They found the empty cart at dawn, three streets from the kiln, under a half-roofed awning where rats felt safer than people. The wheel still smelled of tar and wet rope; the blankets had been tucked too neatly, like someone tidy enough to think order would save them.
Hasb didn't speak at first. He knelt and felt the blanket's hem with a slow, careful touch, as if answers might be stitched into the weave. His hands shook in a way he tried to hide. When he finally looked up, his face had the color of a man who'd been given blame without ceremony.
"She was here," Leto said. He didn't say it like a question. He said it like evidence: a fact you set on the table.
Aminah moved through the space quick and sharp. She checked the straps, the hitch, the scorch marks near the axle—small things that told a story better than a dozen mouths. A scrap of linen caught on a nail near the axle. It was the scrap from the kiln woman—half-knot, coal-stained. Someone had tried to hide the fact.
"Any tracks?" she asked. Short. Focused.
Dzeko crouched near the wheel and pointed. "North. Toward the gate. Two sets of boot prints, one cart-worn. Old iron nails from a ship's hold. They didn't go far before they turned into cart ruts."
Hasb's jaw worked. "So they moved her to a ship. Kept her local long enough to make it look like this was a delivery."
"Who saw them?" Aminah asked.
"A fisherman," Dzeko said. "Says he saw a cart toward the east gate last night, a man with a militia braid and a hood. He thought it odd and then a wagon with a tarp moved by and the tide meant the wharf was noisy. He passed it off."
"Coward," Hasb said, but his voice was softer than usual; cowards get lost in tides like good men.
Aminah crouched by the cart and drew a thin line with her thumb through dust. The rut went north, not toward the west lanes where Nina would've gone if she'd run. North toward the gate that opened to the docks. Someone deliberately sent her away.
"Find the fisherman," she said. "Bring him to me."
They got him, a small man with salt in his hair who kept rubbing his hands as if to get the taste of rope off them. He remembered the cart. He remembered the militia braid. He remembered a laugh. He remembered a hooded face that had a scar that made one eyebrow look like a question mark.
"Did you see the ship?" Aminah asked.
The fisherman nodded. "Big one. Black flag. No crest I knew. Left at dawn. Bright as a new coin. There was shouting. A woman, I swear, looked back once. Then they pulled her under the tarp."
Aminah felt a small, private fury like a live coal. "Which ship?"
He pointed, voice small. "The Northstar. Left from the outer quay. Said it was bound for Moulm."
For a second the world skewed. Moulm meant halls of power and seats that watched cities like chessboards. A ship bound there with a kidnapped girl on board smelled like a message. It meant someone clever enough to hide in plain light.
Hasb's hand closed on a strap until his knuckles went white. "We move."
They moved like a city that smelled of rain: fast and blunt. Aminah left a small detachment to secure the kiln paths and the brig where the crates came from. She took Dzeko and two militia and went toward the outer quay.
The Northstar was a bruise on the horizon, its hull black and slick, men moving like beetles along the rails. It had a mast that towered like a promise and a flag that meant nothing in their books. Men with rope-heavy hands shouted. The gangplank was up and the little harbor smelled of paint and panic.
Aminah stopped at the head of the quay and watched. The captain on the deck barked orders with a voice used to authority. Two men carried a crate with blank tags. She scanned faces—crew, dock hands, the petty boss Dzeko had bribed to look the other way. A militiaman at the far end of the plank looked like someone who'd been paid twice for silence.
"Which way did they take her?" she asked in a voice made for short answers.
"Below," the captain called. "Hold cargo. You can't go below unless you're cleared."
"He's lying," Hasb said. He did not have the patience for the theater people loved. "He's paid to lie."
Aminah moved like she'd practiced this path a thousand times. She had a command to make and a face that did not negotiate. "Order the captain to open the cargo hold," she said. "I want the crates counted. Every crate checked."
The captain's jaw steamed with anger. "You can't board, Captain Theodore. This is imperial trade. I have papers."
"Show them," she said. "Now."
He threw her the ledger like one man throwing down a gauntlet. She read quickly, eyes darting for dates, seals, anomalies. Most of the stamps were foreign or unknown. There was a blank where a signature should be and a mark that looked suspiciously like a scrubbed family crest—her family crest—but not entirely.
A man on the deck laughed, a thin sound. "You'd check a manifest on my ship?" he said. "This is trade. You don't check trade. You pay tolls."
Aminah didn't smile. She stepped onto the gangplank with Hasb at her shoulder. Shoes hit wood. People turned and the deck smelled of tar and saltwater and ambition.
They went loud enough to be a problem, quiet enough to keep the captain's face from crumpling into fear. The crates were opened with dull knives and the smell of the first one made everyone step back: fresh fish, wrapped in oil. The second: barrels of salted meat. The third: linens.
Hasb pointed to the hold near the stern. "There," he said. "They moved things there by hand."
Meren, who had come with them because scholars liked the drama, tapped a crate and his face went tight. "This crate was re-stamped at sea," he said. "Someone altered the manifest. The tag was switched."
A man shouted from below—someone whose breath smelled of oil. "No cargo here. Let us go. We have goods to sell."
A shiphand lifted a tarp and revealed a pallet. Under the pallet—bales of linen, the smell of tar—was a small bundle, wrapped and tied. They pulled it up.
When they unwrapped the last layer, the thing inside made a silence go through the men like a breeze through brittle leaves. Not a body—not yet—but a length of rope tied tight in a way that made people's stomachs clench. Stuck in the knot was a scrap folded many times. It had Nina's handwriting—she'd doodled on the edge of her scrap paper with the little impatient flourish she used when she was thinking.
Hasb made a sound like a man who'd been cut. He turned toward the stairs down into the hold.
"I told them to keep quiet," he said. His voice broke like a snapped cord.
A shadow moved across the hold's opening. A figure came up the ladder: a woman in rough clothes, her hands marked with ash, and a band around her wrist—militia braid, cut and re-knotted. She looked like someone who'd had to make choices too many times.
"Nina?" Hasb said. The name came out thin.
The woman's eyes flicked and she shut the ladder with a quiet click. "Not her," she said. Her voice had the scrape of survival. "Not now."
"What do you mean 'not her'?" Aminah demanded.
"She was here," the woman said, and then spat a name that made everyone still. "She was taken before dawn. They moved her under tarp. They used a cart with a clean brand. I counted them. A man with a scar on his cheek, a captain from the north hold, and a broker who likes cheap things. They paid in kiln coin and had wet rope. They shoved her below in the hold and then someone in your militia walked the plank with her—"
Hasb tensed so hard he looked like iron.
"She was moved below, then out in a rowboat with two men," the woman continued. "They rowed her to a low boat and a ship got her. I saw the lights. I followed till the Northstar's dark shadow. They lifted her aboard. I watched a woman, a small woman, lift her by the jaw like a sack."
Something in Aminah's chest went cold and hot and limned with a clarity that tasted like metal. "Who was the woman?" she asked. She had to go precise. Fury without direction wasted itself.
The woman looked like she wanted to spit and couldn't. "Hard to tell. She had a scarf and a mask. But she wore a token—small, carved. In the dark it shone like the token we found. They pulled a cloth over the face and walked her up the gang."
Meren stepped forward, voice low. "If she's on that ship headed for Moulm, then she's beyond our charter."
Aminah's hand closed into a fist so tight her nails hurt. "Then we get on that ship."
The captain barked a laugh edged with fear. "You can't board without a warrant."
"We make a warrant," Hasb said. He did not ask the captain for permission.
They moved like a storm with a plan. Men below slammed doors, ropes were thrown, a line was tossed. The Northstar's crew turned from smug to frantic in one breath. A trumpet sounded somewhere inland—an imperious sound that made cowards tense. The captain bellowed orders and men scurried.
A rowboat slid from the Northstar's side, thirty feet, ten, five. A figure on deck watched the water like someone measuring it. For an instant, in the terrible grey before rain, Aminah saw a silhouette on the top deck—small, a woman standing with shoulders drawn like someone who had learned to hold her place. She looked toward the city.
A stray light caught the edge of a face. Aminah saw a flash of hair, a tilt of chin—a profile that made her breathe like someone running out of air.
For a second only, the woman looked back. She held something in her hand—a token, small and polished. She raised it like a signal. Her fingers curved as if to tuck it away, then she turned and walked below.
Hasb moved like he'd been pulled. "Pull us in," he said. "Now."
They launched for the ship. Men shoved off. Oars dipped. The city dissolved behind them like a door closing on the last line of a ledger. Water slapped. The Northstar's side loomed up like a wall. The men in the rowboat called up, voices raw.
A crewman leaned over the rail and a rope ladder dropped. Hands reached. The ladder hit the water. Men grabbed and climbed.
At the last moment, before Hasb's boot found a rung, the woman on deck—who Aminah had thought might be Nina—turned one more time and looked straight at them.
Her face was hidden beneath a dark scarf. But in the light a single thing glinted on her wrist: a sliver of militia braid, the same half-cut knot, the same thread Aminah had seen in the cart.
Aminah's hand tightened on the rope ladder until her knuckles screamed.
She climbed toward a deck that might already be empty of the person she loved. The ladder shook and the city below felt a world away.
At the rail, a crewman grabbed her wrist like an anchor. He barked an order in a tongue Aminah didn't like. The world narrowed to the rhythm of her breath and the sound of rope.
Then, from somewhere below the deck, a shout rang out—one voice that made every man below freeze—and the ship's bell clanged three times in a slow, ceremonial toll.
By the time Aminah looked up, the woman on deck was gone. The hatch above them slammed shut. The Northstar's ropes began to slip.
Hasb shouted something in a sound that was half prayer, half order. "We cut them off!" he cried. "We cut the lines!"
But a bigger sound came first—a horn from the inlet, long and low, the sort of sound a city hears when someone wants to be noticed. Men on the Northstar snapped to discipline. The gangway rattled. A small boat reached them with men whose coats bore unfamiliar stitching.
At the outer rail, a thin scrap of paper snagged on the ladder where Aminah's boot had brushed it as she climbed. She tugged it free with her free hand and the ink on it bled toward the light in blotches like small wounds.
Two words, written in a hand she had seen in someone's ledger once, stared up at her.
Exchange. Tonight.
The surf slapped the side of the ship like a door being shut. The Northstar turned its prow and moved out, cutting a clean line through the harbor, heading for Moulm.
Aminah felt the harbor fall away like a measure of time. The list in her head shortened until it had only one name on it. She tasted ash, salt, and the fear that runs quiet and hot under skin.
She had twelve hours.