There was a stitch on the page he did not remember making.
Derrigan tapped the tiny horizon loop in the margin as if it might answer. The mark glinted like a promise in the lamplight; the ink wasn't his. He turned the page once, twice, fingers finding the dog‑eared place where the book and ledger had begun to rub one another raw.
"Tobin doodles," he said, handing the ledger to Seo‑yeon.
She glanced up from the manifest she'd been indexing and took the book with brisk hands. "Tobin doodles sailors and sea charts," she said. "Not horizon‑stitches. Keep it closed. I'll cross‑check the last entries against the registry. If this is a calling card, I want paper that answers it."
—morning, the press and the pinboard—
Derrigan bought every broadsheet at the binder's stall: merchant bulletins, steamer arrival lists, the town sheet with its quiet market column. He spread them across the bench while Seo‑yeon produced a spool of red thread and began pinning clippings to a folded city map.
"Page thirty‑two," he read aloud, holding the ledger over a headline. "Cart spills at East Row — cart overturned, East Row market. Same day."
"One match," Seo‑yeon said, tapping the margin. "Coincidences don't become patterns until you get a second."
They worked that way all morning. Derrigan read a ledger line; Seo‑yeon searched dates and districts. The board filled: a Quiet Spoon mention, a petty theft at Dock Seven, an auction advertised under a chapter title the ledger echoed. Each candidate needed two confirmations — a ledger cue plus an external notice — before it became a data point.
—afternoon, the regional reach—
Tobin came back wet from the quays with a damp arrival list. "Skiff's in from the southern run," he said. "Passenger lists, names. Master Ruan's hall pinned a merchant notice this week."
Derrigan squinted at a printed name. "That shrine name's on page fifty of the novel," he said. "I thought it was flourish."
Seo‑yeon tied two clippings together with thread. "A shrine in a southern manifest and the same name in a local broadsheet the same week is not idle theater," she said. "If these patterns hold across routes, it's deliberate."
They made a rule: three matches across different document types upgraded the pattern from probable to actionable. The ledger's stitch no longer looked like a prank; it felt like a finger pressed into the map.
—evening, a cadence appears—
They stopped sorting by place and started sorting by date. Quiet Spoon reading → courier departure → Halmar crate entry → seam activity. Seo‑yeon drew arrows until the pinboard looked less like gossip and more like a timeline.
"You're mapping a book onto the city," a passerby observed at the window.
"A cadence," Seo‑yeon corrected. "A rhythm. We've seen three‑day gaps from reading to shipment and five‑day gaps to seam work. The intervals repeat."
Derrigan sat with his palms on the table and the ledger open between them. "The book has breaks like that," he said.
"So do these events," Seo‑yeon replied. "Whoever is doing this understands pacing and routing."
—night, the long‑reach test—
They wanted proof beyond the port. Derrigan sent Tobin to the coasters for arrival sheets and slipped a quiet letter to a friend who ran small coasting vessels to the southern ports. The city kept its night sounds.
Tobin returned at dawn with a sheaf of manifests. "Two ports down," he said, slapping the papers down. "Same shrine name, same visitation note. Passenger list matches a merchant we've seen in the broadsheets."
Derrigan laid the southern manifest beside the ledger. The shrine name, the phrasing — the ledger's stitch felt heavier.
Seo‑yeon ran her finger along a column of dates. "Not local. A routed echo," she said. "Different ports, same sequence. Either someone uses the novel as a routing manual, or events are being staged to match it."
—midday, a small controlled test—
"We don't need spectacle," Seo‑yeon said. "We need a low‑risk verification."
They chose a trivial, verifiable line from the ledger: a child drops a red ribbon at East Row market at noon. They arranged for a peddler's apprentice to let a ribbon slip and left no trace of their involvement. The next morning the market column included a throwaway line: "Child dropped red ribbon at East Row; peddler fined a small fee."
Derrigan read it and felt the air shift. "It predicted that," he said, simply.
"One test," Seo‑yeon answered, folding the clipping into the ledger's page. "Not proof on its own. But consistent with the cadence."
—they build a broader timeline—
Over a week they fed registry manifests, port lists, and broadsheet columns into the pinboard. Quiet Spoon readings, courier movements, stamped crate entries, seam reports, and southern manifests appeared in the same sequence, repeatedly, across neighborhoods and ports.
"If this is a manual, why a novel?" Derrigan asked. "Why hide orders in a story?"
"Because books travel like rumors," Seo‑yeon said. "Because a reader can hide a line in plain sight. Because a story is the perfect scatter for a script."
—afternoon, moral weight—
Hana's letter lay folded on the bench — a few domestic lines about a fountain and a steward who whistled off‑key. The life in Seoul had settled into small, ordinary rhythms. Derrigan felt that ordinary like a shield he could not keep with paper alone.
"If the book lets us predict harm," he said, "we could go and stop it."
Seo‑yeon looked at the pinboard, the neat arrows. "If we act on a node publicly, we risk exposing the method and burning covers. The ledger might be noticed. Children's arrangements could be leveraged. Paper first — quiet holds and inspection requests. Let law pull the threads rather than us showing our hand."
—closing, a plan, not a verdict—
Seo‑yeon pinned the ledger's next marginal cue to the board: manifest‑19; a warehouse near the old wharf; dawn.
Derrigan flattened his hand over the map as if to hold the future in place. "We test manifest‑19," he said. "Quiet, targeted. We do your registry hold. We intercept one shard if we can and we do it without noise."
Seo‑yeon slid the ledger into her folder like evidence. "We map the cadence further," she said. "Two more nodes confirmed, then we decide whether to use this as a map or to burn it."
"One page at a time," Derrigan said, and the words landed like a promise.
Outside, a hawker called the morning broadsheet into the dawn. Inside, the pinboard's arrows cut the room with their quiet geometry. The ledger lay closed under Seo‑yeon's hand; its stitch was a pulse. They had confirmed echoes across ports and set a restrained strategy: paper first, then a quiet interception at dawn. Continuity held — the shard, the card, the steward's receipt — and manifest‑19 had a date.