They moved before midnight. No uniforms. Coats that didn't shine. Lanterns capped.
Luth spread a rough map on the Annex table, hand-drawn lines where alleys met brick that wasn't original. The archivist tapped three Xs with her quill. "Every ringed-dot slip in the last week came through one of these. They look like different walls. They aren't. Same spine behind them."
"Access?" Fenn asked.
"Maintenance door behind a dye shop on Thimble Court," the archivist said. "Locked, then painted over. The man who did the paint has a cousin who drinks where I drink."
Fenn looked at her. "Lucky cousin."
"Loud cousin," the archivist said.
They took two squads. Fenn led with Selra, Kaelen, Vorrik, and Jore. Aethryn came this time, lantern in a cloth wrap. Luth stayed back with a set of Wardens ready to close streets if it went loud. The plan was simple: open, look, pull, leave.
Thimble Court slept badly. Dye barrels were lidded. A cat watched from a roof and didn't pretend to care. Fenn stopped at a patch of wall that looked like it had never had a door. Up close, the paint told on itself, smooth over rough, a square just a shade too calm.
Jore got the hinge pins out without a sound. Fenn pushed. The rectangle sighed inward.
A narrow service corridor ran behind shop walls: old brick, newer brick, paste of repairs and shortcuts. To the right, the faintest shimmer ran along mortar lines where someone had set very small mirrors at exact angles. They carried light like a whisper.
Selra breathed out a soft thread and laid it against the edge of one tile. It slid away and came back thinner. "Yeah," she said. "Messages."
Kaelen felt it too, a trickle, not a flow, the way glow moves when it has a job and no time. He kept Ashveil warm and his mouth shut.
They followed the shimmer to a junction. A metal door waited there. No handle. Just a stud of brass. The archivist's thin mirror slid under the gap and showed a slice of a room: bench, crate, an index board with rows of small hooks.
Fenn nodded at Jore. He laid a flat wedge under the door and lifted. The seam cracked. Cool air pressed out.
Inside, it smelled like oil and paste and paper that wanted to keep its secrets.
The room was simple because it didn't need to be more. A waist-high rail ran along three walls, each section fitted with small mirrors and sliding frames. Under the rail were shelves, each labeled by a letter and a number. In the center stood a box on a stand, a ledger's cousin, not as pretty as the one in the culvert, but with the same ugly idea. Its spine was a roll of mirrors. Its face had a slit. A stamp pad sat beside it with the ringed-dot waiting.
No people. No chairs. Work came and went without bodies.
"Router," Selra said, low.
Fenn set the squad in a simple pattern, Vorrik at the door, Jore on shelves, Selra on the mirror spine, Aethryn near the stand. She looked at Kaelen. "You watch the wall. If light starts moving too fast, you say so."
He set his palm near the rail without touching it. The trickle stayed a trickle. "For now, it's lazy."
Fenn pointed to the slit. "Don't feed it. We're not here to test it. We take what's waiting and we leave before the runners wonder why the line went quiet."
Jore began sliding boxes off shelves, fast but careful, palm-sized, each tied with twine, some warm to the touch from the mirrors' work. Selra brushed trace across the stamp pad. Milk glow answered. "They kept their habits consistent," she said. "Thank you for being predictable."
Aethryn leaned over the mirror roll and watched the reflection. Nothing moved. He kept watching. His patience could outlast rain.
Vorrik stood at the door with his tidy line ready and his jaw set. He looked like a man who wanted a fight he could measure. He didn't get it. The corridor stayed empty.
Kaelen let his breath fall into the count. Four in. Two hold. Four out. He said "enough" under it because it settled the part of him that always wanted to do more. The rail carried small pulses along the wall, one after another, like footfalls on a distant stair. He held his hand there until he could tell the difference between a runner and a trick.
"Someone's coming," he said. "Not in this hall. Two turns back."
Fenn didn't rush. "We're done," she told Jore.
He tied the last bundle tight and stuffed it into a cloth sack. Selra snapped a slim mirror off the roll and tucked it in her coat. "Souvenir."
"Move," Fenn said.
They slid out, eased the door down, set the hinge pins, and painted the square with dust by dragging their coats across it until it matched the wall's bad habits. They were three alleys away when two runners slipped into Thimble Court and knocked on a wall that didn't know them anymore.
Fenn didn't smile. "Annex," she said. "Quiet. We don't carry trophies where people can gawk."
They laid the haul on the archivist's table and stepped back. She didn't squeal about paper; she'd seen better days. She cut twine, sorted boxes, and let the first slips breathe.
"Local drops. Debt tallies. Small orders," she said, flipping through rows of neat script. "Nothing that says 'destroy a Beacon.'" She opened another box and exhaled through her nose. "There it is."
Fenn leaned in. The slips in that tray weren't orders. They were routes. A map in lines and numbers, no street names, just distances and timing. One word repeated more than it should:
HEART.
"Heart to Mouth Eleven," the archivist read. "Heart to Mouth Four. Heart to East Stairs. Heart to Gutter Nine." She tapped a small stamp in the corner, different from the dot ring, just a circle with a bar. "Central authorization."
Luth arrived on that line and took in the table without asking for a summary. "Can you trace Heart?"
"Not from this," the archivist said. "But we can see its rhythm." She held a slip to the lamp and noted how the ink shone more in one corner than another. "Pressed fast. Sent faster. It pushes downstream when the ledger's belts get chewed. Tonight will be busy."
Selra tapped the slim mirror she'd stolen from the roll. "We can listen. If a route lights, this should flicker."
"Not in here," Luth said. "Walls have ears. Annex basement."
They moved again. The basement was old stone and shelves that remembered candles. Luth set a bowl on a crate, poured clean water, and placed the mirror face-down in it. The surface trembled, then stilled.
"Talk to us," Selra murmured. Nothing. She didn't force it.
Fenn divided slips into three stacks, routes, debts, doors. "We give these three tiny bites to three different squads," she said. "If anyone goes missing, we know which stack had teeth."
Vorrik nodded at the routes. "I'll take stairs and gutters. Jore takes drops. Myrren—"
"Give me debts," Selra said. "If this ledger balances by scaring people, I want to knock numbers out of it."
"Kaelen?" Fenn asked.
He was still watching the water. "I'll go where the mirror points."
"Convenient," Selra said.
He didn't look up. "It's about to move."
The water dimpled. Thin light crawled across the mirror's back, irregular, as if running stairs. The archivist bent close. "Heart to Mouth Eleven," she said. "Then to Five. Then, listen, there, it jumped."
"Where?" Luth asked.
She didn't answer with a district. She pointed to the stone at their feet. "It just went under us."
Fenn straightened. "In the Citadel?"
"Not a drop," the archivist said. "A route. It's using the city's mirror lines for speed. The Citadel is full of mirrors."
Luth didn't swear. He didn't need to. "We close internal slots," he said. "Now. Warden lanes only. Everything else sleeps."
They moved fast. Doors that usually pretended to be friendly learned to be serious. The Citadel dimmed at the edges, a notch, enough to make casual glances less useful. Luth sent runners down corridors and up stairs to post bodies where light made shortcuts.
Kaelen jogged behind Fenn, Selra on his shoulder, Aethryn on his other side. He felt the change like a drop in air pressure. The mirrors in the hall stopped passing casual glints. They held their light the way careful people hold a secret.
They reached a service gallery, bare walls, a floor that scuffed, a long window of foxed mirror. The window shouldn't have been important. Tonight it looked like a pond that had just rippled.
"There," Kaelen said.
The mirror's surface brightened at one corner, a tiny pulse with direction. Selra held the slim stolen mirror up to it like a musician tuning by ear. The stolen one answered a beat later, blinking in sympathy.
"Heart to Mouth—" the archivist started, then caught herself. She wasn't here. Old habit.
A seam in the frame unlatched by itself, a barely audible click. A small drawer slid out from the wall under the window. Inside lay a slip with the ringed-dot, still damp.
Fenn didn't touch it. "Jore," she said.
He used tongs. He held the paper where Kaelen could see. The letters were neat. The message was short.
—
Change route.
Acquire Kaelen Vire at Citadel gate.
Use House livery.
—
Selra's mouth flattened. "They're bold."
"Or stupid," Vorrik said.
"Or both," Fenn said. "Either way, we don't give them the gate."
Luth stepped into the gallery like he'd always been part of the stone. He read the slip and let out a breath he didn't have time to enjoy. "House guard uniforms, mirrored belts, a borrowed cart. We'll see them before they think we will."
He looked at Kaelen. "Stay off the main floor. If they don't see you, they'll try anyway. We catch the route, not the hands."
Kaelen nodded. He didn't argue.
"Positions," Fenn said again, and the Citadel learned a new version of the word.
They took the upper walk above the gate hall. Guards in honest livery stood where they always stood, but tonight they had extra eyes. The big door threw light out in rectangles that made it easy to count shadows. People came and went with papers and baskets and nothing to do with ledgers. Then a cart turned the corner with the exactly-right shape: two men walking, one man riding, a crate in the bed, tarp neat.
"House delivery," the rider called, bored and a little superior.
"Document," a guard said.
The rider held up a slip with a seal that would pass on any other day. The guard didn't lower his hand. "Open the tarp," he said.
The rider's mouth tilted. "This is time-sensitive."
"Open," the guard repeated.
The tarp came back. Coats. Lenses. A crate that wasn't a coffin but had opinions about light. Nothing that gave them a reason to pull blades.
Fenn lifted her fingers on the upper walk. One. Two. Three.
Selra dropped trace powder from the rail. It fell like dust and landed on the men's shoulders. Milk glow woke on the seams of their collars where ringed dots had been pressed too hard and too often. The rider looked up on instinct. That was all it took.
"Now," Fenn said.
The gate hall shifted from polite to busy. Radiance Bind fell in neat coils. Guards moved in like men who were glad to make something simple again. Vorrik's line cut a wheel. Jore took a wrist and made the hand let go of something it shouldn't have been holding. The rider reached for the crate's latch and met Aethryn's stare instead. He froze. Aethryn didn't have to say anything.
Kaelen stayed on the walk. He let the pull inside him stay leashed. He said "enough" and felt his ribs agree.
The cart crew went down. The crate was just a crate. The slips in their pockets told the rest of it, routes stamped an hour ago, all pointing to the same word. Heart.
Luth took the papers and didn't look satisfied. "They used the Citadel to pass orders to hit the Citadel," he said. "Good. Now we know they'll try anything."
Fenn rubbed the edge of a mirror with her thumb. "And they'll keep trying until we close the real door."
"Where is it?" Selra asked, already thinking two turns ahead.
The stolen mirror in her pocket flickered once, then steadied. In the bowl downstairs, the water would be doing the same.
Kaelen watched the gate hall return to normal and didn't trust the feeling. He turned to Aethryn. "You think Heart is inside the city?"
Aethryn's eyes tracked the light on the floor. "If it is, it's somewhere that doesn't look important."
"Like what?"
"A storage room. A chapel no one uses. A wall we've walked past a hundred times."
Kaelen looked at the foxed window again, the way it had rippled before the drawer slid. He felt the city carry light like a set of small habits, most helpful, some not. He said nothing.
Fenn touched his sleeve. "You okay?"
"I will be."
"Good," she said. "Eat something. We'll be moving again."
He nodded and let the line of people passing under the gate pull his gaze for a moment. A woman with a basket. A boy with a broom. A courier with a folded coat. Ordinary traffic in a place that had learned to keep going. He didn't mistake that for safety.
He walked back toward the Annex with Selra on one side and Aethryn on the other, listening for the small shift that meant the ledger had chosen a new wall.
It would. And when it did, they would be there.