Plans look good on chalk.
Jorn dragged a crate under the Cohort's wall and sketched the West Spur like a man who had argued with it before. Serah added tidy sigils for heat paths and anchor points, her handwriting the kind of neat that made rules feel inevitable. Tessel wrote equations that looked like insults in a polite language. Maeron annotated margins with the glee of a heretic assigning footnotes to God. Lysa knotted cord between nails until the web resembled gravity's favorite trap.
Kael leaned against the opposite wall and practiced not fidgeting. It was like holding in a sneeze while the universe dusted you.
"Roles," Serah said, tapping the map. "Jorn—outer perimeter. Three exits marked: Lash stair, rigging lift, and the service gangway no one admits exists. If one goes wrong, you shove us through another."
Jorn grunted approval. "If two go wrong?"
"Then you shove harder," Serah said.
"Copy," Jorn said.
"Tessel—monitor the lattice and our anchors," Serah continued. "You carry the cutout for Kael's plates. If the Dome tries to write him into itself, we flip the switch and he drops to local."
"I have three switches," Tessel said. "One for him, one for the Dome, one for whatever decides to improvise."
"Improvisation is my brand," Kael offered.
"It is also your crime," Tessel said.
"Maeron—eyes and ears on doctrine," Serah said. "If they pivot to a rite, I want the cue before the chorus."
Maeron smiled like a man handed a loaded book. "I will sing if they do."
"Don't," Serah said. "Lysa—you are the floor. If the Dome twitches the Lash, you make the world remember down is down."
Lysa tugged one more knot tight. "If the Dome refuses to remember?"
"Then we bow," she said. "And hope it takes the compliment."
Serah turned to Kael last. "You're with me."
"I like my job," he said.
"You'll like my rules less," she said. She handed him a pair of thin copper cuffs, each etched with a ring of tiny, tidy sigils. They looked like jewelry for a nervous god. "Anchor plates. Wear both. If I say hands, you clap them together and keep them that way."
Kael slid them on. They settled against his skin with the mildly disappointed air of tools that knew the user. "If I say no," he said, "do I clap?"
"You already know that word," Serah said. "Practice it."
Tessel placed a small cloth bag on the table. It clinked like sin. "Bells," he said.
Kael raised an eyebrow. "For the leash? This is getting kinky."
"For you," Tessel said. "Thread one through each cuff. If we lose you in the field, we follow the sound."
Jorn snorted. "Also warns idiots you're coming."
"Dual-purpose," Tessel said. "Innovation."
Kael tied the bells with exaggerated care. They were simple—polished copper, slit mouths. When he moved, they spoke in little question marks.
"Adorable," Maeron said. "A walking sacrament."
"Shut it," Kael said, and made them purr just to irritate Tessel.
The day slouched toward night with the sluggish guilt of a sinner going to confession. Aerialis dimmed by layers: lamps winking to ordered brightness, field plates shifting to night cadence. The Veiled Sun bowed out, leaving the Black Halo sitting rude on the horizon like a bruise that had learned manners.
They ate again because Jorn insisted. Kael couldn't taste his stew over the copper thread of his own nerves.
"Remember," Serah said as they stood. "No purity contests. We go to listen, not to prove anything. If the Dome opens, we do not enter."
Kael nodded like he meant it. The bells on his cuffs answered: sure and sure.
Two bells, short, rolled out over the city right after second shift ended.
It wasn't the pylon bells or the Conclave's chain-bell; those rang like law. This was a thinner sound, intimate and rude: invite. Kael felt it through the plates, a vibration in the teeth.
The walk to the Dome had the flavor of dream logic. Streets that had taken a dozen turns earlier suddenly aligned like apologies. People glanced up and looked away as if not wanting to be caught seeing the same star. Under the Dome's ring, the air felt newly swept.
A crowd had already formed. Not a mob—mobs shout. This was a meeting. Riggers with rope-callused hands. Plate-tuners with copper dust under nails. Boys with laughing chain paint smudged at the brow. Women who carried tools like prayer beads. A Radiant tech with a singed sleeve stood off to the side like someone both ashamed and inspired. Here and there, little grins stamped in cheap pewter shone like bad teeth.
Officers at the edges watched like men doing math and hoping not to show their homework.
The Dome's stone was black enough to steal stars. No door showed. The ring of anchors around it flickered so fast Kael could feel patterns hidden in patience. The place smelled like cold iron and old breath.
The thin rigger from earlier stood on a crate, hands loose at his sides, head lifted. He looked younger at night, or more honest—same thing, sometimes. When Serah and Kael approached, murmurs moved through the crowd like a breeze learning names.
"Welcome," the rigger said softly. His voice carried without strain. The Dome helped. "We thought you wouldn't come."
"We're predictable like that," Serah said, tone flat as a kept promise. "This is not an endorsement. If you call for the city to fall, I'll make it kneel instead."
"Tonight we call for listening," the rigger said. "Then we vote."
"No you don't," Tessel said, shoving between two men with a politeness that bruised. His circlet flickered faint. "No one votes on lattice behavior."
"Everyone votes on lattice behavior," the rigger said mildly. "Some of us with copper and numbers. Some of us with prayer and breaking. Both are votes. One is only louder."
"A charming speech," Maeron murmured, scribbling. "He plunders my cadences like a smart thief."
Jorn's hand hovered near the hilt of a knife. He wasn't going to draw it yet. He wanted the option to be close. Lysa stood like the edge of a cliff that had learned to sigh.
The rigger raised one palm and the crowd settled another inch. "We meet because plates forgot their prayers," he said. "We meet because the lattice listens to the wrong songs. We meet because the city tries to keep itself on time while the world runs out of seconds."
He pointed—open-handed—at Kael. "We meet because it has a voice it never knew. We can teach it to listen and live, or we can let it ignore and die."
Kael lifted both hands, bells chiming: hello. "If I teach your city to listen to me, you'll hate how much it hears."
"We hate the falling more," the rigger said.
Serah—calm, measured—stepped into the angle where the crowd's attention and the Dome's patience met. "No rites," she said. "No oil. No words you don't understand. You want to listen? Fine. We stand here and we listen and then we all go sleep."
"Agreed," the rigger said, as if the Dome had said so for him.
"Names," Tessel said, because he believed in systems even when they were drowning. "So I can arrest them in order later."
The rigger's mouth quirked. "We're making a list," he said. "You won't like who's on it."
Kael laughed softly. The sound hit the Dome and came back softer. "We're all very funny," he said. "Shall we do the thing before we all remember to be cowards?"
"Begin," the rigger said.
He didn't light incense. He didn't draw sigils. He put both palms to the Dome's stone and closed his eyes. Around him, a dozen others did the same: palms, foreheads, copper against black.
Serah slid her staff down and grounded it tip-first to the ring. Heat flowed into a waiting shape and then stopped there, obedient. Tessel pressed a copper wand to Kael's cuff and his anchor plates whispered present.
"Kael," Serah said, the single syllable containing a room of rules.
"I know," he said, and stepped forward until his breath fogged the stone.
He didn't touch the Dome. He held his hands an inch off it and let the no rise from the Cloister memory and sit in his fingers like a folded letter. He listened.
At first: nothing. Then: less than nothing. The Dome's field was a thought held between teeth. It had curves in it that would shame circles. It had a habit of not being where it was when you tried to be polite.
He let his hands shake once, bells asking are we praying or stealing.
A sound moved through the gathered bodies like a shared pulse: two bells, short. Not from the city. From the stone. From the silence.
Invite.
The ring of anchors around the Dome flickered in a new pattern. Tessel made a strangled noise that meant note that. Serah's grip at the staff tightened.
The Dome's skin cooled—not in temperature, in interest. It made a doorway that wasn't a doorway: an oval patch where the field's no became thinner, and the eye could pretend there was depth.
"Stay," Serah whispered, breath ghosting his ear. "This is only the mouth."
Kael stayed. His body leaned. That was just gravity practicing ideas.
The rigger spoke without opening his eyes. "We ask," he said quietly, "for a path that does not require burning out our plates to heal a city that is already a wound."
He was good. Kael liked him less for it.
Something shifted beneath them—lattice, Lash, the whole architecture—like a bed creaking under too much thought. The doorway wasn't a doorway widened a hair, enough to be rude.
Tessel's wand throbbed. "Do not—"
Kael did not. He let the field's edge brush the back of his fingers. It felt like a cat that tolerated you when you didn't deserve it.
Behind him, the crowd breathed in. The Dome breathed out, and the air near Kael's mouth tasted like stone agreeing.
A laugh arrived. Quiet, familiar. Not in his ears—behind his eyes where the Cloister had taught him to allow, where the sunwell had said yes and last.
"Don't," Serah said again, and the warning carried a softness that had nothing to do with fear.
"I'm not," he whispered, and for once meant it.
The Dome changed key.
It wasn't sound, exactly; every plate in the ring lifted a fraction of its hum and then settled an eighth-tone down. The field that made not-motion possible did a small, elegant inversion and decided motion wasn't rude if it knew how to curtsy.
Kael felt the path—not in, not through, but across. It laid itself like chalk in his head: how to move energy along the Dome's skin without annoying it, how to make the lattice hear that as reasonable and not rebellious, how to let the city listen without turning its ear into a wound.
He didn't take the path. He saw it.
Serah must have felt the same shape; her staff's heat web altered an angle no one else could name. Tessel whispered, "I hate this," like a man seeing beauty and refusing it out of safety.
The rigger opened his eyes. They were wet. He had the look of a man who had been given a kindness by something that rarely remembered kindness.
"Vote," he said.
Tessel hissed. "There will be no—"
"Raise your hands if you know what to do now," the rigger said, ignoring him. Hands rose—half, then more: plate-tuners, riggers, three techs, a woman with solder burned into her cuticles, a boy still with paint on his brow. They hadn't learned a rite. They had learned a habit.
"Hands down," Serah said. "We are not teaching the city a secret chant that only this crowd knows."
"We teach them all," the rigger said.
"We can't," Tessel said. "Balance—"
"We won't," Lysa said, and the quiet in her voice cut the Dome's hush cleanly. "Because if you teach everyone to lean, the world will fall to please you."
"Listen to the war criminal," Maeron said, not helpfully.
The doorway-that-wasn't shifted again. A draft of colder air stroked Kael's knuckles, then withdrew. The Dome's mouth was open, but it was biting back a word.
Two bells, short, rolled again. Invite. A third followed, longer. Threat.
Kael felt his future self the way you feel a cliff through fog: not seen; known. The laugh waited, patient, as if curious what flavor of refusal Kael would invent this time.
"We go," Serah said, voice flat and iron. "Meeting's over."
"No," said someone new, and the crowd parted in a ripple of respect and hunger.
The Star-Sworn Oracle stepped between rigger and Sovereign like a note occurring between two chords.
Elyra wore a coat that wasn't warm and a face that wasn't old, just precise. Light bent near her because it had opinions about her angles. She put one hand to the Dome without touching it and the other to the air without holding it.
"Not yet," she said, looking at Kael and only Kael. "If you leave now, they'll try this again with worse variables. If you enter now, you'll teach the city to kneel to your shadow."
"Option three," Kael said, because he was himself. "Be stupid."
"Be specific," Elyra said.
Serah's breath hitched almost inaudibly. Tessel murmured something like don't you dare. Jorn shifted weight to the balls of his feet and studied exits the way prayer studies silence. Lysa had no expression at all; gravity around her fingers drew a thin line ready to become a wall. Maeron's pen stilled in mid-stroke like a tremor interrupted.
Kael lifted his cuffs so the little bells chimed: here and now. "I don't go in," he said. "I don't go away. I give it the shape of no in a way it hasn't tasted."
"Cloister trick," Serah breathed.
"Scaled," Kael said. "Borrowed manners."
He set his palms a breath from the not-door. He remembered the Cloister, the discipline of letting a room write not into his bones. He lifted that discipline like a cup and poured a thin ring of it along the Dome's lip.
Anchor: the field's invite. Path: around; never in. Release: polite refusal.
The hum fought at first—no one enjoys a new rule imposed by an idiot—but the ring set, delicate as a hair and stronger. The doorway-shape shivered. The two short bells dimmed. The long bell—threat—lost its tail and turned into something like a question mark.
The rigger swayed. A few of the crowd gasped. Tessel's circlet wrote manic little lights and then calmed like a heart deciding not to run. Serah's hand hovered half an inch from Kael's shoulder and did not land because she wanted him to own this one if he could.
Elyra watched him with the slight tilt of the head that meant a planet had nudged.
The Dome… breathed. It thought about its mouth. It kept it. It did not widen it. It held its invitation like a held note, patient, waiting to see if this new ring made the song better.
Kael backed half a step. The bells said okay and okay.
"Meeting adjourned," Serah said, not loud, and the Dome allowed the air to carry it.
Some left at once—the ones who only wanted spectacle. Others drifted, muttering, hands still hot with wanting to touch. The rigger stood a long moment with his palms not on the stone.
"Tomorrow," he said, thin with hope and hunger.
"Tomorrow I arrest you," Tessel said, exhausted.
"Tomorrow," Elyra said, ever unhelpful, "the lattice wakes with a new habit, and we learn whether it coughs."
She stepped back from the Dome. The small gravity of her presence loosened. She looked at Kael like a variable asked to become a number. "You bought yourself a pause," she said. "Spend it foolishly."
"That's my best trick," Kael said, shaky and bright.
"Not your best," Elyra said, and then she was absent, the light that had been choosing her angles relieved to go back to work.
The Dome shut its pretend-mouth by a hair. Enough to say later.
Serah exhaled and finally put her hand on his shoulder, warm as a rule. "You did not go in," she said.
"I did not," he said.
"You refused politely," she said.
"I flirted with no," he said.
"You taught a god to be bored," Tessel muttered, bewildered admiration trying not to be affectionate. "I hate you less for ten minutes."
"Write it down," Kael said.
Lysa's gaze flicked toward the underwalks, where rope shadows pretended to be men. "We'll need to break the meetings," she said. "If too many learn the song, one will sing it wrong."
"Tomorrow," Serah agreed. "Tonight we monitor. We don't give them martyrs."
Jorn clapped Kael once, hard, on the back, anchoring him to the Lash through humor. "Bells worked," he said, and the small copper mouths chimed in smug agreement.
Maeron finally let his pen complete its halted stroke. "Two bells," he said under his breath, "and a refusal that sounded like prayer. Disgusting. I'm in love."
They walked away from the Dome with the city around them adjusting its shirt. The invite had been answered with a complicated answer. Aerialis took that as permission to wait.
Kael didn't look back.
He could feel the future standing at his shoulder, wearing his face, not entering or leaving either, just… waiting to see which of them would learn to be patient first.
The bells on his cuffs said not yet and not yet. For once, he and the city agreed.