Morning tastes like clay and mint.
The kiln breath is warm. Nets drip in slow rhythms. Somewhere a kettle bites and someone swears softly in a language that forgives kettles. I sit up on our pallet. The lantern hangs on its hook, steady. Kirella is already awake, boots on, hair damp from a bucket wash. He hands me a cup—hot, green, simple.
"Sleep?" he asks.
"Enough to dream," I say.
He nods. "Me too."
We find Root, Lelia, and Bora by the map pillar. The chalk lines look different in daylight—less like veins, more like ropes we chose.
"The shadow came back," I tell them. "Not a man. A line—long, thin—holding a key. It turned without touching anything. Then it slid into the seam."
Root's face goes still. "A Listening Lock," they say. "Not a lock for doors. A lock for ears. Someone set it in the stone, and now it listens to where our light lives."
"Temple?" Kirella asks.
Root shakes their head. "Not temple glass. Market mirrors. Cheaper. Meaner. He spreads them through drains and shop backs and prayer kettles that whistle wrong." Their palm rests on the pillar. "If the wall dreams, the key learns the dream."
"So he's watching?" Bora asks.
"Listening," Root says. "Then he will tell the river which way to push."
Lelia claps her hands once, soft thunder. "Then we answer. Kept-wards on every mouth and seam. Mirelle—your rings. Kirella—your pace."
Bora grins. "I like tying ropes more than tying men."
A thin bell tings, far and faint—the bridge-tooth line. Once only. Root tilts their head. "Close eyes," they say. "He put an ear near. Not teeth. Yet."
We move.
Syth—hair short, eyes yellow, guilt set like a pin in her lip—runs beside me with a pouch of chalk and another of salt. Lelia shows us a fast knot, two breaths and two fingers. "Kept-knot," she says. "Tie in pairs. It forgets how to untie itself if you do it alone."
I draw our first ring at the main gate: palm to floor, lantern low. The light spreads in a thin halo and sits there, patient. Kirella lays a line of salt just outside it. Lelia marks WE KEEP EACH OTHER over the lintel. Bora ties the kept-knot through the gate slats and pulls twice.
The air changes.
Not like magic that kicks. Like a room that remembers how to breathe through its nose.
We work a montage of mouths: the drain under the herb rack, the seam at the skull of the dock, the crack behind the kiln. Each time we do the same small litany—ring, salt, knot, words. Each time the lantern hums a little. Each time shoulders drop that last, stubborn inch.
At the smallest tunnel—a rat run with ambition—the lantern's ring doesn't fully wake when I draw it.
"Two hands," Kirella says.
I lay my palm down again. He sets his over mine. The ring fills, bright and even.
"Two lives," I say.
"Two breaths," he answers.
Syth watches, learning the rhythm with her eyes, fingers twitching to practice. "Can I… try?"
"On the next one," I say. "With me."
She nods, fierce.
At the iron grill where the canal kisses the inlet, glass-eel fry slip from the dark above like ribbons. They look like hair cut from a crueler light. One brushes the salt line and pops into a pale hiss that curls away. Another drifts lower—its back scales flash with mirror scutes glued on by a thrifty hunter. It tests the ring and shivers apart like fog.
"Market mirrors," Kirella says. "Root's right."
Something scrapes under a manhole plate by the tea hearth. We circle without shouting. When the plate tips, a quiet hunter eases half out—no emblem, no bravado, only patience. Kirella catches his wrist and turns him to the floor, not cruel, not kind, exact. I lift a ring and let it rise. The hunter freezes at the edge of it; his breath drops from hunted to human.
"Walk away," I tell him.
He looks at our hands, then at the lantern, then at the bowl of soup on the table he almost knocked over. He leaves because leaving is easier than learning a new rule.
Bora slides the plate back into place and stands on it until the stone remembers how to be heavy.
Lelia checks the manhole lip. "He brought a friend," she says, pointing to a sliver of paper glued under the rim. "Left us a note without letters."
It's a token—flat and round, stamped with a little halved lock and a tiny song line. Syth squints, then grins without joy. "Lockwrights," she says. "Kettle-fixers who fix the kettle to sing wrong."
We take the token to Root at the pillar. Root turns it over with a twig. "Pipe mark," they say. "Pipe Choir. He feeds the Listening Lock from a resonance niche down-pipes. The Choir hums, the lock listens."
"How far?" Kirella asks.
Root sketches quick lines with charcoal: inlet here, river there, a run marked GUTTER 9 feeding a chamber labeled CHOIR with a little ear drawn beside it. Past that, a dotted line: Hollow Abbey Spur.
"Two turns," Root says. "An hour, if you don't argue with stairs."
"If we cut the hum?" Lelia asks.
"Two weeks quiet," Root answers. "Maybe three."
"Then we cut it," Kirella says.
"I go," I say.
"We go," he corrects.
Syth lifts her hand like a student who forgot to ask permission most of her life. "I run," she says. "Chalk. Salt. Rope. I carry. I don't fight unless I trip."
"You fight if you trip," Lelia says. "Trip men, not yourself."
Syth loves that sentence. You can see it hang in her pocket for later.
We do another ring at the larder door, this time with Syth's hands over mine. The light rises properly. She smiles sideways to avoid showing it. The lantern hums, not louder—just pleased.
I check on the bat-girl I wrapped yesterday. She rests in a hammock of net, wings folded like capes. I wash the pinch marks the glass-eels left. I tie a small kept-knot around the sling that holds her arm. A breath later the lantern lifts almost imperceptibly, as if a bird under its glass remembered a song.
"Soft mercy," Root says at my shoulder. "Hard light."
The bridge-tooth bell tings twice. Fine. Close. Kirella and I freeze, reading the sound with our shoulders. Bora listens with his jaw like men who knew storms on boats before they knew beds.
"Near," Bora says. "He put a finger in the water."
"Then we move," Kirella says.
Prep is fast and simple: rope, salt, chalk, two small stones that have soaked in the lantern and keep a ring for the length of a long breath, a hook, a short oar, one kept-knot already tied in case hands forget under pressure. Syth checks the pouches like she invented zippers. Lelia presses a packet of bitter leaves into my palm. "For light-sick," she says. "Chew. Spit. Repeat until you hate me."
"I don't think I'll—"
"You will," she says, queen and aunt both.
Bora clasps Kirella's wrist, then mine, warm and firm. "Two breaths," he says. "Return with both."
Root walks us to the side grate where the Gutter 9 mark waits in charcoal. They rest their palm first, then ours, on the stone. "We keep each other," they say, the rule and the prayer and the pact.
We slip through.
Gutter 9 is a slanted throat of brick. Wet green films the lower half. The air tastes like pennies and pepper. Syth moves like a thread—quick, quiet, exact—counting steps because counting is a wall against fear. Kirella takes point, body between us and corners. I carry the lantern low, drawing thin rings to mark bad spots—loose brick, slick moss, a rat that wants our bread and reconsiders.
The Pipe Choir begins before we see it. At first it's only a weight on the eardrums, a hand pushing from inside. Then tone enters—low, then lower, then a second voice beating against the first in a slow argument. The bricks vibrate under my palm.
"Hold the pace," Kirella says. "If you listen wrong, you walk wrong."
We come to a chamber split with ceramic pipes the width of my waist. They climb the walls in staggered lines and curve into a niche shaped like a mouth saying "oh." Thin ribs strung across the opening make a harp. Air pushes through it and makes sound. Sound pushes through it and makes air. The niche hums. The hum is patient and cruel.
At the niche's lip, someone wedged a small iron box into the mortar. Its face bears a tiny ear carved with a grin. A Listening Lock. Lines etched into the box's skin carry the press of the harp deeper into the wall.
Syth swallows. "I don't like the grin," she says.
"Good," Kirella says. "You don't have to."
We set our ring-stones at either side of the niche—two small pools of warmth like cup candles. They won't last long. They don't need to.
Root's voice rides the pipe behind us, thinner than usual but clear. "Cut its meal," they say. "It drinks two tones—low and steady. Give it two truer ones. Then seal."
"How?" I ask.
"Two hands," Kirella says, counting in time. "Two truths. Two tones."
He taps his chest once with his fist and starts a count in a voice that doesn't wobble—one-two-three-four—so steady it teaches my bones a new way to stand. I pitch my voice under it, a hum that sits in the shadow places where my throat keeps secrets. The lantern's glow lifts a hair, like a moth testing a window.
The Listening Lock listens.
Our hum and count meet at the niche mouth and tangle with the Choir's note. For a moment the tones make a knot. For another moment they make a new chord that isn't quite happy and isn't quite sad. The grin on the ear grows faint. The carved lines on the box go dull like a pot left too long on coals.
"Now," Root says.
Syth hands me the chalk. I draw WE KEEP EACH OTHER around the niche, fast and careful. Kirella smears salt into the cracks. Syth hands me the hook; I catch the fishbone of a broken rib and pull the harp strings a hair out of tune. The Choir coughs. The niche tone drops and stumbles like a drunk who finds a step where there wasn't one.
The ear on the box loses its grin.
"Seal," Kirella says.
I press my palm to the face. He presses his over mine. Our two hands make a small warmth that is not applause. It is kitchen. The box clicks—not polite, not patient. Tired. Done. The hum thins. The chamber goes from pressure to space.
Syth laughs once, sharp as a stone skipping. "Two weeks?" she asks the pipe around us.
The pipe doesn't answer. The quiet answers for it.
We collect the stones, now dim. We back away from the niche. The floor has more grip. The air has less argument.
"Back," Kirella says. "Same pace."
We return through Gutter 9 without speaking much. Talking feels like writing on a map someone might steal. Syth runs ahead at the last turn to knock twice on the grate—we—and answer twice—us. The gate rises. Bora's arms are the first thing in the world again.
"Full lungs?" he asks.
"Both," Kirella says.
Root studies our faces, then the lantern. It is brighter—not wide, not showy, but deep, as if the glass found a hotter part of its own flame.
"We bought time," Root says. "Spend it on stitches."
Lelia throws her hands up and kisses everyone on the cheek like a crime. "Soup," she pronounces. "Then sleep, then planning, then you argue with me about kettles."
We laugh because she orders like a queen and a mother and a storm. The Commons exhales. Work resumes in little pieces: a net mended, a chalk letter drawn, a child told to spit out chalk a second time. The lantern hums and hangs. The words on the gate chalk brighter: We keep each other.
We're halfway through bowls when the alcove wall in our corner does a small wrong thing.
Not a crack. A turn. One stone rotates without moving, as if it remembered a position from a hundred years ago. A tiny circle of iron shows in the new angle—the face of an old maintenance lock set deep, old as the city's teeth.
Kirella stands. The room quiets the way water quiets when a bird lands on it. Root crosses the floor in three long steps and presses their ear near the iron.
"Listening?" Lelia asks.
Root's eyes narrow. "No."
"Then what?" Bora says.
Root looks at the lantern, then at us, then at the stone. Their face does something it hasn't done in my short time of knowing it—it closes like a fist.
"It's talking," they say.
The tiny circle ticks once, neat as a coin falling flat on a table.
"We go now," Kirella whispers.
"Sideways," I say.
"Fast," Syth adds, already grabbing the chalk.
We do not blow the lantern out. We do not leave it behind. We lift it together and move, while the little iron mouth in our own wall tells the city where our light has slept.