button shaped like a fossilized tide-spine. His hair hung in damp knots down the back of his neck, and his skin was the color of old driftwood.
He hummed softly, a low, pulsing melody in six-time, the kind used by long-haul ship crews to sync their oar rows. She couldn't place the origin, but the tune was too sharp, too clean, too steady to be idle humming.
Rin slowed.
The rope in his hands coiled like it was alive. Not writhing, just... perfect. Precise. With each loop, the frayed hemp lay flat, settled without resistance, as if soothed by the sound itself.
The water beneath his boat stilled.
Rin stopped walking.
In the middle of a choppy tide, ringed by rain and swell, the patch under his skiff was utterly still, mirror-flat and almost shimmering. Her reflection stared back: sharp-cheeked, sunken-eyed, a streak of dried ink across her temple.
Three seconds.
Then the man inhaled sharply, like swallowing the last bar of the tune, and the water resumed moving.
She blinked. The calm patch vanished.
A voice came back to her: old dock superstition, spoken once by a reed-fingered woman mending nets in Thatchmere.
"Don't echo a dockshanty at dawn. The sea remembers who sings its children."
She kept moving.
At the dock registry station, a crooked shelter nailed into the back of a stilted tower, a girl no older than Rin leaned against a corroded stool, her cheeks tattooed with faint coral sigils that glimmered only when the light hit them sideways. One of her eyes was white-glazed, blind or synthetic. Her other eye didn't blink once as Rin approached.
"Form," she said flatly, holding out a leather-gloved hand.
Rin passed over the manifest.
The girl scanned it, paused, and frowned. "Seal's marred. Windrub, maybe. Maybe sabotage."
"I copied it direct from Callun's ledger," Rin said smoothly. "Crown-stamped, pre-scrolled."
"Looks like the ink bled." The girl turned the case slightly. "Could've been waterlogged."
Rin leaned in. "Look closer. That's a Redlead smudge. Harbormaster's brand. They use it to mark scrolls with altered relic citations."
The girl squinted, sniffed the page.
"…Tide eat me," she muttered. "You're right."
She handed the case back. "Tell Callun to rub his glyphs with salt before stamping next time. Or I'll submit a noise complaint for ledger distortion."
"I'll be sure to use small words."
The girl snorted. "Name's Erina, by the way. You owe me a drink now."
Rin blinked.
Then grinned.
"Put it on my imaginary tab."
The wind followed Rin halfway back to the counting house.
By the time she reached the crooked stairs and ducked under the warped lintel, it had gone still again, no gulls, no foghorns, not even the damp rattle of rain on wood. Just a heavy hush, like the world heldwas holding its breath.
She paused at the threshold, wiped sea mist from her cheek with the sleeve of her ink-stained blouse, and pushed the door open with her shoulder.
Inside, the silence sat like a debt unpaid.
No creaking. No muttering. Even the ever-dripping gutterlanterns seemed reluctant to hiss.
Callun wasn't at his desk. Neither was the spy boy.
Only Sarrha remained, her one good hand gliding across her ledger with elegant, almost priestly rhythm. The coral traceries on her neck pulsed faintly with her breath, like an echo too quiet to be real.
She didn't look up when Rin entered. But she did pause, just once, and let her fingers lift off the page as if listening to the air.
The door to the inner office was ajar.
That door was almost never open.
Rin set the ledger case down gently on the front table, moving slow enough to be invisible. Her boots made no sound. Her heartbeat did.
Then she heard the voice.
"…You noticed the girl at the ledgerhouse," the man said, voice dry as old parchment. "Keep your eye on her. The pattern's already begun to shift."
Callun's reply was curt, defensive. "She's obedient. Copies what she's told, no more."
"Your records suggest otherwise," the man murmured. "A minor tremor was logged last month. Faint, but present. The kind that follows improper containment."
A pause stretched between them.
Rin crept one step closer, just enough to catch a glimpse through the warped glass panel set into the office wall.
The man seated across from Callun was thin, clean, and angular in a way that didn't belong to anything living. He wore a formal half-cloak lined with wet vellum fringe, and a high-necked tunic the color of drowned parchment. A relic-sigil glowed faintly at his collar, not Crown-regulated, but older, spiraled in seven broken points like a shattered compass.
His left hand was gloved.
Not leather-gloved. Sealed, in thick, salt-stiff waxcloth, bound with cord, as though it contained something dangerous.
He looked up sharply.
Rin stepped back from the glass before he could see her. She didn't breathe.
From the office, Callun said, "If I'd known the Unmaking would ripple this far.."
"You didn't," said the man.
The door closed with a whisper-soft click.
Rin returned to her desk like she'd never left it. Her hands shook just once as she settled. Then not again.
She stared at the top shelf of discards above her workstation, a pile of rarely touched tax-lost scrolls and rain-soaked ephemera.
One strip stood out.
Water-warped. Slightly curled. The edges of the paper browned, as if old tea had been spilled across it. She'd seen it there for days, but now it looked… different.
She reached up, slowly, and drew the scrap down into her lap.
At first glance, the ink was faint. Black-brown, but not faded, dull. The way stone looks when light refuses to touch it.
The glyphs weren't Crown standard. Not relic script either.
A verse. Or the ruin of one.
Rin waited until the counting house emptied.
Callun departed first, all vinegar breath and brittle smugness, his boots tapping a slow, deliberate rhythm across the warped boards like he expected them to salute. Sarrha followed soon after, quiet as her ledgerwork, a coral shadow gliding between the lanterns. She didn't speak. Just paused at the threshold for half a heartbeat, one glance over her shoulder, then vanished into the fog beyond the counting house door.
The silence left behind was not comforting.
Rin counted the seconds until the air settled, until the door finished its tired creak closed, until the floor no longer trembled from any footfall but her own nervous shift. The lamps above hummed faintly, flickering with swamp-fed oil and old copper wires. Their amber light cast long shadows across the water-warped ledgers.
She waited longer still.
Outside, the sky muttered. The drizzle had returned, a fine, misting wet that soaked slowly into shingles and boots and bone. Beneath the floorboards, something groaned.
She pulled the parchment from her sleeve.
It felt heavier than it should.
She laid it flat on her desk, ink-stained, scar-notched, gently curved like it had been curled in a scroll for years. The edge bore a faint red-brown tint. Paper didn't look like this unless it had survived too much.
The words on the page were clean.
Eight lines. Sharp, black script. Unfaded, but also unreceptive, it did not catch light or throw shine, only drank it. Crown ink dried matte; this looked like scorched obsidian.
She leaned in, letting the edges of the desk press faintly into her forearms. The spiral-sail glyph she'd carved beneath the desk felt like a hidden heartbeat under her fingers.
Hesitating, she hummed.
Just a gentle echo of what she imagined the verse's rhythm might be, two bars of breath and then a half-stumble into a second stanza. Her tone was low, wavering. She tapped once on the desk to keep tempo.
Nothing happened.
The lanternlight didn't flicker. The timber didn't shift.
The parchment remained motionless.
Of course it did.
She rolled her eyes at herself, at the room, at the persistent itch of possibility that kept scratching at her ribs.
Still… it had been worth trying.
She cleared her throat. Checked the door. No movement, no creaks. Just the endless hush of sea-dampened wood and the occasional drip into one of the mold-crusted pails set near the back wall.
This time, she read the verse aloud.
Clearly, like reciting a prayer no one asked to hear.
"Salt-skin split and memory drowned,
Names unthreaded, ties unwound.
Ash from the tide, bone from the sky,
Dead men's bells will never lie.
Where sails have torn, the voice will bind.
In silent wake, the song confined.
Let marrow crack and reckon spill,
The drowned shall listen, and be still…"
As the last syllable left her lips, something shifted.
The lantern above her desk didn't dim, but the sound around her… did.
Not abruptly. Not all at once. The damp creak of distant piers, the hush-howl of marsh winds squeezing between shanty boards, the breathy cries of gulls over the low-tide muck, they all began to soften.
Rin froze.
This wasn't the sacred silence of churches or the sharp absence of breath before danger.
This was muffled presence.
The air itself thickened, dense like it carried memory in vapor form. The smell of brine grew sharper, richer, like a wet rope pulled from a long-drowned cellar. The sea was still out there, just past the walls, but now it sounded further away.
The desk under her fingertips no longer felt like swamp-rotted pine. It felt… level. Anchored. Like the floor itself had stopped swaying with the tide.
Her pulse quickened.
This wasn't a trick of the mind. She'd known a hundred kinds of quiet in her life, the calculated hush of whip-cracks waiting to fall, the strained stillness before bad weather, the beaten silence of other slaves who'd forgotten the sound of hope.
This was not that.
This was the world pausing to listen.
She looked down. The verse had not changed. No lines vanished. No ink bled. It stared back up at her, as stoic and cold as it had always been, but now with the weight of attention.
The flame of the nearest lantern had narrowed into a thin blue lick of light, heatless.
And beneath her, carved long ago with the chipped edge of a ferrule screw, her spiral-sail symbol pulsed faintly with warmth.
Her throat dried. She pressed her thumb against the carving, feeling its slight ridge.
Outside, a gull called once. Then even that stopped.
She stayed very still for several breaths.
The hush began to recede. Slowly. The waves returned first, soft lapping against the mud-slicked dock pylons. Then the groan of ropes. Then the faint rumble of a wagon's wheels far uphill.
Only when the room felt real again did she fold the parchment and slide it back beneath her ledger. No hiding spot, just proximity. It wasn't contraband. Not yet.
But it was hers.