Some months had passed since the day the Schlund went quiet.
No one wrote it down. The Grund didn't have calendars—only habits—and habits are a kind of clock until you break them. Noon and eighteen still came with the old mechanical mercy, water ticking from pipe mouths in silver strings, but even that rhythm felt thinner, as if the city above had learned to blink and kept forgetting to open its eyes all the way.
The village changed its shape without moving. Firepits shrank to thumbprints of orange. The communal pots that used to simmer like patient thoughts went cold as often as they boiled. The huts leaned in toward one another, conspirators or widows depending on the hour. Someone scrubbed the soot from the face of the old hall and stenciled a new law on tin sheet.
At first, people touched the paint like it might come off on their fingers and turn into older words. It didn't. The law dried hard. A second sign went up on the path itself, two men in armor that was mostly nerve standing with pikes and perfect faces because they were too young to be anything else. Frehn—who had once tried to sell Breuk a smoked mushroom by smiling like a dog—wore a chestplate someone had knocked back into a chestplate from a crushed washing tank. It shone. You could see yourself in it if you wanted to be somebody else.
Breuk watched all of it from the pallet they'd hammered into a podium on the day everybody decided to be brave. The platform wasn't tall enough to make him safe and not low enough to make him easy. Perfect, then, for a man the crowd had decided was a symbol without asking if he minded. His jacket had become a uniform by never changing. The empty sleeve hung clean; they had mended its cuff like it were a wound that could be sewn shut if you only did it neatly.
Peace doesn't always look better, he thought. Sometimes it just stops shouting.
He didn't say it. He made his face into something even the hungry could read—no sarcasm, no sermon. If he stood still, people spent fewer tears.
Lig came and went the way a metronome does: reliable, unnerving. He was cleaner now than the Grund liked its men, hair cut, collar white by local standards, boots that had decided not to soak up the mud anymore. A pin gleamed on his lapel—half circle, three small strokes radiating inward. The new order's mark. He did not press it on people; he let it eat the light for him.
"They've learned to live without bowing," he said, softly, as if he were afraid of spooking good news. "That's progress."
Breuk looked at the sign, at Frehn trying to look like a part of a wall, at the path where children had started to hop between old offering stains as if they were islands. He felt the tug of apology for a god he didn't believe in.
"They've learned to stand," he said. "Knees don't forget quickly."
Lig's mouth made a line that would be kindness in a different jaw. He touched the pin as if to confirm it wasn't a trick of the light and went away to be necessary somewhere else.
What happened between the ending and the opening was uglier than both.
The first week, they kept watch on the Schlund like it could sulk its way back into being a god. People drifted to the rim the way you stand on a grave after the funeral and ask the ground for a receipt. They muttered prayers at first and then talked like men at a valve—flow, pressure, consequence. The old word for the day of offerings lost its taste. Someone started calling it "Gate Day" in a voice that apologized and hoped someone would correct him. No one did.
The second week, hunger learned to be a neighbor. It didn't bite at first. It sniffed. It made small messes and watched to see who would clean them. The storehouse had more jars than grain and more memory than jars. People pretended not to notice; then they noticed too loudly. Lig formed a Committee for Provision—a Title that sounded expensive and therefore worked. He put Jakk on it because Jakk knew how to get water out of rock and opinions out of quiet men. The next morning Jakk was gone.
"He went to scout," Lig said, easy, the way a dealer says only one more card.
Breuk said nothing. He taught a boy how to listen to a bearing by closing his eyes. He fixed the pump again. He climbed onto the old hall roof and tacked a loose sheet back where the wind had been arguing with it. People thanked him the way you thank the rain: vaguely, gratefully, with a superstition you don't want named. They touched his sleeve like it might pay out more cloth. He hated the heat in his face when they did it.
The third week, a funeral cracked the village down the middle and left it that way. They wrapped the old man from the fire in cloth that had lived other lives and took him, in a long, quiet line, to the place where the roots make a curtain and the ground doesn't refuse what you give it. Breuk walked beside the bundle. Lig did, too. The widow didn't weep. Her mouth caved in at the corners and held. At the grave's lip she looked at Breuk once as if he were a landmark and then at Lig as if he were a road sign and then at the hole as if it were a question that needed to be answered by getting into it.
They covered the old man and said nothing too beautiful, because beautiful words bring gods to a table you can't afford.
After, the widow pressed her palms together and pressed them to Breuk's hands. He felt how much work a life puts into skin. "You saved us," she said.
He tried to give her back the sentence. "We saved each other."
She shook her head in that small calm way women have when they're putting a pot on a fire and telling you how the world really works. "You are the one who fell and lived," she said. "We were standing still."
That night, someone scratched a halo into the soot of the hall wall over the mark where Breuk's shoulder leans when he's tired. The circle wasn't neat. The three ticks at the edge looked like children's knives. Lig saw it the next morning and smiled a half smile that ached. "This is what I was afraid of," he said to Breuk as if it would be a relief to him that someone else had finally made the fear into a shape. "We needed a scaffolding. We built a statue."
Breuk took a rag and tried to wipe the circle off. The soot smeared and looked worse. "You built a pin," he said without looking at Lig's collar.
Lig touched the pin as if agreeing and then as if disagreeing and walked away with an armload of lists.
The fourth week, a woman whose hands were hard and walnut-brown stood on the podium and told the village how to tie their food into sacks that rats could not read. "Don't believe in cloth," she said. "Believe in hooks." She didn't ask permission to be listened to. People did it anyway. After, she pressed a loaf into Breuk's hand and said, "You don't eat when you talk." He hadn't noticed. He ate, embarrassed, quick, like a thief in a pantry.
On the seventh week, the soldiers came.
Not the army. Not the clean visors that break neighborhoods into lessons. Two of the undercity's private militias took it upon themselves to inspect the new order. Men with borrowed chestplates, with days-old shaves and a love for the sound of their own boots. They found the Schlund signs and agreed with them loudly. They found the hall door and hammered on it like a sermon. They found Frehn and made him prove he was a guard by making him hurt someone.
Lig met them with his sleeves rolled and led them away from the square. He used a tone he kept for men who had bought their violence instead of learning it. "You want a cut," he guessed aloud. "So we'll give you something to count." He talked them down from blood to numbers, from numbers to promises, from promises to a boring chore they would hate to enforce. He handed them a crate full of machine parts we couldn't use and they turned those parts into tax by calling them that. Everyone was pleased with the name. That night Lig slept upright in a chair and did not snore.
"Don't do that again," Breuk said in the morning.
Lig rubbed his eyes with his pins-and-needles fingers and smiled without teeth. "Don't make me," he said.
Week nine, a boy fell from a scaffold and lived anyway. He lay the way broken things lie and blinked like winter. His mother made sounds that don't have a grammar. The village gathered. The Committee for Provision declared the pump needed mending. The guard looked away because guilt is contagious. Breuk picked the boy up with one arm. He heard the way bone talks to bone when one of them is tired. He carried him to the house two doors down from the hall where the woman with walnut hands lived.
"You're not a doctor," someone said, to be correct.
"I don't need to be," Breuk said. "I need cloth and boiled water and a board."
He set the leg as if it were a pipe. The boy didn't cry. His mother cried for him. The village exhaled like a man who just realized he'd been holding his breath for an hour. The next day someone left a little metal circle wrapped in string on Breuk's step. It looked like the kind of thing Sef used to spin on a bartop with one finger when he was happy. Breuk put it in his pocket and did not take it out and thought of Tev until he had to stop.
Week eleven, the rain at noon came late. Not minutes. Hours. The pipes made a sound like men in another room arguing with cutlery. When the water finally fell, it fell hard and fast and wrong—brown for a heartbeat, then clear, then sweet with metal. The village learned how quiet panic looks: bowls lined up, mouths polite, eyes all teeth. They drank anyway. No one died. People stared at the pipes as if they might give their reasons.
"Do we start again?" the widow asked the woman with the walnut hands, looking toward the path with the two guards—the one that led to the locked mouth. "The offering. If the rain wants feeding, we can feed it without feeding the Schlund."
"No," Breuk said, before anyone else could bid for the moment. His voice surprised him by being exactly the right shape for law. "No more bowls for gods. Only bowls for mouths."
Lig did not contradict him. He did not agree either. He made a note on a board that no one had given him permission to own.
Week twelve, someone scrawled ANGEL STAYED on the wall of the hall. Someone else crossed out ANGEL and wrote DEVIL. Someone else added WHO CARES HE FELL. The sentence looked truer after the third hand touched it. That night there were two fights—one about bread, one about a story. The first was quieter. The second left blood. Lig fined nobody and fed everyone who swung. He hated himself with admirable efficiency.
By the third month, the new order had a rhythm you could dance to if you were the kind of person who danced to machinery. The guard would change at dawn and dusk, two men and then two men. The Committee for Provision argued at midday and in the evening pretended they hadn't. The widow brought a stack of bowls to the path every day and passed them out to the old ones, who were allowed to stand nearest the signs and say nothing or everything depending on their lungs. The pump coughed or purred depending on what version of the world Breuk felt like admitting into his hands that morning.
And Breuk—Breuk kept failing to vanish.
He tried. He cleaned in the mornings and mended in the afternoons and climbed into duct mouths at night with a coil of wire and the prayer that the world understands splices. He made himself an angle men's eyes slid past. But the village decided to believe he was a different kind of angle—the one at the top of triangles you draw when you don't like looking up into forever. Women pressed bread into his palm and made him promise to eat it while they watched. Men asked him what word came after law if law failed and waited while he invented one that didn't make anyone poorer.
Children imitated his limp even though he didn't have one. Boys asked to see his missing wrist so they could imagine a ghost hand and then be brave about losing. He said no to the first and joked with the second and lay awake on the roof of the hall that night staring into the black square where the ceiling pretended to be sky and felt the pendant in his pocket do that soft tick it does when it thinks about being magic.
Lig let it happen.
He was too clever not to use a symbol when it grows itself for free. He placed Breuk in the front of any line that needed to move without breaking. He put him at the back of any room that needed to listen without thinking about why it did. He took the meetings where people wanted numbers and flesh for numbers in the same minute and left Breuk the markets and the funerals. They didn't say they were dividing the city the way a carpenter divides a board, but that's what it looked like by the fourth month: Lig's hands on the ledgers; Breuk's on the leaks.
They fought exactly twice and did it the way men who have loved each other for too long do—quietly, like thieves washing blood out of shirts.
The first was over a boy who'd been caught carrying a circle of bolts and washers toward the path.
"He's going to throw them," Frehn said, eyes huge with the pleasure of being necessary and the terror of being wrong. The boy's mother was already at the back of the crowd, mouth in her hands.
"What were you going to do?" Lig asked the boy, not cruel, not kind, scientifically.
The boy looked at his feet like a door he did not want to open. "I wanted to hear the sound," he whispered. "It makes a sound when it falls. I just wanted to hear."
Lig turned to Breuk as if to say see? and found Breuk looking at the path with his head tilted, listening the way men do who've made bad choices at cliffs.
"Let him go," Breuk said.
"We can't," Lig said, softly. "One boy becomes a line becomes a ritual. Ritual becomes power. Power becomes—"
"Let. Him. Go."
Lig's jaw tensed a degree. He nodded at Frehn. Frehn opened his hand like a trap that forgot its teeth and the boy slid out. The washers did not ring on stone. The mother did not thank anyone. Lig didn't speak to Breuk until after dark.
"It was the wrong call," he said, sitting on the hall steps with a cigarette he didn't light. "It was the right move."
"Those aren't different things," Breuk said.
"They're all I have," Lig said, and the cigarette broke between his fingers.
The second fight belonged to a night the rain did not come at all. People waited on their stoops in the old posture, bowls up, heads tipped. When their hands got tired, they put the bowls down and looked at them like traitors. By midnight the air smelled like prayers swallowed and turned into stomach acid. A woman went to the path and put her bowl down in the dirt and stepped back and folded her hands without bending and breathed like a bellows. Her husband followed. A third. By two dozen, it had a name: watch.
Lig found Breuk on the roof where the warm pipes make a man's shoulders remember winter. "Say something," he said. "They'll listen to you."
"Funny," Breuk said. "I was about to say that to you."
Lig flicked his unlit cigarette into the dark and pretended to watch where it went. "They'll make you into a priest if I don't keep talking," he said.
"They'll make you into a cop if I do," Breuk said.
Lig laughed once without enjoyment and pinched the bridge of his nose. "We used to be better at this," he said. "Deciding who we are."
"We used to have fewer people who cared if we were wrong," Breuk said.
They went down together. They stood between the bowls and the signs. Lig used the voice that turns a crowd into a room. Breuk used the silence that turns a room into a hand. Somewhere above them, a clang echoed the right number of times and the city remembered to bleed. Water fell, late and obscene. People cried and drank and laughed at the way relief makes the body look stupid. The woman with the walnut hands kissed the sign and then swore at herself for catching the habit.
Later, on the hall steps, Lig leaned with his shoulder against the doorjamb and looked at Breuk like a man who wants to dig, not bury. "I need you," he said, like a confession, not of love, not of weakness—of arithmetic.
Breuk let the pendant warm his breastbone. "I know," he said. It wasn't comfort and it wasn't cruelty. It was worse. It was true.
On the hundredth day—if that's what it was—the Grund woke up wrong.
It started with that deep, low throb the city makes when someone above pushes a cut deeper into a pipe. You feel it in the spaces teeth leave when they leave. People looked up the way animals do before a storm: faces askew, ears trying to turn into eyes. Someone laughed the wrong kind of laugh. The mushrooms under the eaves dimmed and then pulsed once as if deciding to be brave.
The air itself wrinkled. Not wind. A skin you didn't know you wore suddenly too tight. The black ceiling that the Grund calls sky thinned to the gauze of heat over stone. Something warmer than the mushrooms' devotion seeped through—thin, gold, as if light could apologize for being late.
"What is that?" someone said, and the sentence went through the crowd like the old processions: each mouth carried it an inch.
"The light," someone else dared. "Look. Look."
Breuk looked. He had seen this color in one place: the pendant when it remembered how to be a wound. He touched the breast pocket. Warmth met him, soft as a fingertip, insistent as a hunger. He pressed his palm and lied to himself and the village by turning his hand into a pledge: I will hold this down.
Lig raised one hand—to shield, to measure, to own. The pin on his collar lit in the new gold like it had been designed for exactly this moment. He squinted and made a sound that had math in it and then said the sentence he had promised himself he'd never have to say out loud:
"The barrier is dying."
He didn't pitch it to carry. It did anyway. The word dying came back from the walls as open. People didn't cheer. They moved the way water does when you kick down even one of the expensive boards that keep it honest.
A woman laughed like a sob and dragged a sack from under a bed and began to pack it with the apology-speed of someone stealing from herself. A man pulled a coil of rope from his rafters and kissed it, and then looked around to see if anyone had seen him kiss rope. Children ran to the community hooks and untied the masks people use for smoke and play. One boy held his bowl up to the ceiling out of reflex and then turned it over and wore it like a helmet and didn't explain himself to anyone.
"Wait—" someone called. "We don't— How—"
No one waited. Everyone did and did not know what to do. It was comedy and it was war. It was a room catching fire and a room going quiet at the same time.
Breuk stood still as the storm flowed around him. He had been the face of the ending by virtue of being a man people could see themselves on. He had been the back of the new order by virtue of being a man a city could lean against. Now he was asked to be a door. Doors do not feel the hands that push them. Doors remember.
The woman with the walnut hands found him. She had made her mouth into a tool. "We go," she said, without praying. "If you stay, it was all for nothing."
He looked at her and at the bowls and at the path with the signs and at Frehn trying to keep his jaw from being a boy's jaw. He thought of Mara's chime ringing at the wrong time. He thought of Iben's bare prints in soot. He thought of the girl on the bright floor in the house with money in its walls and of his hand on the breast pocket saying sorry where the truth was later and the only time left had turned into never. He thought of Lig's pin and didn't think of it. He thought of the Schlund and heard it sleep without breath for the first time.
He nodded, once, the way you nod at a doctor who says a word louder than you want it said. "Then we go," he said.
Lig had moved to the head of one of the new lines without meaning to. He turned, as if he'd felt a rope go taut from somewhere inside Breuk to somewhere inside him. His face did a small change—less clean, more boy, less pin, more friend. For a moment you could hear the whole Grund not breathing, waiting to see if the men they had made into nouns would now conjugate into a future.
Breuk stepped down from the old podium. His boots found the ground the way tired men find beds. He put a hand on Lig's shoulder and squeezed once, and in that squeeze was a year of arguments and an apology that had learned to live without words.
"Then we go," he said again, not louder, only more.
The village turned its face toward the path where the signs tried not to look embarrassed. Frehn lifted his pike and then remembered to lower it. Someone passed a bowl backward through the crowd and it ended in Breuk's hand by fate or design. He didn't hold it up. He put it down on the hall step where it sounded like a clock and left it there to keep time for the ones who were not ready.
People packed badly and perfectly—hooks and rope, a jar of grease, a rag, a knife, a photo made of memory, a handful of seeds, a bolt that fit nowhere but belonged in a pocket because Sef would have liked to spin it. The children pulled masks over their faces and made noises to scare each other brave. The old ones took the first steps even though they had already climbed their last hills and the youngsters watched their feet and promised to imitate the angle.
Lig stood beside Breuk and let the pin be a star. For once, he did not speak first. He looked at Breuk with something like permission held between teeth.
"Keep the line tight," Breuk said quietly to no one and everyone. "Don't look down unless you have to. Don't look up except when you want to be surprised. If a thing breaks, admit it and use it as a different thing. If you slip, say it. If I slip, pull."
People nodded because they wanted someone to tell them the world could be taken like a machine apart and still work when you put it back together with fewer pieces.
Lig's mouth made a line and then found its old curve. "We'll do this your way," he said, and it wasn't surrender and it wasn't victory. It was a road.
They faced the path together, the old signs on either side of it. The paint had dried hard. It would peel in its own time.
"Ready?" Lig asked.
"No," Breuk said.
"Me neither," Lig said.
They went anyway.