The city wakes on a thin hinge today—everything feels like it could flip if leaned on wrong. Corin says the air tastes different when trouble's near; he calls it metal in the mouth. I have the ledger under my shirt like a secret charm and the stabilizer fragment wrapped in oilcloth in my pack. Both hum at different frequencies: one practical, one dangerous.
System: Morning briefing — Shade Rank checklist: Echo Sight; Scent of Quiet active. Suggested task: Survey ward perimeter. Reward: 200 XP.
The System's bright voice tries to make sense of worry like it's a schedule. I ignore it and follow Corin instead. He's got a job for the day that smells faintly like risk and money: a structural inspection of an old apartment block slated for demolition. The city pays salvage crews to certify what's safe to tear down; sometimes it pays them to find things that shouldn't be there. We go because that's how you keep a roof and because Corin trusts me to keep my head on straight when others don't.
The building leans like it's been telling bad jokes for decades. Inside the hallway the plaster flakes in slow confetti and the railing wobbles like it's practicing falling. Echo Sight draws ghost lines of people who used to run here—footsteps, hurried hands—small histories that make the place feel crowded with absence.
Our assignment is to mark structural risks and check for loose salvage. It's ordinary until it isn't. In a back flat a family lives despite the city's paperwork and despite the notices nailed to their door. A woman with tired eyes hovers in the doorway and watches us with the guarded politeness of people who have practiced asking for mercy and been served bureaucracy instead.
Corin talks to her while Jeong and I poke at floor joists and light fixtures. The woman says the building shivered last week—doors slamming for no reason, lights that dim like someone breathes wrong—and she shows us a smear on the wall that looks like a handprint but isn't. I keep my hands on the ledger as if it could anchor me to something.
The Echo picks out a pattern in the flat: small afterimages of people moving in circles, a looping path that ends at the child's room. Scent of Quiet threads in—this place tastes of worry and a lullaby that's been sung wrong. The kid's bed is gouged at the corner; someone tried to make a cradle out of what they had.
"Wards," Corin says under his breath. He slides a small, practiced hand along the wall like he's feeling for a seam. People who live with wards learn their languages—the bumps, the flares, the way a room coughs when memory is near. He looks at me. "We shouldn't poke blindly."
But somebody already poked. The smear on the wall is residue from a stabilizer attempt or a fragment misfiring; the evidence smells like burnt sugar and cold iron. I feel my stomach clench. The ledger's lines of stabilizer notes press against the inside of my jacket, insistent as a chorus.
We advise the family to leave for the night. They look at us like we're wolves with a courtesy pass. The child—small, fierce—hands me a crumpled drawing of a house with a bright sun. I take it because people hand you their small braveries when they think you can keep them safe.
Outside the flat in the hallway something moves wrong—too quick, too neat. A shadow slips across the landing with a greedy, animalic smoothness. Echo Sight pinpoints its arc: toward the kid's door and then out the fire escape. I shout because the choice is simple and the shout works: the shadow stumbles as if surprised by a moral obligation.
It lunges at the banister and flattens into a smear like spilled ink. Not dead—these things don't die easily—but pushed back. We wedge a board over the fire escape like a jury and call it fixed. The family thanks us with hands that look like they've learned to keep gratitude brief.
On the way back to the yard Corin's jaw is tight. "You felt that," he says. He doesn't need to finish. Stabilizer residue in living areas is not an accident; it's either a desperate fix or someone testing proximity. Both are bad.
We take the fragment to Hae‑In; she is waiting like a lighthouse. Her eyes move over the piece and hold like a person looking for a scar they once gave away. "This could destabilize a ward if tuned incorrectly," she says. "Or if someone uses it near a living memory they want to sell." Her voice breaks in a place that makes me want to fix everything with apologies and screws.
She pulls up files—redacted entries and whispered notes—and traces patterns. Someone has been surfacing fragments specifically near places with concentrated emotional residues: markets, wards, homes with children. It's either a callous marketing plan or an experiment in extracting the most valuable memories. Either way, it uses people like bait.
"That means predators," Jeong says. His face is pale. He's young enough that anger still looks like a flame in him.
"Predators with pockets," Hae‑In agrees. "And people desperate enough to sell."
I sleep badly.
My dreams are full of jars: tiny glass orbs, each labeled with a moment—laughter, a graduation, a mother's name—and each orb sits on a shelf with a price tag. I wake with my throat full of grief and the System's cheery task list waiting like an unwanted postcard.
System: New suggestion — establish safe routes for fragment transport. Reward: 300 XP.
It's practical. Systems love logistics. I draft a map across the ledger's margin—safe paths, times, a list of trusted faces. Corin frowns at my neat lines. "You worry too much with a pen," he says, and I tell him I prefer to write a plan than have to apologize for not having one.
The next day a man in a cheap suit and a nicer face shows up near Corin's yard. He moves like a collector—gentle, persistent, the way vultures practice civility. He asks about salvage, about fragments, about the market. I tell him we keep things honest. He smiles and offers legal deals with the kind of phrasing designed to hide teeth.
I watch his hands while he talks. There's a subtle tremor when he reaches into his pocket—he withdraws a card that has names and numbers and a face I recognize from a broker's ledger circulated months ago. He's a port for money that smells like funerals.
"You run a good business," he says. "There's opportunity for collaboration." He does not use the word sell; he uses the word partner. Language is a taxon for intention. I do not trust it.
Corin tells him to take a walk and a long one. The man leaves with the courtesy of predators who have been told the wrong menu. He watches us go as if the city is something to taste.
That night I take the ledger and write a longer plan. Keep fragments in vault; use Hae‑In channels for research; route through trusted hands; keep ledger off public registry. On the ledger's margin I add one line, heavy as a promise: No trades of names. No exceptions.
The System's chime tries to make me feel productive. System: Milestone tracked — Safe route map created. Reward: 250 XP. It's efficient. It's blind.
A week of small defenses follows—moving the fragment between the vault and Hae‑In's covert workshop, teaching Jeong how to watch for suits with polite shoes, patching the family's flat where the smear was worst, and a small patrol at the market. Each day is a series of microbattles: conversations, refusals, small mechanical fixes. The city rewards us with odd looks, grateful hands, and a whisper that Jin‑Woo has been useful.
The tension rises in a place that doesn't explode spectacularly. Instead it tightens, like a wire wound around a spool.
On a damp evening as the light goes soft, Corin catches me looking at the ledger and says, quietly, "You know the more you fix, the more you'll be asked to fix."
I nod. The ledger is getting heavy not because of the ink but because of the lives it represents. Each line is a person who trusted us for a few hours of safety. I am learning that being useful is a compass that points you toward more need.
That night, a message is slipped under the yard gate. No handwriting, no flourish. Just a single line typed on cheap paper: WE CAN HELP YOU FIND WHAT YOU LOST, FOR THE RIGHT PRICE.
It is not a threat. It is a ledger entry written in someone else's currency. The paper smells like a room with antiseptic and money.
I look at Corin. He looks at me back. We do not accept offers that come with a price on names. We do not barter scaffolding we still stand on.
I write beneath the note in my ledger a single reply in blocky letters: WE KEEP NAMES WITH NAMES. NO TRADE.
It feels small and enormous. The city keeps folding around us like a map being read by too many fingers. I sleep with my hand over the stabilizer fragment and dream that names are not things to be bought but rooms to be visited. I wake breathing like someone who memorized a route home.