Iron & Sixth tasted like pennies and hot rain.
The tram feeder ran overhead in a taut line, singing a pitch human ears called headache. On the corner, Dawnshield's van idled with its halo-cam up, banner neatly rolled like a throat waiting to sing. Two crew in white jackets flitted around a pedestal light as if the light could bless them.
Nyx's voice touched Leon's ear—satin over wire, edges sharpened. "Widow harmonics spiking," she said. "Their halo flicker sweetens the note. If they posture under it, she'll eat the posture."
"Hands-only," Leon said. "Ambient feed. Dignity zone on my mark. No faces. Bowls first."
He set the Civic Ledger on a transformer box scarred by old stickers and tapped the cover once to steady himself, twice to warn his appetite for applause to sit down. The inside of his mask fogged and cleared like it remembered what lungs were for.
Oren Dawes ran a thumb along the hot stick like a rosary, ear tilted to the line. "She's here," he said. "Hangs like a spider between frequencies. Don't look for eyes. Listen for manners."
Brutus stood at the curb with his hands visible, presence doing more than any baton. Tamsin Quell had a Blue Lamp held bowl-high, the light a portable law. Mae had a canvas sling folded under one arm—a habit and a tool.
"Saint's watching," Nyx murmured. "War is stretching like something that remembers elbows. Trickster is preheating a pie tin."
"Editor's Cut armed," Leon said. "Halo trims on intrusion."
He walked to the mouth of the alley that funneled into Sixth and pointed where the law would exist. "Dignity zone," he said, voice pitched for a room, not a lens. "Hands where the cameras can see them. Bowls between. No minors."
Kade Wolfe stepped toward the Blue Lamp's ring like a man who had brought the right smile to the wrong door. His white jacket turned the dusk blue. "Architect," he called, affable iron. "Together? We've got donors watching."
Leon angled his head so the mask didn't fog. He did not meet the halo. "Hands-only," he said. "Bowls first. Or the bowl goes on your lens."
Kade's jaw twitched a degree. He lifted his hand to direct his crew to a "better" angle. Tamsin lifted the bowl without waiting to be told. The halo found the bowl and forgot the face.
The line sang a little higher. The air above the tram feeder dimpled. Lightning gathered itself into a suggestion of a person—a human-shaped absence articulating knee and shoulder out of hunger more than anatomy. The glass-block window of the conversion store across the way winked, softening at the edges.
"Widow," Oren said, calm as a foreman diagnosing a rattling valve. He slid the tuning coil down the hot stick's shaft and clipped its mouth to an anchor bolt on the pedestal as if harnessing a dog. "She hates this note," he added, tapping the coil with two fingers. He hummed at a frequency that made Leon's molars consider resignation.
"Bowl," Leon said.
Tamsin raised the lamp higher; the ring washed the ground into law. Brutus lifted both palms. "Hands where the cameras can see them," he said. "That includes yours."
The Widow turned what would have been her head if human parts meant anything to her. The halo's flicker seduced her. She tasted the frequency with a reaching fork of arc. The van's paint acquired a smolder like a blush badly applied.
Oren detuned.
He didn't yank a lever or pronounce a spell. He moved the clip two millimeters on the pedestal bolt and changed his hum by a degree flat. Dissonance ran up the line like water backward.
The Widow recoiled, irritated without malice, hunger offended by a note that failed to apologize.
[Hands Channel — Live (Ambient)]
Hands lifting a bowl. Hands on a hot stick. Hands open in a doorway. No faces.
[Editor's Cut: Applied — Halo trim; Dignity Zone enforced]
[Glass Saint tipped +250 Favor: "Tasteful deterrent."]
[War House: +50 Favor ("At least it tried to kill someone.")]
"Dawnshield crew," Kade said, voice pitched for the halo even though the halo had been made to sit in a corner. "Back the van away from the line. Save the grid for the people."
He sounded right. He often did. The halo added a soft sympathy ripple to the edges of the frame that made the sentence feel like a wet hand laid on an uninjured shoulder.
"Brutus," Leon said.
Brutus stepped between the van and the feeder with exactly the kind of movement that makes a man obey himself in a different direction, hands up, palms open. "Back the van," he said, level. "Now."
They backed it.
A filament strand popped on the opposite pole. The Widow gathered at the corner of the building where a tangle of ancient coax made a nest nobody had paid rent on in a decade. She leaned toward a cluster of kids on the stoop drawn by blue light. One, twelve, eyes too wide—Kite's friend—hugged a soccer ball as if plastic could bargain with physics.
Tamsin dipped the bowl and made a line of law without touching anyone. "Inside," she said. "Blue Lamps first." The kids obeyed the bowl the way you obey the small god that lives in the polite part of your head.
"Detune," Leon said.
Oren tuned Etta's cousin a half inch in the wrong direction and made a sound the Widow disliked without quite understanding why. She unfolded away from the stoop and reached for the halo again, hungry for flattery.
"Bait is a note," Nyx said, delighted and careful.
Kade's hand moved—too well. He turned the halo forty degrees and caught the Widow's shape at the edge of dignity. Nyx's editor's cut took the curve off and replaced it with hands, lamp, coil. The viewer saw what was honest.
The Widow lunged.
It wasn't a leap. It was a choice. Lightning coughed out of everything that had ever wanted to spark, and the arc looked for a human shape to justify itself with. It hit the puddle at the curb. The puddle negotiated with physics and offered up the iron grate as a friend.
"Ground," Oren said under his breath. He laid the hot stick across the pedestal post so the arc would remember that iron meant earth, not people. He detuned half again. It was like soothing a dog whose worst habit was curiosity and whose teeth were made of current.
Brutus didn't advance. He retreated to the bowl the way he had been taught—and the way he had taught—and used his body like a suggestion instead of a barricade. The kids stopped being background and became a line under the lamp.
Mae slipped past Leon's shoulder with the canvas sling. She looped it under the coil's mouth so when Oren killed the clip, the coil wouldn't swing and get ideas.
"Ad in 00:40," Nyx purred. "Statement without faces sells. Make it a sentence you can live with later."
Leon put his hand flat on the Ledger to feel the names on the margin through paper. He did not look at the halo. He spoke to the coil, to the bowl, to the puddle, to the kid with the ball he would never put on camera.
"We fix corridors," he said. "Not halos."
The arc shrank under the wrong note. The Widow compressed into a more offended geometry and then uncoiled like a ribbon surrendering drama in favor of being ribbon. She slid along the feeder away from a meal that had refused to make itself photogenic. The nest in the coax smoldered and went out like dignity.
[Widow: Detuned; Dormant]
[Hands Channel — Retention +]
[Glass Saint tipped +400 Favor: "An anti-spectacle."]
[War House: −100 Favor ("It didn't even sing right.")]
[Trust: +2]
Kade stepped forward with the easy speed of a man who knows where cameras live. "A clean resolution," he said to no one in particular. "You see, when we—"
Nyx's cut eased his mouth off the frame and replaced it with hands winding the clip, hands lifting the coil into the sling, hands lifting the bowl. The Dignity Zone did the work that basic decency isn't strong enough for in a storm.
"Corner's nest," Oren said, pointing with his chin. "If you don't comb it, she'll grow back."
"Comb," Leon said.
He took the construction pencil out of his coat and drew on wet curb: drain, barb, quiet pocket—not for bugs this time, for people. Tamsin read the diagram and knew what to be. Brutus lifted both hands, made space, and did nothing that could be mistaken for a performance.
Oren pulled a rubber blanket from the bag and draped it over the coax jungle like a corrective hand on bad hair. Juno wasn't here; he borrowed her voice. "Keep it breathing," he said to no one, and left a gap for heat to stop scheming.
"Hands Channel," Nyx reported. "Emotion credit +8%. Policy Memo is watching you be uninteresting and losing by points."
"Good," Leon said. He marked the curb—two small rectangles with the heel of his boot. "Blue Lamps post here and here. Corridor runs if it has to."
Tarek Han slid in with his gray notebook and medical-tape tabs, reducing madness to bullet points. "Dignity Zone policy—codify," he said, eyes on the board he carried in his head. "Hands-only in hazard perimeters. Duty to retreat to bowls. Duty to detune before rescue. Publish."
"Add to the ladder," Leon said.
Mae wrote in her head and would write in ink at Paper Street: Dignity Zone — Hazard perimeters: Bowls mandatory; No faces; Editor's Cut armed; Use-of-Force: detune first.
A small drone drifted at knee height with a tin pie smirking in its claws. Trickster. It hovered toward the Blue Lamp as if hoping to baptize pastry.
Brutus raised a hand. The drone kissed it without consent. He set the pie on a step out of the law-light like someone shelving porcelain, then pointed his chin at the THANKS jar Tamsin had brought out of habit.
"Auction," Kite announced, solemn, having appeared from nowhere as if trained by the lamp itself. "Filters fund."
[Trickster Attempt: Meme Insert — Neutralized]
[Public: +Goodwill]
[Glass Saint tipped +100 Favor: "Elegance in refusal (series)."]
[Trickster: −100 Favor ("Spoilsport forever.")]
"Saint's filing a love letter," Nyx said, almost laughing. "War is writing your name with a brick."
Dawnshield's crew packed without being told, confusion beneath dignity. Kade kept his shape—he'd learned that—but his eyes couldn't find an angle that gave him the thing he sold most: proof that he was necessary.
"Tamsin," Leon said, not to interrupt anything so much as to make momentum into a system, "drop a bowl at the coax. Lamplighters—two per block this hour."
"Copy," Tamsin said.
"Grid," Oren said to Etta's cousin, tapping the pedestal. "Be pretty elsewhere."
They walked the coil back under the bowl and into the habit they were teaching the block. The Hands Channel crawled its verbs along the bottom of Leon's sight like a body learning to breathe in a new room: hands moving a coil, hands setting a bowl, hands tying ribbon to the ombuds pole.
[Hands Channel — Pilot: Emotion credit +12% (Anchor window sustained)]
[Corridor Exception — Shielded (24h credit); Review in 6 days]
Back at Paper Street, the print shop was almost a room again. Filter frames stood mounted; a vent stack lay like a chrome bone on sawhorses. Juno had a bolt between her teeth and a pencil behind her ear. Sister Irena's Blue Lamp at the rear looked like a star that preferred municipal paperwork.
"Vent goes up," Juno said. "Two pairs of hands and a penitent."
"Brutus," Leon said.
"Blue Hands," Brutus answered.
Oren guided the stack into the cradle with a grace that didn't look like grace unless you had ever asked a tube to sit correctly on a flue without sulking. Kite handed up straps with the reverence of a child feeding a grown dog. Mae logged seals; Tarek wrote clauses; Murmur took down complaints with a small microphone like a fingertip.
The small red pulse Nyx had pinned in the corner of his vision earlier went from rumor to schedule.
[Producer Court Notice — Efficiency Fee Injunction Hearing]
Time: Tomorrow 09:00
Petitioner: Efficiency House (Greed)
Respondent: Last City (Public Works Clause)
Venue: Producer Court (Remote; ambient acceptable)
"Thole will wear gray," Nyx said. "He'll call the coil theft. He'll call your Public Works Clause romantic. He'll bring charts with the words 'grid stability' in a font that will make you want to use your pen as a weapon."
"Receipts," Leon said.
Mae lifted a folder: photographs of the panel, coil count, Oren's handwriting on a receipt slip—POSTED PRICE: 0 (emergency), INTEREST: 0 (public), SIGNATURE: DAWES/O'SIGN. Murmur held up two notes: one from the Hands Channel reading THANKS FOR LIGHT THAT DIDN'T HUM, one from the Complaints box that said, simply, PIE.
Matron Feroce walked in under her teal lantern with a ledger and a stare. "If the court asks what happened if you didn't take the coil," she said, tapping the scoop, "tell them what I do: I sell tea by daylight, not candles by screams."
Leon wrote FEROCE STARE on the docket list because it had more force than some statutes.
The vent stack slid into place with a sigh like a patient finding a pillow. Oren tightened the last bolt. Juno tapped the flue twice with the side of a wrench, listening to the hollow. "Air logs start at dawn," she said. "If the smell misbehaves, I'll repent with a pen cap in my mouth while I fix it."
"Memorial at Unseen Work," Sister Irena said again, soft habit hard duty.
The lamppost blinked honest—blink, two, three, four, blink. The brace at the bakery drain thrummed a tired chord and then remembered itself.
Nyx's overlay slid a quiet alert into Leon's eye. "Roach migration tick up five percent to Paper Street," she said. "Heat signature: your vent warms the night. Foundry's a hearth; scavengers like hearths."
Juno blew hair out of her face and swore with affection. "Of course they do," she said. "Edict: Sluice Gate on deck for alley diversions. Recycling Plant in future. We'll need to eat what we become."
"Saint is delighted when you say that," Nyx muttered. "Craft too."
[Edict Available: Sluice Gate — Favor 800 + Ether 200]
Effect: Reroute street runoff; +Security (Drains)
Side-effect: Draws burrowers if left open
"Hold," Leon said. "Let the vent sit. We'll comb the alleys before we pour a river."
Tarek tapped his notebook. "Add to the brief: Foundry side-effects acknowledged; mitigation queued; this is a city that knows its garbage."
"Put it in the sentence," Leon said. "Courts respect dullness if you show your broom."
Kite trotted in with a jar of blue buttons and set it beside the Ledger like he had been designated curator of small, round hope. "Matron says Market Holidays will post with the hands list," he reported, professional. "Vendors who honored bowls get a dot."
"Good," Leon said. He put a finger on the jar's lid and spun it half a turn. "Dots matter."
A lamplighter stuck her head in the rear door. "Two blocks down," she said, bowl held at heart height. "Quiet Choir kids holding the clinic corridor dark. They want your word that it stays that way."
"They have it," Leon said. "We count it."
Nyx slid in the last metrics of the hour like a composer writing the final bar over silence. [Hands Channel — Anchor window sustained; Emotion credit 68% of next threshold.] [Corridor Exception — Shielded.] [Hearing prep — Receipts queued.]
"Leon," she said, honey over wire. "You have mops to film and law to write. Also, the Widow at Iron & Sixth left a little battery of scorched coax. If we don't comb it, a kid will touch it and write a complaint called 'my hand hurts' with their left hand."
"Comb," Leon said. "Then Unseen Work."
He tapped the Ledger once. He didn't tap twice.
They went back out into weather.
Under the Blue Lamp's ring, the street chose to be boring on purpose. Hands set a cone over the coax nest. Hands tied tape between two posts because tape is a law that costs pennies. Hands wrote a sign in plain language: DON'T TOUCH. HOT. WE FIX. Hands put the sign under the bowl because bowls lend truth to cardboard.
"Ad in 01:10," Nyx murmured, content against her will. "Say something that will buy you one more day."
Leon set his palm on the Ledger, feeling the names in the margin. He didn't look at a lens. He looked at the bowl.
"We count what we keep," he said. "And we keep what counts."
[Glass Saint tipped +300 Favor: "A sentence that behaves."]
[Craft House tipped +150 Favor: "Receipts as poetry (sorry)."]
[War House: −100 Favor ("Still no elbows.")]
Across the district, Dawnshield found an alley with a better minor and a worse bowl. Kade's voice rose as if he had been promised a crescendo. The lamplighter lifted her light, and the crescendo became a suggestion and then a shrug.
Nyx breathed laughter without letting it ruin her metrics. "Tomorrow," she said, "we insult Greed in court with a ledger and a scoop. Tonight, we install a vent and call mercy dull."
The lamppost blinked—blink, two, three, four, blink. Etta purred. The brace at the bakery drain held a sentence inside it and decided not to speak.
He carried the bowl to the Foundry door and set it down. The ring made policy out of air and put a face on nothing.
"Unseen Work," Leon said.
"Seconded," Sister Irena said, as if it mattered to the law that someone loved saying it.
Hands moved. The feed told verbs. The Producer timer for the court hearing slid to the corner of his sight like a second spine: 14:58:12.
Cliff hung off the top of the map in Nyx's overlay—Iron & Sixth shifting from red to pale, Paper Street warming to amber, Producer Court pinned like a nail through a printed notice.
"Tomorrow," Nyx said.
"Tomorrow," Leon agreed, pen already naming it.