The Salted Bastion rose from the sea like a wound stitched with stone: a ring of battered walls and glassed turrets, private vaults tucked into its lee where the tide could not reach and patronage could hide. Lanterns winked along its parapets, and flags—black with a spiral of silver—snapped like a warning. From the Bonebridge the Bastion looked smaller than it felt up close, a compact fortress of old quarried rock and new, careful wealth. Up close, the sea made everything larger: the smell of iron and kelp, the constant slap of water against hulls, the way the wind took a voice and made it thin.
They moved in a skiff that rode low and quiet, a dark thing with a padded keel and a false manifest tucked under the apprentice's cloak. Halv kept the pole steady, her forearms a map of rope and habit. Rell watched the waterline, eyes narrowed against the spray. Luna sat with her back to Aria, fingers loose on a length of braided jasmine, humming a cadence under her breath that smelled faintly of the Night Orchard and steadied the team like a hand on a shoulder.
Aria kept her hood low and her hands empty. The Bastion's private vaults were the kind of place that ate witnesses and spat out tidy receipts; they were the places donors hid what they did not want the city to see. If House Virelle had a private vault here, it would be ringed with patrons and paid muscle and a ledger that liked to keep its margins clean. They were not here to fight—yet. Tonight was reconnaissance: see the compound, count the launches, test the boarding approach. The moving parts of a heist had to be rehearsed until they were muscle.
Halv eased the skiff into a shadow between two launches. Lantern light fractured on the water, a scatter of glass that made the world look like a broken mirror. The Bastion's outer ring was a tangle of ropes and gangways; men moved like ghosts, and the air tasted of coin and old oil. A patrol passed on the parapet above them, boots ringing on stone. Halv's pole dipped and the skiff slid like a thought into the Bastion's lee.
"Quiet," Aria breathed. Her voice was a thread. The apprentices tightened their grips on the false manifest; one of them, a thin boy with ink on his knuckles, swallowed and nodded. He had been practicing the route's cadence for days—names, times, a practiced tremor in his voice that made him sound like a courier who had been paid to forget. Tonight he would be the face if anyone asked.
They had rehearsed the boarding a dozen times in the Loom's tunnels: a rope ladder, a soft hook, a quick transfer of weight. Halv's hands were sure as she set the skiff's prow against a shadowed cleat. Rell tossed a coil of rope up and it caught on the Bastion's lip with a soft, practiced thunk. Aria's fingers closed on the ladder's first rung.
The approach was a test of timing. A patrol's lantern swung into view; a voice called out and then passed. Luna's hum tightened, a thin net that braided the night's sound into a pocket. For a breath the world narrowed to rope and breath and the scrape of leather on stone.
Aria climbed.
The ladder took her weight like a promise. She moved with the economy of someone who had learned to make the city's bones do the work for her: a foot finding a notch, a hand reading the rope's give. At the top she paused, listening. The vault compound lay beyond a low wall, a courtyard of crates and curtained stalls, and at its center a private launch with a crate wrapped in oilcloth and a donor token glinting at its corner. The spiral of silver was unmistakable.
"Virelle," Rell breathed, and the word landed like a stone.
They were not alone. A sentry lounged by a brazier, a silhouette with a glass blade folded at his hip. He had the look of someone who had been paid to be invisible and had learned to enjoy the practice. Aria's hand went to the apprentice's shoulder and squeezed—a small, private anchor. The boy's face was pale in the brazier's light.
Halv's signal was a soft tug on the rope. The apprentices moved like a practiced shadow, a crate of false wares pushed into the courtyard as a distraction. The sentry's eyes slid to the crate and then to the apprentices; curiosity is a currency as old as hunger. He rose, and for a heartbeat the courtyard's attention shifted.
That was when Aria made the choice she had rehearsed only in the Loom's dim rooms. The skiff's approach had been clean, but the Bastion's inner ring had a narrow channel that required a small, precise motion to slip past the patrols: a Tidebind step, a redirection that used the water's pull and the rock's slickness to fold momentum into a human motion. It was a technique she had practiced until the cost was a ledger entry she could feel in her bones. Tonight it would buy them a second of space.
She breathed, felt the tide's tug at her ankles, and moved.
The Tidebind was a blur of motion: a step that took the skiff's slight drift and folded it into a momentum that nudged the prow into the channel's shadow. Halv's pole answered, the rope sang, and the skiff slipped like a fish into a crevice. The brazier's light missed them by a hair. The sentry's head turned and then turned away, the distraction holding.
For a moment everything was perfect. The private launch sat like a sleeping thing, its oilcloth edges glinting. The donor token winked in the lantern light. Aria felt the ledger's thread tighten into a rope she could follow.
Then the aftershock hit.
It was not a blow but a betrayal: a slow, searing fatigue that began in her shoulders and spread like cold through her limbs. Her muscles answered late, a fraction of a breath behind her intention. Her fingers fumbled the rope's knot; a coil slipped. For a heartbeat she felt the world tilt—her hands moved as if through water, her foot missed a notch, and the ladder's rung bit into her palm.
"Aria!" Halv's voice was a rope thrown. Rell's hand closed on her elbow and steadied her. Luna's hum braided around her like a net, a teacher's cadence that steadied the edges of perception. The apprentices froze, eyes wide.
The Tidebind aftershock was a known cost—short motor impairment, a tremor that made precise motions clumsy for a time. They had counted it in the Loom's ledger and accepted it as part of the arithmetic. But counting a cost and feeling it were different things. Aria's jaw tightened as she forced her fingers to obey. The knot would not tie itself.
"Hold the line," she said, voice thin. She tasted salt and iron and the sudden, private hollow where a small, nameless memory sat like a coin she could not find. The words came out clipped; the motor delay made them sound like they were being measured before release.
Halv moved without hesitation. She took the rope from Aria's slack fingers and finished the knot with a single, sure motion. Rell shifted his weight to cover the ladder's base. Luna's hum deepened, a low chord that steadied the apprentices' breathing. The team compensated for the cost as if it were a wound: immediate, practical, and tended.
They did not linger. The reconnaissance had to be quick. Halv slipped into the courtyard under the pretense of a bargaining apprentice and counted the launches: three private skiffs, one with a reinforced hull and a patron's crest, a small launch with a crate stamped in a donor's spiral. The private vault's gate was a slab of iron and glass, its hinges new and its locks sigil-etched. Men moved with the easy arrogance of those who believed their coin made them invisible.
"Two guards on the north parapet," Halv murmured when she returned, voice low. "One with a glass blade. The private launch moves at dawn."
Aria nodded, feeling the aftershock like a bruise. Her hands trembled when she flexed them; the knot she had tried to tie sat undone in her palm. The apprentices watched her with a new kind of attention—respect mixed with the sharp, practical fear of people who had seen a leader pay a cost and not break.
"We have what we came for," Aria said. "We saw the vault. We counted the launches. We know the gate's timing."
Luna's fingers brushed Aria's wrist, a small, steadying touch. "You paid for it," she said, voice soft. "We'll log the cost."
Aria let herself lean into the touch. The aftershock would fade—short motor impairment, a ledger line that would be crossed off in time. But the cost was real, and the Loom's work was the slow accounting of such things: who paid, who held, who made sure the burden did not fall on one pair of shoulders alone.
They eased the skiff back into the channel and slipped away under the Bastion's lee. Behind them the private vault's lanterns blinked like eyes that had not yet noticed the small, patient thing that had come and gone. The night swallowed their wake.
On the Bonebridge, as the city's lights blurred into a scatter of coin and rumor, Aria sat with her hands in her lap and tried to steady them. The aftershock made simple motions clumsy; she could not tie a knot without Halv's help. She tasted salt and the faint, impossible sweetness of jasmine where Luna had been close. The ledger's thread had been pulled taut tonight; they had a map and a time and a donor's spiral to follow.
"We go back at dawn," she said. The words were small and fierce. "We come with a plan."
Luna's smile was a private thing. "And we make sure you don't pay alone," she said.
Aria believed her. The Bastion had shown its face; the Loom had seen it. The ledger's margins had a new name and a new place. The cost had been paid and recorded. Dawn would bring decisions, and the sea would carry their wake.