Dawn smelled of boiled oats and wet rope. Derrigan slung a crate over his shoulder and met Seo‑yeon at the seam of the lane, paper satchel in one hand, a thermos clinking in the other.
"You look like you could use a second breakfast," she said.
"I don't want a second breakfast," he said, taking the thermos and grimacing. "I want not to smell of rot by supper." He tipped the thermos back, passed it, then tucked it away. "You coming to make sure I don't gossip my way out of a job?"
"I'm coming so Tobin doesn't buy you instead of the salvage," she said, folding a strip of paper with the mechanical calm of someone who'd learned misdirection as a craft. "And I'm making sure you remember which buyer to avoid. No curious types."
Haeun and Minji appeared in the doorway rubbing sleep from their eyes. Haeun hugged the wooden horse tight like a talisman; Minji scooted forward with a knitted pouch and pressed it into Derrigan's palm.
"For luck," Minji said. "Not coin."
"Luck it is," he promised, pocketing the pouch. "I'll bring back something pretty."
"Pretty can smell like old rope," Haeun warned.
"Then I'll bring you a charm," he said. "Not too many strange smells."
They left the lane. Market morning was already a chorus of calls, frying fat, and the clack of bartering. At the cartyard he found his crew: Lena, wiry and precise; Jory, who disliked mud more than most men disliked taxes; Marek, grin and rope at the ready.
"You got the spool?" Lena asked without preamble.
"I got the spool, and I got a joke about a gate that refuses to cough," Derrigan said.
"Spare us," Jory said. "We've a farmer waiting and a crate that won't empty itself."
Marek rubbed his palms. "You keep the hands steady and I'll keep the buyers calm. Strip, grab, back. No heroics."
"No merci‑heroics," Derrigan agreed. "Speed and stubbornness."
The seam in the hedgerow was smaller than the big port gates—more like a stitch that had loosened in the world. The farmer chewed straw and watched them as if he'd paid for the sight.
"Last time it spat out three goats and a carriage wheel," he said. "I want the crate emptied and off my land before the sheep find it."
They worked with practiced choreography. Derrigan crouched at the rim and felt the gate's rhythm under his palms: a tight, held inhalation, the air metallic on his tongue. He fed the spool into the seam and timed his push against its breath.
For a flash a smell of wet pine and old smoke rolled through; the seam sighed open. A small, furious bird tumbled out first, feathers slick and eyes too quick. Derrigan caught it on a lurch and dropped it into the crate. Then came a trunk padded with sailcloth and a strip of mirror glass with hairline cracks that looked like road maps.
"Not goats, but not empty either," Lena muttered, hauling the trunk out.
They set the trunk on the cart and when Jory flipped the lid a child's carved whistle rolled into his palm. The whistle smelled faintly of salt.
"Take that," Marek said, already thinking of a buyer. "Kids will pay for a toy that sounds like a ship."
Hana's voice cut from the hedgerow as she stepped down the path, a sack of herbs at her hip and a scowl she reserved for precarious seams. "Wrong breath," she said, more statement than question. "There's an eddy in the cloth at the seventh pulse. If you shove again you'll pull threads you don't want."
Derrigan blinked. "We got a trunk and a bird. Why does that matter?"
Hana looked at him as if he'd asked whether rain was wet. "Because some seams keep memory. You pulled a box with things pretending to be ordinary. Ask the wrong buyer and they'll start asking why a child's whistle smells like sea and not soil."
He felt an odd tightening behind his ribs—a small, private echo that had nothing to do with the ledger under their floor and everything to do with a memory in his head. A line, a phrase, sat on the roof of it, stubborn and familiar. He kept his mouth closed, folded it back like a card he didn't want to show.
They pushed the cart toward the market where Riva kept her stall in a narrow leanway. She had a way of making goods feel like secrets you could trust.
"Where did you find this?" Riva asked, fingers already ghosting over the trunk as if assessing its honesty.
"Field seam just outside the city," Derrigan said. "Farmer asked for clearing."
Riva's hand stilled over the whistle. "Bird?" she said, not a question.
"Bird," Derrigan replied. "And a trunk."
She hummed, an inward sound, then hooked a finger into the whistle and blew a test note. It came out thin and bright, like gulls. Her lips twitched. "Not shabby," she said. "Looks like it's been kept with care."
She tapped the strip of mirror. "This brace—new. Where'd that come from?"
"New and useless," Jory grumbled. "We take coin, not lectures."
Riva smiled—a small, knife‑quiet smile. "I buy things with stories," she said. "I like objects that carried someone's hush. They pay nicer."
Derrigan felt that small echo again—like a word nudging at the back of his tongue. He didn't speak. He watched her watch the whistle.
"You ever find things with…marks?" Riva asked, lowering her voice. "Little scratches that look like letters, little runs that people rub out of habit? I had a buyer last month, an odd noble. He wanted items that wore certain phrases."
Derrigan's hand tightened around the cart's handle. The phrase she used—marks; runs; phrases as tokens—landed on him like cold water. It was not the precise line that had been sitting in his head, but it bent toward it. He'd read those words once in a book years ago, an old novel with a passage that described a charm as "a sentence worn thin by touch," and the cadence of it echoed now in Riva's quiet way of speaking.
"Marked things find marked buyers," Derrigan said flatly, keeping his voice blunt as plank. "Not my concern."
Riva's gaze flicked—just a fraction—at his hands, then at the seam of his coat. "Not everything people notice becomes trouble," she said. "But some things make buyers remember where to look."
They took the trunk for coin and watched Riva package the whistle in old paper. The market's ordinary commerce swallowed the exchange like bread. On the walk back, Hana fell into step beside Derrigan.
"She asked about marks," Hana said. "Not binders. Not that sort of claim. Just marks. That's someone testing the waters; buyers are being cued."
"Or being planted," Derrigan said. "Or trained."
"Either way, a map's being traced," she said. "We don't know whose hand drew it."
At the lane the children waited on the sill, the whistle wrapped in paper like something sacred. Haeun's fingers brushed its carved edge and she asked the question Derrigan had not known she'd have.
"Did you bring it from a ship?" she asked.
"No," he said. "From a seam in the world." He felt the phrase he'd read as pure memory sitting in his throat and let it alone. He didn't need to tell the girls about the echo of a line from a book; it was his private compass for now.
Seo‑yeon met them at the door, face practised into civility. "How was harvest?"
"Dirty and profitable," Derrigan said. "And Riva smelled of questions."
Seo‑yeon's brow went tight. "What kind?"
"Marks. People looking for rune‑like scratches. Curious buyers."
Seo‑yeon set down the thermos and folded her hands as if folding a manifest. "We make a list," she said. "Tobin fences the salvage; I file a note with the registry about foreign buyers; Hana tracks the ones that ask for marks. If Riva comes back, tell her we dropped the crate in the lane."
Derrigan met Seo‑yeon's steady eye and felt steadied in return. "No blinking," he said.
"No blinking," she repeated, then let a corner of her mouth lift. "And bring home charms without too many strange smells."
They ate stew and passed the whistle around. Derrigan kept the private echo in his head, a line from some long‑forgotten book that had lodged like a pebble. He did not tell them about the exact words—why invite others to a memory that might make them think differently of him?—but he listened when Hana hummed and made a note to follow the hints: buyers who asked for marks, merchants who lingered on certain objects.
Outside, the market wound down. Inside, the house settled around small noises: the whistle's tentative sound, a spoon against a bowl, a child's sleepy question about birds. The small thread in Derrigan's chest tugged—curiosity without name. It would be his to pull, quietly and alone, until he knew whether coincidence had teeth or whether a story he'd once loved had become, for someone else, a key.