There were rules. Seo‑yeon wrote them down in the margins of a clean sheet and slid it across the table like a warrant: two confirmations to call a match; three matches to call a pattern; no public spectacle; paper first, quiet second.
Derrigan read the rules and nodded once. He set the ledger between them as if it were a patient they could question. The horizon‑stitch on the margin looked like a thumbprint now—neither accidental nor casual. Outside, the lane kept its small noises: boiling kettles, the clack of a cart, Anja singing a kettle‑song to herself. Hana's last letter lay folded at the corner of the bench, neat and ordinary, and he felt its ordinariness like a fragile shield.
"Low risk," he said. "Low profile. We don't want Verren to know we know."
Seo‑yeon pinched the edge of the paper. "We do this with documents that stand in court. Broadsheets. Arrival lists. Registry manifests. Nothing theatrical."
—Test One: Press—
The binder's stall smelled of glue and ink. Derrigan took every morning sheet the man had: the town column, the merchant bulletin, the weekly with its auction list. He spread them on the bench while Seo‑yeon produced a spool of red thread, a needle, and the pinboard they'd been building. She began to pin clippings by date, whispering the new rule as she worked. Derrigan read ledger lines aloud; she matched dates and districts.
The margin had suggested a small, silly thing—East Row at noon: a peddler's child drops a red ribbon. It was a line that could be arranged without noise. They found an apprentice who owed Tobin a favor and paid the fee for a ribbon to loosen from a satchel. The next morning the market column contained a throwaway note: "Child dropped red ribbon at East Row; peddler fined a small fee."
Derrigan taped the clipping to the map and felt something tighten in his chest. Match one. The ledger had nudged; the city repeated the note.
"Not proof," Seo‑yeon said. She nodded the way she did when she meant to trust a result but wanted to mark the doubt. "But it's data. Keep it filed."
—Test Two: Quiet Spoon—
A second margin whispered Quiet Spoon again, a different page this time, a line that read less like instruction than memory. Derrigan went because curiosity is the hollow around which his patience gathers. The tea house smelled of lemon rind and cooled broth; the reader's voice rolled like a practiced tide. Derrigan watched the room, the way people reacted when a line hit them, the small ticks and payments that followed.
At a lull the reader finished a shore‑song and folded the book. A plain‑coated woman slid a folded note along the bar. The reader tucked it into a satchel stamped with the horizon‑stitch and left. Derrigan trailed, two steps back, and watched the courier meet a rider at the back gate. The courier's pouch bore the same stitch.
He waited until the pair turned a blind corner and then came back to Seo‑yeon with the satchel's stitch still bright in his mind. She had already pulled a registry column from memory—Halmar's small consignments—and cross‑checked it against the Quiet Spoon's delivery note she'd flagged last week.
"It links," she said simply. "Quiet Spoon delivery; Halmar signs for a crate next week. Two confirmations: the ledger line and a manifest entry." She pressed a pencil dot into the map. Match two.
Derrigan felt the ledger's margin like a second pulse. The coincidences accumulated.
—Test Three: The Long Reach—
If the ledger was only echoing their city, it could be local mischief. They needed distance. Tobin went to the coasters, the small ships that ran the southern circuit, and used every favor he had to pry manifest lists from a stevedore two ports down. He returned with damp paper and a smell of tar.
"There," Tobin said, tossing the sheet on the bench. "Passenger list. Shrine name. Merchant notice pinned at Master Ruan's earlier this week."
Derrigan read the printed line and it picked the place from the ledger's page—an offhand shrine name he'd once assumed was an ornamental touch in the novel. Seo‑yeon ran dates in a quiet calculation and matched the southern manifest's arrival to a local broadsheet mention: the same sequence repeating in a different port.
"Not local," she said. "A routed echo. Different ports, same sequence. If that's not a pattern, then what is?"
They pinned the manifest beside the market clipping and the Quiet Spoon needle. Three matches: press, token, and regional echo. The ledger's prompt had moved from suggestion to map.
—Consolidation—
They spent the afternoon turning clippings into a timeline. Seo‑yeon threaded red string and drew arrows. Quiet Spoon reading → courier departure → Halmar crate entry → seam report → southern manifest. The intervals repeated: three days between reading and shipment, five days to seam notes. The rhythm was not random.
"This is a cadence," Seo‑yeon said. The word made the board look less like gossip and more like evidence. "Someone has sequenced events to these intervals."
"Or the book is a manual, and someone uses it to hide instructions," Derrigan said. "Either way, someone knows how to make pages travel."
They reviewed their options — bait and trap, quiet legal pressure, seize a crate outright. Each choice came with a cost. Seo‑yeon's eyes, always the ledger's other ledger, settled on the provisional hold she had already filed for manifest‑19.
"Paper first," she said. "If Verren's network will move because of an inspection, it will show us where they hide things. We don't need to shout. We need evidence that sticks to the registry."
—Hana's ordinary—
A small parcel lay at the edge of the bench: a pressed flower from Hana, folded into a letter. The girls had learned a rhyming game with fountain water. The world the children woke to was ordinary and safe and not this pinboard of stitched dates and county lists. Derrigan thought of the steward's receipt, the arrangements in another harbor, and felt the pressure of distance—how fragile security could be in a ledger's breath.
"We do not bring them into this," he said. "Not unless we must."
Seo‑yeon folded the letter and slipped it into the ledger's back pocket as if tucking a promise there. "We act with paper," she repeated. "Quietly."
—The bad feeling—
They had confirmed three micro‑tests. The cadence held. Derrigan should have felt relief. Instead, something colder ran under his ribs. He looked at the pinboard and then at the ledger, at the horizon‑stitch on the page he kept returning to. The arrows reached outward now, beyond their city and beyond the southern quay pins—names that matched chapter headings, dates that matched the intervals. The same breaks that had structured the novel arranged themselves across a wider map.
He went back to the ledger and reread the passage he had once loved for its plainness. A line he had thought ornamental had become a nut of logic: the novel's chapter breaks were not merely narrative choices; they were timing marks.
"If this is the cadence," he said, voice small, "then it isn't just about East Row markets and seam chambers."
Seo‑yeon looked up from the board. "How far?"
He tapped a thumb on the margin where the stitch gleamed. "Further than the ports. The intervals map across coasts. If chapters correspond to nodes on a schedule, then whoever uses those nodes could stage events on a scale we haven't imagined. This isn't local theater."
Her face went flat. The practical mind that had, until recently, been measuring manifest dates took a hard, quick inventory of consequences. "You mean geopolitics," she said. "Supply lines, ports, festivals—things that chafe against power. If someone can pace events globally with these chapters, the stakes are not petty markets."
Derrigan swallowed. "And what's worse— if knowledge changes it."
Seo‑yeon's hand closed on the ledger. "Explain."
"If an actor in the novel becomes aware," he said, "and they act according to what they think the novel wants, they will change the cadence. The script will bend. But if no one tied to those roles knows, we can move unnoticed. We're not the majors of that book. That gives us cover. It also makes us the only ones who see the pattern clearly."
The phrase struck both of them: the knowledge that changes outcomes. He thought of the ledger's stitch, neat and private, and of the way an audience shifts the play when it shouts its lines.
"So anonymity is our asset," Seo‑yeon said slowly. "We act from the shadows. We preempt the nodes quietly and only where we can be surgical."
—Decision—
They pinned manifest‑19 at the center of the board—the warehouse near the old wharf, dawn—then drew thinner, quieter arrows to adjacent nodes they could touch without calling attention: a customs clerk who owed Tobin a favor, a steward's paperwork with a sloppy signature, a porter who liked to smoke alone. Each was a lever.
"We test two more nodes quietly," Seo‑yeon said, "then we move on manifest‑19. No spectacle. Paper holds, a single inspection request. You and Tobin recon the site at dawn. Take one shard, one ledger leaf. We record everything."
"One page at a time," Derrigan said. The ledger was warm under his palm as if it kept the memory of every margin fold.
They slid the book into Seo‑yeon's folder, the way one seals evidence. Outside, the lane went on—children playing, kettles steaming, the city indifferent to the geometry of their pinboard. On the board, arrows waited like tidal marks.
Derrigan stood, looking at the map that now stretched beyond them. If the novel was a script being read onto the world, it had become something more dangerous than curious art. The knowledge that it could be global tightened his throat.
"No one else must know," he said, and it was both instruction and fright.
Seo‑yeon closed the ledger like a lid over an ember. "Then we keep the secret. We keep the book's margins to ourselves and act where we can do the least harm and the most good."
"One page at a time," he repeated, and the words felt both vow and warning. The pinboard's arrows trembled faintly in the lamplight as if the tide was listening.