The registry's test was the sort of ritual designed to look tidy while it took breath away.
They called it a "verification sweep" in the notices: a standard check to confirm provisional markers and to catalogue provenance. In practice it meant a careful man with an index of habits and a small box of instruments would sit across from you and listen to anything you could not stop saying. The city preferred doing its violence with patience; a ledger's needle moved slowly enough that even panic looked like order.
Thane was the first to arrive in person, not with the bluntness of a warden but with the careful courtesy of an auditor. He wore no badge that day—only the registry's gray that made him look like a page in the middle of a book. His eyes were the kind that read handwriting in the air: they noted how people shifted their weight, which way they folded their hands. He greeted them politely and directed them to a small room lined with filing cabinets that hummed faintly as if each drawer contained its own weather.
"You have presented a provisional marker," he said, setting the stamped token on the table as if it were an accusation. "This will be scanned and then manually inspected. We pursue due diligence."
Nox felt the object between them like a pulse. It sat bright and honest on the table, the jagged circle catching the light. Gus had varnished it until it seemed to forget it had been forged. Still, there were hands that liked to read varnish for the fingerprints of different workshops.
An archivist entered—thin, restless, with the sort of hair that teeth into the air. She introduced herself as Rell. Her badge was a small plated strip engraved with Ilmar's sigil in careful script; she wore the name like a tool. Rell moved with the immediacy of someone who found arguments in facts; she set down instruments that smelled of copper and wet paper.
"The registry appreciates honesty," Rell said. "Honesty keeps civic grief manageable." Her voice was level; the sentence was not a creed but a method.
Lian sat with her hands folded, the ribbon stitched into her fist. Nox put his coat open so the shoe and the horse showed like modest proofs. The token lay between them as arbiter.
Rell began with a machine: a scanner that read the metal's chemical memory and the touch-patterns recorded in the varnish. The device hummed and blinked, liquefying the token into numbers that crawled across a small screen. For a moment nothing happened; that small pause felt like a hinge.
"It will pass basic metrics," Rell murmured, more to herself than to them. "Composition consistent. Polishing in line with common workshops. Varnish within expected range."
The relief that rose in Nox's throat was brief, a thought that arrived like a small bird and left before the next breath. Rell did not allow smiles. She moved to the finer instruments: a brush that smelled of gunmetal and a tooth—a thin, mechanical comb meant to read the seams.
"You understand," she said, "that manual inspection looks for the hand of authorship." Her comb hovered over the token like a surgeon's instrument. "Forgeries can be charming. Forgers are excellent at charming. The registry is not charmed."
She ran the comb along the token's edge. The device gave a sound like teeth against wire. Rell's face did not change; the sound itself was a sentence, and she read it aloud with cool attention. "Microstitching here," she said. "Imitation registry-braid. Not registry-made. Skilled hand, but not ours."
Lian's throat made a small, involuntary noise. Nox felt the world narrow into the small room, paper and varnish and the hum of drawers. If Rell's comb read forgery, their provisional status no longer bought them a week of safety—it bought them a closer watch and perhaps a file labeled counterfeit mitigation.
Rell's eyes flicked to Thane, waiting for his card. He pulled a small slip from his pocket that read Field Discretion: Containment Optional and set it on the table. The paper's soft permission tasted like a hinge being opened in slow motion.
"You are aware," Rell said to Lian, "that a forged seal requires resolution. The registry can request the object be held and further provenance be produced. If the item cannot be validated, the provisional sponsor may be held accountable."
Lian could have offered herself fully there. She could have declared everything and asked for mercy. Instead she stared at the token as if begging it to keep singing. "We found this through a transaction," she said. "We can produce a witness of exchange, a courier receipt."
Rell's gaze sharpened at the word. "Exchange evidence is a ledger's friend," she said. "Provide the courier, and the registry may accept provisional proof and move this to a longer verification. No immediate containment is necessary."
"It was Gus's courier," Marek said; he had come with them—part merchant, part guarantor. "He can confirm delivery. Gus trades on favors in the under-bridge. The courier will vouch."
Rell tapped the token with a pen. "This type of seal, when checked against registry registers, should sing if genuine; if not, the courier and the chain of custody will be decisive."
They waited for a courier to arrive with a name, a pack, a man who could say: we took it here, we placed it there. Waiting meant exposure; waiting was a thing that caught breaths and shaped them into claims.
Hours thinned. The room's hum became a separate weather system. Outside someone rearranged a statue; a child learned a new rhyme. The courier arrived finally, thin and watchful, with a small wrapped packet that held a string and a name scrawled in a clerk's hand. He placed the paper on the table: the notation was crude but legible—northern plate—Gus—delivered 00:36.
Rell read it like a litany. "Chain of custody nominal," she said at last. "This will move to a scheduled verification, not immediate seizure." She folded the paper and placed it into an envelope that smelled faintly of bay leaves and paper. "For now, record corrected. The item will be audited in three days. Until then, provisional status continues."
The exhale they all permitted themselves was small and furtive. Nox felt relief like a healed cut: it hurt where it had been, but it had not opened again. The registry's machinery had accepted a path that allowed them to keep the token visible without immediate confiscation. It bought them time and risk in equal measure.
But time in that city was never neutral. It came with a ledger's appetite.
That night Nox woke to discover a new absence had taken root in him. It was a slender thing—no trumpet lost, no long narrative—but a quiet personal omission that made him blink and search. He wondered for a moment why he had liked the sound of a particular street vendor calling his stock in the mornings, and then the call was gone like a name scraped from a list. He tried to hum the vendor's cadence and found only a neat, blank space where melody should have been. He had lost the timbre of a small, ordinary thing.
Across the compound Lian sat in the dark and tried to recall the felt cold of a particular winter morning she had once loved: the taste of roasted chestnuts, the way breath stiffened. She could no longer summon the exact bruise of the cold against her fingers. Her mind produced a pleasant blank instead: a notion of winter without the small edges. The sacrifice she had made—unfolding a month's scent and scattering the remainder—had taken a shape she could not fully see. She felt lighter in strange places and raw in others.
They had avoided immediate containment, but the registry's audit had left them bracketed. Rell's comb had traced a seam they could not pretend away. The provisional label, once a lifeline, had become a calendar—three days until a thorough audit.
Outside, Ilmar's sentences continued to paste themselves to public posts. An editor from the registry had published a short column that evening—an argument about mercy and order that did not hide its debt to Ilmar. It suggested that precision in filing saved communities the chaos of fragmented truth. The essay was mild and logical; to some it read as comfort. To others it tasted like a warning.
In the morning a single stamped notice slid under Nox's door like a blade softened by bureaucratic courtesy:
Audit scheduled: Three days hence. Prepare chain of custody. Non-compliance will result in containment and review.
Beneath the line someone had scrawled, in a hand that trembled with humor: Good luck.
They began to make lists. Not of places to steal or tokens to buy but of people who could bear witness: Marek, the courier, the tailor who had seen them in Tailor's Alley. Lian wrote names in the margin like talismans. Nox wrote the vendor's call in as best he could—half-words, snapped syllables that might trigger a sense if replayed aloud.
They had delayed the immediate consequence. But delay in a ledgered city is an invitation to precise hands. The registry's comb had read their token. It had found stitching. It had not sealed their fate, but it had given the archive a number to watch.
And in the small private ledger of their bones, absence continued its work: a laugh gone, a winter dimmed, a vendor's call scraped to a thread. The city's margin whispered: keep accounting, or be accounted for.