The Hollow Bridge wasn't hollow the way a lie is hollow. It was hollow the way a flute is: a shape built to make air honest.
Azurehaven had laid it across the canal ages ago, a long rib of pale stone with a belly like a bell. Water slid under it in a wide rush, and the whole span hummed with a low, constant tone that changed with the day's wind and the weight of feet. People pretended it was just a crossing. The musicians pretended back.
By late afternoon, the bridge had gathered its regulars: a pair of old men playing bone flutes in thirds, a kid with a cracked tambourine, a woman with a bowed psaltery that sounded like silk torn on purpose. Aria sat on the central lip with her lute laid across her knees and the kind of patience that lets other people believe they're leading until it's safe to follow.
Goose came from the market with a new drum skin and the cheap shirt Joram had bullied him into, and the canteen hitting his hip like a metronome. Freedom rode his shoulder and made the precise, unimpressed face of a creature who considered all bridges practice for flying.
He paused at the mouth of the span and listened.
Four counts from the water. Two from the feet. A slow, delicious sway in the stone's belly tone. The air had an edge in it that meant the wind would turn at dusk. Aria's lute set a phrase down like chalk on stone: room for other hands to make a mess, room for someone to tidy up later.
He stepped into the flow, and it caught him. He tapped the new drum skin with two fingers—tak tak—and the bridge answered with a soft belly-note —mmm as if it had been waiting for him to ask.
Aria glanced up. Not much. Half-lidded acknowledgement. He settled on the low curb across from her and set his drum where the curve of the stone kissed sound back into his hands. He matched her phrase, not in notes—he didn't need them—but in shape. He gave her the question she'd left.
She smiled with one half of her mouth and moved the third note by a hair. If Chapter Four's marketplace had been a handshake, this was a tug at a sleeve.
They played.
It wasn't a performance. It was a conversation ten people were allowed to eavesdrop on and four were allowed to answer. The kid with the tambourine slotted in with bright impatience. The psaltery found the lute's shadow and wrote embroidery there. Goose set a low pulse under the whole, kept his hands loose, and let the bridge tell him when to be clever.
A translucent line in his periphery flickered, shy:
[Resonant Phrasing: Bridge Cadence Available]
Hold-Fast Beat (minor poise)
Unseen Step (footfall muffling)
He didn't stop. He eased the Hold-Fast into the second measure like you ease tea into hot water. It wasn't flashy—no magic sigils or glowing hands. The change was social, not spectral: the kid with the tambourine quit rushing. An old man's hands stopped shaking on the bone flute. A pair of dockworkers leaning on the rail straightened like their spines had remembered a better idea of themselves.
Aria heard it and, without looking, turned her phrase inside out to make room.
"There," she instructed the other players with a calm, steady voice, her eyes focused intently on the scene before her. "Stay right there."
On the fourth pass, Goose attempted the Unseen Step. He tapped his palm's heel against the rhythm, then slid his left hand forward just shy of the downstroke. Something changed beneath the bridge—the air thickened like honey poured over sound. Footsteps crossing above became muffled whispers. A pigeon perched nearby cocked its head, tested one tentative claw against stone as if stepping into invisible water, then withdrew both feet with a startled, bewildered hop.
Freedom, affronted at being neither seen nor the one causing the effect, practiced a long-suffering sigh.
The jam held for five minutes, then eight, then the sweet spot: twelve. Time enough for strangers to forget they'd meant to be somewhere else. When Aria finally closed the circle with a clipped cadence that meant we did the thing, don't gild it,claps rolled along the span like a wave striking piers.
A coin clinked into Aria's case. She didn't look at the rate; she looked at her hands. They told her more.
"Here," she said to Goose, as if continuing a conversation he'd joined hours ago. She plucked two short notes and tapped the top of his drum with the back of her knuckles—tak—tak. "That's your Hold-Fast. Keep it in your pocket for places with bad floors."
"And the other?"
"That one you don't teach to fools," she said, dryly. "You use it to leave them wondering how you vanished."
He grinned. "Ethical theft."
"Sound ethics," she deadpanned, then nodded her chin toward a knot of teens lingering a little too long near a merchant's back-basket. "Speaking of ethics."
The trio's rhythm was wrong. Goose didn't need to see hands; he heard intent. There's a tempo to honest curiosity (rush–rush–wait). There's a different one to practiced theft (wait–rush–rush). Their footfalls muffled themselves without help. One laughed too loudly, three counts before needing the cover.
Goose shifted to the edge of the curb, kept the drum at his knee, and brought Unseen Step up like a curtain over a stage no one had asked for.
Footfalls vanished within a five-pace bubble.
The kids took the bait—leaned into the quiet—and overreached. The tallest one reached to cut the basket thong with that smug, neat little flick thieves think is a signature. Goose waited until the blade freed the strap into his palm, then popped a tiny syncopation off the drumhead: tak—tak—mm—tak.
It hit like a stumble. The boy's knee jittered, his balance said no, and his hand forgot which finger held the knife. The blade kissed stone, not leather.
"Hey—" the merchant started.
Goose was already moving. Not heroic. Efficient. He slid his hand across the drumhead for a whisper shhhk that doubled as a set of footfalls going the other way—kids look where sound goes—and palm-muted a single dum right behind the tall one's left ear. The boy turned to face a weight that wasn't there and met Goose's forearm where his center of gravity used to be.
Down, not hard. Elira had taught him what it means to put a body down without shame.
As the tall boy's center of gravity shifted, Goose slid his forearm up and under, nudging him backward with the unyielding force of a bollard against a drifting skiff. The kid stumbled, arms flailing like a sparrow in a gale, and landed on his backside with a huff, his feet over his head. His companions' eyes went wide. Their steps faltered, unsure if they should stay or flee.
"Oops," Goose said nonchalantly. "Afraid you dropped something."
He held up the stolen blade, glinting in the fading sunlight.
The other two bolted.
They didn't get far. A long shadow unhooked itself from a parapet and stepped into both paths at once. Kaela's robe didn't flare; that would have been drama. She raised one hand, and two paper slips left her fingers like well-trained moths.
The seals landed soft. Their glyphs woke sharp. The kids stopped, legs attached to the idea of law for a breath long enough to let reality catch up and safety arrive.
"Easy," Goose told the boy at his knees. "Breathe."
"I was breathing fine!" the boy snarled, as people who want to cry do. "You took the air away."
"I borrowed the tempo," Goose replied. "You can have it back if you want it more than the knife."
The boy looked at his empty hands, angry and relieved at once, and shoved his wrists out toward Kaela without being asked. Resignation has a rhythm, too. She tied him loosely. Mercy is expensive now, but saves money later.
The merchant recovered the basket and his pride and pressed a cheap plum into Goose's palm in a ritual older than empires. "For the music," he said. "And for the gentle hands."
"Take it," Kaela told Goose when he hesitated. "No one gets to feel like a charity every hour of their lives."
She glanced at the boys. "You owe the bridge a day of work. Joram will find you something to carry that doesn't fit in your pockets."
They groaned.
Kaela's eyebrow raised. "Two days?"
"One," the tall one blurted.
After all, negotiation is a skill for the living.
"Bring your mother if she's alive," Kaela added, and the boy flinched like he'd been hit in a place you can't bandage. "Or someone who knows how you spoil."
The boys were marched gently away by a patrol who didn't bother inventing paperwork where shame had already done the work. Kaela watched them go with that detached kindness Goose recognized from old nurses and tired saints.
"You didn't break his wrist," she said.
"I like wrists," Goose said. "Useful for drums."
"Keep that habit." She tapped his drum head with two fingers and made a face. "Joram upgraded you. Good. Don't get attached. The skin will still split when you're excited."
"Heard," he said.
She tilted her head at Aria, who was fiddling with a tuning peg and pretending not to listen. "Don't let her talk you into tempo politics."
"That a thing?"
"Everything is a thing if too many people enjoy it," Kaela said. She started to turn, then paused. "Bridge sessions draw watchers. Don't play the same pattern three nights in a row."
"I'll try to be interesting," he said.
"Try to be alive," she said, and walked off into the crowd without making a single person startle.
Aria packed her coin with the kind of neatness that is part pride and part protection. "You disarmed someone with only rhythm," her voice akin to pointing out rain.
"Feels natural," Goose said. "I had a teacher who made me count everything."
"Let me guess," she said. "Windows. Radiators. Delivery trucks."
He looked up. She was watching him in that not-watching way again.
"You're new," she said, to change a subject she'd cracked open herself. "But you're not new."
"Is there a prize for answering that?" he asked.
"Only if you can play in seven," she said, smirking. "We do Hollow Sessions Even-days at twilight. No showboats. Bring everything you don't want to say out loud."
He nodded. "If I'm not dead."
"Fair," she said, and shouldered her case. "Try not to be."
A horn blared from the far end of the span, vulgar and joyous. The crowd turned like a school of fish.
"QUALIFIERS!" a barker roared from a little platform, hat too big, grin bigger. "GLADIATOR QUALIFIERS! Sign at the north ring! City writ to the top five, inner-tier postings to the top three! Bet with someone who deserves to keep your money!"
"Subtle," Aria murmured.
"Do you fight?" Goose asked.
"I argue with tempo," she said. "Sometimes that's the same thing." She looked him over, frank. "You?"
He thought of the Barrens and a mouth that wasn't a mouth hitting a wall that was a decision. He thought of a sigil lifting itself out of air to say no, like a brother says no when you're sober enough to hear it.
"Sometimes," he said.
She followed his gaze when it landed on the ring sign-up board posted at the bridge mouth. A line had already formed, a polite rush of people who believed in chance and training in equal portions.
Toward the front, a tall man with calm shoulders and hands like clean hinges was writing his name on the slate. His hair was pulled back. His eyes were the sort that do not change speed without a reason. He finished the stroke of the final letter, blew the dust off, and turned.
Khalid Rune saw Goose and smiled like a man greeting a colleague outside a funeral.
Goose did not mistake the warmth. It wasn't personal; it was professional appreciation of a problem worth solving.
"Afternoon," Khalid said when the crowd eased enough to exchange words. His voice had the roundness of someone who made a point of not raising it. "I hear there's a drummer who fights with patience. That's a fight I'd like to witness."
"I hear there's a martial artist who treats the arena like a prayer rug," Goose said. "The god I pray to enjoys melody."
Khalid's mouth curved. "Shall we see whose god listens?"
"Even-days," Aria murmured, amused into her collar.
Khalid's eyes flicked to the hatchling, to the drum, to Goose's stance. He catalogued the way good fighters do, and he did not sneer at the drum. That bought him a point, Goose didn't owe him.
"Tomorrow, second bell?" Khalid said. "Not for blood. For form."
"For form," Goose thought, then agreed.
Khalid dipped his chin and moved on, honest enough not to crowd his opponent before the match. The sign-up line swallowed him. Aria bumped Goose's shoulder with her case as she passed.
"Don't let him set the pulse," she said. "Even when you agree with it."
"Advice taken."
"And if you start to rush—"
"I won't."
"You will," she said. "Everyone does in front of a crowd. Make it look like intention."
He raised the drum. "I can do intention."
"Good," she said. "Azurehaven likes confidence. It forgives arrogance if you bleed for it."
She went. He stood with Freedom half-asleep at his collarbone, watching names chalked onto a board that promised a tidy war. Joram waved a sausage on a stick at him from across the way like a man bribing a dog away from a hedge. He smelled citrus and steel and hot water and a thin line of ozone that might have been the city reminding itself it was on a cliff.
Was this place really a game? This entire world was really all data? It felt so…
Real.
The device called the Dream Codex, which no one had explained to him, warmed under his palm. It wrote a single new line without his help:
[Threadbeat Logged: Bridge Cadence — Hold-Fast, Unseen Step]
Freedom nipped his ear with exaggerated tenderness and then pretended he hadn't.
"Tomorrow," Goose told the hatchling, the bridge, the city, the part of himself that shook less now that it had been asked to do something difficult in public. "We keep time."
Down the span, the barker bellowed something about discounted ale and regret. The bone flutes tried a minor key and laughed at themselves. Kaela's shadow touched the parapet and went without leaving shape.
Goose let his fingers rest on the drumhead and felt the bridge's hum come up into his hands. He and Aria had set something; it would keep.
He turned to go—and stopped, because a muralist had been busy while they played. The chalk dragon on the wall at the bridge's mouth now had its head lifted, and the child had moved one step closer, hand almost on scale.
Someone had written a single word under it in a small, careful hand:
Not yet.
Goose stared at the mural for a moment longer, then turned away. The city was talking; it was up to him to learn its language, or be left behind. He tapped his chest, as if to reassure himself that the Codex still lay there, waiting for his next move.
Joram was still waving the sausage ominously in his direction, and Goose knew better than to keep his boss waiting. Besides, he needed to figure out how to explain this whole "fighting in an arena" thing without raising too many questions.
He slipped through the crowd, already mentally running through the day's experiences, committing every note and nuance to memory. Azurehaven was a mystery, but it was one he intended to solve—one drumbeat at a time.