They did not go like an army. They went like a rumor: small and fast, edges softened by the dark. Plans are polite things—you make them because politeness keeps people alive long enough to act—but the real work happened where plans met mud and breath. Miriam drew the route on a scrap of oiled paper, the lines frayed and exact. She marked the registrar barge's last known anchor and the way its escort cut slack in the current when it thought itself safe. Kade memorized the chords of the crossing: where the river chewed reeds, where the searchlight had blind spots, where a man could step from the dark into a space that would still be his.
They moved at an hour when the sky had not yet decided whether it would accept the day. Jun drank the last of a bitter coffee and rolled the cigarette between her fingers like it was a coin she might gamble. Elda strapped a coil of cable across her back that clinked. Rafi tested a small device—an improvised jammer—rolling it between his fingers like a nervous god. Miriam took a small satchel of papers and placed them in Kade's hands with a look that meant more than orders: trust. Halim's small bag, left behind in the mud where he had dropped it, had been scavenged by someone else; the loss of small things had the sting of being told you were less able than you'd believed.
"You sure about this?" Jun asked as they slipped into Tomas's shallow skiff. The motor coughed and then found a note of steady work. "If Corbin's already sorted lists, he'll have the barge under a hundred little locks."
"He locked the barge to make us feel small," Miriam said. "Locks are only as good as the people who tend them. We'll take what we can and we'll leave lines of confusion behind." Her eyes were measured. She had practiced the kind of patience that comes from keeping records rather than wielding weapons. This job unnerved her because it required less certitude than her stacks of paper ever had.
Tomas pushed off. The reeds swallowed wake and whisper. The settlement's shapes folded away behind them like a curtain. Kade felt the map under his jacket as if it were a second heartbeat. He rubbed the leather through cloth until the familiar bumping eased his edge. The map did not tell him anything new; it did not have to. It was enough that he carried it—enough that the book had already yanked the world into a different orbit, that because of it men with stamps and men with teeth had learned to hunt in the same way.
They approached the mouth where the registrars had moored like a chorus of gray teeth. Two barges lay anchored, their hulls rubbing against one another like indifferent giants. The larger barge had the registrar emblem painted clean on its side: a scale inside a circle. Men with clean jackets patrolled the deck, their boots making a sound like counting. Halim had been seen here earlier that day, and Kade imagined his friend bound and cuffed, hands bruised by the chain of a bureaucracy.
"Listen," Jun whispered. "Rafi, you're our noise. You jam the comms when we need you. Elda, you get the ladder down. Miriam, you—stay ready to bury things." She sounded almost calm, which in Jun's case meant she was terrifyingly prepared.
They moved in under the reed line until their dark boat brushed a shadow near the hull. Tomas let them slip into the black like something borrowed. Outside, muffled, the registrars sang their careful litany—roll call, manifest checking, the soft hum of lights. A radio crackled. Kade's fingers closed on the map until the leather warmed.
Rafi eased a small panel open and fed a spool of wire through, then set the jammer afloat—a device designed to throw a humming interference into a narrow band of radio frequency. It would not stop everything—this was not a world of miracles—but it would make a patch of silence the size of a boat, and silence was the currency they needed.
The jammer breathed and then watched the radios stutter in the dark. The registrars' men frowned and tapped their earpieces. They did not, however, leave the deck. Bureaucrats get nervous when their paperwork goes silent, but they do not act without a file. The confusion afforded them only a handful of minutes, maybe seconds stretched into the kind of thin elastic that could snap if tugged too hard.
Kade slipped up a rope-ladder that Elda had lowered with the sound and smell of metal against water. Up here the night smelled of diesel and the cleaner decay of metal that had been kept tidy. He moved like someone who had practiced the art of not being seen; the registrars were dangerous not because of their guns but because they thought themselves lawful. Men who believed in procedures do not always notice improvisations until the improvisation has already happened.
They reached the deck and melted into the shadows between crates. A pair of armed registrars paced by, chatting, their rifles slung like toys. Kade's lips made no sound. He felt old hands in his memory—hands that had once calibrated survey wheels and measured road beds—and he used those hands now to feel the grain of the planking and the thrum of the barge's hull.
Halim might be below, or he might have been moved. The registrars had the habit of moving valuable prisoners into deeper custody when they anticipated trouble. If they moved Halim, the trail would go cold fast. That possibility made Kade's stomach thin with bad math. He had to assume the worst and act as if the worst were a negotiation he could win.
Elda found the hatch to the lower deck and slid the padlock with a cautious twist. She had the easy, practical motion of someone who had once coaxed open machines that were older than she was. The lock split with a soft sound; it was cheap, and cheaper still for the registrars who had made a show of it—to be seen as secure, not actually to be secure.
They pushed the hatch. The smell that rolled up was the smell of things kept in plastic and quieted: old paper, disinfectant, the iron tang of fear. Voices down below, but not many. The registrars kept a small crew. Halim's presence might be in the human sense greater than the sum of those numbers.
Kade slid down the ladder. Jun followed, then Rafi and Elda. The lower deck was a low cathedral of stacked manifests and metal lockers. A single bulb hummed, throwing long, sensible shadows. Someone had been working here—charts were left open, a logbook half-filled. A chair had been overturned in haste, its legs like broken promises.
"Split," Jun mouthed. "I'll take the stern. Kade, you go starboard and sweep. Rafi, you watch the comms. Elda, chart exits."
They divided like bruised halves of something still stubborn. Kade swallowed and moved, heart a soft, recognizant drum. He kept his knife low, feeling for the bones of the place.
The first man he found was half-asleep, back against a stack of manifests, mouth slack. His radio lay on the deck and his earpiece had been removed. The jammer had done its work; they had a sliver of silence. Kade moved like a shadow and wrapped his forearm around the man's throat, not to choke but to hold. His fingers found the registrar's ID clipped to a strap. The name was crisp: Corbin, in a neat hand.
"My name's Kade," he whispered, because telling a truth to a face like that sometimes felt like an offering. The man did not look surprised; bureaucrats were used to names being spoken like liabilities.
They tied knots with the efficient brutality of people who had practiced restraint. They scavenged the registrar's keyring and found metal teeth stamped with district codes. Kade felt a small, private thrill at the clink of them. Keys are honest things; they tell stories you can't argue with.
They worked fast. Jun moved like a knife—quiet, efficient—and in the infernal, delicate minutes that followed they found a small holding cell compounded into the ship's bow. A man sat inside with his hands cuffed, battered, watching the slatted light. It was Halim.
Relief came hot and thin down Kade's spine, a bright flaring moment that made his breath catch. Halim's face registered hope and pain at the same instant. "Kade?" he croaked.
"You picked the worst possible boat to get locked on," Kade said with what passed for a grin. "Come on."
Jun pried the cuffs off with a practiced twist. Rafi jammed the lock and held the light. Halim's leg, the wound—old blood and new scab—bled a thin, stubborn line. "They had a plan to move me," Halim whispered. "They said… paperwork, then transit. I thought it was a lie, a way to get me aboard and keep me quiet."
"We're getting you off," Jun said. "Tomas is skiffed up outside. We've got minutes."
They moved through the bow with the care of men open to the chance they could be stopped at any second. Kade's fingers touched the map under his jacket like a benediction. He pressed his palm to Halim's shoulder as if to anchor him to the small string of life that was their escape.
They were almost to the hatch when a radio hissed—a sound that was a cold, slow betrayal. The jammer had been good, but not good forever. Someone had brought another device, or someone had walked up close enough to call out the alarm. The registrars knew.
"Move!" Jun snapped, and it was less an order than a sharpened fact. Men's boots began to pound above. Voices called in clipped protocol: "Unauthorized access. Hold the deck. Seal compartments."
Kade shoved Halim down the ladder first, then Jun, then himself. The ladder was a rope of urgency. They stepped into the skiff's belly and Tomas—blessed, solid Tomas—yanked them up the ladder like a boot swallowing a hand. Elda was last, hauling a crate of decoy manifests to the deck; she hissed a curse and then joined them.
The barge stirred to life in a stuttering, angry clatter. Alarms bled raw into the night. Above, on the deck, men flooded toward the stern with a speed that was administrative and brutal. Kade saw shadows moving with rifles like workers' tools.
Tomas shoved off. The hull's prow begged the water to swallow them whole. Bullets splattered, staccato, and one hit the skiff's motor. Tomas cursed and worked the choke, then found a note of speed that kept them going—the boat groaned and moved, reed and current and skill paying the toll.
They were not free. A light caught them—harsh and embarrassed—and a second skiff pushed onto their wake. Men in uniforms were fast on the water; the registrars had discipline on their side and numbers. The chase began as a low, furious geometry: boats weaving, commands barking, the river taking sides it had not meant to choose.
Jun steered a little, guiding Tomas through shortcuts that were the river's private highways, the kind only a man who'd manned an oar with desperation knew. Rafi's jammer flared and stuttered; its battery was not endless and reagents were not free. Their pursuers closed like a ledgering tide.
When the second skiff came up to their flank, a man leaned and fired. The bullet chewed into the rearboard and a splinter tore into Tomas's arm. Pain cut through the boat like a bell. Tomas swore and drove, teeth clenched. Kade felt the map under his jacket as if it too were bracing. The skiff lurched. The reed line approached like a green wall.
They dove into a narrow cut where the barge could not follow—the small, treacherous channels that had been hidden during the day. The pursuing boat tried to follow and tore its prop on a submerged timber. The chase blurred into muffled curses and the sound of machines dying with indignity. Tomas paddled with his good arm and his jaw set so tight it hurt.
They came out on the other side of the reed ring into a hidden cove where Halim staggered and vomited a little and then laughed, surprising and raw. They had the crate and Halim, and the registrars had a bruise on their side and a laundry list to explain. The victory felt small and greasy, but it was theirs.
They rowed back toward the settlement in the first, tentative light of dawn. The river accepted them like a thing that had heard the world's news and decided not to comment. Miriam was waiting with wraps and healing salves; Soraya met them with hands ready. People gathered in a hush that was not simply curiosity—there was a wary pride in the faces that had chosen to be loyal to one another rather than to a manifest.
Halim sat, head heavy in his hands, and looked at Kade with a thirst that had nothing to do with water. "You had a name on you," he said. "The vault called it. It drew them to you."
Kade did not have words that were clean. He touched the map's leather through cloth and felt the pull the way you feel a tide against a pier. "Names have weight," he said simply. "They buy you trouble."
Miriam unfurled the crate they had taken—the one registrars had meant to hide—and they unpacked carefully. The strips were damp but intact: records, lists, a small ledger with hand-written marginalia. One strip, folded and cracked at the edges, bore the same initials that Kade had swallowed: M.E. The notation alongside it was clearer now: Shutdown Sequence 27-Delta. Archive to Vault Zero. Restricted.
A hush fell like a curtain. Miriam's mouth pressed into a line she used when she was deciding whether to cry or to act. "This is worse and better," she said. "Worse because we now know they know, better because we have what we need to ask harder questions."
Kade held the strip as if it were a small, live thing. The name inside him felt less like a label and more like a hinge. He thought of the projection's voice, of Dr. Miriam Elad's recorded tincture, and of the ledger that the registrars had tried to write him into. They had two victories: a friend returned, and documents rescued. They had one problem: a whole bureaucracy had learned his name and decided it mattered.
The ledger had been read and now had demands. Men with clean boots would not let questions rest. They would follow leads and make lists and tick boxes until the world folded into their perfect, cold order. That was the thing they would now resist.
Kade pressed the strip to his chest as if to keep something warm. He met Jun's eyes—she looked like someone who had been woken to the truth and was ready to pay the cost. "We keep moving," he said. "We bury what we can't fight with and trade with those who won't sell us out. We learn the map's rhythm faster than they learn our name."
Miriam nodded. "We burn no bridges we need. We also burn what must not be cataloged."
Outside, the river whispered and the reed beds pressed close as if to guard the settlement with a cheap, natural secrecy. Kade let the map warm against his chest and thought about levers. Names buy doors opened, but they also buy attention. He had been named and the world had answered. The ledger had snagged him and people like Halim had paid for the fact. They would move now with the knowledge that the registrar's net would tighten.
But for the moment, in the small hush after a narrow victory, they were whole enough to breathe. Halim drank and laughed and fell asleep in a chair like someone who had slept for years. The map hummed a low, private note. Kade heard it and did what he had to do: he wrote a small entry in Miriam's ledger—a line that said who they had saved and what they had lost—and then crossed it out twice. Records are treacherous things; sometimes you write only to unwrite and keep the truth from becoming property.
The ledger would be hungry again by dusk. Men with stamps would return and set the barge's course like a compass. But their name, their small map, and their ragged kind of courage would not be ceded without a fight. Kade closed his hand around the map's leather and felt, for the first time since the vault had spoken his name, like a man who could answer.