He wakes with the taste of ash and the heavy certainty that someone has been sitting in the room counting his breaths. No one is there, of course. The clock is unhelpful and smug. The scar says otherwise.
It is very possible to hate a part of your own body. People do it all the time—knees, stomachs, faces that remind them of relatives. The Seeker hates the scar. He hates it as one might hate a rumor that keeps being true.
Light leaks in from the alley. Somewhere, a delivery truck exhales. The morning smells like damp cardboard. He lies still and negotiates with the pain, small treaties and armistices made at the speed of heartbeat. The scar does not sign anything. It answers by warming under his palm until his hand feels like a borrowed animal.
He counts to nine—because that number used to mean something in a language he hasn't admitted to learning—and gets up.
Tea first. Always the ritual. Not for taste. For borders. He measures leaves like a man laying down a line of salt to tell the sea where to stop. Steam rises. The kettle's whistle saws at the silence, and for a moment the noise harmonizes with the throb beneath his ribs—two thin flutes, half in tune, half threat. He pours. He waits. It does not help much, but rituals, like umbrellas, are not about guarantee. They are about posture.
The phone is face down. Xuemei has a talent for arriving without arriving, which is to say there are three folded newspapers wedged under his door and a paper bag of buns on the table, still warm, smeared with the thumbprint of someone who thinks affection is an action and not a declaration. There is also a scrap of butcher paper ripped from something red and precise: ossuary, she wrote. Prague. Stay away. Then, because she is fair, overturned that law with a second line: if you must, bring salt. And onions.
He smiles despite everything. Onions, yes. The living do not like meeting the dead on an empty pan.
Coyote is in the window, reflected, not perched. That is how you know you are still in this world and not an adjacent one: tricksters prefer liminal modes of entry. He is lean across the glass, the color of scuffed nickel and diner coffee, a suggestion with teeth.
"You smell like museum," Coyote says, amused. "Scorched labels. Volunteers in vests. Sirens coming late on purpose."
"Get out of my glass," the Seeker says. He drinks. The tea hurts the way honesty hurts. "I'm busy."
"You confuse busy for useful. A charming mortal habit. Like pockets." The god tilts his head; if reflections can yawn, this one does. "You should take the train that is not on any map. Buy a ticket from the woman with three thumbs and no shadow. Forget to validate it. Walk until the bones hum the note you've been avoiding."
"I'm not going."
"You are not going yet," Coyote corrects, which is a kind of kindness if you squint. "When you've finished objecting to your own fate, call me. Or don't. I'll answer."
The reflection empties into plain morning. He eats a bun mechanically, discovers he is starving and was not going to admit it to himself. Grease on a napkin, a human proof-of-life. He packs. Salt, yes. Onions, yes. A switchblade, because reason. A pen, because stupidity. The old notebook with the water stain that sometimes dries into legible lines and sometimes into maps of places he hasn't ruined yet.
By noon he has already broken his promise to nobody and is on a bus out of the city, watching warehouses give up and fields practice being winter. He took the back seat because it feels like a habit from someone else's life. Every bump startles the scar into punctuation.
He tells himself he will get off before the ossuary. He tells himself he will sit in the café across from the souvenir shop and drink something local, and then go home. Nobody believes him. The world adjusts its collar and pretends not to listen.
The village has more dogs than people and more stories than both. Tourists hold their phones like offerings. The ossuary doors are closed, not quite successfully, as if closure is just theater and the building has a better agent.
Police tape hiccups across the gate. There is a priest, and there is a woman who is not a priest but wears a coat with the smooth weight of authority. He notices her because she notices him first—without moving, without speaking, by the simple trick of existing in the exact place he would have chosen to stand if he were trying to look like part of the scenery.
Agent Nakamura is there for stability, which is like being a lifeguard at a baptism during a hurricane. She has a face laid out in clean lines and a voice he can hear even before she uses it: the tone of someone who has lost and therefore does not bluff.
She approaches only when he glances toward the door and not before.
"Don't," she says.
He considers humor. He discards it. "I can't," he says. It is almost the same sentence.
"Your name is on half a dozen lists," she tells him. "On the others, it's been erased too cleanly to be accidental." She is not threatening him. She is placing cards on the table so no one can pretend they are coins. "The Lantern Keepers sent me a file with all the pages missing."
He thinks of lamps in libraries, green-shaded and patient, and of the hands that turn them off. "They are very talented at subtraction."
"They are very talented," Nakamura agrees. "At subtraction, at fire, at saying 'for your own good' while building a closet large enough to make an era disappear."
"Then why are you telling me this?"
"Because people who are erased make messy ghosts. I prefer my mess on the front end."
In another life he might have liked her, which is to say he likes her now and will have to pretend not to. The doors groan. Someone inside drops something that was part of someone else once—a tibia, a chandelier of skulls, a fraction of history—and the noise jolts the scar. It spikes, bright as a match drawn against a box.
He does not enter. He does not choose. The scar chooses. The body is a door when the right key is pain.
He steps forward. Nakamura does not touch him, because touching would be either arrest or mercy, and she is not prepared to offer either. "If you go in," she says, "you will come out wrong."
"I already did," he answers, without knowing which fire he is confessing.
The smell inside is the exact opposite of flowers. It is chalk and cellar, iron and archived breath. Bone has its own weather. The air is tired of being air and would like to be earth again.
He has seen photographs. Everyone has. The chandelier is famous in the way tragedies are famous: the camera makes saints of whatever it does not understand. In person, the geometry is rude. Everything has been arranged to comfort the living with the illusion of pattern. Skulls stack into tidy columns. Femurs volunteer for architecture. Jaws make polite circles.
No one asks the bones anything. He does not either. He says hello, though, which is not nothing.
The scar listens before he does. The heat settles, a dog finally circling down into its place. Then heat becomes hum. The hum becomes pitch. He feels the note in his molars.
If you pressed him later, if you forced him to name, he would have said it wasn't music so much as math that had learned to grieve.
There is a guide with too much mascara and a badge that says MIRKA, who is beginning to weep without realizing, tears cutting gray paths through the powder on her cheeks. There are six tourists rehearsing how they will tell the story later. There is a kid with dyed hair trying to film without shaking—although shaking is the point. There is the priest from outside, trying to make the sign that once held back winter.
And there is the chandelier lowering itself by a handbreadth, the chain squealing a complaint to a god that does not do maintenance requests.
No one screams. That comes later. The first sound is smaller: a whisper with teeth. The bones are hungry for sentence. They have been organized too long.
He puts his hand on the nearest column. Cold, then not. The scar opens its eye. Light does not spill. It stains. A dull, fishbelly luminescence beneath skin, a bloom that has nothing to do with mercy.
Coyote is in the glass of the chandelier for a fraction, upside down and elegant. "This is the part," he remarks, conversational, "where you confuse surviving with succeeding."
"Help me," the Seeker says, but it comes out to the wrong universe, because asking tricksters for help is the fastest way to earn a story and the slowest way to get assistance.
He reaches into his coat. Onions, in a cloth bag still damp from his sink. A pinch of salt. He doesn't really cook. That is not what this is for.
Recipe, then. Ritual is a recipe that pretends to be a door.
He peels one onion by hand, not the neat halves of a kitchen but the rough work of a man who has only ever learned to tear. The smell hits the room hard, assertive, stubbornly alive. He scatters salt in a circle not for defense but to declare a center. He is not a priest. He is not a mage, except for how knowledge behaves like an instrument and sometimes plays him.
The chandelier creaks. The bones rattle in a wind that does not attend to the laws of buildings. The tourists finally remember how to be terrified. Someone drops a phone. It lands screen up and records the ceiling where history is negotiating new terms.
He does not chant. He does not know the right words. He uses the ones he has.
"Borrowed ones," he says aloud to the bones, to the cathedral, to the song. "I'm borrowed too. I won't stay. I won't keep. I will carry, and then I will set down. That's the oath."
Oaths taste worse than onions.
The hum modulates. For a moment he hears a second layer, a counterpoint inside the bones: not Catholic, not anything that came to Europe on a boat or a crusade, older and less concerned with people. He hears the math of tides; he hears the ledger of those who watched from the doorways of caves and told each other which stars were accurate and which were stories.
The scar answers. It says: yes, I remember this. It says: you have stood here before with different skin and fewer teeth. It says: hello again.
He does not faint. That would be a kindness. He sways in a way that insults gravity but somehow remains vertical. The salt darkens as if it is absorbing breath. The onion in his hand becomes, for the length of one exhale, a heart; not beating, just reluctant to be cut.
Mirka stops crying. The priest remembers a name that is not his to say and closes his mouth on it. The kid's phone flickers with a failure that looks like censorship and is only electricity.
The chandelier lifts itself the handbreadth it had descended and freezes. The song goes from a shout to a murmur. Not silence. Silence would be a lie.
He speaks quietly to the bones. "Later," he tells them. "Not this way. Not with these cameras. Later, and properly. I'll bring the right names next time, and the right debt."
The chandelier holds. The room exhales.
This is the part where a person says everything is all right now. It is not. Things have stopped moving in one place so they can move faster in another.
He steps away. The scar cools from iron to kettle to water-not-yet-boiling. He leaves the onion on the floor, gently, as if it might wake.
Outside, the afternoon has put on evening like a borrowed coat. A crow flies low and rude enough to be a warning. Nakamura has been leaning against the wall watching the door as if willing it to behave. This is a bad strategy with doors. Doors live to disobey.
"You went in," she says. "Then you came out."
"I promised to set down what I carried," he says, and realizes it is true and that he did not mean to be honest in front of anyone who files paperwork.
Her mouth does the thing that is not quite a smile and not kindness. "The Lantern Keepers will escalate," she informs him, as if reading the weather. "They don't like improvisation, and you just improvised faith."
He chews the inside of his cheek until copper arrives. "They'll label it contagion."
"They will label you a breach." A pause. "Am I supposed to take you into custody?"
He looks at her and it is almost humorous, the way we find jokes at cliff edges. "You could try," he says, softly. "But then you'd be holding a fuse and calling it a candle."
"I prefer flashlights," Nakamura says. "They lie less about what they are."
There is shouting behind them—a tourist realizing late that survival has happened and demanding a refund or a sacrament, which are often the same thing. The priest crosses himself in a way that suggests he expects interest to be charged. Somewhere, an official realizes paperwork will be needed in languages that do not submit to forms.
A text from Xuemei vibrates his pocket. She does not waste taps: dinner. Don't argue. Bring your guilt; we'll use it for stock.
He almost types back something jaunty. He settles for okay.
Nakamura studies his face in the level way that people use when they are building a file in their head. "There will be videos," she says. "Angles where the light under your shirt is not a trick. They'll parse frames. They'll match your gait to old footage. A dozen pantheons will claim the event, and a dozen others will use the claim to start a fight. You have hours before the lanterns are at your door."
He thinks of green shades again. Of fingers turning wicks down. "I don't live under my own name."
"You live under a story," she corrects, gentle and fatal. "They're better at killing those."
He wants to ask her for help, in the plain way, but he has learned the price of plain. He says, "If you meant to arrest me, you would have done it before telling me the truth."
"I'm not sure I can arrest whatever you are," Nakamura admits. "I can escort you as far as the edge of the cliff and suggest you not step off."
"That's where all the good views are."
"Not from the bottom."
She turns the conversation with the precision of a blade and the courtesy of a surgeon. "Where will you go?"
"Dinner," he says, and it is the bravest answer available.
"After?"
"After," he echoes, and the word is a coin with no face.
She hands him a card. No name. A number that will answer sometimes. "If I call, answer," she says. "If you call, I may come. We'll both pretend we keep our jobs by accident."
He takes it. The card is heavier than it should be. He wonders if the weight is tungsten or debt.
Night rearranges the city into a set of mutually agreed-upon lies: safety by lighting, privacy by darkness, anonymity by speed. Xuemei's shop is warm and untidy and full of the smell that money cannot counterfeit—old paper that has told its story to hands for a century and refuses to stop.
She makes soup that would shame an ancestor. Onions, as promised. Salt enough to convince the dead to wait their turn. He watches her move, the efficient gravity of someone who has chosen her rituals and will not be deflected by gods who have not paid for dinner.
"You stink of tourists," she observes, setting bowls down.
"I asked politely," he says.
"You asked like a person who thinks requests bind the world. Which is to say like a good man and a bad strategist." She sits, eats. He follows. The soup is honest, which is rare and a little violent. "They filmed you, you know."
"I know."
"They will slow the footage. They will draw circles around the light. They will fight in comments and churches. The Lanterns will use a word like containment. Others will use a word like prophecy. Meanwhile, I will have to raise my prices because grief is expensive."
He says nothing because she is right and because he does not trust his voice to carry anything but apology.
"Don't do that," she says, less sharp. "Apology is just a coin you pay yourself with."
"I think I promised the ossuary I would come back," he confesses, very quietly.
"So you lied," Xuemei says, and sips. "Or you told the truth. Which is worse."
He tells her about onions becoming heart for one breath. He does not tell her about how the math inside the bones felt familiar, like a song he had danced to with feet that were not his.
She hears it anyway. "You're sliding," she says, not unkind. "What did the dog say?"
"He said choice is the lie gods tell mortals so they feel noble when the trap shuts."
"Useful dog," she says. "Untrustworthy, but useful."
They eat. He lets warmth work at the edges of him until the scar stops thrumming like a generator and becomes just heat again. For a few minutes he is almost a man who has had soup, which is a very safe species.
The bell over the door does not jingle. It clicks, like an instrument being tuned one half note crueler. The shop acquires a draft that is not meteorological.
Xuemei looks past his shoulder. Her face does not change. She does Xuemei's equivalent of flinching: one eyelid considers blinking and rejects derivative behavior.
"Close early?" she asks the door, dry as a ledger.
The door answers by opening further. A woman steps through wearing a coat the exact color of absence. No badge. No gun on display. She is so ordinary your eyes try to misplace her. Only the lantern in her hand gives anything away—a traveling lamp with glass the color of old teeth. The flame inside burns steady and pale, like a star that has decided to live indoors.
"Mr. Nobody," the woman says, and there is the grain of a dozen centuries in her tone, sanded smooth by policy. "We've been looking for you."
Xuemei does not stand. She does not reach under the counter for one of the interesting books. She does not touch his arm because that would mark him as hers. She switches the sign to CLOSED by leaning on the string with the precise weight of a person who knows the physics of hope.
The Seeker knows many things about lanterns. How far they throw truth. How far they throw shadow. He knows what it costs to be illuminated by the wrong hand.
He knows the scar is awake again, bright and hungry, and he knows there is a door inside a door that is about to be opened and that it is exactly the size of a pulse.
"Eat," Xuemei says mildly, as if they are discussing weather. "Finish the soup."
The Lantern Keeper raises the pale lamp and the light does that old thing it does when stories decide to change tense: it flattens everything into icon. The room tightens.
He lifts the spoon. He eats. The broth burns his tongue into honesty.
"Come with me," says the woman with the lamp, so courteous that the word might almost be please if you didn't know math.
He considers the door. He considers the bowl. He considers the onion waiting to be cut for tomorrow, the one that will hold the shop together during storms, briefly, because food is the only spell everyone believes in.
"Later," he tells the lamp, which is not an answer and is not a refusal and is, unfortunately, exactly the kind of word that stories hear as yes.
Coyote laughs in the window, gentle as a lie that loves you.
The lamp's flame leans toward him like a finger. The scar answers, brighter. Nakamura's card in his pocket grows heavy enough to remember the shape of her decision.
He sets the spoon down.
The door opens a second time, wider, and the light unbuttons the room.