The morning after the raid the Veiled Crossing smelled of rain and hot metal and the small, stubborn business of repair. The workshop's glass panes were clouded with breath and soot; the anvil where the apprentice had worked was a dark crescent in the light. Remnants wax sealed the door and a thin ring of witnesses stood at the edge of the yard like a human fence. Keeper Sera moved among them with the calm of someone who had learned to make law feel like a shelter.
Aria kept her hand on the warded box that held the Pale Codex shard as if the leather strap could steady the ache in her ribs. Thorne was already at a bench, sketching the shard's microetch in shorthand, his fingers stained with oil and ink. Marcus had posted two facilitators at the lane and kept his eyes on the pass; his posture was the quiet readiness of someone who expected trouble and hoped he would be wrong. The apprentice—small, hollow-eyed, wrapped in a blanket—sat on a crate and watched the adults with a look that had been taught to obey.
They began with the human work. Keeper Sera read the witness protocol aloud and the Remnants' scribe copied the apprentice's narration into triplicate. The boy's voice was thin at first; then, as the ritual of telling took hold, it steadied. He described the forge's rhythms, the way the master had taught him to hold a hammer, the smell of flux and jasmine that had been in the room the night before. Then he told them about the memory that had come to him—the lighthouse bell, the woman's scar, the bread that tasted of a place he had never been. He said the shard had sung and he had reached for it as if it were his own.
Sera's hand moved like a benediction as she pressed the Remnants seal to the witness sheet. "We notarize what was taken and what was returned," she said. "We make the cost visible. We will keep you safe while you tell us what you remember."
The apprentice's narration was a hinge. It gave them a human face in a room where metal and manifest had been the currency. It did not name the patron committee, but it named the mechanism: a shard that could graft, a forger who stamped plates, and a chain of hands that moved goods through private slips. The Loom had a lead; the Remnants had a witness; the ledger had teeth.
Thorne fed the shard's microetch through the warded lens again and sketched the bloom. The Pale Codex glyph was faint but present—an older geometry threaded through the Veiled Crossing variant. He cataloged the shard's reply pattern: a resonance keyed to bell tones and salt-scent anchors, a latency that matched the ferry seam they had seen at the border town. The shard's graft had been tuned to social rhythms; it had been designed to sing where people already gathered.
"We quarantine and we study," Thorne said. "But we also follow the rope. There will be manifests, courier stubs, FACV codes. Someone paid for field trials."
Keeper Sera nodded and produced a brittle stack of ledger fragments. She had been up all night cross-referencing the plates they had seized with the Remnants' stacks. "Calder's templates show up here," she said, tapping a margin. "FACV-coded payments routed through a merchant trust. There are courier drops to neutral slips. And look—this shorthand." She pointed to a small string of characters in a clerk's hand, a loop and a slash that matched the facilitator mark Thorne had found in the fragment. "This is a hinge. Follow it and you find hands that sign and forget."
Aria felt the ledger's rope tighten. The procurement chain had been the clever part: legal motions that added up to plausible deniability. If a patron committee had wanted to test a graft, they could fund a contractor, route payments through a trust, and let clerks sign manifests without looking at the contents. The Spiral had been built to hide in procedure.
They moved the evidence with the care of people who knew how to make law hold. Thorne wrapped the shard in oilcloth and set it in a double-warded box; Keeper Sera read the custody terms aloud and the Loom's archivist signed in triplicate. The plates were cataloged and sealed; the apprentice's witness packet was stamped and a copy placed in the Remnants' stacks. No artifact would leave Remnants custody without witnesses and a public protocol.
Then they followed the rope.
Thorne and Marcus rode to the nearest courier house with a sealed request and a Remnants warrant. The courier who had signed for the crate months before was a thin man with ink-stained fingers and a habit of looking at the floor. He unfolded a manifest with hands that shook and pointed to a line where Harlan's route was listed. Harlan—an Alpha midrank who moved goods across the borderlands—had been the hinge the Loom had suspected. The courier's memory was messy and human: a limp, a belllaugh, a man who signed and left.
"We ask for a meeting," Marcus said. "Neutral ground. Witnesses. We do not accuse; we present evidence and ask for explanation."
Harlan's gatekeeper agreed to a neutral meeting under Remnants witness. The Loom's team prepared a packet: ledger fragments, notarized witness sheets, and a sealed microetch replica that could be demonstrated without letting the shard sing. They would not bring the shard into the meeting; they would show the pattern and ask for answers. Procedure, they had learned, could be a tool for exposure if used in daylight.
Back at the Loom, Thorne fed the microetch variants through the matchers and found a pattern in the margins: shell trusts that rerouted invoices through three clerks before they reached a ledger; a fence network that laundered plates through the Gray Market; a midrank fixer named Rell whose ledger code appeared in procurement stubs. Rell's mark was a small, careful thing—an administrative shorthand that opened into rooms where favors were currency.
"We're not just chasing a broker," Thorne said. "We're chasing a system that knows how to hide in procedure."
Aria wrote the day's lines into the Spiral Log with hands that did not tremble but felt the ledger's weight. She recorded the shard's quarantine, the apprentice's witness, the plates sealed in Remnants custody, and the procurement leads: Calder Engineering templates, FACV-coded invoices, Harlan's route, and Rell's ledger code. She added the human costs: the apprentice's exposure, Aria's Redirect at the workshop and its toll, and the need to make costs visible in any public framing.
Keeper Sera prepared the Remnants packet for Greyhaven and for the Loom's stacks. "We will present this as evidence," she said. "We will ask magistrates to allow subpoenas where they can. We will not hand artifacts to the Council without witnesses. If the Council refuses to act, we go public with the packet and the demonstration."
They did the small, stubborn work that made law possible: witness packets sealed, courier requests dispatched, magistrates notified. The Loom's technicians tuned a detector prototype and Thorne sketched a controlled demonstration protocol that would show the Spiral's mechanics without letting it spread. The plan was deliberate: public framing, Remnants custody, and a demonstration that made costs visible.
That night, when the lamps in the Loom's lower hall burned low, Aria sat with Luna and Thorne and Keeper Sera over a thin bowl of stew. The apprentice's narration had settled into the room like a new fact; the shard slept in its box beneath the bench. Luna braided a small jasmine sprig into a cord and handed it to Aria—a private marker, a teacher's talisman. "We hold the cost together," she said softly.
Aria pressed the cord into her palm and felt the hollow where the lullaby had been. The Redirect she had used at the workshop had saved a life and taken a memory; the ledger would record the trade. The work ahead would be legal and public and costly. They would follow the procurement rope, subpoena manifests where magistrates allowed, and teach towns to be noisy so the Spiral could not find a single dominant note.
Before she slept, Aria added one more line to the Spiral Log: Workshop Aftermath — plates and Pale Codex shard quarantined; apprentice witness notarized; Calder templates and FACV invoices traced; Harlan route identified; Rell ledger code recovered; Remnants custody for artifacts; prepare neutral meeting with Harlan under Remnants witness; prepare public packet and controlled demonstration; record costs and witness statements. She closed the log and felt the ledger's map shift under her fingers.
Outside, the Veiled Crossing held its breath. Inside, the Loom hummed with the small, stubborn work of turning evidence into law. They had a rope and a path; now they would follow it, with witnesses and sigils and public packets, until the patron committee's face could be seen in the light.