After supper, Luxe knocked on Mrs. Greene's office. The matron looked up, rosary glinting like a length of dark rain across her desk.
"I need one of your small, lawful lies," Luxe said.
Mrs. Greene didn't blink. "Which flavor?"
"Please tell anyone who asks that the Y is recommending girls report to the glove factory at seven. If an officer asks, show him our curfew extension and say we'll be there at sunrise."
"Seven," Mrs. Greene repeated, writing it in her book like a priest writes a memorial. "And what time will you actually be elsewhere?"
"Four-thirty," Luxe said. "At a pier that isn't a pier."
Mrs. Greene's mouth tilted. "Ah. The librarian's handwriting is very persuasive, isn't it?"
"It is," Luxe said. "So is your door."
"Keep my door clean, then," Mrs. Greene said, but her voice had warmed. She slid two tiny safety pins across the desk, of all things. "For your hems. Wolves watch girls who trip."
Luxe pocketed both pins like talismans.
When curfew brushed the Y into quiet, Luxe didn't go to bed. She sat in the chair by the window, curtain parted the barest slit, heart beating the way a drum beats to call a village into the square.
She didn't have to wait long.
At eleven, the patrol car cruised the block, not stopping, a shark's silhouette under milk water. At one, a man passed beneath the lamp, not Daniels—too short, the walk wrong. At three, the street was so still even the fog seemed to have lain down to sleep.
At three-thirty, a shape slipped out the Y's side door. Not Aurora. Not Margaret. Helen. Practical shoes, coat buttoned, hat plain enough to be invisible to anyone not looking.
She didn't turn her head. She didn't hesitate. She headed toward the trolley stop, where a watchman's shadow wore a cap and a bored expression.
Luxe tracked the clock's hand tick toward four. She counted to a hundred, then two hundred, then stood. She tucked Aurora's blanket higher, pressed her mouth to her sister's hair, and whispered, "Sleep."
Aurora murmured a word—roof—and smiled into the pillow.
Luxe slid into her skirt, pinned the hem with Mrs. Greene's safety pin, palmed Grace's little folding blade for fruit string, and tucked Ruby's curfew letter into her coat pocket purely for the feel of it. Paper roofs. Witness walls. And a hammer that looked like a girl in a plain coat.
The waterfront before dawn was a geography of unlit teeth. Tugs muttered to themselves. Ropes creaked with the secret language of work. The air tasted of salt and metal. Pier numbers loomed out of fog like chapters in a book someone else was reading.
At the signboard for PIER 21, a man leaned smoking, hat down. Not Daniels. Hired eyes. Luxe kept walking. PIER 22 had a cat and a sleeping drunk. PIER 23 was there, but its loading doors wore letters A and B and nothing like C.
Luxe melted into a doorway across the narrow street where fog-webbed lamplight could still find her if danger needed a witness. She waited.
At eight minutes past four, Helen appeared from the trolley stop, small and brisk against the cold. She scanned the doors. A, B. B, A. No C.
A shape unpeeled from the dark like mold: Daniels.
He had dressed the part: plain coat, hat low. But even hunched, his posture said I own whatever I look at. He didn't see Luxe, because Luxe had become doorway and fog and breath held to a thread. He saw only Helen.
"Well?" His voice was rough cloth. "Your board said C."
"There is no C," Helen said. There was no apology in it, only information. "But the girls—"
"Which door do they use?" Daniels snapped, patience already short.
Helen's jaw tightened, a flicker of something human cracking through the plain face. "They go where work is. Ellis Cleaners at nine. Library Thursdays. The Y at night with the other girls." She hesitated. "They help children read."
Daniels stared at her, smoke seaming the air between them. "I didn't hire you to bring me storytime."
Helen's mouth tightened. "You hired me to tell you their patterns. You changed the place."
Daniels swore softly. "Not my change." The word Beaumont lived in the pause like a gun behind a door. He flicked his cigarette into the gutter, the hiss sharp. "Get me something useful. Or get out of my way."
Helen absorbed the hit without flinching. Wolves trained their pets well.
She turned to go. Daniels caught her sleeve for one ugly beat, then let go, remembering himself or remembering the street. Helen didn't look back. She walked away faster.
Luxe stayed in the doorway until the clock at the ferry building tolled the quarter hour. Daniels stood staring at the wrong door as if he could hate it into being right, then finally stalked toward the shadows that fed him men like Helen.
Luxe let her breath out slow, the way you set a glass down when the table's crooked.
Proof. Quiet proof. Not enough to end anything. Enough to move the next piece.
On the trolley back, Luxe stood near the back, swaying with the car's sway. Men hunched in damp coats, women clutched lunch pails, a sailor dozed under his cap. The city had its own heartbeat; today, Luxe felt it in her bones.
At the Y's door, the night clerk glared without heat. "Curfew passed hours ago."
"I'm an ink blot on Mrs. Greene's ledger," Luxe said, and held up the letter like a talisman. "Roof beams."
The clerk snorted, unimpressed but mollified. "Don't wake the house."
"I never do."
The hall swam softly in its pre-dawn hush. Inside their room, Aurora turned toward Luxe the way sunflowers turn toward window light.
"You're cold," Aurora murmured, barely awake.
"Fog," Luxe said, sitting on the bed edge, rubbing warmth into her sister's hands. "Sleep."
Aurora's fingers tightened around Luxe's. "You smell like the sea."
"It tried to hire me," Luxe said, and realized too late the joke sounded like truth. Aurora smiled anyway, already slipping under.
Luxe lay down at last, shoes still on, blade still a small weight in her pocket. She stared at the ceiling until the cracks reminded her of a map again, then let her eyes close a fraction.
When she slept, it was for six clean minutes, and it was enough to carry the morning.
By afternoon, word had reached the writing circle—filtered and softened by gossip's habit of sanding splinters off truth. The inspector left. The Y stood firm. Some man was seen near the docks. Margaret spun it into a line break; Ruth made it a note in the margin.
Helen sat where she had before, hands folded, attendance perfect. When Aurora read a small poem about C not being for Cat or Cake but for Courage, the new girl's lashes flicked once. Luxe watched that flick.
After, Helen handed Aurora a note. "A list of good magazines that publish poetry," she said, polite as a typed letter. "If you ever wanted to send something out."
Aurora lit up like someone had lit a match in her chest. "Really?"
"Really," Helen said, smile careful and well-made. "Girls' voices should travel."
Luxe intercepted the paper with a thank-you and a smile that had teeth on the inside. She unfolded it later at the window: five real magazines, three real addresses, one wrong street number that would turn a letter into a loop back to sender.
A test inside a test. Wolves weren't the only ones who set them.
Luxe refolded the page and tucked it under the jar of Grace's salve. "We'll hand-deliver the first," she told the empty room. "Neighbors before postage."
When curfew's hush settled, Luxe didn't sit by the window. She sat at the desk with a pencil and paper and wrote what she knew, the way Ruby had taught her to pin butterflies without killing them:
Daniels prefers ash to ink. Impatient. Needs theatre.
Beaumont prefers to let Daniels fetch the curtain cord.
Helen passes notes. Acts under pressure. Mark on wrist—trained by someone who believes pain is a ruler.
Mrs. Greene is a door that learns your weight.
Ruby builds roofs from paper and schedules.
Grace builds weapons that look like kitchen drawers.
Aurora builds heat.
At the bottom, Luxe added one more line:
Me = hammer that looks like a girl.
She blew on the page until the pencil dust settled, folded it, and slid it under her mattress. Paper could be used against you. But sometimes you needed to see your own head on a page so the fear had to meet your eyes before it could make itself bigger than truth.
From the bed, Aurora whispered, "Luce?"
"Mm?"
"Do you think Helen likes poems?"
"I think she likes the kind of work that gets her praise," Luxe said truthfully. "And poems are the sort of thing people will praise in the open."
Aurora turned that over like a pebble in her palm. "Maybe we can make her like the other kind of work, too."
"What kind?"
"The kind where you stay," Aurora said, by which she meant us, this, roof, neighbors.
Luxe stared at the window's pale square. "Maybe," she said, which meant not yet, not safe, not until we know where her leash ties.
Aurora sighed, not disappointed—only tired. Within minutes, she fell asleep, mouth parted, breath a soft metronome.
Luxe went to the window then, parting the curtain just enough.
No car. No ember. Only fog thinking its slow thoughts.
She let the curtain fall, lay down, and put her hand in that familiar space between the beds until Aurora's fingers found hers in the dark.
They slept like that, the way you hold a bridge over a river while the water argues underneath.