They moved at dusk, when the port's shadows pooled long and the tide‑light thinned to a cool, silver thread. The staging yard sat behind a low wall of rusted containers, a place where Vale & Marrow kept things that did not belong on manifest lists: crates with false bottoms, anchors with altered sigils, and the kind of ledger tokens that could buy silence. Ishaan's contact had a key and a face that did not ask questions; the rest of the team had to answer for themselves.
Captain Rhea could not sanction the operation. The academy's rules were a net that kept people from falling into private hands; a sanctioned raid would become a spectacle and give Vale the legal cover he wanted. So they did it as a night job: Arjun, a rune‑coder named Lira, a tide‑engineer called Mave, Ishaan's liaison as a shadow guide, and two cadets who moved like practiced ghosts. Harun's absence was a hollow place in the line; his bed in the infirmary had been a reminder that every stitch had a cost.
The yard's outer gate was a seam of rust and old bolts. Lira knelt and traced a glyph in the dust with a fingertip, whispering a code that smelled faintly of ink and iron. Her sigil did not open a door so much as confuse the yard's watch‑runes—mirror sigils that reflected patrol patterns and made memory loops for anyone who tried to follow. The mirror corridors were Vale's specialty in this sector: arrays of echo glyphs that duplicated lanes and folded them back on themselves. They trapped pursuers in loops and hid true seams behind false ones.
"Watch for echoes," Lira murmured. "They'll try to make you follow yourself." Her voice was small and precise. She handed Arjun a thin strip of polished bone—an echo token she had carved from a courier's seal. "If you get lost, press this to anchor a single memory. It will cost you something to use it, but it will break the loop."
Arjun slid the token into his palm and felt its cool weight. The idea of sacrificing a memory had been a rumor in the academy—an old, dangerous trick that left a person with a hole where a day had been. He had not expected to hold one in his hand. The token's cost was a promise: power for absence, clarity for loss.
They slipped through the yard's perimeter like a shadow with a plan. Mave moved with the slow, sure steps of someone who read tide‑veins like maps; she carried a coil of thin wire that hummed faintly with tide‑light. Her job was to find the yard's hidden veins and steady them long enough for Lira to read the mirror arrays. Ishaan's liaison kept to the edges, eyes like a hawk's, and the cadets melted between stacks.
The first mirror corridor hit them like a wrong turn in a dream. One moment the lane was a narrow path between crates; the next the same lane repeated itself, a dozen identical stacks folding into an impossible corridor. The air tasted of old ink and the faint metallic tang of tide‑light. Arjun felt the halo at his throat prick; the mind‑screen showed a thin, wavering echo line that suggested duplication. He tried to name a seam and found his words doubled, as if the corridor itself were repeating his thought.
Lira moved with a calm that was almost clinical. She traced a rune in the air and the mirror shimmered, revealing a seam that was not a seam but a reflection. "They mirror memory," she said. "They make you trust what you see. Don't trust the echo." She tapped the echo token against her palm and the bone sang a single, clear note. For a moment Arjun felt a tug at the edges of his mind—an invitation to fold his memory into the corridor and let it guide him. He resisted.
Mave found a tide‑vein running under a stack of crates and anchored a thin wire into it. The wire hummed and the tide‑light around the stack steadied, making the reflection less perfect. "We get one clear lane," she said. "We push through, find the ledger, and get out." Her voice was steady, but Arjun could see the strain in the way her fingers flexed around the coil. Tide‑veins were not things to be handled lightly; they answered to pressure and to promise.
They moved through the cleared lane and found the staging node: a low container with a false floor and a lock that had been stamped with Vale & Marrow's insignia. Lira worked the lock with a rune‑pick and a whisper; the mirror arrays around them tried to fold the moment into a dozen identical openings, but the tide‑wire Mave had set kept the reflections from closing. The container opened with a soft sigh.
Inside were crates and a ledger box wrapped in oilcloth. The ledger was small and dense, a book of stamped tokens and courier routes that traced payments through shell accounts. It was the kind of thing that could make a public case. Ishaan's liaison reached for it with a hand that did not tremble.
Then the yard changed its face.
A mirror trap snapped. The arrays that had been dulled by Mave's wire flared back to life with a pulse that smelled of ozone. The lane behind them folded into a loop and the stacks rearranged like a living thing. The cadets shouted; one of them stumbled and found himself walking the same stretch of crates twice. The mirror corridors were not just illusions—they were active defenses that could steal time and bleed fatigue by making you relive the same steps until your mind frayed.
Arjun felt the halo at his throat tighten. The mind‑screen flashed echo fatigue—a rare reaction where repeated corridor echoes drained the memory of recent actions, leaving gaps and confusion. He could feel the edges of his own memory blur: the exact pattern of the ledger's binding, the face of the courier who had carried the token, the cadence of Lira's whisper. The corridor wanted to make them forget.
Lira's hand found his sleeve. "Use it," she hissed. "If you get lost, anchor a memory." The echo token in his palm felt heavier than before. Arjun thought of Harun's laugh in the training yard, of his mother's hands folding cloth, of the first time he had named a seam and felt the Veil answer. He pressed the token to his temple and let the memory burn.
The cost was immediate and strange. A bright, clean line of a morning—Harun's grin as he misstepped during drills—flared and then went dark. The memory left like a small bird, and with it went the exact shape of a cadence he had used to steady a corridor. He felt a small, private loss, a place in his mind that was now a blank. The echo token cooled in his hand.
The token worked. The loop broke like glass. The cadet who had stumbled found himself back at the container's mouth, breath ragged but whole. The ledger box was in Ishaan's hands. They moved fast, threading the cleared lane and following Mave's wire toward the perimeter.
They were almost clear when the yard's alarm sang—a thin, mechanical keening that meant someone had tripped a distant anchor. Footsteps multiplied. A squad of mercenaries poured from a side gate, faces set and weapons ready. Vale's men had been waiting for a chance to test the mirror arrays against a live team; they had not expected Lira's rune‑craft and Mave's tide‑wire.
The escape became a fight of small, precise choices. Arjun widened a corridor to lift a cluster of vendors who had been hiding near the wall; the tide‑light buoyed them like a raft and they moved through the air with a slow, careful grace. The Golem‑bond was not here to press keystones; the cadets formed a human chain and shoved crates to block a lane. Lira worked a counter‑mirror that made the mercenaries hesitate, seeing duplicates of their own squad where none existed.
But the mercenaries adapted. One of them carried a cutter that sang with corrosive intent; he slashed at Mave's wire and the tide‑vein spasmed. The wire snapped and the cleared lane wavered. Mave cursed and dove to reanchor the coil, taking a shard of metal across her forearm. Blood darkened the tide‑light where she had fallen.
Ishaan's liaison shoved the ledger into Arjun's hands. "Run," he said. "Get it to Rhea." His voice was a map and a goodbye. Arjun ran, the ledger heavy and real against his chest. Behind him the yard became a tangle of shouts and mirrored lanes. A mercenary lunged and caught the edge of Arjun's sleeve; the fabric tore and a token fell free from his pocket—the echo bone, now dull and warm.
Arjun did not stop. He ran until the yard's wall was a smear and the city's weave swallowed them. They reached the academy's safe house with lungs burning and hands shaking. Lira collapsed against a crate and laughed once, a sound that was both relief and grief. Mave sat with her arm bound and a thin line of tide‑light leaking from the wound where the wire had cut her skin. The ledger lay on the table like a small, dangerous thing.
They had the evidence: courier routes, stamped tokens, a list of shell accounts that traced payments to Vale & Marrow. It was enough to force an inquiry that could not be scrubbed. It was also enough to make Vale furious and to make the contractor houses move with a new, sharper intent.
And there was a cost that would not be counted in ledgers. Lira's rune‑craft had worked, but the mirror arrays had left a mark on her—an echo residue that made her dreams repeat the yard's corridors for nights afterward. Mave's arm would scar where the tide‑wire had cut; she flexed her fingers and did not smile. Ishaan's liaison had vanished back into the city's weave with a face that was both satisfaction and calculation. The cadets were shaken; one of them would not speak of the loop without a long pause.
Arjun sat with the ledger on his knees and felt the halo at his throat like a compass that had been nudged. He had traded a memory to break a trap and had gained evidence that could change the map. He had also learned the price of moving through mirrored lanes: memories could be spent like coin, and each spent memory left a small, private hole.
He did not write the reflective entries that night. He sat in the safe house and opened the ledger, tracing the stamped tokens with a finger. The names and routes were there, cold and bureaucratic, and they pointed to a map that would take months to unravel. He folded the echo bone into his palm and felt the blank where Harun's grin had been. The loss was private and sharp.
Outside, the city breathed and the tide‑light pooled in gutters like coins. They had stolen a ledger and paid a price. The next move would be to turn the ledger into a public wound for Vale & Marrow—if they could do so without losing more of themselves in the process.