We climb from the Last Gate with the lantern between our hands.
Behind us, WE KEEP EACH OTHER → glows faint on the stone. The air ahead is clean and cool. The lantern trembles once—like a bird testing its wings.
"Easy," I whisper. "We're still two."
"Still two," Kirella says.
A round chamber waits with a well in the ceiling. Real daylight spills down and pools on the floor. It bites my skin like cold salt, but I keep my eyes on the floor, not the cut of light. I draw small rings with my palm—step-stones of promise—and we cross ring to ring.
A narrow passage leads out. Somewhere a chain whispers against stone. We don't look back.
The passage opens into an old checkpoint: broken desk, dead brazier, mold-bitten ledgers. On the wall, someone scratched We keep each other. I add an arrow → with chalk. A thin string at ankle height ties to a tiny bell—a trap. Kirella catches the clapper before it sings and knots the string to a nail.
"Quiet hunters," he murmurs.
"Key-man's kind," I say.
We slip on, turn a corner—and a shadow peels off the wall. A hunter lifts a mirror to catch a seam of light and throw it at my face.
"Down," Kirella says.
I drop. He strikes the hunter's wrist, not his head. The mirror skitters. Another figure lurks behind with a knife, careful feet and hungry breath. I drag a ring on the floor with my hand. Warmth rises.
"Step here," I tell him.
He does, without meaning to. The ring settles around his ankles and wrists like quiet. His knife lowers. He blinks, confused by not hating.
"Walk away," I say.
He does. The first hunter grabs his mirror and retreats—back, not forward. They care more for tools than bones.
We run.
The tunnel curves into a long corridor with a roof of thick glass in iron ribs—the Sunline Causeway. Above the glass, the world is only smears of light and moving dust. I pull the cloak low. The lantern paints rings on the floor. Kirella lifts the cloak like a sail, giving me a traveling patch of shade.
Midway, a spear whistles and kisses stone. It snags the cloak; Kirella frees it with a hard yank and uses the shaft as a railing for one beat. We don't look back. Looking back turns feet to stone.
At the far end stands a pale arch carved with knife and hand—no coin—and words:
TWO PASS WHEN TWO TRUTHS ARE SPOKEN.
I set the lantern where its glow can touch both symbols. Kirella plants his knife hilt-first. We press our hands to the stone.
"Speak," the arch says.
"I'll leave doors open," I say. "I'll come back for three, and I'll mark the way."
"I won't go where she can't," Kirella says. "Not for orders. Not for coin. Not for fear."
Warmth hums in the stone.
The arch… doesn't open.
Instead, tiny lines of lime dust drift from the joints like old breath. A hairline crack splits across the lintel.
Kirella leans close, soldier-careful. "This isn't a border," he says. "It's a maintenance arch—a dead throat. Someone sealed it years ago."
The lantern flickers, as if agreeing. The glass ribs above us shiver.
A polite click travels the iron like a cold song.
"Keys," I whisper.
Water answers somewhere below—deep, moving. The city drinks again. The sealant dust falls faster. If we force this arch, it will collapse and bury the causeway. No Light Region waits here. Only a dead mouth and a hungry flood.
Kirella's jaw hardens. "Not up," he says. "Not today."
"Then where?" My voice is steady. Hope is still hope if it turns left.
The lantern warms in my hands and throws a line of glow down the wall we just passed, onto a faint chisel mark I didn't see before: a small boat and an arrow sideways. Below, in tiny letters:
RETURN LINE → GLOAM INLET
"Sideways," I say.
"Sideways," he echoes.
We backtrack three rings and find a narrow service slit behind a fallen grate. The lantern's breath fits, so we do. We shoulder through and slide into a tight drain-run that smells of pepper and old rope. The glow paints low arches and wet stone. Far behind, the polite clicks multiply—more locks; the Key-man turns patience into flood.
The run widens into a shallow channel. A skiff crouches there like a stray dog that wants to trust. We lower the lantern into its stand and push off. The current carries us sideways, not up—past ducts, dead stairs, and a tiled wall painted long ago with fish whose eyes never blink.
"Listen," Kirella says.
I do. The city's ribs hum, but here the sound changes—less temple, more market. Murmur. Bargain. Pans. A baby's small anger. Someone singing badly. The lantern's light leans left.
We follow.
The channel yawns into a low harbor cut from rock, ropes hanging like vines, herb bundles drying, nets mended and stacked. A painted sign in chalk and soot spans the stone:
GLOAM INLET — LANTERN COMMONS
A gate waits—iron woven with river reeds, marked with the hand-drawn motto: We keep each other. A grey hand I know grips the bars from inside.
"Bora," I breathe.
He grins, big and gentle. "Sideways," he says, pleased. "Good."
Lelia appears with moss-hair pinned back and a ladle like a scepter. Root steps from shadow, eyes ringed like cut oak. Two more figures I don't know work the winch, quiet and quick.
"We heard the locks," Lelia says. "The causeway grinds. We set catch-nets in case the city spits out fools."
"We are the fools," I say.
"Not today," Root answers. "Today you are ours."
Bora nods to the winch team. The gate rises with a wet creak. We glide in. Warm hands catch the skiff. Warm hands steady us.
"Entry price?" Kirella asks, because he is a man who understands markets and honor both.
Root taps the lantern with two careful fingers. "Keep it fed," they say. "Here. With us. For a while."
"For a while?" I ask.
"This inlet is old," Lelia says. "The flood will search every throat it knows. The Key-man will net the district above. The Light people won't come. They never do. So you stay. Help us hold. When the locks tire, you run again."
Bora gestures to the Commons beyond the wharf: a maze of low rooms and kilns, a tea hearth, a school corner chalked with alphabets, cots stitched end to end. Monsters and humans move inside it like a river that learned manners—sharing bowls, sharing news, sharing quiet.
Kirella looks at me. His eyes ask a simple question: For now?
"For now," I say.
Root leads us under the wharf to a small alcove with a pallet and a peg rail. "Your corner," they say. "Your breath." They point to a bell hung on a nail. "If the flood changes its mind, this rings from the rope under the bridge with the broken tooth."
Lelia presses a hot cup into my hands. "Pepper mint," she says. "For the glass-sick."
I sip. Warmth loosens the wire in my neck. Kirella wraps fresh cloth around my burned wrist, thumb gentle on the knot. The lantern hums, brighter near Lelia's ladle and Root's quiet hands and Bora's soft laugh. Kept places feed it too.
We hang the lantern on an iron hook where its glow can reach the Commons. Children drift closer, pretending not to look. The light paints soft rings on the floor, and people step into them without noticing. Voices drop. Shoulders lower. The room remembers kitchens it has never had.
Bora kneels by a map scratched into the wharf pillar—channels like veins, circles for safe rooms, crosses for dead doors. He taps a route to a mark labeled OLD LANTERN LINE → LAST GATE and crosses it out with a piece of charcoal.
"Sealed," he says. "Dead throat."
He draws a new mark: SIDEWAYS FLOW → HOLLOW ABBEY.
"What's Hollow Abbey?" Kirella asks.
"A place the glass forgot," Root says. "Deeper in the Dark. Not holy. Not cruel. Just old. If a way to the border exists that isn't a mouth full of teeth, Abbey knows its start."
"Later," Lelia says. "Not today. Today we keep each other."
I set my palm to the lantern's handle. Kirella sets his over mine. The glow holds steady, warm as bread.
From deep in the stone, a last click answers the Key-man's key. Then another. Then quiet.
"Flood is full," Bora says, listening with his whole body. "It will slosh and spit, but it won't climb for a while."
Root wraps a scrap of red cloth around the hook under the lantern. "A kept sign," they say. "People will see it and know where to breathe."
I look out over the Commons. A child with green skin and soft ears curls to sleep on a folded net. An old man with bark-brown hands repairs a cracked cup with tree sap. A woman with three small horns shares bread with a human who smells like metal and cedar.
"Us," I whisper.
"Us first," Kirella answers. "Then the rest."
"Then ten quiet years," I say, and for the first time it does not feel like running away. It feels like a place.
We don't go up today. We go sideways and in.
And the chapter ends there, with the lantern hanging over the Commons, the flood holding its breath outside, and the words WE KEEP EACH OTHER chalked fresh on the gate.