Dusk put a skin on Paper Street.
The old print shop wore scaffolding, filter stacks laid out like organ pipes along the wall, Juno's chalk Xs marking where the flue would drink. A Blue Lamp hung at the back door like a quiet star. Etta blinked honest on Oren's beat—blink, two, three, four, blink—and the lamppost answered as if the rhythm had always belonged to the street.
"Side-channel is live," Nyx said, satin over wire. "Hands Channel. Ambient only. Names by consent. Minor filter hard. Hearing timer at five hours and change."
[Hands Channel — Live (Ambient)]
[Hearing: Corridor Exception Review — 05:13:27]
[Feed Mode: Hands/Objects/Tools only; No faces]
Hands tied a teal ribbon to the ombuds pole. Hands slid a filter into a frame. Hands wrote Due Rations on a chalkboard. Hands folded a paper crane and tucked it under the Blue Lamp like a secret.
"Anchor event," Murmur said, appearing with fingertip microphones and rumor cards, voice pitched for a room, not a lens. "Bring one object you'd keep in a flood. Say what it is with your hands."
Sister Irena stood the Blue Lamp on a crate and smudged the bowl with ash, making the light kinder. "Hands at the X," she said. "Names only if you want them. No faces."
Kite climbed his milk crate and tapped a cardboard sign that read HANDS AT THE X in his neat hand. Next to it: a jar labeled THANKS and another labeled COMPLAINTS. He set a smaller bowl beside them for the Memorial: a porcelain dish with a crack running through the glaze like a little map.
Leon set the Civic Ledger on a wood pallet, tapped the cover once to steady himself, twice to tell the part of him that liked applause to sit down. Juno's case sat next to it, boss-class plate wrapped in a towel like an honest, heavy word. The Producer memo sat under a paperweight—a bolt Oren had saved and named Etta's First Gift.
Matron Feroce moved under her teal lantern with her ledger and small brass stamp. She touched the rim of the bowl. "We are here to sell tea, not grief," she said, soft. "But we will drink with grief if it behaves."
"Begin," Murmur said.
Hands came forward.
Brutus laid his clinic-blue patch on the crate—just a square of cloth stitched to the coat with thread that didn't match. He smoothed it once with his thumb. He didn't say what it was. He didn't have to. He lifted his hands, palms open.
[Public Presence — +Calm (Warden radius)]
[Hands Channel: +Audience; +Trust]
[Glass Saint tipped +150 Favor: "A vow made of thread."]
Mae set a jar on the crate. IOUs folded small, the paper soft at the edges from being passed back to hands that hadn't expected to be trusted. She uncapped a marker and wrote PAID across the top of three and slid them into the THANKS jar. Her fingers did the talking. The Blue Lamp turned the gesture into a law.
[Merit: +5 (Trust economy on display)]
[Craft House tipped +100 Favor: "Receipts as ritual."]
Oren laid down a red plastic tag that once read DO NOT OPERATE and now had a notch cut into it where someone had carried it as a key. He tapped Etta's panel twice with his knuckles. "She's pretty," he said, not to the feed. The tag looked good next to the bolt.
Juno set her leaf-printed gloves in the light and a glass pipette the size of a pen. She turned the pipette between her fingers and then laid it down like a person giving up a vice. "Keep it breathing," she wrote on a scrap. She slid it under the glove.
Sister Irena put her chipped porcelain chalice in the Blue Lamp's ring, the crack catching the light. She set a small paper list beneath it—names written in a hand that had practiced not shaking. She touched each name with two fingers.
[Memorial — Hands-Only: Names read at Unseen Work]
[Hands Channel: +Audience; +Emotion Credit (Pilot)]
Kite stepped down and set a jam jar of blue buttons on the crate. He shook it once; the buttons clicked like rain on tin. He put his palm over the lid as if swearing. He didn't take his hand away until the bowl had made the gesture official.
A runner in a too-big rain jacket slid in at the seam. Quiet Choir's boy. He held a folded black cloth with four short white lines that weren't quite rays and set it beside the Blue Lamp with two hands like he was offering a letter to someone he didn't hate. Sister Irena rested her palm on it and nodded, gratitude and warning at once.
[Quiet Choir: +Notice ("Kept corridor dark")]
[Policy: Clinic Corridor — Exception hearing—05:08:42]
Matron Feroce set her tea scoop in the light, a worn bit of metal that had measured comfort for decades. She stamped the paper beside it with a teal loop that looked like patience drawn to scale. "If your Foundry stinks," she said, to Juno, to the bowl, to the world, "this scoop becomes a knife."
Juno tapped the filter stack nearest her, rueful. "Air logs weekly," she wrote on a card, and slid it into the Ombuds box.
Trickster inserted a quadcopter the size of a dinner plate with a pie snuggled into its claws, smiling face iced in blueberry. It drifted toward the crate with that generous hunger only mischief accomplishes. Brutus stepped forward the exact degree it takes to rescue a joke from becoming a cruelty. He lifted a palm; the drone kissed it. He set the pie on the pallet like porcelain and pointed his chin at the THANKS jar.
"Auction," Kite announced, solemn. "Clinic filters."
Caps clinked into THANKS. Murmur wrote PIE FOR FILTERS on a card with a small smile and slid it under Thanks like a prayer.
[Trickster Attempt: Meme Insert — Neutralized]
[Public: +Goodwill]
[Glass Saint tipped +100 Favor: "Elegance in refusal (again)."]
[Trickster: −100 Favor ("Spoilsport.")]
A woman's hands placed a cold pack on the crate and a sticker with a Blue Lamp drawn on it in children's pen. She adjusted the pack like a person who had practiced steady with shaking inside. She didn't turn her face toward anything. Mae reached across and laid a hand next to hers—just touching the wood—and left it there until the hand on the cold pack steadied.
[Merit: +5 (Clinic trust)]
[Hands Channel: +Emotion Credit (Pilot)]
Dawnshield turned the corner with a banner folded like a plan. CLEAN GRID MIRACLE had been retired; GIFT OF HOPE — COMMUNITY DONOR DRIVE took its place. A halo-cam found light helpfully as ever. Kade stepped forward with a smile tuned to a sympathetic pitch.
"Neighbors," he called to no one and to everyone, halo-cam lifted at a polite height. "Join us to give—"
A lamplighter lifted a Blue Lamp between Kade's halo and the crate. The bowl turned faces into law. Kade's mouth kept speaking; the words slid off the light like rain off polished stone. He adjusted the angle. The bowl adjusted with him. Politeness met policy; policy won.
[Editor's Cut: Applied — Halo trim; Dignity Zone enforced]
[Public Notice: Consent inside clinics; Bowls mandatory; No minors]
[Hands Channel: +Retention; +Pilot Credit Accrual]
Nyx purred, unable to keep all the pride out. "The Saint is buying ribbon," she said. "Policy Memo is stalking the Complaints box in my imagination."
Thole arrived like a bill in a place that had just finished dinner.
Gray suit hedged its bets on decade, ring fat, smile sympathetic and empty. He held a folded plastic portfolio like a man bringing scripture to a fight about irrigation. " Architect," he said, giving the word too much spin. "Efficiency House recognizes your grid needs. A modest 'transmission efficiency fee' on captured Ether would keep the city competitive. Ten percent. We waive penalties for your—admirable—siphon."
Leon lifted the portfolio by its edge and opened it on the pallet under the Blue Lamp, hands only, face nowhere. The clause read like a snake. REFERENTIAL TARIFF; BRAND SYNDICATION; EXCLUSIVE LOWER-THIRD RIGHTS.
Mae clicked her pen once and wrote a line across the bottom that had kept people alive for two days and would keep more if they let it: No external logos in civic institutions or markets without Council approval. She tapped the words with the pen's back end.
"Public Works Clause," Tarek said, stepping in with his little notebook and tabs of medical tape. "Emergency appropriation; no private claims to grid assets in a declared crisis; seizure with receipts."
Leon put his finger on a paragraph and, without changing his voice, read it the way you read a charge you're about to prove. "Exclusive—" he let the word expire under the Blue Lamp "—lower-third rights." He pushed the paper into the Ombuds Complaints box. Murmur pinned it to a board, and the lamplight made it look smaller than it had sounded.
"Interest remains," Thole said, smiling. "We fund miracles. You fund drains and mops."
"We sweep before we sing," Leon said.
Matron Feroce's stare traveled across the paper and made it law. "He brings paperwork," she said. "We have bowls."
Thole's smile thinned. He palmed a card across the pallet anyway, a small rectangle winking Greed House's logo in understated gold. Kite picked it up with two fingers like a dead thing and dropped it into COMPLAINTS.
[Greed House: −300 Favor ("Hostility to efficiency.")]
[Craft House tipped +150 Favor: "Fine print autopsy."]
Hands kept coming.
Tarek set an old bodycam on the crate—face down. He taped a small piece of paper to it: WRITE, NOT FILM. He wedged it under the edge of the bowl as if to keep a table from wobbling.
Murmur slid a card under the lamp with a thin drawing of a microphone: FINGERTIP—NOT FACES. They lifted the recorder so it saw hands tying ribbons and nothing else.
Nadia's hands—not her face—set a used insulin pen case next to the chalice. She took a cap from Kite for the THANKS jar like a person who understood economies both material and moral.
Brutus turned a wrist for a kid in the Warden ring and made the boy smile by accident. He didn't smile back, so the kid would own his own grin.
Oren tightened a bolt on a filter frame half a turn with his fingers. "Pretty," he told Etta's new friend, a smaller balancer box he'd bolted to the print shop's wall.
Juno wiped the rim of a mixing tank with a cloth like a penitent, then wrote AIR LOGS in grease pencil where a camera couldn't make it sexy.
The Hands Channel crawl kept telling verbs aloud in a gentle voice you didn't have to like to respect: hands tying a ribbon; hands sliding a filter; hands counting caps in the THANKS jar; hands writing a name on a Memorial card without trembling; hands setting down a lineman's tag; hands setting down a tea scoop; hands setting down a black cloth with four short lines that refused to become rays.
[Hands Channel — Pilot: Emotion Credit accrual: +42% of required]
[Trust: +6 (Ward 4)]
[Saint'sChalice: "Emotion without faces. Approved."]
[War House: −150 Favor ("I need elbows.")]
Nyx breathed a laugh she didn't quite believe belonged to her. "We are boring them on purpose and they are thanking us for it," she said. "Hearing timer: 04:07:58. We can buy another hour if you give Craft House a schematic they can drool over."
Juno obliged by laying the Blueprint Card on the pallet under the lamp.
[Blueprint Card: Bio-Foundry (Structure)]
– Function: Convert chitin/biomass → protein paste, medical grafts, chitin plating
– Cost: Ether 800 + Merit 100 + Law: Organ Donation Opt-In (met)
– Side-effect: Attracts scavengers unless waste processed (Recycling Plant)
– Synergy: Clinic + Market Charter = "Closed Loop" (−15% upkeep; +5% Hope)
She traced the flue, the filter stacks, the back door to the bowl with a gloved finger. She wrote OUTFLOW → FILTER → QUIET and underlined quiet once.
[Craft House tipped +300 Favor: "Machine with conscience (diagrammed)."]
A tremor wrote a bass note under everyone's boots. The brace at the bakery drain hummed a tired tenor and shut up. Oren pressed his hand to Etta's panel and murmured, "Good girl."
"Widow?" Tamsin asked, bowl tilted to listen.
"Busy chasing a halo," Oren said, satisfied. "Detuned note worked. She hates art."
Kade's crew rotated their banner twice and managed to make it face a camera and nobody else. Brutus's hands were visible and honest. Tarek's notebook tab for DUTY TO RETREAT glowed dull but sure. Sister Irena held the bowl like a beat.
"Ad in 01:30," Nyx said. "Anchor moment now if you want to milk credit without milking people."
Leon didn't step forward. He lifted his pen and brushed its tip against the Ledger's margin where names lived. He wrote a new line instead of a speech:
Hands Night — Not a show. A vow.
Sister Irena touched the list under the chalice with two fingers. "Names," she said. She read them aloud—not faces—first names and an initial, slow enough for a hand to tie a ribbon on each. Kite passed the ribbons out like a clerk of a gentle court. The Blue Lamp's ring made the names into law.
[Hands Channel — Anchor Delivered]
[Emotion Credit: Threshold met (Side-channel Pilot)]
[Hearing Timer Bonus: +01:00:00]
[Glass Saint tipped +400 Favor: "A ritual instead of a spectacle."]
Nyx's voice softened like porcelain cooling. "We bought an hour," she said. "Corridor Exception hearing acknowledges Side-channel Pilot. They want you 'on camera' at the table in four hours."
"They can have my hands," Leon said.
He turned a page in the Ledger and wrote down a schedule no producer would like: Foundry phase two—filter frames—Unseen Work shift; Paper Street corridor posted; Tram coils—secure in bracket; Wardens—night rotation.
Thole lingered with the ring on his finger and the empty portfolio under his arm like a habit. He watched a pie become filters and looked confused without knowing how to perform it. He put his card on the pallet again. Kite swallowed a face he wanted to make and slid the card into COMPLAINTS without being red.
Dawnshield's halo hunted for a child's brave face and found bowls, bowls, bowls. Kade bowed to no one and left, his smile tuned for obligations instead of rooms.
The quiet under the grate moved. The brace held. The pipe scratched its name once under the city to remind itself it was there and decided to be patient.
The Hands Channel crawl added a verb that made Nyx exhale like a compliment: hands setting a table. Not a metaphor. A plank, two trestles, a cloth. A place to work.
"Closing montage," Nyx said. "Then we break to teapots. You can drop an announcement they'll tolerate."
Leon raised his voice just enough to carry to people who didn't like being carried to. "Foundry build resumes," he said. "Unseen Work shift. Wardens training tomorrow. Tram coils docked. Hands Night weekly. If you have an object you'd keep in a flood, bring it next time. We'll count it. We count what we keep."
[Trust: +8]
[Merit: +20]
[Hands Channel — Pilot: Approved for 24h Category Credit (Corridor Exception)]
[Hearing: 04:01:12]
"Message from Policy," Nyx said, voice went business. "Hands Channel recognized as 'Human Interest Ambient.' Corridor Exception under review but shielded for 24 hours if you deliver two more 'anchors' this week. Tonight counts as one."
"Good," Leon said. "We'll make anchors out of mops."
Matron Feroce stamped a schedule with her loop. "Market Holidays posted tomorrow. Vendors who honored bowls keep priority. Those who didn't get the stare and a new chance."
"The stare is policy," Leon said, and wrote it down because it was true.
A low crack sounded from the bakery drain. Not a break. A sigh loosening the mortar. Oren put his hand on the grate and said, "Pretty," like it mattered. It did. Pipes like praise.
Nyx's overlay slid a quiet warning into Leon's eye.
[Greed House Probe: Tram Yard Fee — Petition filed (Producer Lobby)]
[Widow: Remembered note — latency reduced (watch dusk raids)]
[Hearing: 03:59:58]
"We'll argue the fee with receipts," Leon said. "And hum the wrong note at the Widow again if we have to."
He tapped the Ledger once. He didn't need the second tap.
"Hands Night ends," Sister Irena said, lifting the bowl so the ring broke and the air returned to weather. "Unseen Work begins."
Juno pulled on her leaf gloves and set the filter frames into their cradle. Oren bolted a brace that would keep the flue from sulking. Brutus stood in a doorway and let a lamplighter pass under the bowl. Mae counted caps in THANKS with a small, fierce smile a camera would have ruined. Kite drew a blue circle on a button with a marker and dropped it into a jar.
Across the block, a halo lost interest and went to find a face that would make an easier story.
Leon lifted the Foundry Blueprint Card into the lamplight one last time and then slid it away. "We pass laws," he said, to the board, to the bowl, to the pen. "We keep them. We build with what's left."
Nyx inhaled, not a sigh so much as a composer finding the next bar. "Four hours," she said. "Hearing table. They'll try to turn your hands into a face. Bring your Ledger. Bring your bowl."
The lamppost blinked—blink, two, three, four, blink—honest. The pipe under the grate decided not to wake anybody up tonight. The case with a jawplate in it felt like a promise that could afford to wait until morning, which is to say the city had bought itself one more hour.
[Cliff: Corridor hearing in 04:00:00; Greed House fee petition; Foundry build phase 2 underway; Widow latency reduced for next raid]