Night came down like a lid, flat and patient, and Selene wore it like a captain's cloak. Her caravan slid along back lanes where laundry lines drew constellations and gutters remembered rain. Carts rattled under tarps painted to look like piles of scrap; beneath them, tithing jars clinked softly like teeth in a cold mouth. The route traced a glyph only Luna could see—turns arranged to dodge meanings as much as patrols.
Target: a divine depot stamped C‑19, where the Tower stacked life in glass and kept spare "state anchors" on racks in case the city misbehaved. Objective: empty the shelves, return breath to chests, and salt the ground with clauses that would refuse a reset.
"Shadows are ready," Selene said, fingers brushing a wall until a door remembered it existed. "We're in and out before the hymn at third bell."
Luna unpacked brass leaves on a crate. "No explosions. The martyr machine loves funerals." She set magnets, drew a thin sentence, and taught the depot's floorboards to forget how to creak when feet meant mercy.
Cyrus rolled his shoulders, Oath cord steady over his chest. "If anyone sings, I'll hum louder."
Tam grinned, chalk under his nails. "And I'll write 'No' on anything that looks like it needs it."
Aragorn palmed the bell. It purred, warm cat in a leather sling. Fire twined his forearm in a patient bracelet, not asking to be dramatic. "Three seconds if we must," he said. "Meaning, if we're clever."
The depot's yard looked like a chessboard abandoned mid‑game. Angels on the battlements blinked as Selene laid night over their eyes like a polite handkerchief. A lock made of stern adjectives softened when Aragorn pinched the connecting word that made "authorized" contagious, and Luna breathed the door open with a clause about maintenance inspections that no one had bothered to revoke.
Inside, rows of glass glowed with stolen mornings. Labels read like petty poetry: SEVEN HEARTBEATS FOR A SAFE DELIVERY. THREE BREATHS FOR A QUIETER HOME. A whole shelf promised GOOD CHILDREN, RETURNED.
Tam reached for a jar and looked at Aragorn without touching it. "Do we—?"
"We route first," Luna said, already at the ledger altar, plate spread, magnets clicking. "If we pour life back without a witness path, the reset sweeps it back at dawn."
She wrote an amendment that felt like a lock learning it preferred to be a hinge: ONCE RETURNED, LIFE SHALL NOT BE RESTORED TO STORAGE BY AUTOMATIC REVIEW. She set a second clause that braided itself through the first: ALL TRANSFERS SHALL COPY TO HUMAN MEMORY, PREFERABLY NOSY NEIGHBORS.
Selene tipped the first jar to the lip of a brass funnel, and the breath ran like clear smoke into the pipe Luna had arranged. Upstairs, a widow woke mid‑snore and wept without knowing why. Across the lane, a boy's fever broke because his body remembered it had the receipt for a healthy minute.
Aragorn refused three victories on the way to the shelves that mattered. One: a guard asleep at a desk, face soft, throat bare. Cyrus's axe could have made the alarm ring in the Tower's throat. "No," Aragorn said, and they walked past. Two: a chapel of ledger‑rods stacked like firewood and primed with triggers that would erupt into praise if desecrated. "No," he said again, and they stole the ink instead. Three: a switch that would black out the district and let them move like kings. "No," he said a third time, and his refusal felt heavier than a strike. Martyrs are useful to empires. He wouldn't feed the altar.
Halfway through the shelves, the air grew courteous.
He felt it first in the way his shoulders wanted to relax; Selene noticed when her shadow offered to step aside for someone unseen. Luna's magnets shivered, and a brass leaf clicked into a configuration she hadn't set. Out in the yard, boots touched down without sound.
The monster entered by asking.
"Permission to approach?" said a voice as mild as tea. A figure stood in the aisle—a long coat, no wings, cuffs embroidered with apology. Its face was a blur of agreeable features that would accept blame before offering it. It held no weapon. It carried a clipboard.
"The Gentle Warden," Luna said under her breath. "Compliance predator. It only harms with consent."
The Warden smiled the way a guest does at a door with a chain. "Please kneel," it said. "You are overworked. Allow me to relieve you of your burdens."
Two laborers on the night shift, hiding beneath the labeling bench, almost knelt out of habit. Selene snapped her fingers; their own shadows pinned their knees in place like stern aunts.
"Politeness field," Luna warned. "It'll make refusal feel rude."
Tam, gulping, chalked on the crate: NO. He stuck the word to his chest with both palms.
The Warden drifted closer without stepping, stopping at the polite distance of an arm and a half. "Please," it said to Cyrus, voice so sincere it made his ribs ache with the desire to be agreeable. "Put down the axes. You look tired."
Cyrus grinned through clenched courtesy. "I am," he said, "but rudeness is a civic duty." He did not move.
The Warden turned to Aragorn. "You are carrying a bell you do not want. Let me carry it for you. I will be careful."
Consent is a hinge. Aragorn felt the temptation as a key in his pocket, smooth from years of fidgeting. He met the Warden's eyes—which was to say, he looked at the blank until he could see his own reflection—then lifted the bell and let it hum. Not a ring. A breath. "Consent must delight," he said, and pressed his brand to the nearest polite verb. PLEASE blurred to PLEAD.
The Warden recoiled a fraction, as if discovering it had been asking favors all night. Its next attempt came smaller. "If it wouldn't be too much trouble," it murmured, "might you… die?"
"No," Selene said, kindly, and cut the line with her shadow until the request fell on the floor and became a spider that crawled under a shelf to consider its life choices.
Luna scratched a fast sentence over the depot threshold: SILENCE IS NOT CONSENT; COMPLIANCE REQUIRES JOY. The words bit into the sill like teeth. Tam duplicated the clause on three crates and a sleeping guard's boot for good measure.
The Warden tried a different corridor. "Then allow me to audit," it said, to the jars themselves. "You are improperly shelved. Come with me."
The jars trembled toward the clipboard, eager to be correct. Aragorn touched the bell to the nearest label and changed WITH into WITHIN. "They come within us," he said, and the breath poured not into crates but into chests through Luna's pipes—swift arrows of morning returning to quivers across the district.
The Warden's smile held, but its voice thinned. "Please stop stealing," it suggested.
"We're returning," Cyrus said. "And we're tired of being sorry about it."
Footsteps entered the yard and arranged themselves into columns not because a commander ordered them but because the yard remembered how. The Auditor had sent ranks to pair with his Warden's manners. Trumpets cleared their throats quietly. Ledger‑rods were raised with the grim blessing of someone whose spine had been ironed.
Selene flicked her gaze to the rafters. "We're running out of night."
"Two shelves," Luna said, measuring jars and heartbeats. "Maybe one if they get fussy."
Aragorn breathed through his teeth. He could pull three seconds and buy them one more shelf, but the bird behind his eye had been patient; he didn't want to reward it. "Tam," he said instead, "paint the city."
Tam blinked. "How?"
"Short words you can believe in," Aragorn said. "Everywhere someone will see them when they reach for obedience."
The boy grinned like a cutpurse hired by a priest and vanished into the aisles with chalk and audacity.
The Warden followed him and asked him to stop in eleven increasingly considerate ways. Tam shook his head each time, less from defiance than from glee at getting away with it in front of an adult. He scrawled NO on a column, NOT TODAY on a crate, and a gallant SORRY, NO on a ledger that would be very annoyed when it woke.
Cyrus met the first file of troops in the door with a wall that had learned to be a door and chosen wall again. "Store's closed," he said, and the Oath cord across his chest hummed until neighbors in three lanes woke and put on their boots because something about the sound told them all feet were needed.
The first rod touched him; pain crossed the bridge; the district split it like bread. He laughed, because being the door is easier when a street decides to be its hinges.
The Warden reached for Luna with a question that fit her bones too well: "Wouldn't it be more efficient to collaborate?" It almost worked. She nearly agreed out of respect for the craft in the trap.
Aragorn put the bell between them. "Ask for joy," he said softly.
The Warden tried. It didn't know how. It could only offer relief. Its voice frayed. It looked to the Auditor's ranks for help and found none; they had no verbs for this problem.
"Last shelf," Selene said, levering a crate into shadow and out another wall entirely, where a shopkeeper would find it at dawn and think generosity had walked it there.
"Salt it," Luna said, writing the final rubric: IF THE TOWER RESETS, THIS DEPOT REMEMBERS THEFT AS DONATION. "And let's ghost."
They moved. Tam sprinted out a postern where a fence had always wanted a gap. Cyrus backed away with the confidence of a man who knows the door will close itself after him. Selene folded night under her arm. Luna pocketed a magnet and left one on the ledger altar like a dare. Aragorn walked last, the Warden keeping pace at his elbow as if they were colleagues leaving a late meeting.
"Please," it said, exhausted politeness making the word wobble. "At least feel bad."
Aragorn considered, then nodded. "We will," he said. "For the parts that hurt the right people."
Outside, the yard remembered torches and raised them. The Warden paused in the doorway, visibly unwilling to step through first and make anyone feel crowded. Selene caught Aragorn's eye and smiled with every tooth. "We weaponized manners," she said, delighted.
"Keep walking," Luna advised, because delight is a luxury and the Tower bills by the minute.
They bled back into lanes that knew them, into a city that had begun posting NO on its own shutters without being asked. Above, the Auditor watched from the edge of a rooftop and wrote nothing—as if considering whether "polite" should remain a useful word.
The bell was hot. The fire on Aragorn's arm hummed the way bread sings when it has baked enough to feed. He had not used three seconds. He had spent something more difficult: patience.
Behind them, in depot C‑19, labels peeled and reattached to nothing. Jars stood clean and foolish, like glasses after a wake. The Warden sat on a crate and practiced asking for joy. It would be a while.
"Next?" Cyrus asked, because doors need destinations.
"Law Tower's ledger hall," Luna said. "If they can't audit us, they'll try to name us. We go break the pen."
"After breakfast," Selene said, because revolutions must eat.
Aragorn listened to the city's pulse. It beat even, slightly faster than last night, the way hearts do when they have decided to keep living. He let the bell cool and made a promise the day would help him keep.
— End of Episode 7 —
Key powers this episode: Politeness field counter (consent requires joy; silence ≠ consent), Bell hum (please→plead), Shadow logistics (Selene), Depot anti‑reset clauses (Luna), Oath pain‑split (Cyrus), Citywide micro‑graffiti negations (Tam), Fire‑covenant restraint.
Focus cast: Selene (lead), Aragorn, Luna, Cyrus, Tam, Gentle Warden; distant Auditor.