They say betrayals always smell like somebody else's money. Tonight, the smell in the barracks was salt and soot, with a faint undernote of coin that tasted like cheap iron.
Aminah woke before the lamps were out. Habit more than duty — mornings felt like second chances, and she kept collecting them. The militia room was quiet except for the low breathing of men who'd been pushed through too many shifts. Joss lay on a pallet, eyes bandaged; he breathed in fits and long sighs like a man with sleep full of bad things.
Meren had stayed up with the diagnostic tools until his lids begged mercy and he left his notes open on a table. Hasb moved like someone who wanted order to hold while the city kept trying not to.
"You should sleep," Hasb said when she came in, more charity than command.
"I sleep better when others don't," she said. "Tell Dzeko to watch the north gate tonight. No one with a dock coin leaves without three men at their elbow."
His face went hard in the way she liked — not fear and not bravado, just the right hardness for keeping a line. "You want names?"
"I want a list and a face," she said. "Names without faces are rumors. Faces are easier to find."
He hesitated. "We found a name last night that made people look away. Rell."
She'd known Rell — a watchman who'd been on the gate for years. Quiet, good hands, and the sort of face people trusted. The idea that Rell might be anything but steady scraped at her like a dull knife.
"Rell?" she echoed. "What of him?"
"His ledger's clean," Hasb said. "No official leave. But he cashed a coin two nights ago—odd amount, foreign mint. Dzeko's got his ledger and a ledger from the docks boss. I sent someone to tail him. He's not where he's supposed to be."
"Tail him until he's tired," she said. "Quiet tail. Make regular people look like they're in a hurry. If he notices, he'll stop trusting people who watch him and then he'll make mistakes."
They moved into the morning with small, purposeful cruelties. Orders that were designed to look like care: "Take a rest, go to the baths," meaning "we watched who speaks at the bath." Small manipulations became their leverage.
By midday, Dzeko returned with a face that read like a ledger gone wrong. He didn't bother with pleasantries.
"He's been to the wharves," Dzeko said. "He met a man who's been asking questions about old foundations. Paid in coin, then left with a crate ticket—north hold, crate number thirty-three. It's on the manifest for 'restoration materials' but the tag's someone we've never used."
Aminah unclipped the scrap of militia cloth again. It was small, fibrous, mundane — the kind of object that collects truth like grime. She placed it under a lamp and peered. Threads held dust that didn't match any street. She pinched one out with tweezers and Meren hissed.
"That's not town dust," he said. "This is ground slag. From an industry that melts metal or—" He stopped. He was a scholar who loved patterns but hated guessing at malice.
A list of places in town that used slag was short. The foundries had marks. The old kiln-works had marks. And the north hold, where the crates passed, had ties to a merchant who liked to stay absent while men did the work. A man who liked coin and distance was the best kind of merchant for someone buying trouble.
They sent people to the north hold. They sent other people to the kiln. They sent a polite note to the priest in the hollow foundation — asking if anyone had come to ask questions. They let the city churn a little and watched where it spat answers.
Rell was found by noon, but not where they expected. He sat on a crate at the wharf, hands empty and face drained. He refused to meet Aminah's eyes.
"Why did you go to the shrine?" she asked in a quiet, dangerous voice. People answered better when she asked as if it were ordinary.
Rell's voice was low, not broken. "I did my rounds. I keep the north gate at night. I saw some men unloading. I thought to stop them, but I saw—" He swallowed. "I saw they had papers. They called it restoration. They showed a civic seal. I thought it was sanctioned."
"You thought the Empire would lie for them?" She wanted the question to be meaner than it was. He had the look of a man who'd been given a choice between believing the world or being seen as a traitor to it.
"They were polite," he said. "They didn't seem like the ones who'd hurt us. They had coin that smelled like the kiln. They—" He stopped. The rest was a shame that men folded over like old paper.
She didn't shout. She didn't need to. "Who paid them?"
Rell named names: a petty broker name Dalen, a captain of a small crew who worked nights, and a signature Aminah didn't recognize yet — a merchant who traded in blanks.
Dzeko returned with more: a crateman who'd been paid extra to watch the manifest. He'd seen fingerprints not of foreign hands but of local men wearing coveralls stamped with a small, obscure sigil — the same sigil Maer the apothecary had muttered when she'd asked him about ash.
The sigil pointed to a guild that dealt in salvage from older foundations. Not priests. Not scholars. People who pried old places for profit.
Profit was a bland word until it put a boy in a crate sick with ash. Then it was a blade. Aminah flattened that knife into something useful.
"Close the ledger on Dalen," she said. "Tell him any coin he takes is poisoned. Tell the kiln we're opening an audit of outgoing slag. Tell the merchant—" she hesitated, trying to pick which angle made sense — "tell the merchant we'll offer a list of buyers if he cooperates. No Empire. Make him choose."
Meren's face was tight. "If we move heavy-handed, if we break a trust publicly, the Empire will use it to reshape our charter."
"We'll make them wait." She drew a breath. "We'll let them come asking out of concern. We don't give them the scandal."
Orders moved like threads through the city. People hustled. Money changed hands. The north hold made excuses and had less energy for them. The kiln made noises like someone trying to cough up a secret.
At dusk, a man from the kiln — ash on his palms, a stoop that smelled of work — brought her a name: **Carver Venn**. He was small-time, known for bargains and for buying old bricks and sending them outward. He denied knowledge of men buying ritual ash. His eyes slid like coins.
Aminah had a list now, and lists became nets. She made the choices she had to: arrest a crateman for questioning, detain Dalen casually, bribe a dockman, and threaten a kiln foreman with public dishonor. The city answered in small, loud ways: an ally refused to help because the merchant held her debts; a minor noble feigned ignorance.
They worked through the night. By the time fatigue set into bone, they'd pulled a ledger, found a route of crates, and discovered that crate thirty-three had been relabeled at sea and reentered with a different tag — a move that implied planning.
Meren sent samples to an old contact in the scholar-abbey, a man who liked curiosity more than caution. The message came back: the residue's composition was a bastard line between sealing ash and industrial slag — exactly the kind of thing that could be used to paint old rites over new metal. It didn't just bind flesh. In theory, with enough of it and the right phrases, it could anchor a pattern and spread.
Aminah let that sit like a hot coal in her chest.
She sealed her plans into motion: more tails, quiet arrests, a fake manifest to force the merchant's hand. They set a trap to watch crate thirty-three when it moved next, to see who came for it, and to see how they handled the ash.
She walked alone to the shrine where the watchman's badge had been found. The stone was still warm in places. The circle felt like a bruise left just under the skin of the city. She knelt and, with gloves, touched the edge of that cold ash residue.
It clung to the glove like static. She inhaled through her teeth at the dryness of it. For a moment she simply pressed her hand to the stone and listened to a hum that lived at the rim of hearing.
Then she felt it — a small numbness that crawled up from her fingertips to her wrist, like the cold when you touch water a second too long. Her on-edge patience flipped to edge.
She stood quickly, heart thudding that private staccato she never showed. She peeled off the glove and flicked it into the gutter. Nothing dramatic happened. The ring of the alley was quiet. The city breathed.
She went back to her table, sat, and found the militia cloth in her palm again — where she hadn't remembered putting it. She frowned, then looked to her fingers. There, faint but certain, a smudge of gray clung to the nail like dirt.
She rubbed at it. It did not come. She frowned harder, brought a candle closer, and saw a hairline crack across the thread of the cloth that she had not noticed before. The crack formed a symbol that made her stomach thin like a knife.
It was not a mark of the guild. It was her own family's sigil, stitched wrong.
Aminah's mouth went very dry.
At the outer gate a bell tolled once. Someone called a name—a name she knew from childhood and did not want tethered to treason. The city answered with a footstep, and her world tightened into a shape that had less answers than it had danger.
She tasted smoke at the back of her throat as if a distant fire was just waking. She did not like the taste.
She put the cloth in a locked box, wrote out a list of names she could not trust, and then, because ritual helps order the frayed mind, she lit a candle and prayed in a language she rarely used. The prayer was short and ugly and not for salvation. It was for time.
Outside, in the rain, a shadow moved on the wharf — quick, methodical, and carrying a crate.
Aminah heard the sound of nails. Something tapped at wood like a small, slow heartbeat.