Chapter 16 — The Twelfth Stroke
The second hand crawled.
Xion stood beneath the bronze face of Maryville's clocktower and watched the long needle drag across the pocked enamel, a tired eyelid refusing to close. The tower's stone ribs held centuries of rain like old lungs, breathing out a chalk-dry cold that bit his cheeks. Far below, lanterns were being lit one by one in the public square, a constellation conjured by calloused hands. Voices braided together—vendors haggling, a drunk warbling the same three notes, a child clapping to count paces between cobbles.
Seven-twenty.
He didn't remember dying.
That didn't matter anymore.
"Five at seven-thirty. You said I failed." He didn't look at Will Breaker, but he felt the sword spirit's attention like a cat's headbutt at his ribs—insistent and affectionate in its own dangerous way.
"I said the Lost Soul killed them," she answered, faint and glass-bright beside him. "Failure's the word you chose."
Xion's thumb rolled across the hilt wrapped in black silk. He had not drawn her. The miasma that liked to curl from the blade when he did—blood-colored, hungry—wasn't welcome. Not yet. Not with children tossing bread to pigeons and a baker hauling a crate of sugared plums across the stones like they were the heaviest prize in the world.
"What killed me?"
"A blade you didn't see," she said. "That's honest, if not helpful."
He grimaced. "More helpful would be where."
Will Breaker's eyes slipped shut, as if listening through walls. "That's a knot. The Cycle isn't a rope you unspool—it's a weave. It tugs in more than one place when it tightens. But your grave was in the cemetery. And the chime was twelve."
He watched the second hand inch toward the twelve; when it arrived, the hour hand wouldn't move, not yet, but something inside him would count. It already was. In a way no language could name, he felt the tower's iron heart stretching its tendon wires for the night's habit.
"Then we start with the bell," he said. "If the Cycle is a weave, cut the center thread."
"You don't want my opinion," Will Breaker sang lightly. "But you'll get it anyway: not every knot is meant to be a sword cut. Some you untie."
"Talk fast."
"You're in love with velocity," she said, drifting around him to meet his eyes. "Shift let you surf time's skin without punching through it. Your Ascension amplifies that—your channels are adapting. Forty-three lines already, whereas this body had... much less when I first met you here. You're pressing your ankle on Time's tendon, Trinity. That's why the return hurt so little you forgot."
He rolled his shoulders. Muscles along his back had a hummingbird's tremor. "Then I keep pressing."
"Or," Will Breaker countered, tilting her head toward the square, "you use your mouth. Words and levers. Move people, not bells. You said it yourself: stop feeding the Cycle what it eats—your soul burned by Ascent. Stop giving it the feast of spectacle."
Xion's jaw worked. Words.
The idea felt like grit in his molars. It wasn't that he couldn't talk—he'd manipulated crowds and assassins, charmed gatekeepers and priests—but choosing talk over the tangibility of a cut always felt like feinting when his blood wanted a blade. He could cut a thing and know it was cut. With words you couldn't always tell where you'd hit until the whispers came back through doors.
Seven-twenty-one.
He stepped off the tower's shadow and walked into the square. Every place that mattered had seven doors in the world's weave and he could feel five of them opening: a bakery's side alley, a string of laundry across a narrow lane, a tiny chapel with a cracked window, a fruit stall with a suspicious bruise on every apple, and a guardpost whose torch had an inch too little pitch. None of that should have meant anything.
But now his nerves were little singing lines. He could see how the air leaned toward certain gaps. He could taste the place where a step might slip. He could smell the faint iron that meant a lark would fly and a hawk would happen to look down.
He didn't draw his sword. He tugged his collar straight. He walked faster.
"Luminous will look for you," Will Breaker warned. "She smells calculations like a wolf smells broth."
"I could use a wolf." He stopped by the fruit stall and leaned an elbow on the stand. "Evening."
The girl behind the stall had a coin-counter's fingers, quick and precise. Her hair was tied back with twine. "We're closing."
"In ten minutes," he said. "Before you do, I need a favor. Take your brother home. Now."
She stared. "I don't have a brother."
Xion dropped a silver piece in the basket. "Not the time for jokes. Take him home."
Her stare hardened into a scowl. "Do I look like a fool to you?"
"I don't have time for gentleness," he said, and let a bit of his aura slip out—just enough for her breath to catch and her heart to drop a beat. Not the hungry dragon throat of his Ascent, not the miasma of Will Breaker, but the bone-deep authority his bloodline gave off like ozone before lightning. People recognized it without knowing what it was; their ancestors had told them this feeling meant kneel or run.
She took a step back.
"You don't need to know why," he said quietly, holding her eyes without blinking. "Go home."
Her mouth opened, closed. She motioned to a boy sleeping under the table—no older than seven, cheeks sticky with plum sugar. She lifted him, and the basket, and fled down the lane.
One.
He went to the guardpost next. Two men dicing. One woman polishing the buckles on her cuirass, trying not to be annoyed at being scheduled for the boring shift. "Torch," Xion said, pointing at the wall sconce. "Pitch is low. You'll lose your flame in a gust."
She glanced up; pride pried her mouth open. "We know how to maintain—"
"Pitch is low," he repeated. It wasn't condescension—just a flat statement with a grain of command. Her eyes narrowed, then slit in reluctant recognition. She sloshed extra pitch. Her hand brushed the tungsten bracket—no splinter now to catch her skin and make her jerk, elbowing the waiting knife off its edge and into someone else's side.
Two.
The chapel's door had a hinge that bit on the upswing. The old priest who favored his right knee planned to limp through, the iron bite would startle him, he would drop his book, a boy would stoop to help, a spill of candles would carry flame to a ribbon of oil where the sexton had sloppily cleaned the lanterns. He pried up the hinge and whispered a word you weren't supposed to say to metal, and the hinge remembered its youth.
Three.
Laundry across the lane: the weight of wet cloth would treat the wire like a garrote in a gust. He cut the line and rerouted it over a pipe with a better bite. An old woman squawked at him from her window. He waved an apology and kept moving.
Four.
He reached the bakery alley and found it empty. There should've been a stray dog sniffing for sweet crust. None. The alley smelled wrong—clean where it shouldn't.
Will Breaker hovered at his shoulder. "You're untying."
"Trying." His throat felt dry. "Where's five?"
"Maryville keeps secrets," she said. "The fifth door isn't here."
Seven-twenty-seven.
He saw Luminous before she wanted him to. Amber eyes like a fallen star in an alley's half-light; a face carved out of intention. She didn't startle when he turned his head. She had a talent for believing she was always seen.
"You did the hinge," she said, voice low. "Smart. And the torch. Smarter."
"You were watching."
"I watch interesting things," she said, stepping out. She had left her crimson cloak somewhere, traded for grayscale leathers that made her look like a contour line on a map. "You're going to miss one if you keep being noble."
"Which one?"
"That's the game," she said, smile not reaching her eyes. "Do I tell you and become predictable? Or do I watch your choice and learn what you fear failing?"
He bit back the first acid answer his tongue rolled up. Words, not blades. Levers. "Does your answer change if five people live or die?"
Her expression shifted. It was still and then less still, like a pond that had remembered a fish. "You believe you can break the Cycle by—what? Evacuation? Fixing hinges?"
"I can thin its weave," he said. "I can deny it the little frictions it wants."
She moved closer. Wind lifted a strand of hair; she didn't tuck it behind her ear, she liked how the loose line softened her jaw. "You're making bets without knowing the house rules."
"We make those all the time," he said. "When we breathe."
"Some houses don't care if you breathe." She tilted her head. "Do you want my help?"
He hated that the correct answer wasn't simple. He could trust her—no, he couldn't. He could use her—yes, and she could use him back, and maybe that was a balance. Will Breaker, unasked for, cleared her throat loud enough to split stone. "Say yes, Trinity. You want a second brain."
Xion nodded once. "Help."
Luminous's smile this time reached her eyes. Barely. "Five doors. You found four. The fifth is never a door."
"What is it?"
"The square itself," she said. "You think five people died at five points. I think five died because the square wanted a mouth."
Seven-twenty-eight.
"Prove it," he said, but she was already walking, hips an argument against the idea that power had to be loud. He followed. She stopped in the square's dead center and knelt to run her fingers along the grout between cobbles. "There."
The stone was darker by a fraction of a shade, a circle the width of a sleeping child's arm. He would've missed it on any other night; tonight his lines were singing and the circle hummed back. "A drain."
"A throat," she corrected. "Ritual runoff. Holy waste. The city's forgotten bellybutton. The Lost Soul doesn't need knives if it can drink panic."
"How do you close a mouth that's stone?" he asked.
"You don't. You make it puke." She touched the circle and murmured something in a language that smelled like old paper and candle-soot. The stone flinched. A thread of black water rose like a worm and wriggled, looking for air. The instant it tasted night it split—five finger-width tributaries crawling in five directions.
Five.
The lines slithered. People's steps would intersect them like fish gills intersect currents. The ritual didn't require intention to make a death—it just needed a body.
Xion moved. He didn't draw the sword. He didn't burn his channels. He kicked a crate. He bumped a vendor. He let a mug fall and shatter where it needed to so a mother would pull her child a step left so the black line would miss his ankle. He shouted "Snake!" to no one in particular, a perfect lie because the real shape was worse. The square lurched, attention compressed into a knot. He scooped a toddler by the waistband and made a father into a hero by handing him the child.
The first stream missed its meeting. The second hit leather and hissed only to slough off because Xion had smeared pitch on that boot thirty seconds earlier, an act that made no sense until it did.
"Three," Luminous counted under her breath. "Four."
"Five!" Will Breaker cried.
The last line found a shin.
The woman didn't notice the trickle darken her hem. She would've, one heartbeat later, when she tripped and cracked her head on the cobble lip by the square's throat, feeding it herself. Xion grabbed her shoulder and spun her. She scowled and sloshed her drink; the black thread hit the side of the cup, slid down, and oiled the cobble that was supposed to take her blood.
It found none.
Seven-twenty-nine.
The square breathed wrong.
"The Cycle noticed," Luminous said.
Xion heard it: the clock's bronze tongue flexing in its sleep like a beast tasting a change in wind. The first chime would come at seven-thirty—small, a neighborhood bell from a chapel—but it would start the counting toward the twelve that mattered.
He looked up at the dark ribs of the tower.
The first chime didn't come from the chapel.
It came from the sky.
A thin, metallic laugh scraped along the rooftops. Something moved between chimneys, the shape of a broken minute hand wearing a man's coat. It leaped, and the air decided to make way. It landed on the fountain's rim and smiled without lips.
Lost Souls had many faces: the loved dead who were too angry to sleep, the murdered made into knives, the regrets a city learned to weave. This one was needle-thin, its joints reversed like a puppet's and its shadow disconnected from its feet. Every time it cocked its head, the little bones along Xion's spine tried to align to the same angle.
It bowed as if to begin a dance. Its fingers brushed the fountain's edge. Water remembered a winter four years ago and tried to freeze out of season.
Luminous inhaled. "Well," she whispered, amber eyes bright. "Hello."
"Don't greet it," Will Breaker hissed. "Cut it."
"Not yet," Xion said. The Lost Soul's head snapped toward him like a compass needle finding old north. "You came to drink, but the mouth is closed."
The Soul tilted. Its hand lifted. Xion saw his own neck cupped by that hand, another night, the alley where his breath had been cold enough to see and then not.
He did not draw the sword.
He stepped, and Shift came like a quiet—the space between piano keys where a pianist thinks. The square flattened; everyone else slowed into an oil painting. His channels hummed, and he eased on the tendon, not a stamp, a pressure. He stepped to the fountain. The Lost Soul's arm extended like a lazy thunderbolt. He put his palm on its wrist—a flat, human touch, not a strike.
Warm. Almost.
"I know you," he whispered. "You and your five."
Its eyes—if those hollow sockets deserved the word—wobbled in and out of focus around him like two magnifying glasses being slid against each other. Behind those lenses: a child's shoe under a market table, a prayer half-mouthed and never finished, soap on stairs, an apple dropped, a torch gone out. It was a collector, not original sin. It was a basket.
"You're not a mind," he said to it gently. "You're a pattern."
The Soul laughed, and it sounded like a clock-spring shaking suddenly loose from its teeth.
Seven-thirty.
The chord rang.
Not from the chapel. From the tower's throat. One. Xion felt the sound enter his ribs and write a line across his heart.
He looked into the Soul's non-eyes and made a decision he hated. "Run," he told Luminous. "Get the square out."
She did not argue, and he didn't know if that meant she trusted him or understood triage. Her voice cut through the static of the slowing world; even under Shift, even under the little pressure on the tendon, her words moved fast because words cheat. "Fire! The bakers' lane!" she shouted. The square convulsed, a sea tilting toward a false horizon. She pushed panic like a shepherd pushes a flock, and it went where she wanted.
The Soul's free hand lifted to ring the next chime on his bones.
He drew Will Breaker.
Her blade left the sheath like a breath turning to smoke. Blood-color miasma stepped out to greet the night. The Soul shivered as if someone had set a knife on its spine. He entered his Inside Stance, shoulders square, hips turned, weight balanced on the tendon of an ankle that knew what its knee would do two moves from now.
Two.
He did not swing for its neck, where nothing real lived. He cut its shadow.
The miasma hissed as it slid through dark water. The fountain's veil of cold blinked and broke. The Soul staggered without moving, like a sound made a man stumble.
The square was emptying. The drain whimpered without drink.
Three.
The Soul's smile deepened. It tapped the fountain rim like a metronome. Every tap rang a memory of a tiny death that would have been. It wasn't going to make five new ones; it was going to replay the last five at once, overlapped, multiplexed into a choir of ache, to meet the quota. It didn't need present bodies if it had past footsteps. It didn't need to break the hinge if it could ring the bruise.
Four.
"Break its bell," Will Breaker murmured, eager. "Sever its tongue."
"The clock will compensate," Luminous barked over her shoulder, still reshaping the crowd like a hand cups water. "Bellkeepers are never singular. You remove a tooth, the jaw closes differently. Xion! Anchor it first."
"How?" he asked.
Her eyes flashed. "Use what you were born for."
Every instinct snarled. He had sworn half an hour ago to stop feeding the Cycle his Ascent—to stop setting his soul on fire as a signal flare. He tasted metal on the back of his tongue, the taste of giving in. He refused.
"I was born with a mouth, too," he said coldly. He didn't mean to, but the cold came out of him anyway. The square's shadows leaned in as if they were listening. The Lost Soul tilted that needle head. Its reverse joints flexed like deliberate spiders. Xion lifted Will Breaker and pointed—not the tip at the Soul, but the flat of the blade like a teacher's ruler.
"You do not get to choose the script," he told it.
Five.
He stepped and cut—not its arm, not its shadow this time, but the line that ran between its wrist and the fountain. The miasma bit the air. Something whined like a puppy under a table. The line snapped invisible.
Six.
The tower allowed itself a mezzo forte. The sound lodged in his sternum and tried to be a second heartbeat.
"Xion," Will Breaker said once, warning and love. "He'll need you to be cruel."
"No," he said. "I'll need me to be precise."
He lowered the blade. The Soul cocked its head again, unfamiliar with a prey putting a weapon down. He opened his left hand. He met the empty eyes and he did what his bloodline hated: he let someone else touch his throat.
The Soul's fingers reached. The city sighed in relief—ah yes, a script we know. Its wrist brushed his wrist. Inside his skin something hot jerked like a horse. He let it.
Seven.
The chime went through him. For an instant, he saw the night he had died—alley, breath, the moment he had looked left instead of right because a girl had cried in the lane and he'd been the kind of person who couldn't help turning. He saw the blade he didn't see.
He turned the other way.
Shift was not a speed so much as a decision to be elsewhere without crushing the world in between. If he pushed too hard, he would rip the tendon and drop the leg. He did not push. He slid. His hand closed around the Soul's bony wrist. It tried to reverse his reverse, to slide into his shadow and out his heels, but he moved like a man remembering stairs in the dark. He placed his foot where the stair would be. He stepped onto the absent step and found it willing to exist.
Eight.
He bent the Soul's arm back and down, not enough to break, enough to restrain. "Pattern," he told it. "You're a pattern. You can't drink if I take your cup."
His right hand lifted Will Breaker for the second time. He angled the blade toward the fountain—not to strike the stone, but to cut the reflection of the stone on the water. Miasma hissed. The reflection split like an eyelid cut in a photograph. The drain's little tributaries skittered like centipedes and stunned into stillness.
Nine.
His channels burned. Not fire. A clean ache, like winter air in your sinuses. His vision sharpened into too many lines. Dragon blood uncurled in his bones and complained that he was using it without using it. Use me fully or not at all, it said like a proud father with a broken back. He ignored it.
"Now," Luminous said, at his shoulder she hadn't left somehow. "Anchor."
He hated being told a second time. He lifted his thumb and bit his own skin. He pushed the blood along Will Breaker's spine like he was oiling a hinge. The blade drank greedily.
"Careful," Will Breaker murmured, eyes lidded, delight and concern mixed.
"I'm not your parent," he said. "We're making an agreement."
Ten.
The tower was impatient. The chime came too quick; or the previous one had lasted too long. He couldn't tell. He dragged the Soul's wrist toward the stone circle and pressed bone to rock. The black water that had risen like a worm recoiled from his blood like from a hot coal.
"Say it," Luminous breathed.
He hated needing liturgy. He said it anyway. "By Ascent that I refuse and blood that I ration, by name I am not, by name I am—" His tongue stumbled on Pendragon. He tasted a woman's refusal three hundred eighty-five thousand years ago. "—Trinity. Anchor this pattern to my pulse. Bind it to my beat. If the bell rings, it rings with me."
The stone drank the last word. The Soul trembled like a fish held too tight by an old man's hands. The black lines in the grout went pale as pearls. The square's throat clamped.
Will Breaker shivered. "You are unwise."
"Sometimes," he said softly, eyes on the Soul. "That's called courage."
Eleven.
The tower took a breath to bellow the last rich note. He lifted Will Breaker and slashed without thinking—no—he thought. He had been thinking since the hinge. He cut the air under the bell, not the bell. He cut the echo. The blade's miasma wrapped around the note like cloth around a child's cry.
Twelve.
The sound arrived.
It did not leave.
He held it, not with his hands, but with whatever in a man holds his breath before a jump. The note quivered on the cloth. His channels howled. His bones hummed. He could feel every line of mana in his body like steel wire in winter. Forty-three lines bright as roads.
Luminous would later, if she had lived through this, tell him that he had been beautiful in a way she didn't like, because beauty that was also disobedience was hard to look at. But for now she said: "Finish it."
He turned his eyes back to the Lost Soul. It stared down at the blade pressed to its old patterns. No fear, of course. Patterns don't fear. But recognition.
"Go to sleep," he told it gently. "I will hold the bell for you."
He let Will Breaker kiss the place where its wrist met water and cut the thread that tied it to the square's throat. Not a violent cut. A stitch removed.
The Soul evaporated like breath on slate.
The note in his chest bucked.
"Let it go," Will Breaker said quickly. "Xion!"
"If I let it go," he said, teeth bared, "it rings."
"That's what notes do."
"It rings me," he hissed, and understood. Anchor this pattern to my pulse. Bind it to my beat. If the bell rings, it rings with me.
He'd made a good oath with stupid edges.
He took a step back so his spine met the fountain's cold rim, because if he fell he didn't want to break his head like the woman almost did. He closed his eyes and pictured the cemetery gate. Black steel. Twisted into hands. His name on stone. He pictured the chime cracking the marble. He pictured it splitting the date that refused to be read.
"Xion," Luminous said, real concern now. "Breathe."
He took a breath, and the note tried to use it to climb out of him like a wasp crawling up a throat.
"Different way," Will Breaker murmured. "Don't yank. Untie."
He uncurled his fingers on the hilt one by one. He put the blade's flat against his own chest and let its miasma smoke roll over his sternum. The smoke found the note and wrapped it and, like he'd wrapped the echo under the bell, he wrapped the thing ringing inside him with a blade meant to cut but willing to hold.
He let the note end.
Silence walked across the square on soft feet.
"Five?" Luminous whispered, counting out of habit and superstition both.
Xion looked around. The bakery's alley was safe and full of a scrawny dog that had finally decided the smell was worth the risk. The guardpost torch burned steady. The chapel's hinge sang quiet. The laundry hung like a flag of surrender and did not strangle. The square's throat was just stone.
"Five," he said. His knees shook. He let them, because arrogance breaks ankles.
He found Luminous's eyes. "We're not done."
"No," she agreed, and he loved her for not presenting a lie he could have rested on. "The Cycle doesn't like being starved. It sends something worse when something clever interrupts the meal."
Will Breaker spun so fast her skirt ought to have flared, if her dress had been cloth, if she'd had a body that obeyed fabric. "Cemetery," she snapped.
He nodded.
They went.
⸻
Maryville Cemetery's gate did not creak for them this time. Either it had learned courtesy or it had learned fear. The world felt bruised; the stars had smudges under their eyes. The grass had a barber's missed hairs cutting his finger when he reached down without looking.
His stone waited where he left it. Xion did not want to walk toward his name, which meant he did. Will Breaker hovered at his right shoulder. Luminous kept enough distance to read him. He liked that; it made him think about how far to move so she would have to read more closely.
The epitaph remained a smeared date and a name carved as if the cutter loved his hammer. But now, beneath his name, a second line had appeared in a hand he knew too well to be a coincidence:
Anchor accepted. Price pending.
Luminous exhaled between her teeth. "Well. You did it."
"We did one thing," he corrected.
"You made a promise," Will Breaker murmured, drifting closer to the letters. "The kind that only knows two outcomes: paid or broken. You're not a breaker, Trinity."
"I know," he said dryly. "I've met me."
"Do you want a moment with your tombstone alone?" Luminous said lightly.
"I want to meet whoever carves in the middle of the night without lanterns," he said. "And save myself the time of dying."
"You can't save time," she said. "You can spend it better."
He almost smiled. He didn't. "Then show me where it's spent worst."
She hesitated. He liked the honesty of her pausing to decide how much to give. "There's a thing you should understand about bellkeepers, patternwrights, Lost Souls—whatever city weavers are wearing tonight," she said, hand resting on crooked iron like she was greeting an old aunt who didn't like her. "They hate being alone. They make friends with things. Doors. Drains. Bells. They need allies to keep their echoes alive."
"And you know one of those allies," he said. It wasn't a question.
She didn't lie. "I know a name."
"Say it," Will Breaker said.
"Not here," Luminous whispered, eyes unfocusing over Xion's left shoulder. "It hears its echoes. And we've fed it enough for one night."
"What's its name, Luminous?" Xion asked.
She stepped close enough for him to smell that paper/candle soot smell on her skin. Maybe she did it on purpose. Maybe she just wanted warmth. "The Bell Warden," she said in a breath he felt on his cheek more than his ear. "Old as the tower's foundation. Older than the creed that built the chapel. It was a hinge before it was a bell." She pulled back. "If you cut the bell, the hinge turns you."
"That tracks," he said. "So we don't cut the bell. We cut... what? The habit?"
She smiled, bitter as a burnt plum. "You cut its calendar."
He watched the stone rules stenciled along the cemetery path and thought about calendars—agreements with the sky we pretend we invented. "Then we need sky," he said, and pointed at the tower stabbing it. "And height."
He left the cemetery before he could talk himself out of the only plan that made his teeth itch.
⸻
The clocktower's throat had a ladder that wasn't meant for hands like his. Whoever had hammered the rungs into the stone had had smaller fingers, more patience, a worse diet. Xion climbed. Twice his boot slipped and he caught himself on knuckle-bad metal. Will Breaker hummed to herself a song soldiers sang when their steps had to be one noise.
Luminous followed below, not asking if he needed help. He would have lied. She conserved her breath, saved it for either the climb or the argument she was surely rehearsing. He had rehearsals, too, but fewer words.
Inside the tower, the wooden stairs curled like a dragon sleeping in a human shape. He did not touch Shift; not because he couldn't, but because he felt the tendon under his heel still complaining from the square. He admitted that caution was not cowardice. He liked the honesty in that admission.
They reached the bell room as Maryville decided to remember that it was a coastal city and invited wind in to prove it. The bell hung from a beam that had listened to more secrets than any priest. The tongue, a bronze sword, swung sulky and spent.
"The Warden sleeps between strokes," Luminous said. She did not step under the bell. She had superstition or sense, same thing tonight. "You anchored its midnight song to your ribcage. That buys us the few hours between now and final toll. After that..."
"I know," he said. "Price pending."
"It's older than our tricks," she said. "But not older than your ancestor."
"Aura," he said softly. "Judgement's daughter."
"A rebel," Luminous said with respect she gave few. "She cut calendars in half, once. She slid seasons. She made winter trip on a stair so the hungry would find spring sooner than the men who hoarded grain wanted."
"So you want me to call her?" he asked.
"I want you to remember that your blood remembers how calendars feel in the hand," Luminous said, voice sharper. "Stop pretending that refusing your Ascent is integrity. Sometimes it's only fear with good manners."
He swallowed pride and the desire to make an ugly joke. "How?"
"Don't call the dragon," Will Breaker said, before Luminous could. "Call the woman."
They looked at each other like two schoolchildren forced into truce by a too-wise teacher, then nodded.
"Fine," Luminous said. "The woman. Aura. The rebel who told a god no and made that no into architecture."
Xion stood under the beam, but not under the bell. He spread his hands on the wood, feeling the rings that had once been tree then tree then tree. He closed his eyes and imagined a girl with dirt under her nails and scales along her cheekbone like freckles. He imagined her picking up a calendar like a board game and flipping it to make the cheat obvious.
He did not pray. He remembered.
And the wood remembered back.
The beam held winter and spring and a hundred thousand mornings hearing a city make bread. Under his skin, the forty-three lines lifted their heads like dogs at a whistle. He exhaled and let them move without making them run. Calluses on his palms stung.
"Anchor this pattern to my pulse," he had said. That was done. "Bind it to my beat." Done. "If the bell rings, it rings with me." That was the pending price, but also the lever.
He opened his eyes.
"We change the count," he said.
"Explain it to the girl at the fruit stall," Luminous said. "If she understands, the world might."
"Humor me," he said.
She gestured with two fingers, go on.
"Five at seven-thirty. Twelve at midnight. The Cycle likes numbers with ecclesiastical prestige. It likes what men made holy." He wiped the dust on his thigh. "But before calendars were bent to keep tithes in order, farmers used knots on strings. Sailors used stars we keep misnaming. The city is older than the church."
He looked past the bell at the big gear whose teeth had been replaced twenty times and thus somehow were still the same. He heard, faintly, the rhythm of a clock built by three generations of the same family, each of whom had wanted to add something to prove they'd mattered.
He pulled Will Breaker from her sheath but didn't let her smoke free. He pressed the flat of the blade to the gear and pushed—gently, like persuading a stubborn calf to move without bruising it.
The gear slid half a tooth.
The bell did not ring.
The tower waited, confused, like a man who reached for a word and caught the wrong one.
"What did you just do?" Luminous asked.
"Moved midnight," he said. "Not far. Enough."
"Enough to...?" she prompted.
"Enough that the twelfth stroke will come at twelve-oh-three," he said. "Enough that the ritual that loves neatness will look at the mess and sulk."
A sound like a little boy's giggle ran along the beam and down the bell; Xion's skin crawled. Bell Warden. It liked order not for holiness but for the satisfaction of plates stacked correct. He had tilted a stack.
"It will wake," Luminous said.
"It will argue," Will Breaker said.
"Then we argue back," Xion said, and for the first time tonight smiled. "With words."
"You are trying very hard to impress me," Luminous said, and he could hear honesty behind the tease—she was, and he was, and it was ugly and fine both.
"Does it work?" he asked.
"We'll see if we live to decide," she said.
The argument came through the floor.
A resonance thudded in the bones of the tower like a fist on a table: who moved my plates? It wasn't language; it was force arranged like grammar. Xion put his palm back on the beam and tapped twice with two fingers like a man who grew up under a mother who used the table to talk when her mouth got tired.
I did, he tapped. Because the plates are not yours.
The Warden considered indignation. It found it wanting. It chose a different tool. A gust shoved through the bell room hard enough to lift Luminous's hair like a wave. The tongue swung; Xion stepped aside and let it. He felt air tug his shirt and tried not to make a noise his pride would remember later.
The bell did not ring. He had not moved the tongue. He had moved the tooth. The tongue could swing like a scythe and still find itself without grass.
Luminous laughed—soft and dangerous. "You petty genius."
"The petty survive," he said.
The Warden used another tool. Cold. It put winter under their nails and asked politely if flesh would be so kind as to crack. Xion's channels tried to close like flowers in the first frost. He refused. He slid Shift half a breath forward, just enough, and the cold missed. It hit where he had been.
"Stop being clever," Will Breaker snapped. "Start being stubborn."
"That's all he ever is," Luminous muttered, but she took a step forward into the cold and let it hit her to test its teeth. She hissed through her own. "It's ritual cold. Not real. Not hurt. Not yet."
Xion rapped the beam again, a measured pickpocket's tap. Hinge, he sent along the wood, the word not as a sound but as a picture of a door opening the wrong way when the house shifts in an earthquake. Compromise. He offered two gears half a tooth each. He thought about his grave and the pending price and added a drop of stubbornness.
The tower sighed in a language people had never bothered to learn because they were busy naming stars wrong. It allowed him the half-tooth. The Warden learned a new shape for displeasure.
"Time will retaliate somewhere else," Luminous said flatly. "It's a bully—you push one kid, it steals another's lunch to prove it still matters."
"Then we go where the lunch is lightest," Xion said.
"Translation," Will Breaker said is a schoolteacher voice, "the square. Again."
"Again," Xion agreed.
They made themselves climb down calm, because running down tower stairs breaks ankles and the Cycle loves ankles. On the last landing, Luminous brushed his hand; it could've been an accident. It wasn't. "Why does this matter to you?" she asked, so plain he had to look.
"Because yesterday I learned I died and my mind cleaned up the blood so I could keep walking," he said. "Because five mattered and I didn't know their names. Because a girl at a fruit stall listens when a voice that smells like storms says run, and I don't want to be the voice that smells like storms."
She nodded. She didn't thank him for being good; she did something better—she agreed to pretend he hadn't said something soft. "Then let's go prevent the petty revenge."
⸻
By eight-ten, Maryville was tilting in a new way. The square wasn't hungry anymore; hunger had been pushed out into side streets the way a flood leaves puddles. The chapel's candles behaved like boys forced to sit through a long reading. The guardpost told jokes. The bakery sold late bread to those whose hands couldn't unlearn work.
Then a lantern tore itself off a hook three blocks away and knocked a woman hard enough to break two ribs.
"See?" Luminous said grimly.
Xion didn't waste breath answering. He tilted his head and listened. Will Breaker was quiet; that meant she was thinking too hard to waste quips. He followed the air through lanes and came to a corner where the road had slumped into itself after the last storm. Someone had filled it with bad cobbles and worse tar. The tar had a smell; the smell had a predator in it. Patterns weren't just in cities; they were in materials.
He knelt and pressed his fingers into the tar seam. "There's our bully," he said.
"Tar?" Luminous asked, eyebrow high.
"Not the tar," he said. "The habit that says fix it later. The Warden likes things that pretend to be temporary. They're easier to make permanent."
"How do you fix 'later'?" she asked.
He looked at her and smiled without humor. "You do one thing now."
He stood and shouted at a man across the lane. "You! With the rope!"
The man flinched so comically that for an instant Xion saw the boy he had been, caught with bread in a pocket. "Me?"
"Yes, new friend," Xion said, walking and clapping his shoulder harder than was polite to steal both resistance and fear. "We're closing this lane for repairs and for once we actually do repairs. Rope here. You on that end. Luminous?"
She had already stepped into the road and raised her palms like a traffic keeper who had worn the badge long enough to forget her wrists once ached. People obeyed because she looked like they should and it's easier to do the thing that makes the world smoother when someone looks like they know.
Xion guided the rope into a lazy S across the lane. He moved boxes. He dragged a barrel. He forced an inconvenience into order. It was a ridiculous defense against a primordial bellkeeper—the human act of arranging objects to make a different flow.
But people tripped the least when someone loved their path enough to shape it.
The lantern that had jumped two ribs ago tried to leap again. It swung. The rope caught it. It sagged and looked annoyed in a way that made him want to punch a lantern.
"Petty genius," Luminous muttered again. He took it as a benediction.
They spent a quiet hour unmaking little hungers. Every time they untied one knot, two found them. He didn't get angry. Or he did, but he shaved the anger into something that made him more precise. He refused to take his blade out because his hand kept wanting to. He refused his channels because some meals didn't deserve his blood.
At nine-thirty, Will Breaker said, apparently to the sky, "He deserves bread."
Luminous rolled her eyes so hard the act deserved an award. "I'll get him a loaf."
"I can buy my own bread," he said.
"You spent your coin on a fruit girl's non-brother," Luminous said, already walking toward the bakery. "Allow your predators to feed you."
"Predators?"
Her smile was not kind, and he liked it. "We see each other."
He almost said thank you. He didn't. She brought him bread anyway. It tasted like reward, which was almost as dangerous as punishment. He ate it in small bites to outpace superstition.
By ten-fifteen, the city had decided it would survive the night without drama and thus drama should be invented. A pair of boys started a fistfight over a girl who liked neither of them. A man tripped theatrically under a window to make a woman rush out and scold him with hands that were made to be kind. Life tried to find its old loops.
Xion allowed it.
"Why?" Will Breaker asked, bemused. "You could stop half of these with a glare."
"Because sometimes the world has to ring a smaller bell so it forgets to ring the big one," he said.
Luminous, contagious with amusement she refused to admit existed, said: "Stop making sense. It's unnerving."
At eleven-thirty, the tower reminded them in their stomachs that it was moving toward twelve anyway, tooth shifted or not. Xion felt the anchor thread tugging on his ribs. He pressed his palm there, not because it helped, but because failing to press would admit a kind of fear he didn't want to audition.
"You'll pay," Will Breaker said, soft.
"I know."
"You don't need to be brave for me."
"I'm not," he said. "I'm being obstinate."
Luminous didn't pretend to be a comforter. She said: "Tell me their names."
He blinked. "Whose?"
"The five you didn't let die," she said. "If we can't know the ones the last time lost, we can at least inventory the living. Facts are anchors."
He listed what he knew: the fruit stall girl—no name, but twine and a brother shaped absence; the guard with clean buckles with shoulders that wanted a better command; the priest with the hinge and the stubborn knee; the laundress; the woman with the drink and the hem. It was clumsy and not enough. Luminous didn't mock him.
"We'll learn them," she said. "Tomorrow."
"Will there be a tomorrow?" Will Breaker asked, almost mischievous, the way you tease a doomed man into laughing.
"Will there ever not be?" Xion answered, and he meant it. He believed in the days after because he was tired of not.
They walked back to the tower.
⸻
Twelve-oh-one arrived like a held breath let out in a friendly room. The tower's guts creaked. The bell tugged at its leash and found the leash tied to a different post. It complained to the Warden. The Warden, too old to come up stairs, stumbled upstairs anyway.
Wind pressed its face through the bell room's window, trying to see. Xion put his palm to the beam again. He heard the Warden's question—what did you do—and the impatience behind it and the old man's sadness that young people always touch your shelves.
"I moved plates," he said aloud, because he hated lying at the precise moment he was his most arrogant. "And I bound the bell to me for a night."
He felt the creature lean close without coming near. It sniffed and made the face an old dog makes when it smells a new pup on a guest's coat. Price, it said, a single word made of three.
"Not your price," Luminous said sharply into the wood, and Xion realized she was speaking to something other than the way she normally spoke—she'd been trained by someone who'd made her practice words as spells even before she touched real ones. "His oath is his, not yours. He pays where he chooses."
The Warden did not laugh. It did not speak again. It sent cold through the wood until his fingers ached and he wondered if bones could cramp. It considered breaking his grip. It considered waking the city bells one by one to ruin his petty genius.
Instead, it listened.
It found something it hadn't heard in a while: a man refusing a grand gesture and choosing small ones instead. Hinge. Pitch. Laundry. Rope. He had given it no spectacle to memorize. It had nothing to hum later.
Petty, it said, without disdain.
"Yes," Xion said. Pride hurt the same whether it was large or small.
Then you will pay in petty coins, the Warden declared, and he waited for the knife that would be death by a thousand little slices and decided that if that was the price, he'd... count.
"Count with me," he said, palms on the beam as the bell readied itself to make a liar of him.
It rang.
Twelve-oh-three.
The sound went through him like a river through culverts. He held his breath. He did not hold it with Will Breaker. He did not wrap it in miasma. He did not anchor it. He let it go.
The bell finished. The tower settled. The city exhaled.
Xion's ribs ached. He put his hand there and found the anchor thread still tied, but not pulling, like a kite in a field once the wind got bored.
"Price?" he asked, low.
"Pending," Will Breaker said. "Not forgotten. Not demanded. You bought time with time."
"Tomorrow," Luminous corrected him mildly and him both. "We learn names. And we get you a different shirt; you look like you wrestled a chimney."
He looked down. He did. He liked that she'd said it like people said goodnight. He liked, horribly, that the night had worked.
He hated that it had.
"I'll go check the cemetery," he said.
"Do you want me to—" Luminous began.
"No," he said. He softened the word before it could be a cut. "Please."
She nodded. "I have a map to annotate," she said dryly, which meant I hate that I can't control this next part and I will make a different part behave.
He and Will Breaker walked alone to the gate. The stone did not creak this time either. His name was still cut. The second line was still there:
Anchor accepted. Price pending.
Below it, something new had appeared, a third line half cut, like a hand had trembled and stopped because a woman had thrown a shoe from a window and spooked him.
—and if you keep moving the plates, boy, put them back later.
Xion laughed aloud. It echoed stupidly among stones named for better men. Will Breaker floated near his shoulder, amused. "You do not heal cities," she said. "You make them more obvious."
"That might be what healing is," he said.
Before he turned from his own grave, he noticed something else in the marble's grain. Not letters. A small change in veining. Where his name was carved, the stone had always been darker than the surrounding. Now, around the first letter, the dark had whitened by a whisper.
"Tomorrow," he said to the stone. "Then the day after."
"You can't finish everything," Will Breaker reminded softly.
"I can refuse to finish dying," he said.
They walked back toward light.
⸻
Luminous sat with a quill and a map and a face she wore for no one but herself. Elise would've rolled her eyes at the romance of it; Luminous let the romance be. She pinned the fruit stall in a clean square of ink, next to it: twine. brother? She pinned the guardpost and wrote: buckles. name later. The chapel got: hinge fixed. knee—ask. The laundress needed a neighbor to check on her line; she scribbled: line rerouted. who? The fifth—drink hem saved—made her quill's nail bed ache. She'd seen the way Xion had turned the woman. He touched the world with intention like a draftsman who adored his pencil more than his drawing.
"You're making him into a plan," she told herself. "Careful."
Will the obsession help or harm? Elise would've said: it will be both. Luminous marked her paper with a private symbol—an eye with a slit pupil—and put it beside the bell. Warden hears. She added: petty coins.
There was a knock she hated and liked: soft, precise, a man who could have walked in without permission and didn't. She called, "Enter."
Xion leaned in the doorframe like he hadn't been thinking about how doorframes liked to remember how many hands gripped them. He had washed the soot off his face with water that left a kiss by his jaw. He looked, annoyingly, like the adventure the city told itself to keep the children from sleeping.
"You going to tell me your more dangerous name?" she asked him bluntly.
"No," he said. "But I'll tell you a lesser dangerous truth."
She waited.
"When the clock hit twelve," he said, eyes nowhere near her mouth because he was better than that, "I wanted to use the Ascent. I wanted to call the dragon and make a meal of the bell. Not because it was right. Because I was hungry to stop feeling small."
Luminous didn't soften. She didn't weaponize sternness, either. "And you didn't."
"I didn't," he agreed. "I made small moves and let them be enough."
She tapped her quill against the table, once. "You will not always be allowed to be small."
"I know," he said. He stepped inside. He didn't sit. He looked at the map. He pointed at the fruit stall square. "Tomorrow we learn names."
"Tomorrow," she said. Her voice was more tired than she liked men to hear. He pretended not to.
He lifted his gaze to hers. "You told me a truth tonight," he said. "Now mine. I don't trust you."
"Good," she said, too quick. She smoothed her tone. "I don't trust me either."
"I will use you," he said. "And you will use me. If we are more honest about that than the things we pretend are more palatable, we may not betray what we care about."
"Which is?" she asked, and held her breath because she understood the danger of asking.
He smiled, small and cruel to himself. "A city. Not a destiny."
She looked down at the map so he wouldn't see her face betray either relief or strategy. "Then let's build this petty religion," she said, mock-solemn. "Hinge. Pitch. Rope. Line. Hem. Amen."
He laughed, and the sound put a pin in the map.
When he left, she let the obsession rise to the surface like bread that had waited too long for the oven. She pressed it down, not to kill it, but to shape. "You are like me," she told the room that had never once answered, "and that makes me very careful."
She blew on the ink by the bell and watched it dry.
⸻
He woke before the sun made the city forgive itself for its night. He woke to a tapping at the window—gentle, rhythmic. He half expected a sparrow. He found a folded paper tied to a string, the knot an old sailor's.
He tugged. The string didn't go slack; it pulled again, twice. A signal, not a delivery. He leaned out into the narrow morning and saw a boy on the next roof, hair like soot and eyes too old. The boy gestured with a chin. Xion climbed.
On the roof, the boy handed him the other end of the string. "You moved the plates," the boy said, sure of a thing he should not know.
"Who are you?" Xion asked.
"Maryville," the boy said, and smiled a gap-toothed admission. "Part of it."
"You shouldn't be in a boy," Xion said, because sometimes honesty is a hand you stick in a fire to find what burns.
The boy laughed. "I'm in a lot of things. Thought I'd choose a mouth you'd listen to without making it beautiful." He glanced at the string. "The Warden likes you because you didn't pretend. It doesn't often get argued with by men who have knives and won't use them."
"Price," Xion said carefully.
"Pending," the boy sang, mocking him with tenderness. "Don't pay it stupid. Don't pretend not to owe."
"Advice?"
"Put the plates back later," the boy said, like the stone had. "Don't leave this town tilted once you've had your fun."
"Saving people is fun?" he asked, dry.
"You're a Trinity," the boy said, and for an instant Maryville looked out of a child's face like a god looks from behind a coin—too old, too knowing, indelicate. "Fun is the wrong word for everything you will do."
The boy stood, sure on the roof's edge because he was the edge. "Tell the girl with the twine to get a better ribbon," he said. "The guard with the buckles hates his command because his command hates him. The priest will refuse help and need it. The laundress knows how to break a man's ankle with a rope. The woman with the hem will drink less if someone lets her tell a story before she orders."
"And you?" Xion asked.
"Me?" the town grinned. "I'll ring on time if you remind me what time is for."
"What is it for?"
"Hinges," the boy said, then jumped, and was a sparrow, and was gone.
Will Breaker, watching by his shoulder, sighed. "You're in a romance."
"I hate that," he said, smiling helplessly where no one could see.
He pocketed the string.
He had a day's work. The Cycle had not ended. The Beast Gate still hummed behind the world like a neighbor repairing something he only half cared about, and later—maybe tonight, maybe three nights from now—something would come through because things always do. The predators he'd felt on his walk to the library were still out there, licking their teeth after being denied.
He would argue them, too.
He walked to the square before the lanterns were lit. He bought plums before the baker could worry about the price of sugar. He leaned his elbow on a fruit stall. The girl scowled in a way that felt like relief. "We're not open."
"You're never open," he said. He put a ribbon on the table. Not silk. Not twine. A good cloth torn from his shirt. "For your brother," he said.
"I don't have—" she began, and stopped, because a woman came down the lane with the same jaw and the same clever wrists and a little boy on her hip and a laugh that made the square's throat less hungry.
"Names," he said, and the girl said one without meaning to, and he took it like a kindness, not a weapon.
Luminous joined him later with a face that said I slept badly and a map that said I slept well. She didn't touch his arm. He didn't touch her mind. They both stood under the tower and pretended to argue about the price of plums.
At noon, the chapel bell rang and nothing hungry listened. At dusk, the guard with neat buckles told Xion, grudgingly, his name and asked—not begged—if there might be a better posting if someone with storm-smell put in a word. At evening, the laundress taught Xion a knot that could hobble an ox with a smile. At night, the woman with the hem told a story before she ordered and drank only half and went home with the other half and a promise to the child who waited.
At midnight, twelve-oh-three rang.
His ribs ached.
He counted.
He slept.
⸻
He dreamed the Beast Gate in the seam behind the world. It looked like nothing like the Maryville gate and exactly like it—steel twisted into hands. He dreamed the Creature from the first page of this night, its joints wrong, its smile wronger, its hunger simple. He dreamed himself pushing it back not with a cut but with a refusal to be a wall. He dreamed Luminous with a knife in one hand and a feather in the other, not choosing yet, telling him with her eyes that she could be both and that he'd have to love or kill both and that the choice would not make him a better man, only make tomorrow possible.
He woke to someone at his door.
He did not ask who.
He opened.
Luminous. Hands empty. Eyes full.
"The organization wants you tomorrow," she said. "Not for punishment. Not for reward. For recruitment."
"I've already been recruited."
"Not to this," she said. "This is the thing under the thing."
He leaned his shoulder against the jamb. "What does it cost?"
"Everything," she said, smiling in the old office-worker's way Elise hadn't quite let die, "but in petty coins so you won't notice until you try to buy a life."
"Then we don't join," he said.
She shrugged. "Or we join and steal the petty coin purse."
"Words," he said, with something like affection and disgust for both of them.
"Levers," she said, with something like prayer.
They stood there, two predators who had decided to shepherd a square and a roofline for a little while.
He said: "Tomorrow we learn names."
She said: "Tomorrow we tilt plates back."
They did not promise anything larger.
The clock turned its tooth, half a notch out of habit.
On his way to sleep, he passed the window and saw the string on the sill, tied in a sailor's knot he didn't know. He smiled and did not untie it; some knots deserve to live longer than the hands that made them.
He slept, and for the first time since the clock had struck twelve in a place that wasn't his, he didn't dream of dying.
He dreamed of a hinge, willing to open the other way.