We held the rim for a quiet watch. The visitors stayed—behind the white line by choice now, nobody eager to be the one who spoiled a clean record.
The first grit came stub-fine. Seraphina's head turned. "There. Crisium again. Low and flat."
"Same maker?" Rose asked.
"Probably," Erebus said from a pocket that wasn't there. "They're proud of this trick."
We expected filaments. We got a braid: seven hair-thin threads twisted into a rope, each a little out of phase with the next, skating along our listening net as if it had dipped its toes in yesterday's hum and brought a recording.
"Not a bead," Kade said. "A leech. It wants the lattice to hum back, so it can clap in time and learn our song."
"Let it commit," I said.
The braid brushed a singing ghost. The ghost hummed wrong and stopped. The braid waited, then added a tiny echo of the ghost to itself. Unpleasantly smart. It split into two braids and tried two real nodes at once, betting on lag.
