The hall in the Aurelia house-ground ran long enough that the walk itself was a kind of talk.
Armandel moved at the beat he always moved—not pushed, not slow—the beat of someone who'd been steering house-halls long enough that the steering had turned to bone. Aldric walked beside him. Outside, the city was chewing its morning work with the blank beat of a place that didn't yet know what was being picked inside its house walls.
"The hunt-order has full green," Armandel said. "Thing-grab. Hold without ground-bishop say. They'll swing through the high houses tied to the order inside the week."
"The houses will fight it."
"Through which law-bones?" Armandel's voice sat flat. Not for show. Straight asking what wheel they thought would shield them.
Aldric said nothing. The law-bones the high houses would lean on were the same bones the Church's shake-greens had just stepped over.
They walked another twenty meters in hush.
"The Guild looks," Aldric said.
"Eight spots hung. Three more under live dig." Armandel glanced at a door they passed without slowing. "The head desk is playing along."
"Playing along because he wants to or because the other road bites harder."
"Does it split."
It didn't. Aldric knew this and had known it when he asked.
The hall turned. The late-day light fell through a high glass at a slant that made the stone floor read older than it was.
"The Iron Group's crack is speeding," Armandel said. "Faster than the order wanted. They're losing grip on the squeeze."
"Because someone else is yanking the string."
Armandel looked at him short. "That's the now-guess."
They walked.
The thing neither of them said sat in the space between words—the Church was swinging into bones already cracking under it. All the weight in the world couldn't spin what the bones were doing.
The Pope was on his feet when they stepped in—which wasn't normal. He stood at the glass, staring at Aurelia's roof-cut with the face of someone who'd been staring a while.
He turned when they walked in. Armandel hung near the door. Aldric crossed to the room's gut.
"Sit," the Pope said, and sat himself.
Aldric sat.
The Pope looked at him a beat with the sharp eye of someone taking stock. He was older than his street-shows let on—the lines at the edges of his eyes, the way his shoulders carried weight like it was stacked there, permanent.
"Your paper on the second body," he said. "I've chewed it three times."
"I figured you'd have asks."
"I had asks. I've bit most of them myself." He folded his hands on the table. "The ones I couldn't bite are the ones that count. You lean this body is new."
"The oldest track I have is four months. The working sharpness doesn't match a body of four months."
"Which means either the track is off or the body was there before it turned seeable."
"Yes."
The Pope sat still a beat. "And you lean they're the hand behind what kicked in the floor under Vhal-Dorim."
"I lean the hand I hit was a tool of this body. I lean they'd been inside the floor before the gather was cracked—which means they had word about the floor's spot that we didn't hold. I lean the stuff they pulled is now in this body's hands."
"The stuff from the third room."
"Yes."
Another stop. The Pope stared at his folded hands, then back at Aldric.
"The Children of Medusa will be bit by the hunt-order," he said. "That's locked. If your dig crosses their work, the cross falls their way. That's not up for chew."
Aldric heard this clean. "Got."
"What I'm handing you is green to chase the second body with the hands open to your send—plus a door to three old bones from the side-vault. Armandel will green the vault door." He stopped. "I'm handing you this because your push bit and because the other road isn't something I can stand in front of myself or the Lord with."
"But the hunters step first."
"In all that brushes the Children of Medusa. In all else, you have room." He looked at Aldric with the flat of a sharp-head who'd picked that flat was the faster road. "Find them. Bite what they want. If lining up sits open, bring me the words. If it doesn't—"
He didn't wrap the line.
He didn't need to.
"One more thing," the Pope said. He looked worn in a way the hold didn't full hide. "What's chewing in Elysion will get rougher before it has any chance of getting smoother. The Church will be asked to do things in the next few months that will cost us. I mean to pay them. I want you to know that."
Aldric said nothing.
"That's all," the Pope said.
Armandel stood in the hall when Aldric walked out.
They went back the way they'd come—through the long hall with the high glass and the late light on the old stone. The walk back hung quieter than the walk there had.
"The vault green will be set by first light," Armandel said.
"I'll need a ride back to Vhal-Dorim."
"It's laid."
At the hall's bend, Armandel stopped. He stood a beat staring at the floor.
"The Lord's word," Armandel said. "Line them up if we can. Cut them out if we can't."
"Yes."
"The word leans we'll reach them." He stopped. "I want to lean we will."
Aldric looked at him. It was the nearest thing to bare he'd caught in Armandel in eleven years of working under him—and it bit exactly as long as Armandel let it bite, which wasn't long.
"We'll reach them," Aldric said.
Armandel nodded once. They kept walking.
The house was quieter than the shop.
Mira sat on the floor near the glass with the sharp cross-leg hold of a kid who'd picked that floor was better than chair. She was staring at her own hands with the aimed eye of someone who'd just been told a thing about herself she was still chewing on.
Alaric sat beside her in the low seat. He'd been laying something out when Gepetto walked in, and stopped.
"She pulled one from a memory that wasn't hers," Alaric said.
Gepetto looked at Mira. "Which memory."
"She doesn't know whose. She knows it's not hers because the body in it is too tall and the city wears a different face. She said the body was sad in a way she hadn't felt before."
Mira was still staring at her hands. Eight years old. Alone in Edren before Gepetto's net caught her. The things she'd felt in that stretch were fat enough to cook a class whose wheel was turning feel-stuff into something that could be walked into in the world.
"Mira," Gepetto said.
She looked up.
"What did it look like? The thing that walked out of the memory."
She chewed this with the weight of someone who got that the ask was real. "Like the feel," she said. "When you're somewhere and you want to go home but you don't hold where home is. It looked like that."
Gepetto sat still a beat.
"She's doing it without knowing she's doing it," Alaric said. "The calling is on its own. She feels something and it grabs a shape. What we've been working today is whether she can feel it coming before it lands."
"Can she?"
"Getting sharper."
"She shouldn't be here for what's coming," Gepetto said. Not at Mira. At Alaric.
"I know."
"But she's safer here than anywhere else she'd be."
"I know that too."
They looked at each other with the grip of two heads who'd hit an end that didn't sit easy but sat right.
"Keep working her," Gepetto said. "Slow. The point isn't reach. It's grip. She needs to chew what she does before she does more of it."
Alaric nodded.
Gepetto turned toward the back room.
The puppet stood where he'd left it—locked in the sharp still of something with no inner spin. With the Soul gone it was just there.
He sat across from it and threw the full string.
With the Soul gone, the reach was different. There was no bones to chew with, no own-spin that his push had to step around. He aimed and the puppet stirred. He burned a few minutes with this, settling into the split.
There was a why he didn't do this with all of them. Alaric needed the Soul because he lived in ground where Gepetto's straight hold was too seen. Seraphine needed it because she was climbing toward a roof she'd have to cross alone. But this one—standing at a counter, running a shop, never needing to breathe for itself—this one just needed reach.
He stood. The puppet stood.
He walked to the door. The puppet walked to the door.
He went back to where Alaric sat. Alaric watched the puppet step into the room with the eye of someone catching a thing they'd been told about and were now seeing first-time.
"It'll be at the shop," Gepetto said. "All it says is what I want said. All it sees, I see. All it does is because I aimed it. There's no Soul in there trying to near-me. It is me—in the cut that bites for anyone brushing it."
Alaric looked at the puppet, then at Gepetto. "It's a sharper skin."
"It's a sharper tool. The skin is second."
Mira had turned from the glass and was eyeing the puppet with the open stare of a kid who hadn't yet caught the crowd-bone that said don't let them see you looking.
"Is it live?" she asked.
"No," Gepetto said.
She chewed this. "It stirs like it is."
"That's the point."
She swallowed this with the flat of someone who'd hit weirder stuff.
Gepetto moved toward the coat by the door.
"I'm pulling for Eldravar."
Alaric said nothing, hanging.
"There's a man there whose work is going to bite. I need to weigh him straight before I lean him with what I'm going to ask him to haul." He stopped. "There are also names in Eldravar that need to go dark. Faces who've been shaping the head-ground of Elysion in ways that make putting back together harder."
Alaric drank this with no face-shift.
"And the press," Gepetto said. "Eldravar has four sheets that touch Elysion's taught heads. I'm going to hold them before I go."
Alaric looked at him. "All four."
"Three straight. One through a middle hand that won't trail back for at least two years." He pulled on the coat. "The sheets won't spin right off. Their head-hands will keep their seats. Their word-hands will keep their work. What will spin is which stories get fed and which don't, which voices get stage. Nothing seeable. Nothing that kicks a walk-off. Just a slow turn in what the taught heads of Elysion chew as worth jawing."
He stopped. "Emeric's work needs ground to land on. I'm cooking the ground."
He lit Metamorph.
The shift wasn't loud. It was the sharp cut of change that worked under the line of live eye—the face locking into something that would be read as a face without being read as his. He looked like a man in his thirties with the sharp blank of someone whose look threw nothing that would make them worth holding in head.
It was like a hand pulling off a glove. The glove had near-matched the hand's work in most spots. The hand, bare, was just the hand—sharper, cleaner, with no buffer between aim and reach.
"Don't let her shove herself," he said to Alaric—meaning Mira. "If something walks she can't box, pull back. There's no clock."
"Got."
He swung the door.
The train to Eldravar pulled at noon. He had time.