Cities also hold grudges.
Lindell's were mortared into the brickwork and braided into brass, stashed behind bulkheads and inside bylaws, left to ferment under the cobbles where good citizens refused to look. The god—unemployed and overqualified—lounged on the lintel of reality and spun a die because eternity is long, and people make reliable noise when they break.
Two weeks of peace performed as parody—bread queues, rent arguments, watchmen playing moral ping-pong with drunks—while the sewers sang a low, patient note, the pitch of a city waiting to choose what kind of wrong it would permit. Two weeks since midnight geometry left a hairline fracture in the world under our feet. Two weeks since Merrow woke the same instant Lyra's coin learned a new knot. The story pretended to catch its breath. Stories lie.
The Engineers' Guildhall loved itself. Whitewashed brick buffed to a municipal shine. Iron ribs riveted so every beam felt official. Floors tiled in hexagons, promising your next step would land where a mathematician approved. Gnomes moved through the nave like mirrored dreams—tool-belts, monocular lenses ratcheting into place, the proprietary air of small gods who keep things from collapsing until it profits someone that they do.
At the counter, a woman with cobalt hair braided around a slide-rule glanced up like a judge assessing a cartload of damp timber. Her nameplate bragged: CHIEF CALIBRATOR TILLA BRASSBIND, P.E. (PHLOGISTON ENGINEERING). She had the look of a person who sharpened pencils with policy.
Riona took point, posture saying she'd attempt courtesy until logic failed to earn it. Branna stood on her right like punctuation that refuses to be decorative. Kel showed up as a model citizen, halfling skin on, tail vanished, horns suggested by a fashionable cowlick and the insinuation of good breeding. Tamsin's bone beads clicked the soft syllables of weather. Merrow wore his Merrow-face properly buttoned, the agreeable forgettability of a man no one could sketch from memory. Lyra drifted toward the shelves with the preserved powders, all glass and warning labels, the way a hunter drifts toward a treeline that might be hiding dangerous ideas. Skrik insisted on entry, claws scrubbed, scarf neat as if you could launder away a city's prejudice.
"Business?" Tilla asked, a syllable away from contempt.
"Your sewers have become a theology of error," Riona said evenly. "We intend to deconsecrate. The Drainpipe clan knows your tunnels—"
"With," Skrik cut in, bristling. "With, not under. With-for. Is same."
A dozen gnomes inhaled, small bellows making the old anger shape: property. Someone at a side table tutted at the presence of scales.
Kel bared a market-safe smile. "Imagine, Chief Calibrator, a liaison whose extended family maps your undercity by smell and folklore. No invoice for the folklore. We manage the cultural topography; you get a functioning city instead of a righteous crater. The Guild bows, citizens clap, I write a tasteful bill…"
Tilla's mouth did not host humor. "Kobolds install unlicensed 'improvements.' They steal calibrated valves. They make amateur modifications near methane seams with substances they pronounce 'phosfor' when there is clearly an H. Last quarter: six cave-ins, two fires, and one complaint from a priest who claims our manholes blaspheme."
Skrik's frill sank with shame and then rose with stubbornness. "Some clans," they muttered. "Not Drainpipe. We fix the fixes you break fixing."
An inspector pointed at Kel. "And your companion is a known menace. Banned from the Stooped Giant for aggravated dice."
"An unprovable rumor," Kel said brightly. "I possess an honest face and a naturally lucky wrist. The sin is aesthetics."
Merrow produced the appropriate chuckle like a man taking the correct book off a shelf.
Riona's voice didn't move. "We aren't here to confess urinals. We're here because you've had detonations in outflow lines, and this morning a joyfully timed cough near the river vent. You need hands that crawl places your lens can't reach."
Tilla's attention slid to Skrik and ossified. "No kobolds," she said. "This is a line."
Lyra's gaze strayed to a locked cabinet marked OPTICAL MEDIA / PRISMATIC DUSTS: GUILD USE ONLY. She staged a quick quiet conversation with a junior calibrator whose ambition could be measured in coins, and a narrow vial of silvery grit slipped into her pouch. She moved with the caution of a woman pocketing grief and calling it a tool. Tamsin saw; they saw everything; they set the observation aside like a stone saved for later throwing.
Kel leaned harder on charm until it squeaked. "Outsource part of a mess to the people who understand the landscape or cling to purity until the pipes vote with shrapnel. Bureaucracy has a flavor; yours tastes combustible."
Tilla tapped her slide-rule the way some people count to ten and others prime a fuse. "Assist the watch if you must. But kobolds will not be deputized in my sewers." She smiled the exhausted smile of an irritable deity. "Next."
Outside on the cobbles the god flicked its die and let it show a number nobody wants.
"Pairs," Riona said. "We sweep for witnesses and ghosts. If it hums, ticks, or winks, you don't touch it alone."
Riona, Branna, Lyra took the civic square. Kel, Merrow, Tamsin, and Skrik dropped toward the noise where the city keeps its organs.
"Explain," Branna said after three blocks, "why the gnomes who live in mud and math care whose feet share it."
"Identity," Riona said. "If your work is invisible, you teach the city to chant your name when it flushes. A kobold down there is heresy and review."
Lyra drifted ahead and back, reading stone the way a midwife reads a wrist. "Two soots on that wall," she said. "Coal and oil. Someone running burners out of bounds. Footprints at the fountain—three-toe drag. Kobold, yes. But this—" She plucked a hair-fine filament from a storm grate, metallic and coiled, stamped with tolerances no one admits are signatures. "Guild thread. Left like the world carries magnifying glasses on purpose."
Branna frowned. "If we paint their hands on the bomb, they'll set the painting on fire."
"Then we find people who bleed when you tell the truth," Riona said. "Blood makes stubborn evidence."
Kel and his entourage meandered with intent, innocence advertised so aggressively it read as confession. Merrow observed the ordinary catastrophe of the living like a scholar translating a new text—laundry as proclamation, a child astonished by a street illusion, two knife-grinders arguing over whose grindstone ate whose wheel. Skrik annotated the alleyways with smell and sound. Tamsin breathed and tried to name the wrongness that hid under all the right.
The stink changed. Resin, saltpeter, a ridiculous floral slapped on top to trick noses. Not kobold kitchen chemistry. Gnomework pretending not to be gnomework.
"Left," Tamsin said. "And down."
Behind a theater of deliberate trash, in a space that didn't want to be found, two kobolds cowered, flayed by fear. Cloth gags had been ripped out; frills bled where someone had twisted. They recoiled from help because help often starts with a hand and ends as something worse.
Tamsin showed two empty palms. Skrik chirped kin. Words spilled: Draconic, Trader Cant, the grammar of terror. Merrow didn't search their minds; he cupped meaning so it didn't fall.
"Gnomes made us carry boxes," one hissed. "Said press brass pin when sun is this tall. Said if not, they break nests. Break all nests. Kill all kobolds."
"We are sorry," the other said, and now you had to be a monster to hear that and not taste metal. "We are sorry. Wrong to make loud fire in people-place. But they said. And knives that cut water. And we were—"
The first explosion lifted the square and taught the air new verbs. The angel on the fountain wore a necklace of fire, and the water put on a halo and flung itself at witnesses. Pressure shoved. Lights died. Pigeons invented a new shorthand for apocalypse.
Riona already had her shield up, already moving, already turning chaos into lanes—this way, not that, carry the living, leave the copper. Branna slotted her spear into leverage and pulled a girl free of a grate that had decided to practice dentistry. Lyra went prone and made of herself a pry bar. The work sang in her shoulders like an old song.
Under the fountain the second sound grew: a clock embarrassed to be caught.
On the stone lip, half hidden under a prayer ribbon, lay a device that did not apologize for existing: compact metal, lacquered for splash, waxed cord, printed sigils pretending not to be signatures. Factory pride where contrition should live.
"Guild," Lyra said, one word with teeth.
Branna set her jaw. "And those tolerances? That's a name in disguise."
"We evacuate," Riona said. "Then we catalogue."
The second blast answered from the south. Panic moved through streets as if summoned by decree. Down in the lines, heat shoved air up the throats of storm grates. A rain of black droplets peppered stone; where they landed, they chewed.
"Cover mouths," Riona snapped. "Brace for aftershock."
Tamsin slammed Skrik into shelter and took the shock with the kind of grace you only develop by arguing with weather. Kel bent like a reed; Merrow anchored himself and the nearby mind he disliked least.
They found two kobolds who had been used to carry crimes. They found a Guild smell under noble words. They found the city's patience thinning to filament.
By the time the second team sprinted back into the square, Riona had turned catastrophe into something like order. The fountain's angel had mislaid a wing. The water ran pink. Watchmen built lanes with their bodies. Civilians did what they do when instructed by someone unafraid to sound like a parent.
Kel peeled the device Lyra had wrapped and whistled low. "Pride is a brand," he said. "They stamped it on the bomb."
Another pressure wave shouldered through the bricks. Merrow felt the tunnels plucked like strings. This was not a choir. This was accountancy with a fuse.
"Down," Tamsin said. "If we want to matter, we go where it hurts."
The storm-runoff's ladder led into a throat of brick and stubborn water. The air smelled like sugar gone bad and citrus that had lied in court. A brass valve sang a note Merrow could hear with his bones. Skrik's body knew the path and insisted. Left, then down, then pray to whatever understands pipes.
The chamber did not deserve a hymn. Catwalk, valve wheel, a brass egg bomb bolted like barnacle under the walk. A glass ampule beat the red heart of a bad idea. The clockwork gnashed. Paper tags pretending not to be priming spells fluttered in the damp.
Riona leaned on the wheel. It fought. It relented. Water diverted; not much; enough.
Tamsin coaxed hair-thin roots to be useful to things not made of soil. The harness that held the device stopped wanting to leap. Branna planted herself for physics. Skrik named everything wrong about the bomb until the bomb sulked. Kel slid under and listened to time with his fingers. The ampule throbbed like an old bruise.
"Failsafe," he grunted, eye on a screw that had a secret life. "Cut the waxed cord and the clock bites you. Stop the clock and the phlogiston burps flame to save face. Charming."
He did not get it right. Then he did. You could tell because his shoulders moved an inch that wasn't panic. The ampule's heartbeat learned humility. The clock swallowed its threat. He came out grinning like a man who has greatly inconvenienced fate.
"Again," Merrow said softly. "Another."
They ran.
The second device they found had a pulse and eyes. He wore the harness like a coffin he'd been told to carry to his own burial. He wasn't a child by kobold arithmetic but he looked painfully young through the human lens of presumption. His frill rustled like flags above a besieged wall. A timer bit seconds out of air. Two watchmen heaved their stomachs dry on the catwalk while a Guild auditor in blue read bylaws at the wall, the voice you use when you've decided to be useful to power.
"Hands back," he snapped when the party slid into the space. "This is a Guild-managed hazard."
Riona walked through the sentence and he learned something about leverage and who the world actually belongs to.
"Sorry," the kobold gasped through panic. "They said. They said nest—"
Tamsin made their hands a shelter for words. Skrik sang nest-song under their breath, a noise so small only terror pays attention. Merrow handed the boy's mind a place to stand. Lyra saw the linkage, the plate hiding the real bite, the trap under the strap. Kel did sums out loud because silence is a liar.
"Not a wire," he said. "A sequence. We convince a machine to accept a lie as a better truth."
Pick seated. Strap loosened under heat coaxed into brass. Escapement wedged. False friend severed. The ampule's tantrum choked itself quiet. The timer clicked once more, then slunk into uselessness, embarrassed by its pride.
Trel—the name arrived late but stuck—sagged into Tamsin's hands. Skrik cursed the buckles like uncles curse the stove. Riona stared at the Guildman, and the Guildman flinched for the first time, as if he'd glimpsed an inconvenient shape in his own mirror.
Above, the city's chest rose and fell like a creature trying to recall whether to live.
After is the slow work that bleeds you: dragging the wounded out of the lines of fire; writing names you didn't expect to learn on the inside of your mouth; listening to watchmen who crave orders that don't embarrass them; letting civilians sob gratitude like you deserve it.
The Guild's spokesgnomes arrived with language that had been pre-polished for negligence. "Kobold extremism," they said. "Unknown outside agitators." "Unlicensed magical interference." City criers took coin and broadcast contrition clipped for time. The lie put on good boots and marched. The truth stopped to spit gravel out of its teeth and limped after.
At the Stooped Giant, the barkeep tore down a KEL BANNED sign and replaced it with SORRY KEL STILL BANNED, loud enough for witnesses. "Leaseholder's a gnome," he told the room, exculpating himself with a theater voice. Kel tipped an invisible hat and called the legal definition of gnome something that would get you slapped if you said it near children.
On the square, Riona helped a captain who secretly liked being told what to do. Branna took statements from gratitude-drunk shopkeepers and from a butcher who'd watched a clerk die and had decided to hate silence the rest of his life. Tamsin made a corner into a nest of blankets and dignity. Merrow stood under a street lamp and listened to the way a city lies to itself when it wants to be forgiven.
Lyra crouched near the fountain and pried a sliver of stamped brass out of a crack with a fingernail. She didn't show anyone. She tucked it with the prismatic dust and the coin with the knot in it. A woman can build a siege engine out of three small things if she hates correctly.
Names floated up like corpses when the tide changes: Chief Calibrator Tilla Brassbind, whose slide-rule could castrate an elephant; Horologer Jaxle Vervain, who kept the valves marching to his private metronome; Factor Queldon Gearwright, who owned leases and outcomes; Auditor Primm Nackle, whose mouth had been dressed by knives. These weren't engineers. These were clocks taught to pass for men.
"We can't fix this in the street," Lyra told Riona. "We have to break the part of the city that refuses to admit it has a heart."
"Then we break it," Riona said. "Quietly."
"Quietly," Kel said. "In my dialect that means spectacularly but with apologies."
Skrik kept Trel's wrist and squeezed. "We show belly doors," Skrik said, small voice, absurd bravery. "We show nests. Is very… heist?"
"Heist is the word," Branna said. "A moral burglary. You steal back the truth."
"Horologium," Merrow mused, as if tasting a word he hadn't let himself say in years. The Guild's metronome-vault. "Where they keep their timing and their lies."
The square leaned toward quiet in the wrong way—the way a room does when someone enters who makes silence behave.
Primm Nackle stepped into the lamplight. Guild blue. Polished hair. Badge stamped with a sigil that meant Horologium if you spoke gnome and hubris. Four clipboards came with him like proper ghosts; two watchmen with set jaws had been rented for the scene.
"Busy," he said pleasantly. "Heroics. Trespass. Tampering with calibrated instruments. Harboring noncompliant tunnelfolk. The paperwork alone will embarrass shelves."
"We saved your city," Riona said, voice as bored as a sword.
"You saved an outcome," Nackle corrected. "The Guild designs systems to contain outcomes. You introduced error. We'll need to audit your lives."
Kel's grin scraped thin. "We're already auditing ours," he said. "Findings: insufficient beer, surfeit of gnomes."
Nackle's eyes moved to Skrik and Trel and came back full of something that wasn't humor. "Stand down," he said, gentle as a blade wrapped in velvet. "Do not do whatever you think you're doing next. I don't like it."
He stepped closer. Space tried to make room for him because fear is polite. Riona didn't move and space reconsidered its manners.
"You don't like it," Lyra said, and made the words sound like a diagnosis. She looked at the sigil on his badge, at the neat corner stamping that said the clock and the man shared a name. She wanted, briefly and vividly, to grind that little mark into the pavement with her heel. She filed the desire in the drawer labeled Later, between Kill the Right Thing and Kiss the Wrong One.
Captain Mire arrived with ink on her fingers and the worst job in the world on her face: making bad orders behave. She nodded to Riona in the language of people who've already exchanged too much respect for free. "You're done here," she said, not unkind. "We've got lanes and the living. Take your… collective… and go."
Nackle smiled as if he owned the concept of permission. "Yes," he said. "Go. Do not plan crimes. Crimes against time are prosecuted with unusual vigor."
Kel stepped into Nackle's air, too close for a man half his size to be polite. "Here's a clause," he said softly. "We will do exactly what we have decided. If you attempt to stand in front of it, we will walk through you and add the mess to your ledger."
Nackle's eyes didn't blink. "I will enjoy this," he said. He did not mean the same play the rest of us were watching.
They parted like arguments that intend to resume.
You want the blueprint for a heist? Too bad. This isn't an instruction manual. It's a confession. Yes, there were maps: big linen sheets stamped HOROLOGIUM, labeled with cruel, tiny hand. Yes, Skrik traced freeze-doors and belly doors and the places where the Guild had chosen pretty over sensible. Yes, Kel found the chain of ownership on the vault's locks and wrote a contract that frightened the hinges. Yes, Tamsin found the old stone behind the renovations and convinced it to remember being older. Yes, Merrow sketched the wards in thought and argued the difference between resonance and consent until the air yielded two inches. Yes, Branna counted guards and their habits with a soldier's love for boring men. Yes, Riona said, "Here is the line we will not cross," and everyone pretended not to hear the other sentence implied: until.
Night made itself useful. Ravens pecked at lamp soot to reduce glare. Kel wore the sort of gray that reads as apology in moonlight. Lyra breathed ash and citrus and the quiet on certain roofs. Merrow felt the Horologium hum under his feet: time stored like grain, rationed by men who fancy themselves gods.
The first door wasn't a door. A culvert mouth that insisted on being ignored bulged very slightly where no bulge should be. Skrik knew the pressure trick. A knuckle of mortar coaxed. Stone turned a degree. A seam showed. Tamasin made vines act like hands. Riona carried a weight that didn't show to keep everyone honest. They went in.
The corridor believed in hexagons. The Guild loved recursion; they repeated themselves until the pattern bored the eye into carelessness. Kel put chalk on stone wherever a trap felt smug. Branna brushed dust off a plate that was ready to impersonate floor. Merrow bridged a trip-ward with thought instead of foot, cool and precise and ashamed of how much he enjoyed being good at wrong things.
The second door believed in language. It wanted a phrase in a dialect of math. Merrow gave it a sentence and the door opened because the structure of obligation is older than lockpicks. Lyra dusted the edge with prismatic grit. Color skated along the jamb, found a hairline of something not-Guild. A bead the size of a nail head winked.
"We've seen that," she murmured. "In the sump."
"I know," Merrow said. The words came out clipped as if he'd bitten them to keep them from drawing blood. "Don't look too long. It looks back."
How many rooms can a vault have before it gets bored of itself? The Guild was not bored. Display cases full of erotic clockwork; valves from triumphs and disasters; a brass astrolabe named in honor of a king who'd died of debt. The Horologer had kept trophies the way some people keep fingernails. Behind them, the ledger rooms. That's what they came for. Truth doesn't travel alone; it needs papers to hold its hand when it crosses the street.
Branna stood guard with a patience that scares poets. Riona counted moral breaths. Tamsin kept stone remembering silence. Skrik crawled under a glass belly with a screwdriver stolen from a god. Kel broke three locks by insulting them differently each time. Merrow pressed his palm to a ledger's spine and asked it, politely, to give up a secret it had been bullied into keeping.
The book sighed. Paper has opinions. It opened. Line items like teeth. Authorizations signed with the neat right-angle arrogance of Horologer Jaxle Vervain. Contingency Demonstrations, it said. Calibrated Public Acuity Events. The math of moral injury. Budgets that go up when bodies go down. Factor Gearwright had notarized death into performance. Auditor Primm Nackle had approved the scheduling. Here was a scribble everyone recognized: Tilla Brassbind's approval of tolerances. Not "bomb," not "murder," never the honest words. Things wrapped in euphemism until they suffocate comfortably.
Lyra's hand closed on the case of a glass bead. It was a cousin to the one Merrow had shelved in salt. She didn't touch it bare. She used the little scoop she kept for ground leaf and slid the bead into a tin. The tin rattled like a caught insect. She wrote on the lid with a grease pencil: LISTENING. She did not add FOR WHAT. She already knew.
"Enough," Riona said. "We have what we came for."
"Not enough," Lyra whispered. It wasn't about evidence. It was about a woman whose notebooks still stained the table in their basement and whose name kept showing up like gravity in every room that mattered.
"Enough for tonight," Riona said, executing leadership with the soft cruelty it requires. "We owe these truths daylight. We owe the living more seeing than the dead can use."
They backtracked. Doors liked them on the way out because doors have simple ethics: you open or you close; you rarely hold a grudge. Halfway through the corridor that believed in hexagons, the alarm decided to behave. Not the bray of bells. A change in pressure. Air sucked backward as if the building had taken a breath to shout. The rune lines hummed.
Nackle stepped out from a deep embrasure like a polite tumor. He had six inspectors with him now. And twelve watchmen who had been told this was good work by a man who'd never lifted anything heavier than a pen.
"I asked nicely," he said. "Which was a mistake."
Kel's smile came easy and unwise. "We're still workshopping our response."
"You walked into the part of the city where outcomes are designed," Nackle said. He gestured at the ledgers tucked under Riona's arm, at the tin in Lyra's hand, at the thieves' tools and the dirt under Tamsin's nails. "You think truth is a weapon. It is a contract; the party with better counsel wins."
"You signed a calamity," Branna said. It wasn't an accusation. It was a weather report.
Nackle's mouth softened into something almost kindly. "You are brave," he said. "It makes you useful and doomed."
Riona shifted the ledgers so her sword hand was empty. She did not reach for it. "Auditor," she said, like a teacher saying the wrong student's name on purpose. "You increased your budget with bombs. You taught kobolds to be the hands of your sin and then you planned to clean the nests they came from. You will stop."
"Will I," he said. The delight in his voice made three of the watchmen take small steps the wrong way. "The city is a machine. I keep it honest."
"Honest men don't speak in euphemisms when they order explosives," Lyra said. "They use the right nouns and accept the rope."
Nackle's gaze flicked to Lyra, snagged on the coin in her belt—just a coin to anyone who hadn't watched the world hiccup when a tear struck chalk. He noticed things because he had trained himself to keep lists of other people's purposes. "What is that," he asked softly, like a man in a museum, like a thief shopping.
"None of your business," Lyra said.
He stepped in, too close, and Merrow moved—small, subtle—as if the space didn't belong to the Guild after all. "Auditor," Merrow said—and his voice for once carried a shadow of what he was under the careful face, the old music squeezed into a human throat—"you are about to tug a string. You will not like the bell."
"I catalog bells," Nackle said. "Name your string."
"You have let something listen to the city," Merrow said. "It is not yours. It will not invoice you for your obedience. It will eat you with the rest."
For the first time the auditors' eyes shuttered and opened again as if dust had been kicked up in a room that was supposed to be clean. "You think I don't know my own apparatus," he said.
"Everyone thinks that," Merrow said. "Up to the instant they choke."
Mire's voice carried down the corridor like a rope thrown to fools. "Auditor Nackle," she called. "Stand off. I'll not have a bloodbath under the Guild's ass. We can do it on the street like decent animals."
Her sarcasm saved a life, maybe more. The watchmen cracked, obedience warring with an older instinct called survival. Nackle's jaw flexed, clipping a line his mouth would have enjoyed crossing. "You're trespassers," he said to the party. "I will make sure the word means something again."
"Good," Kel said. "I'd hate for words to be unemployed."
They left because Riona saw the line and decided to be a better person than a satisfying headline. Mire gave them a corridor no one else could see and snagged Nackle by the badge hard enough to scuff it on the stone.
Outside, night pretended to be neutral. The vault doors locked behind them with righteous satisfaction. The city breathed. The god spun its die, not to choose an outcome, but out of boredom. Don't worry; boredom is an outcome too.
The ledgers weighed more than paper when Riona set them on the granary table next to Isolde's notes. Merrow salted the tin with the bead in a jar marked EVIDENCE as if labeling the monster makes it less a monster. Tamsin stretched cold hands over a cup and didn't drink. Branna took the first watch because she hates sleep when it thinks it can sneak up on her. Kel wrote, in neat hand, a summary of crimes and a list of names and underlined the word Horologium three times because sometimes pettiness is prayer. Skrik tucked Trel under a blanket and then lay on the floor with one claw hooked in the boy's strap as if connection could function as law.
Lyra stood over the table and stared at the line that said Calibrated Public Acuity Event until the ink tried to crawl out of its letters and hide. She touched the prismatic dust in her pocket. It sang, faint and stupid and hopeful, the way a tool sings when it mistakes itself for an answer.
The god's die showed an edge. Edges aren't numbers. Edges are warnings.
Listen: the city will not forgive them for being right. The Guild will not forgive them for being impolite to power. The Elder thing that has learned to eavesdrop on Lindell through beads stuck like barnacles in the seams of reality will not forgive them for saying "no" in a dialect it loathes. None of this forgives. Good. Forgiveness is a luxury, and what they need is stamina.
Riona rubbed the bruise the valve wheel had left in her palm and allowed herself to think about a future in which she testifies at a trial instead of at a pyre. Branna set her spear within reach and her back against a wall worth trusting. Kel drafted a clause he told himself would save someone he hadn't met yet. Tamsin went upstairs to the roof and asked the raven which direction the next fire would come from and believed the answer even though ravens are ambitious liars. Merrow lay down and didn't sleep because quiet has too many edges right now. Skrik dreamed of pipes that sing and nests that don't have to choose between hunger and law. Lyra put her hand on the coin and whispered one word so soft you couldn't hear it unless you were the kind of god that hangs around listening for hard promises.
Tomorrow, they will carry proof into daylight and discover daylight is a suspect witness. Tomorrow, Auditor Nackle will smile in the wrong room and show them how many laws a gnome can bend before he breaks. Tomorrow, the Horologer will notice a ledger missing and order the city to hold its breath while he counts to something no one else can survive. Tomorrow, the bead will hum in its salt and Merrow will consider how to break a listening without teaching it his name. Tomorrow, Lyra will knock again, because that's what love does when it refuses to learn obedience.
Tonight, the egg sleeps. The city keeps score. The sewer mutters in its sleep about floods it has known. Somewhere, in a brine pool where arrogance pretends to be religion, something huge felt a tug on a leash it didn't tie and wrote RETALIATION at the top of a page. The god flipped the die in its palm and caught it without looking. You want a number? Earn it.