Some streets are built to be walked. These were built to forget you were there.
The eastern lanes didn't hold shapes so much as the memory of them. Walls leaned at disgusted angles. Steps ended in gaps. Sand filled what water used to own and tried to finish the job. Signs hung unreadable, letters chewed off by grit.
Kade stood just past the threshold and let the ground speak. Instinct mapped weight lines through his ankles: a safe slab there, a treacherous skin of dust there, a plate pretending it could hold a man and half a horse and lying.
The voice again, from inside. Male. Young enough to hate being ignored. "Late."
Euthy raised two fingers and made a small circle in the air—eyes open. Then she stepped in, putting her weight where Kade would have anyway.
The Mist Horse dissolved and re-knit at the next patch of ground like it refused to be counted as mass in a place that kept a ledger.
[ZONE: SINKING LANES]
Hazards: subsidence lines; sudden flush; residual dwellers
Advisory: lateral movement > vertical force
Residual dwellers showed themselves exactly once: a cluster of slick shapes in a side pool where water had learned to be sand and hadn't let it go. They looked up, eye-pits clean of eyes. They didn't chase. Not yet.
"Left," Euthy said, and took it.
They moved like practicing surgeons—hands where they should be, breaths measured, conversation only where it had to live.
"The 'late' voice?" Kade asked.
"Bait," she said. "Or confidence. Either way, it wants time."
"What doesn't."
He listened for bells. He heard none. He heard a different rhythm: a slam, a scrape, a five-count, a slam. Someone barricading, unbarricading, indecisive in cycles.
"Up," Euthy said.
"Up is bad here."
"Still up."
A set of stairs climbed along a wall that didn't believe in load-bearing relationships. Kade tested each tread with a toe. The fourth pretended to be good and wasn't. Threads spiked into the wall, and he put weight only where the stone remembered being a stair and not a suggestion.
Halfway up, something moved under the stairs: long, jointed legs folding like knives. It tried to pick a tread and remove it from the problem set. Euthy pinned it with one thrust—steel through joint, piston through wet paper. It went still without a death.
"Gutterling," she said. "They borrow from old spiders and new knives."
"I liked them better when they were stories."
At the top, a landing. Beyond it, a corridor with one door wedged open by a ceramic jug. The jug was empty. Its shadow had weight.
Kade went first. The corridor tried to lean, failed, and complained in dust. The door had been barricaded from the inside with a table. The table had been moved. The cycle: slam; scrape; five; slam.
He pushed the door.
A man crouched at the back wall, hands up like someone who'd laughed too often when surrendering and knew the lines by heart. His hair was shaved at the sides and left long at the crown, a style that looked better with soap. He wore leather armor that had outlived the person who'd shown him how to fix it.
"Don't kill me," he said. "Yet."
Euthy leaned against the doorframe like she owned thresholds. "You said we're late."
"You are." He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. "They already moved the circle. Bearers don't stick around. They rotate. If you chase them, they make you chase the person holding the wrong piece."
Kade studied his eyes. No shake. No glassiness. No open hunger. There was a piece of a plan behind them, and people with plans lived longer than people with gear.
"What do you want," Kade said.
"Out," he said. "With my head attached. In return I'll walk you to a place where the ground hates everyone equally and the Bearers like to meet."
Euthy's mouth crooked. "You were a Bearer."
He laughed once. "No. I was bait."
Kade stepped in until he could take the man's wrist if he needed it. "Name."
"Rase."
"You lie pretty."
He shrugged. "I lie alive."
Kade looked at Euthy. She gave the smallest shrug he'd seen given honestly. Your call.
Kade sheathed one dagger. He left the other out. "Walk."
Rase squeezed past the table, then didn't take the corridor. He went through a hole in the wall Kade wouldn't have called a hole. A leaner man would have used it. Kade made it work by not caring if the stone had opinions.
The lanes rearranged around Rase like they were used to him. He turned where a tourist would die. He paused where someone in a hurry would be punished. After ten minutes, Kade allowed himself to think maybe.
The Mist Horse stopped.
Kade felt it before he registered the posture—the way muscle goes quiet in a dog that wants to growl but listens. He raised a hand. Euthy stopped on a tightrope of intact floorboard that could have decided to be a memory.
Rase froze like a drunk who remembered being a soldier.
A sound seeped up from below—a many-throated whisper pushed through canvas. It didn't have words. It had intention.
Ash Collectors.
"Up," Euthy said again, softer.
"No time," Kade said.
The floor bulged in three places and split along lines dust had already drawn. Robes rose. Hands reached. One of them held something that looked like a coin and a thorn and a word you weren't supposed to say out loud.
[CENSER SIGIL] — visual match: likely
Note: Bearer Circle uses rotating custody.
"Rase," Kade said. "Who carries it now."
"Depends on who got scared last," he said. "Probably the one with the least to lose. They move it when blood hits the floor."
"So we make them move it," Euthy said, and stepped, and cut.
Kade went high at the same time. Threads stapled a robe to a beam. The Mist Horse hit the third with its chest, not its hooves, like a battering ram made of winter. The robe rang like a bell.
The Ash Collectors didn't bleed. They gave up ash like they couldn't afford it, then pulled it back from the air, stingy. The one with the Sigil didn't engage at all. It slid sideways through two walls as if they were opinions.
Kade swore. "It's going."
He took the window that had been a window when glass had been a currency. The frame scraped his shoulders. He hit the adjacent landing low, rolled, and let Instinct pick a route over discontinuous stone. The Collector tried to take the shortest line between points; Kade took the only one.
He reached it where the lanes made a throat. The robe turned to meet him, tried to flat-hand his chest. Threads wrapped the wrist. Duskveil tightened the loop until the pseudo-bone inside remembered what strain was. Kade put a dagger into the point where you'd hide a heart if you were trying to be human.
The Sigil fell.
He didn't get to pick it up.
Someone else's hand was already there—gloved, slim, precise. Euthy. She'd taken the other path and met him at the mouth of the mistake like she'd designed it.
The Sigil landed in her palm. It was hot where the Downwell had been cold. It didn't look like a coin; it looked like a tiny censer lid, holes punched in a pattern that meant something to architects and liars.
[ACQUIRED: CENSER SIGIL (2/3)]
Activation status: 2/3
Remaining: Bearer Sigil
The Collector's wrist snapped free as if nothing had ever bound it. It recoiled into stone and became shadow again. Others rose where it left.
Rase's voice came from above them. "You two are trouble."
"Only when we're awake," Euthy said.
The lanes decided they'd had enough. The ground under the throat moved—not collapsed, not slumped; moved sideways like a rug. Kade lost his enemy and found gravity's sense of humor. He went toward a gap that didn't have a bottom.
A hand closed around his forearm. Not Euthy's. Too big. Too warm. He looked up.
Nor.
He held Kade like a man holds someone he hasn't decided to forgive. He hauled him back onto something that would be a floor if it behaved. Behind him, a second shape loomed—Rase, not helping, just watching to see which way the coin landed.
Kade stood. Nor didn't let go until he had to.
"You're late," Nor said.
"We were told," Kade said.
Nor's gaze flicked to Euthy, then to the Mist Horse, then back to Kade. He didn't bother hiding the calculation. He reached into his coat and took out a piece of metal wrapped in cloth. He didn't unwrap it; the cloth smoked at the edges where it touched.
"I found this before the lanes started shifting," he said. "Didn't know what it was. Figured you might."
Euthy's eyes narrowed. Kade didn't smile.
[ACQUIRED (by ally): BEARER SIGIL (unclaimed)]
Activation status potential: 3/3 (pending assembly at Portal Locus)
Note: Claiming requires intent + contact + cost.
"What cost," Nor said, flat.
The pane didn't answer. Of course it didn't.
Kade took a step closer. "We finish the set. We go to the Basin. We don't die on the way."
Rase licked a cracked lip and looked everywhere but at the cloth. "The circle's going to know you took it," he said. "They feel when weight leaves a hand."
"Let them feel," Euthy said. Her voice went soft in a way that meant people got cut in half. "Let them run."
Nor looked at Kade the way a man looks at a cliff and decides if he'll jump to make the point. "You have something else I should know about?"
Kade's pocket felt cold around the Downwell. His bandolier felt ordinary where the coordinate shard lay. Euthy's left inner pocket didn't look heavy now. It looked obedient.
"Plenty," Kade said.
The lanes sighed under them like an old man deciding to stand. Somewhere far off, a bell rang where no bell hung.
"We move," Kade said.
They did.
As they threaded back toward the Basin, the system laid a new line over the world—
[NOTICE — CIRCLE ALERTED]
Bearer Sigil custody: contested
Portal Locus: pulsing
Time limit update: –24:00 hours (attrition)
At the edge of the Basin, the ash began to fall upward.