Root writes DAY 4/7 on the pillar and, beside it, D-3 in a square like a small cage. The chalk makes a dry sound. The room listens.
"We start with names," Root says. "Ours. Not theirs."
We line up bowls on the board—cracked, whole, mended with wire, each with a chalk mark on the rim. I draw a thin ring from the lantern and let it sit warm under our hands. The ring is not for show. It is for remembering.
Root touches the first bowl. "Say the name you will answer to in kitchens," they tell me. "Not the one paper wants."
I breathe once. Twice. "Red Ladle," I say.
Syth grins. "Quick Spoon."
Kirella's mouth almost smiles. "Steady Hand."
Nim stands straighter than breakfast. "Little Breath."
Around the ring, others speak: Salt Palm. Rope Ghost. Blue Apron. Each time a bowl-name lands, the lantern grows a fraction heavier, the good heavy, like bread taking final shape.
Kirella's shoulder finds mine. He speaks only for me. "I'll remember your real name," he says softly. "Paper won't."
"Two breaths," I answer, and the ring warms under our palms like yes.
We mark a board and hang it high where a lie can't reach:
NO COIN • NO NAMES TO PAPER/STONE • BOWL-NAME ONLY
Lelia rubs a little name-salt—salt and mint and a whisper of pepper—on Nim's wrist and my temple and Kirella's pulse. "For talkers who pretend to be doors," she says. "Let them sneeze on the threshold."
Nim counts with their small spoon. One—two—three—four. The little swirl on the lantern's glass flares once, proud.
---
We walk the Blue Pantry lane. Three new paper doors hang like well-dressed insults: neat pleats, raised letters SIGN across each lintel, the smell of fruit learned wrong.
"Promise Choir," Kirella says.
He sets the count—one—two—three—four—steady as rope. I hum low where the chalk dust lives in my throat. Lelia speaks first—We won't pay—and Bora answers—We won't sell—and others follow until the alley sounds like soup remembering where it boils. Syth presses the WORD tile to the first fold; WE KEEP EACH OTHER stamps through. Root writes the same in brine-chalk along each threshold and knots the pulls with kept-knots that judge a liar's shin. One by one, SIGN washes to WAIT, then fades until only a faint KEEP sits there like a good bruise.
We move to the next door, then the next. By the third, the Promise Choir sings without us telling it how. People know the two lines now. Their mouths memorize the rhythm.
The lantern grows heavier again. It likes kept doors.
---
Ash Market wakes wide today. In its middle, men build an Auction Ground—an ugly little stage without shame. Above it hangs a paper net, pale ropes and pleats, mirrors hidden like fish in weeds. Painted on the crossbar: SPEAK TO PASS.
A man with a clean hat walks toward the net. He opens his mouth, says a name I don't want, and walks through with a satisfied face. The net steals a shadow from his breath—an echo that tastes like consent.
"Name-net," Syth says, disgust like a sharp spoon. "Talk to walk."
A lockwright leans on a post and admires his math. I want to salt his shoes.
"We don't give names," I say. "We give bowls."
I kneel and pull a strip of ring across the ground, thin and stubborn. Kirella raises his count until the Fair's bowl beat—spoons on wood, lids on pans—finds one steady rhythm. I lift my voice under it, the kitchen hum. Syth hops onto the stage edge and slaps the WORD tile at three different knots in the net with a glee that is not holy and is correct. WE prints through like a hand on a cheek. The net hesitates.
"Bowl-name chorus," I say.
We speak our kitchen names together, not loud, not pretty—Red Ladle, Quick Spoon, Steady Hand, Little Breath, Salt Palm, Rope Ghost, Blue Apron—and dozens more. The net reaches for true and gets ours instead. The mirrors inside it blink, find only bowls, and go bored. The pleats sag to WAIT.
The city assessor arrives with two plain jackets and a face that can read ledgers and people with the same tools. She draws a chalk square around the Auction Ground and writes MIRRORS BANNED INSIDE RING with letters that don't wobble. The lockwright pretends he ordered it. The market pretends to believe him because it's busy being fed.
We feed.
---
At Quiet Wharf, Ira has built a small weather out of rope and patience. We help make it permanent. Between Post Saint and Post Dummy we space ring-stones in the water until each circle touches the next and a warm path sits on the black like a ribbon you should step on with careful feet. Ira bolts the brine barrel to a bracket and ties a kept-knot that will smack any hand that unknots itself wrong. A thin pepper-mint chimney finds the little wind and learns to throw scent up, not out.
Children hang thin boards from the posts: WE, KEEP, EACH, OTHER, writing letters too big and wrinkled for pride to stand. The river reads again and remembers how to mind itself.
The pipes grumble a fake flood—the water rises a finger and stops, a cheap scare. Nim, very serious, counts four for the smoke bell. We tip the brine a little and let the ring-path wink at the surface. The smell tries and fails. The river chooses quiet.
Ira grins at Syth with a new respect that makes Syth look away and then back and then away again, which amuses me.
"Bowls later," Ira says, which means yes.
---
On the way back to the market, a young man with tidy hair and shoes that don't belong to his day holds up a metal registry box.
"For safety," he says, not meeting my eyes. "We'll write everyone's bowl-name so kitchens remember."
Bora brings the box to us like a man carries a loud baby.
"Salt first," I say.
We set a salt circle on the board. I pour a thin ring over it and hold the warmth steady while Syth picks the latch with a pin and a smirk. Kirella lays his palm on the lid and says the two truths where the hinges can hear them.
"We won't pay."
"We won't sell."
The lid opens.
Inside sit name-tally pins—little teeth waiting to fall for syllables—and a silk strip rubbed with scent that wants to crawl into your nose and live there. There's also a hole where a ribbon used to be, for collecting the smell of the hand that dares the latch.
Nothing falls. Nothing sticks. The salt ring and the kept ring taught the box manners before it learned our breath.
We tip the pins into the bucket labeled SORRY and push the whole box down into brine until it stops telling stories.
Under the false bottom, Syth finds a paper sketch rolled tight. She flicks water and spreads it flat with a care she pretends she doesn't have. The drawing shows the Auction Ground like a body: pleat hinges along the rim, a little scent chimney hidden behind a banner, a mirror perch up in the awning shadow.
"Thank you for your homework," Syth says to no one and everyone.
We go to class.
---
At the Auction Ground, we work like people setting a table no one invited trouble to.
Kirella distracts two lockwrights by asking them for the rules of a game they haven't invented yet. While they give him a speech, Syth climbs where scorn lives—under the awning edge—and packs the scent chimney with crushed mint and pepper, tamped tight, then flips the duct so it draws inward. When the wrong perfume lights, it will eat itself.
I kneel by the pleat hinges where the paper folds to make its showy throat. With a brush and a jar lid, I paint brine into each joint until the glue drinks and the paper remembers it used to be pulp. The hinges stiffen. Fold becomes stuck. Show becomes shy.
Ira laces a rope ring around the ground, a quiet border that says keep in a language locks dislike. Root leaves a chalk that looks like an accident at the corner of the stage: WAIT small and stubborn, the kind of word that trips men who run too fast.
The lockwright watches the air for proof. There isn't any, because kitchens don't leave confetti. He smooths his coat and smiles at nobody.
---
We close the day at Blue Pantry with a full-street Promise Choir.
Kirella sets the count. I hum. Nim and the kids step on four like champions. Lelia and Bora and Ira and Root and the ledger aunties and the assessor and rope men and dye women and children with spoons and men who never learned to say sorry but are trying—all of them speak the two sentences as if they were born in their mouths.
"We won't pay."
"We won't sell."
Root adds the third line and the street repeats it like a blessing. "We won't give names to paper or stone. We leave doors open; we return for three."
The contract doors in the lane go from WAIT to KEEP like a pot settling on a trivet. The lantern deepens, heavy, good; the glass shows a second faint swirl beside Nim's—two breaths side by side, like stitches.
We hang it back on the hook in the Commons.
The rope bell gives one clean note, then—bold—four that are too perfect to be ours.
We all look up.
"Not us," Bora says.
"Not yet," Root answers.
The wax seal on the wall twitches. The pale scratch that tried to write my name stirs—MI— returns to life and reaches for the next curve. I set my palm to the stone. I pull a ring up from the lantern into rock until my hand feels like a warm plate. "No names to paper," I say. "No names to stone."
The scratch sticks at MI—, mean and unfinished.
Syth pries carefully along the mortar with a dull knife. Something small and dark thuds into her palm—an echo-stone, a pebble with mirror dust inside, beating like a wrist. She hisses and nearly drops it, then pockets it in the SORRY bucket like a jewel that misbehaved.
Root pulls a hidden paper moth from under the stone—thin, greasy with perfume. They flatten it with two fingers and read the stamp: AUCTION—DAY 3 → DAY 2.
"He's stealing days," Syth says, furious and delighted to have a new problem.
"We salt time," Kirella says, calm as soup.
Root crosses D-3 on the pillar and writes D-2 slow and large so even a wall can learn it. They draw a ring around the number and another around the half-name on the stone, because rings keep.
I look at the bowls lined on the board. Red Ladle on my rim. Steady Hand on Kirella's. Little Breath on Nim's spoon. The words look small. They feel ours.
"Us first," he says at my shoulder.
"Then the rest," I answer.
"Then ten quiet years," Nim chants softly, as if years were soup you could ladle if you learn the rhythm.
We sleep in shifts. The kiln breathes. The bell pretends not to learn. The Abbey under the world hums a note that tastes like bread.
And the chapter ends there, with bowl-names on our lips, contract doors kept, a market net that learned to wait, an auction throat gummed with brine, and D-2 chalked big on the pillar while MI— sits in the stone like a tooth the city cannot quite pull.