Saltpier didn't sleep that night.
Not really.
There was this thrum beneath everything. Not a sound, not quite. A pulse. Like the whole district was waiting for its own name to be spoken aloud—or erased again. Children muttered verses in doorways. Old men sharpened fish hooks just to feel metal against stone. Street vendors didn't hawk—they whispered. Like shouting might break whatever was starting to form in the dark corners between memory and fire.
We walked through that quiet. Hecate and me. No words. Just boots against wet stone and the rustle of her coat where it snagged on wall rot. She had Brack's bundle tucked tight beneath her arm. The parchment was still warm from Sarn Pell's press, and it smelled of ink and old smoke.
"This many names..." I finally said. "They'll retaliate. Hard."
She didn't answer.
Not until we reached the black post at the edge of Daggerlight Alley. A fresh Syndic notice flapped there, nailed in with rusted wire and something that looked too much like dried blood.
By order of Clause IX.5, all unverified names are to be turned over for declaration processing. Failure to comply constitutes erasure.
"They're accelerating," Hecate muttered, voice low.
I looked around. No watchmen in sight. But the eyes behind shutters glinted like waiting knives. The smell of boiled ink and rot hung in the damp air. The whole street held its breath.
We needed the printer.
Sarn Pell, they called him. Used to do leaflets for puppet shows. Now he printed smuggled declarations, counterfeit slips, and every blasphemy worth reading. Ran presses out of an old theater near Latchstring's fall-line. The place stank of ink and broken applause. It was a three-floor husk that had once staged operas. Now, the floorboards were warped with mold, and half the balcony was missing.
He greeted us half-drunk, ink-stained to the elbow, and leaning on a press that looked older than the Syndic's reign.
"You're late. I started printing just in case," he slurred.
"What?"
"Don't look at me like that, Auditor. Even ghosts like to see their names in print."
Hecate shoved the bundle of slips across the table. He peeled it open like it was holy scripture.
"This... this is old naming. Look at the framing. The second echo lines, the inverse clause logic... gods, this is from the Burned Years."
"Can you print them?"
He tapped a drum of thick parchment. "I can print anything. The question is—will they read it before the fire finds it?"
The Wharf wasn't sleeping anymore.
At Thorn's warehouse, we met a crowd. Not a mob. Not yet. But something close. Dozens of them. Dockers, food hawkers, knife-fighters, couriers, whisperfolk. Most were young. None wore names.
"You sure this works?" Gavri asked, gesturing to the stacks of declaration sheets we carried.
"They don't have to believe it," Hecate said. "They just have to read it. That's how the clause activates."
A boy stepped forward. Twelve, maybe. Held a slip like it was glass.
"My sister's on this list," he said. "She vanished last year."
"She didn't vanish," Hecate replied. "She was removed. This gives her back."
Murmurs. Hope, again. Dangerous. Loud.
We handed out slips until our hands ached. Gavri organized the rest into bundles, distributing them to trusted vendors and low-level smugglers. Kids from the inkstreets sprinted into alleys with full sacks of names.
Sarn Pell's runners shot through the Wharf, leaving trails of ink and folded paper. Some left them in pockets. Others slipped them into jars, inside bread loaves, under soup bowls. One girl pinned one to her chest and dared a watchman to tear it off.
He didn't.
A beggar with no tongue tapped one against his forehead. A washerwoman folded hers into a bird and let it fly into the gutter, murmuring a name as it vanished into the dusk.
Then the clause triggered.
It was a grandmother who read it first.
She was in a stairwell, squinting in the dusk. Said the name. Just a whisper.
The wind shifted.
Ink lifted off the paper, spiraled in the air like smoke, and vanished.
The grandmother blinked.
"Sela?" she called.
From behind the stairwell came a girl, barefoot and blinking, skin covered in soot, but eyes clear. She said, "Mama?"
It spread from there. Name by name.
A dockhand read a slip and his brother came staggering out of a fish crate he hadn't been in an hour ago. A man whispered a name and his wife screamed from the alley below, suddenly visible again, hands still shaking with memory. A girl wrote a name in chalk and her dead friend walked out of the Blight.
Some weren't returned in full. Some just left shadows. Some screamed and screamed and wouldn't stop.
But they were there.
Returned.
The Syndic panicked.
Watchmen flooded the Wharf.
Torch lines. Drones with clause-sticks. Steel boots. You could hear the thunder of their approach, rhythmic and merciless. No warning. No clarion.
They didn't announce themselves.
They just started tearing. Paper. Walls. People.
Thorn's warehouse went up in flames.
We ran. Again.
Back through rope lanes. Through the rain. Through screams.
The ink in my pocket bled through my shirt. The air reeked of burnt parchment and blood.
We lost two of the runners. Pell's apprentice was taken. One of the kids from Saltpier—Yul—had vanished.
"It's too fast," I shouted.
"It's not fast enough," Hecate snapped.
We ducked into the Inkcellars. A crawlspace beneath the Blight's northern rim. A place where the walls sweat memory and ink gathers in pools. Refugees lined the dark like statues. Whispering their own names just to hold onto them.
How many of them were already erased?
"Forty confirmed returns," Hecate murmured. "Maybe more. Dozens still missing. Too many slips intercepted."
Her hands were shaking. First time I'd seen her afraid.
"We need the next name," she said. "The one Brack wouldn't give us."
"The founder's clause?"
She nodded. "The name that erases the Syndic."
We returned to Brack's.
It was empty. Burned. Ink ash everywhere. But on the wall, above the melted ledger shelf, was one phrase carved deep:
You already know it.
Hecate stared. Then looked at me.
"It's not a name, Arlen. It's a title."
I felt the pulse before she said it.
"The Priest in Red."
Me.
The clause was written into me. Burned into my spine the day I watched my family erased. Buried behind everything I'd tried to forget. Brack knew it. Hecate knew it. Deep down, so did I.
I stumbled back. Cold hit me like a fist. My lungs couldn't find rhythm.
"If you say it," Hecate said softly, "they fall."
"And I disappear."
Silence.
Ink dripped. Somewhere far above, a bell rang once, then broke off.
A child coughed.
"Then let's make it count," I said.
Hecate stepped forward. Pressed a slip into my hand. Blank.
"It has to come from you. You have to write it."
The paper warmed in my fingers. The ink rose from my skin.
I wrote.
The title.
The clause.
The truth.
And Saltpier shuddered like something ancient waking from a dream.