The chimes began like dew shaking off spider silk—one, ten, a thousand—until the roofline glittered with sound. Circles of light opened in the sky and tilted to examine the city as a jeweler eyes a stone. Inside each circle floated a radiant scale, balanced not by weight but by confidence; on one pan, accusations stacked themselves into neat columns, on the other, a blank page waited to be impressed.
Selene drew both hands upward. Shade unhooked from wells and eaves and climbed, strand by strand, until it wove a fine net beneath the jury halos. The city exhaled as if the air had remembered that light has a partner.
"Keep it loose," Luna murmured, setting two magnets on the parapet and a third on the lip of a broken gargoyle. "A net catches only if it pretends to be air." She pulled a thin brass leaf from her case and traced two verbs along its edge—must and should—then pinched the hinges until each word began to apologize for itself.
The nearest halo re‑written a sentence in light: You must confess before we consider your needs.
Luna tapped the brass. The must wavered and—very politely—became might. The sentence lost its hunger and acquired a question mark. Selene's net lifted the dot and tucked it into shadow like a seed.
Across the square a witness kit had already opened on a stoop. Two women and a butcher's boy set three cups in a row, filled them from a kettle, and began to speak the way people do when they've decided a story will be true whether or not anyone important believes it: who had carried, who had cooked, who had chosen the tiring job without applause. The halo above them, annoyed to discover chores on the scale, drifted to find a simpler street and did not.
Cyrus planted his boots near the chimney with the cracked crown and laid one palm to his chest. The Oath cord thrummed a comfortable note. If the light tried to force kneeling into knees that did not consent, the pain would split and come to him first. He grinned at the noon, which is a difficult thing to do sincerely, and told it with his stance that he had time today.
Aragorn set the bell on the parapet so its lip kissed stone. The white stitch under the black brand on his wrist pulsed coolly, a metronome tucked beneath skin. He looked across the roofs and lanes, then down to the square where a mother held a sleeping child and pretended, beautifully, not to be afraid.
"We anchor," he said.
Luna's eyes flicked to him, then to the brass leaf. She knew the cost; she had an index for it. "Tie it to what lasts," she said. "Not to ideas. To something the city cannot help but keep."
Cyrus heard the decision and knocked once on his sternum, a hollow boom that bounced down gutters and came back from stairs. People felt the sound in their ankles, then in their teeth, then as a rhythm in the hands that held cups and bread and chalk. The district found its heartbeat in the shape of a job.
Aragorn pinched time.
He did not pull it flat and leave a slick on the day for the Artemis‑hound to lap. He slid a thread from the loom and looped it through the district's pulse, tying it off where breath thickened—at the exact moment before panic chooses a verb. Three seconds folded into the beat like extra cloth stitched into the hem of a child's sleeve. The world did not freeze; it simply agreed to hesitate in the right places.
The halo‑juries felt the anchor as a disrespect to schedule. Their scales dipped with a petty annoyance that reminded Aragorn of magistrates who do not like to be told there are more chairs to set. One halo wrote a sentence across the square like a warning banner: Kneel, receive, rise.
Selene moved her net as one adjusts a shawl on a grandmother. Shade provided the "kneel" all by itself; people sank because it was cooler under the net, not because the light had opinions. The "receive" became passing cups. The "rise" happened when chores called, and no one had time to be ceremonious about it.
A brighter circle dropped low, confident it had found a corner where the script of guilt could play without interruption. It examined a young man with soot on his hands and decided soot meant theft. Tam, standing behind the man with chalk on his fingers and defiance in his hair, wrote three words on the wall at shoulder height: HE FIXED STEPS. The circle tilted, astonished to find an annotation on its text, then blinked in embarrassment as three witnesses—none related to the young man—set down their cups and said they had used the steps since dawn.
The Artemis‑hound loped along the ridge line, collar quills tasting for missing frames. It slowed where the anchor lay, then sat, not frustrated—professionals aren't—but curious. It breathed in the synchronized beat and thumped its tail once, twice, as if acknowledging that this prey would be inconvenient to chase.
"Here," Luna said softly, sliding a magnet to the parapet's edge where wind likes to eavesdrop. "Let them weigh with us, not on us." She etched the curb with precise strokes, her script plain as bread: Illumination reveals; verdicts require shade, witnesses, and chores. The words sank into the stone. The stone seemed relieved to be asked to remember something it could feel under its own weight.
A particularly officious halo dropped the Radiant Scales directly into the square until the pans hovered level with people's faces. On one side the light placed an accusation—looting—attached not to acts but to a mood. On the other, the city stacked cups.
Cyrus half‑laughed, half‑coughed as the Oath redistributed a ribbon of nausea that would have made five knees buckle into one polite cramp in his side. He rode it out with a breath and a curse he didn't waste on god or jury.
Aragorn tightened the anchor's knot. Pain, immediate and electric, pecked behind his right eye—backlash's familiar beak. The ribbon of memory it took was thin and oddly shaped, a smell torn loose from a face. He knew summer rain. He knew hot stone. He could not, suddenly, remember who had taught him to love both. He swallowed the absence and stored it, like a bill tucked into a ledger column where payment would be honorable later.
Selene's voice laced through the square, low and patient. "If they ask you to confess, tell them who cooked. If they ask you to name your guilt, name the tool you carried. If they ask you to kneel, ask who watched." Her night made her words audible without being loud; haloes were forced to listen by etiquette, which is a power older than they are.
The scales found themselves flooded with small, tedious facts: ladders held, ropes did not, a boy tied two knots wrong and then right, a baker burned one loaf and saved ten. Light must look, and when it looks at work, it has less time for drama.
The Commander did not appear; verdicts were trying to perform without him and discovering that sunlight makes a poor judge unless someone tells it what to see. Instead, an auxiliary halo tried an end run: You should accept a clean designation, it wrote, trying to rename the ward while everyone was busy being good.
Luna pinched should into could with a twist of her brass leaf and then trimmed could into may if the mouths consent. Tam, grinning, chalked the neighborhood's true name along three gutters and a stray dog, who wagged its consent as if it had understood, which, in its way, it had.
"Anchor's holding," Cyrus reported, not because Aragorn needed proof, but because the street did. "If they try to rewind, they'll snag their hems."
As if to test him, the halo above the stoop rolled its scales back two seconds to see whether the cups would still be full and whether the butcher's boy would still say the woman's name correctly. The second hand caught on the anchor's knot and clicked. Time shook its head—no, not here—and kept walking.
The halo drew itself up, dignity offended by mechanics. It wrote an appeal that glowed with italicized patience: Only those with titles may testify.
Selene smiled, showing small, elegant teeth. "We got some," she said, and nodded at the square.
Grandmother. Midwife. Vendor. Runner. Neighbor. The titles stacked, bright as saints' names and twice as hardworking. The scales tipped toward these like plants toward sun.
The chime‑storm softened. Circles lifted, embarrassed to learn that their favorite trick—naming—worked poorly where names were already in warm circulation. A last halo tried a flourish, spinning a verdict sentence in cursive above the fountain: Guilty of inconvenience.
Aragorn let the bell hum once, low; the word guilty lost its appetite and settled for accurate but unhelpful. "We are," he agreed, aloud for everyone to hear. "Inconvenient. We recommend chores."
The halo went away to write a memo.
For a few breaths the roof was only roof, the rain only rain, the net only shade. People in the square discovered they were tired and allowed the discovery to stand. The anchor hummed with the district's pulse—work, work, work—and hid its own knots in the rhythm.
The first tremor came so gently it could have been a sigh from the heated stone below. The second was clarion: a bass note that vibrated crockery and temper at once. Down in the street a crack wrote itself across a wall in neat script like two hands deciding not to hold.
"Underground," Luna said, already folding brass. "Earth wants words."
Selene gathered the net, drip by unwilling drip, and wrung it into a long, dark ribbon that could become a rope or a lane or a door depending on who asked. Cyrus rolled his shoulders and took one last breath that tasted like hot bread and rain.
Aragorn bent, pressed his branded wrist to the curb, and untied the time anchor with a care that made the day forgive the knot. He had paid with a memory; the district had paid with breath. The city owed itself a stable floor before noon tried a new game.
"To the mines," he said.
The halo‑juries watched them go and, lacking chores, considered, for once, the possibility of adjournment.
— End of Episode 12 —