They met at the East Gate before first bell. The wall threw back the city's light in clean planes; beyond the arch, the Gloom barrier hummed like a held note.
Warden Fenn stood with her slate tucked under one arm, coat pinned tight, lantern capped. Selra bounced on her heels next to Kaelen, chewing something that crackled like sugar between her teeth. Vorrik Drenn arrived last, polished and unruffled, with a lantern that looked prepared to lecture lesser flames.
Fenn didn't waste the air. "Outer Ward patrol. Reports of missing persons near the barrier. If they're sleeping in gutters, we wake them. If they're being dragged through cracks, we cut hands."
She pointed, assigning with the tip of her chalk. "Drenn, with Jore. Myrren, with Kaelen. We take the spine road to Coil Street, then down to the culverts. Eyes on lantern lines and cradle seals. If you see a lens that looks clever, it's probably stupid. Don't touch anything you didn't bring."
They moved under the arch and out into the waking ward. The Outer Ward wasn't squalid; it was tired. Shops opened with the sighs of hinges; street vendors lit their first lamps with the economy of people who counted oil by spoons. The barrier's hum felt stronger here—closer to the skin.
"First missing?" Selra asked, falling into step beside Kaelen.
"Three nights ago," Fenn said over her shoulder. "Baker's boy on Salt Court. Before that: lamplighter off Flint Row. Before that: someone no one is willing to admit they knew."
"Why us?" Vorrik asked. He asked like a question was a tool with an edge.
"Because people stop lying when they see a Lightkeeper coat," Fenn said. "And if they don't, I step on their foot."
They took the spine road, broad, straight, designed to funnel crowds toward the gate in case of breach. Lantern poles here were taller, glass clean, wires tight. Kaelen felt them notice him as he walked. It wasn't mystical. It was habit; he'd spent his life watching flames.
On Coil Street, the light shifted. Houses leaned closer. Laundry lines cut the sky into narrow strips. The lanterns were closer to eye level, and their panes were a little dirtier, and their wicks a little shorter than they should've been.
Fenn stopped at an intersection with an unlit cradle bolted to a pole. The metal was scuffed around the bolts; someone had worked here with fast hands and no permission.
"Jore," Fenn said. The non-polished trainee with Vorrik, broad shoulders, steady face, stepped up with a toolkit. He opened the cradle's back panel and sucked his teeth. "Seal's been popped and re-stamped. Bad re-stamp."
Selra leaned around Kaelen, curious. "Smugglers?"
"Borrowers," Fenn said. "They take small sips from city lines and sell them to people outside the wall with better money and worse options. Most of them stick to old lines that can spare the theft." She tapped the panel. "This is a gate cradle. That's not sip work. That's a puncture."
Kaelen crouched and set two fingers on the metal. Heat memory traveled his skin, faint, messy. "Three days," he said. "Maybe four."
Vorrik's eyebrows lifted. "You guess by smell now?"
"By stain," Kaelen said, pointing at the glaze on the rim. "Oil burn leaves color. Fresh is amber. Old is black. This is… tired."
Selra bumped his shoulder. "Look at you, science."
They moved on. Coil Street emptied into a narrow square with a shrine that had been turned into a market stall. The saint was draped in fish nets; offerings were coins tucked under the broken toes. A woman with salt-stiff hair pointed them toward a courtyard.
"Three taken from that block in a month," she said. "We don't sleep much."
"Doors locked?" Fenn asked.
"Locks don't matter when no one knocks," the woman said, and turned back to gut a fish with professional rage.
In the courtyard, Kaelen saw the shape of a thing he knew from home: the way people make circles without thinking. Lanterns were hung at equal distances around the yard, but their lenses were mismatched, one frosted, one clear, one edged with little teeth like a gear. He stepped under the frosted one. The frost wasn't factory. It had been scrubbed with salt. The light it threw looked soft and kind and failed at edges.
"Selra," he said quietly.
She was there, breath sweet with stolen sugar, eyes bright. "Yes, apprentice of interesting."
"Flare small. Not at me." He stood where the light thinned in a crescent near the ground.
She breathed into her lantern and sent a fingertip beam across the space. The beam should've traveled straight. At the crescent it… bent. Not enough to be seen if you weren't looking for it. Enough to matter if something needed that bend.
"Lens trick," Selra murmured. "Somebody's redirecting light to make a blind seam."
"Who?" Vorrik asked, joining them with his tidy disapproval. "People with sandpaper and embarrassment?"
Fenn ignored the jab. "Jore?"
Jore bent, ran a hand along the lantern's bracket, then behind it along the pole. He found the culprit fast: a set of tiny mirrors glued to the back, angled to catch and slide light into a slit between stones at the base of the wall. He pried one free with a blade. The glue came up clean. The mirror's back was stamped with an ink mark in the shape of a narrow ledger book.
Selra whistled. "Ash Lane?"
Fenn's mouth made a line. "Or an admirer who wants us to think so."
Kaelen crouched at the seam. Cold bled from between the stones. Not the heavy, oceanic cold of the Gloom, this was a draft. A path. "There's a space behind this."
"Culverts," Fenn said. "Drainage runs under the ward and out toward the barrier. Doors down there are supposed to be barred and blessed."
"Supposed to be," Selra said.
Fenn straightened. "We go down. Drenn, you and Jore take the west stairs. Myrren, Kaelen, with me. If you see a door open when it shouldn't be, you shut it and you call. Do not go through."
They found the entry two streets over, an iron grate half-hidden by a shop's awning. Fenn wrapped her hand in cloth and lifted it like it weighed less than it did. The breath from below smelled like wet stone and old oil. Kaelen's lantern warmed at his wrist.
"Lanterns low," Fenn said. "We don't announce unless we must."
The steps led to a narrow tunnel that ran parallel to the wall. Water whispered along a shallow channel; the sound turned corners and returned as rumor. The city's ordered light didn't reach here; glow lived where you brought it.
Kaelen walked second, Fenn ahead, Selra behind, formation that said he's useful and needs not to die. The silver in the mortar lines glimmered here and there, old wards that had been painted a decade ago and touched up by the faithful and ignored by the practical.
They passed the first door: iron, bolted, seal intact. Fenn touched the mark the way the priestess had touched a basin rim, habit, not prayer.
At the second, the seal had been scraped and re-stamped. The stamp was wrong by a hair. Kaelen leaned close. A knife had copied a city sigil by hand. It was almost good enough.
"Almost," he said before he could stop himself.
Fenn glanced back once, approving without saying so. She set two fingers on the bolt. It slid too easily. The door creaked, complaining in a voice that wanted witnesses.
Behind it, a short tunnel sloped toward something that breathed cold. The stones were slick. Little mirrors were glued to them, sending any stray light past a corner.
Selra whispered, "I hate clever."
"Clever is how people live when they don't have walls," Fenn murmured. "And how they get other people killed when they do."
The tunnel opened into a chamber barely taller than Fenn. It shouldn't have had a light. It had a lot of them, lanterns like hunched birds around a crude contraption made of polished scrap. Mirrors angled to kiss each other's faces in a spiral. At the center, a glass flask the size of a fist glowed with stolen shine.
Jore's voice came faint from the west passage. "Found the other end. Same build."
"Don't touch the flask," Fenn said, stepping between Kaelen and the device. "Break the mirrors. Slow. If you crack the spiral, it'll dump."
Selra set her lantern on the floor and used a small knife to prise a mirror loose. Kaelen did the same, feeling the way light bent off his fingers and tried to obey. As they worked, a skitter ran along the far wall: claws on stone. Then another above them: more than claws.
Fenn's hand went up. "Hold."
Kaelen froze with a mirror half-lifted. A shape unpeeled from the stones near the ceiling, a Shadebeast the size of a dog with too many elbows, its skin glossy like wet ink. It blinked the wrong way and tested the air with a mouth that wasn't in its face.
Selra breathed, a thin flare ready. Fenn shook her head: Wait.
More skitters. Two, three, four, small, fast. A nest, startled by the change in light. They weren't what stole people. But they were what panicked rooms and got people cut.
"Kaelen," Fenn whispered, no louder than a thought. "Pulse on my count. Short. Don't flood."
He nodded. The pull inside him stood, eager, teeth bared. He set the count in his bones.
Fenn's fingers marked time. One, two, "Now."
Kaelen pushed. The pulse snapped out, tight as a clenched fist. It hit the nearest Shadebeast and threw it against the wall hard enough to smear. The others flinched, confused, then came in as a pack.
Selra's flare split into three, fast threads that slashed the left flank. Fenn stepped into the middle and drew a clean Arc that cut a leaper in half in midair, the beam thin enough to shave stone.
A small one slid under Kaelen's swing, fast as a rat, and bit for his boot. He dropped his lantern, caught the chain with his free hand, and jerked it low. The cage slammed the beast's skull with a sound like wet fruit. It went limp. He hated the way it felt.
"Right," Fenn said, and Kaelen didn't think, he set his beam to a blade and took the right, cutting tight lines across snapping mouths. His wrists burned. His stop held. His stop held. His stop—
Something bigger scraped in the tunnel they'd come through. Vorrik's voice came bright and far. "Visitors."
The chamber turned into angles and breath. Fenn's tone didn't change. "Mirror out. Flask last. Drenn, hold the mouth. Jore, with him."
Kaelen slid the last mirror free. The spiral loosened. The stolen glow in the flask dimmed, trapped with nowhere to run. Selra stuffed the flask into a thick cloth bag and tied it shut twice.
A man's boot scuffed stone in the tunnel, then stopped. A silhouette appeared at the edge of their light, human height, hood up, lantern in hand. Not a Lightkeeper lantern. Smaller. Meaner. It threw light in a nervous arc.
"Leave the bag," the man said. His voice tried to be steady. It had learned too many alleys to be honest.
Fenn didn't raise her lantern. "You brought Shadebeasts into a culvert under the wall. You're going to prison, and if you're lucky, not the dark part."
The man laughed, a single, brittle sound. "You don't know who owns this street."
"I do," Fenn said. "We do."
More boots behind the first, four men, maybe five. One had a curved blade. One had a mirror strapped to his forearm like a shield. Little lanterns bobbed. Light jittered over stone.
Vorrik stepped into the mouth of the tunnel, neat as a diagram, Jore at his shoulder. Vorrik's beam drew a line across the floor between smugglers and Lightkeepers like chalk. "Cross it," he said, "and I'll teach you about edges."
The man in front flinched. He lifted his lantern higher like light could make him important. The ink-stamped ledger mark on its base winked.
Selra leaned close to Kaelen without taking her eyes off the men. "Ash Lane," she breathed.
"On three," Fenn said softly. "Pulse. Push them back. We're not killing for mirrors."
"We could—" Vorrik began.
"Not today," Fenn said. "One. Two—"
Kaelen set the count. The pull in his chest surged forward, wanting to be more. He caught it. He held it. He made it work.
"Three," Fenn said.
The chamber filled with controlled thunder. Light slammed into men who had counted on panic and knives. They stumbled, cursed, fell back into the tunnel. Mirrors clattered. One lantern went out. The Shadebeasts that had wanted to be brave decided this was a bad room and fled through cracks.
"Go," Fenn said, already moving. "Door. Seal. Now."
They ran. Kaelen and Selra took the lead, flask bag tight in Selra's fist. Jore yanked the culvert door; Vorrik slammed the bolt with a sound that felt like relief pretending to be metal. Fenn slapped a new seal over the scraped mark, hers, clean and centered, and pressed until the wax cooled.
They stood there in the tunnel, backs to the door, listening to bootfalls retreat. Breaths counted themselves into normal. The barrier's hum came back like weather.
Selra grinned, shaky and wired. "First patrol," she said. "You didn't drown."
Kaelen exhaled a laugh that hurt. "You kept the bottle from exploding."
"Teamwork," she said. "Hate it. Need it."
Fenn took the bag from Selra, weighed it, and passed it to Kaelen. "Deliver to the archivist. Jore, log the cradle. Drenn, take names if the street wants to give them. If anyone asks, this was a leak inspection. If anyone insists, they can insist in front of a mirror at the Citadel."
Vorrik smoothed a nonexistent wrinkle out of his sleeve. "Ash Lane won't forget."
Fenn's look was dry. "Good. I'm tired of reminding them."
They climbed back toward light. When they reached the grate, Kaelen looked up at the morning's version of day and had the odd, foolish feeling that the city was relieved.
As they crossed Coil Street, a boy watching from a doorway caught Kaelen's eye and froze. He held a tiny paper lantern shaped like a fish. Its tail fluttered in the draft from the culvert. The boy's gaze flicked to Ashveil on Kaelen's arm and then to the bag in his hand.
"You're the one from the story," the boy whispered, like he'd discovered a thief in his own house.
"Don't tell that story," Kaelen said. "Tell one where you went inside before dark."
The boy nodded, vanishing into the shadows of his door. Selra elbowed Kaelen, amused and fond and a little sad. "Look at you," she said. "Recruiting."
"Fenn," Vorrik called from ahead. "We have another cradle with a bad seal."
"Of course we do," Fenn said. "This city leaks like a drunk."
Kaelen shifted the bag from hand to hand, feeling the dull throb of stolen Glow inside. It vibrated against his skin, hungry, thin, trapped. He wondered how many more bottles were hidden under streets that pretended to be safe.
He glanced back once at the grate they'd sealed. Cold air pressed against the new wax as if it had a memory.
"Keep walking," Fenn said.
He did. The lie kept pace. It felt heavier now, like truth learning how to carry itself.
He did. The lie kept pace. It felt heavier now, like truth learning how to carry itself.
They cut back through the ward with the culvert flask wrapped in Selra's double-knotted cloth. Fenn kept their pace brisk, answering every curious glance with a look that said leak inspection, just like she'd promised.
"Archivist first," Fenn said. "Then we sweep Ash Lane's front and see who pretends not to know us."
"Should we split?" Vorrik asked.
"No. They count heads before they count knives."
The Citadel swallowed them and traded street noise for polished echoes. Kaelen felt Ashveil warm against his forearm, the lantern's heat buzzing faintly at the presence of the flask.
The archivist didn't look surprised when they walked in, because she rarely did. She cleared a space with two efficient swipes of her forearm and set a brass ring on the table, etched with small runes that had learned not to brag.
"On the ring," she said.
Selra placed the bundle. The archivist unwrapped it, held the glass up to the lamp's soft glow, and watched the light inside the flask quiver like a hungry insect. She hummed, a sound that could have been a note or a worry.
"Spiral theft device," she said. "Not gutter work. The mirrors were cut true and set with a level hand. Whoever built it has done this before."
Fenn folded her arms. "We found ledger stamps on culvert mirrors."
"Of course you did," the archivist said mildly. "Ash Lane likes to sign what it didn't do."
Vorrik frowned. "So not them?"
"Maybe them," the archivist said. "Or a friend who borrows their sins. The lane is a ledger. Debts change hands."
She slid the flask into a copper sleeve and tightened a cap until the glow inside dulled to a sulk. "Where were the mirrors glued?"
"Stone seam below the lantern line," Kaelen said. "Angle bent the light into a blind crescent."
The archivist's gaze flicked to him, then to Ashveil. "You saw the bend."
"I felt it first," he admitted.
"You should stop that," she said, not unkindly. "Feeling is expensive."
A knock tapped the doorframe twice. A man in a neat black coat with a pin in the shape of a sunburst ledger stepped in, followed by a clerk with a satchel. He smiled like a receipt.
"Procurement Office," he said. "We'll take custody for disposal."
"Containment," the archivist corrected without looking at him. "Then disposal, maybe. Don't skip steps because your form has a smaller box."
His smile didn't change. "Of course."
He produced a paper and held it out to Fenn. "Classification Level Three. Language: 'Routine cradle tampering, minor siphon, no public hazard.' Please refrain from alarming the ward with speculation."
Fenn's eyebrow twitched. "Speculation is a luxury. Today we had Shadebeasts in a culvert."
"Which you handled," he said smoothly. "And which would be simpler to report as a routine leak."
Kaelen watched the way Fenn's jaw worked once, then stilled. She signed. The clerk sealed the flask in a dark pouch and tucked it into the satchel. The watcher's glance slid to Kaelen and stuck for a half-second too long.
"New recruit?" he asked.
"Trainee," Fenn said, done with the conversation.
Procurement departed on soft shoes. The archivist watched their backs and wrote a word on the corner of her ledger that Kaelen couldn't read upside down. It looked like Again.
"Anything else we should know?" Fenn asked.
"Yes," the archivist said. "People who steal light rarely stop at sips. And things that live in culverts aren't the ones funding mirror-cutters."
"Meaning?" Vorrik said.
"Meaning you should visit Ash Lane," she said, "and then visit whoever Ash Lane pretends not to know."
Fenn nodded once. "We'll sweep. Keep a copy of that classification."
"I keep copies," the archivist said. "It's a hobby."
Back in the corridor, Fenn set the pace for the East Gate. Selra fell in beside Kaelen, hands tucked into her sleeves like she was hiding more sugar.
"Procurement always that warm?" he asked.
"They like clean stories," she said. "Today's wasn't."
Vorrik matched their stride without announcing he was doing it. "Ash Lane is a waste of time. We should have pushed those men in the culvert harder."
"And set off a panic in the outer ward," Fenn said. "Lovely plan. We'll send you a chalk star."
He shut up, but his lantern threw a little extra shine for a few steps, as if it wanted to argue on its own.
They broke for a quick meal, broth that tasted of salt and discipline, then were back on the stones. Ash Lane began as a street and ended as a rumor: a braid of alleys stitched between old warehouses, where lines of lanterns ran perfectly straight and still somehow made more shadow.
People there wore the look of markets that had learned to be polite with their crimes. Kaelen saw a lens-mender's stand, a butcher, two stalls selling "lamp herbs" that did nothing, and five different tables offering mirrors the size of palms.
Fenn moved like she belonged, which is how you don't get followed. She didn't slow until they reached a shop with a narrow door and three mirrors arranged in a triangle above it. The inked ledger mark sat in one corner, a book spine, a slash, a dot.
Inside, the air smelled like tin and oil and the kind of paperwork that gets burned when visitors knock. An old man blinked behind the counter. His eyes were filmy, but his hands weren't.
"No repairs until afternoon," he said without looking up.
"We're not repairs," Fenn said.
He looked up. His smile appeared and stayed where it was told. "Lightkeepers. We are honored."
"Someone used your mirrors to bend gate light into a culvert spiral," Fenn said. "Shadebeasts liked it. I did not."
"Many people use mirrors," he said. "They are reflective like that."
Selra's eyes roamed the walls. "You cut true," she said, admiring despite herself. "Edges clean as a clock."
"Old hands have to be steady somewhere," he said.
Vorrik's tone made the word go cold. "Who buys the good edges?"
"Everyone," the man said. "Or the same five men with different hats."
Kaelen stepped closer to the counter and set his fingers on a hand mirror laid out for sale. Light crawled along the rim and gathered at a flaw, tiny, sharp, almost hidden. He tapped it. "Ash Lane stamp, lower left. Ink smears if you warm it. The ones in the culvert didn't smear."
The old man's smile thinned. "Then they were ours once and aren't now."
"Stolen?" Fenn asked.
"Purchased by someone who pays in cash and names other people," he said. "If I tell you which names, you'll visit the wrong door and they'll keep the next mirror cleaner."
Fenn studied him for a beat. "Keep your stock list handy," she said. "We'll be back."
They stepped out into the lane. Traffic shifted to let them through. Two boys pretending to dice watched with the practiced boredom of kids who double as lookouts.
Selra blew out a breath. "So much for easy."
"Easy is expensive," Fenn said. "We don't buy it."
They looped the ward until bell two shook the mirrors. No more bad seals. No more culvert doors ajar. The barrier's hum held steady. The city behaved.
At the gate, Fenn dismissed them with a nod that meant eat, breathe, report back when the bell makes you. Vorrik walked off without a word. Jore followed, rolling his shoulders like he hadn't decided if they still belonged to him.
Selra hooked an arm through Kaelen's. "Sugar?"
"I'll pay," he said.
"You will," she agreed, cheerful as a bill.
They found a stall that sold fried dough dusted with something that pretended to be cinnamon. Kaelen took a bite and felt the world tilt toward ordinary for three seconds. Then a bell rang far off—thin, sharp, a sound the ward didn't usually make. People paused. Lanterns near the spine road brightened a fraction, as if answering a question.
A runner in a brown vest cut through the crowd toward them, breathless. "Warden Fenn!" he called, then spotted Kaelen and Selra. "You, Lightkeeper squad, Gate Two needs eyes. Cradle burst on the line. Guard says it was a 'routine leak.' It's not."
Selra tossed the rest of her dough back onto the tray. "So much for sugar," she said.
Kaelen clipped Ashveil tight and felt the familiar pull inside him stand up. Not eager. Ready.
They ran.
The lane blurred into silver streets and then into the shadow of the wall. Ahead, Gate Two's lantern line spat light at uneven intervals, like a heartbeat with a stutter. A cradle on the fourth pole hung crooked, the seal split neatly down the middle with a blade that knew where to press. Oil leaked in a dark tear; something cold threaded the spill from below.
"Hold," Fenn snapped as they reached her. Her slate was gone; her lantern was up. "Drenn, left flank. Jore, right. Selra, Kaelen, on me. We keep the seam shut until the repairs get here or the wall learns new tricks."
Kaelen stepped to the mark. The Gloom pressed at the crack like a tongue testing a tooth. He set his breath to four and thought of circles. He didn't look at the line. He looked at Selra's shoulder and matched her light, seam to seam, until the stutter in the gate's heartbeat smoothed.
"Good," Fenn said. "Hold."
They did. The city breathed behind them, steady, ordinary, children arguing over paper lanterns, vendors shouting about fish, a life built on the quiet hope that the men and women at the wall would never blink.
Kaelen didn't blink.
When the repair squad arrived with tools and fresh seals, Fenn stepped back and let them do work they were glad to do. The hum evened. The pole stood right. The cradle stopped weeping.
Only then did Kaelen let the pull inside him lie down again. He locked Ashveil's cap and listened to his blood find its normal speed.
Fenn looked at the sealed mark, then at the street. "Ash Lane wanted to see what we'd do," she murmured.
Selra nudged Kaelen. "Tomorrow?"
"Tomorrow," he said.
The wall threw back the light in clean planes. Above it, the sky held its usual, patient dark. The city kept pretending it wasn't afraid.
For a while, it didn't have to.