The coliseum slept at last.
By midnight the banners hung like tired wings, their azure phoenixes drooping in the humidity. Vendors had shuttered their steam-kettle carts; confetti clung to gutters and the insides of storm drains. The crowds had been a living sea hours ago—chanting, stamping, rising and falling like breath—and then the tide withdrew, leaving only a glaze of spilled sugar and scuffed stone to prove it had ever been there.
Cire stood alone at the edge of the arena floor, looking small against the bowl of tiered seats. A maintenance drone drifted past on whisper fans, sucking up ribbons and plastic cups. When it passed near him, its belly light washed him in a sterile cone. The light slid over the faint bruises where Kingston's Tempest Blade had kissed his ribs, over the band of gauze beneath his shirt where an instructor had wrapped a sprain, over the calluses along each finger that weren't there a month ago.
He closed his eyes. Listened.
Sometimes he could feel the Warden System the way a doctor felt the rhythm of a healthy heart at a wrist—quiet, sure, unremarkable unless you knew what to listen for. Tonight it hummed low, like a wind slipping through iron reeds. It wasn't hungry the way it had been during the quarterfinals, when Talia's shadow-chi had set the klesha inside the arena howling. It wasn't triumphant the way it had been when Ruby stood over Lian with smoke curling from her knuckles and the crowd roaring itself hoarse.
It felt…watchful. Like someone waiting to catch his sleeve as he walked by and say something he did not want to hear.
"You haunt places that should be left to the sweepers," a dry voice said behind him.
Cire turned. Ruby descended the steps from the competitors' tunnel with the effortless grace of someone born to be watched. She had wrapped a cape about her shoulders to ward off the night draft—the fabric a quiet, dignified gray rather than her usual red—and pinned her hair in a knot that pulled sharp like a blade. It was the first time since the tournament began that she wore anything which concealed her arms. He wondered if the burns stung; wondered if she wore sleeves as a statement, that no one should stare at victories that had cost her.
"It's quiet," Cire said. "I wanted to hear what my head sounds like when no one is yelling."
Ruby stopped beside him. The drone's cone panned across them both, limning her cheekbones and the slight downcast to her eyes. "And?"
"Mostly whistling. Possibly a leak." He offered a grin. It was lopsided, hopeful, the grin of a boy from the hills who had learned humor was a better armor than fear.
Ruby didn't give him a smile back, but something around her gaze softened. "Your head is not leaking. It's just loud in there. When you become too practiced at listening, silence feels hostile."
"Is that your experience?" he asked.
"My experience is knowing when to stop listening. Tonight is one of those nights." She turned her face toward the ring. "Sanio will wake up tomorrow to a different set of rumors. And to people watching the three of us."
"Three?"
"Kingston," she said simply. "And you. And me. The Academy pretends the tournament is training, but it is a mirror with hundreds of faces peering in. We just became a shape people recognize. That has uses. It has dangers."
"You sound like you've been composing speeches."
"I sound like someone who knows the palace will start calling." She raised a hand and made a small circling motion with two fingers; in the stands, a black silhouette detached itself from the shade of a column and came padding down the steps—Ruby's shadow aide, Phuong, as noiseless as spilled water. She carried a slender case under one arm. "Come," Ruby said. "We eat."
They took the service stairs to a narrow balcony that overlooked the inner city. Sanio at night was a lattice of soft blue veins—chi-lines running beneath transparent sidewalks, feeding the hovering tram spines and the temple lanterns that had been modernized to slice the smog with crystalline light. Far to the north, the docks beaded the bay with sodium orange, ships stacked like playing cards in the harbor and tug drones blinking their red eyes. Wind hissed softly along the spine of the academy's towers. A long way down, the night wardens' mechs moved between districts like thoughtful beasts, their footfalls lost under the traffic's sigh.
Phuong unfolded the case: three bowls, lacquered black, and a squat clay pot that gave off a cloud of ginger and broth when she cracked the seal. Ruby ladled out noodle soup, topped with slices of smoked lotus root and an egg whose yolk slouched lazily against the rice noodles.
"Sanio tradition," she said, handing Cire a bowl. "When a fight ends, you eat warmth."
Cire accepted it gratefully. The steam damped his lashes and the smell snapped him straight back to his grandmother's table, to a kitchen where the wind forced itself under the door and his father's hands were red with cold from washing goat hides. He had to swallow twice before he could get the first mouthful down. "Thank you," he managed. "I didn't realize how empty I was."
"Good. Then we start with something simple."
They ate. When the silence between them wasn't so taut, Ruby spoke without lifting her gaze from the bowl. "There will be invitations. Dinners with people my grandfather has cultivated for years. They will smile and test the quickness of your tongue. And your temper."
Cire twirled noodles around his chopsticks. "I can behave," he said. "For a while."
"For a while is sometimes all we need." Her mouth tugged, almost a smile. "Phuong will organize a list of those we can refuse without offense. There will be others we cannot refuse. Some of them will be dangerous in ways you cannot see until you are already inside their rooms."
Phuong inclined her head. "I have begun a preliminary security map of the residences that matter. Routes of approach. The way the roofs slope. Where the drones settle to recharge." Her voice was a low murmur, almost proud, and Cire had to resist the urge to applaud. "If you must meet someone, Lady Ruby, I will choose the room first."
"Thank you," Ruby said. "We will need more eyes. Kingston is making his own web; his threads catch different flies."
Cire set his bowl on the railing and looked at her. "You don't need to do this right now."
Ruby's chopsticks paused over the soup. She turned her head and he saw the glint of heat behind her calm, the flint that had carried her through fire in the ring. "I have needed to do this for years," she said softly. "Tonight, we can talk about the shape of the first moves. And then we sleep, so that in the morning we do them."
"And the first moves are?"
She gestured, minimal, to Phuong. The woman slid a thin slate from a sleeve and woke it with a thumb. A map unfurled—Sanio, heat-coded in oranges and blues, bleeding slowly with shipments and routine foot traffic. Ruby tapped three nodes. "Here, here, and here. Officially, low-grade medicinal warehouses in the Canal Quarter. Unofficially, where Uncle Bao moves things when he wants to make them look clean."
"Uncle Bao," Cire repeated. He didn't know the man, but he recognized the sound of how Ruby said it—like a foreign object caught in the throat.
"My grandfather's right hand on the street." Ruby's mouth went flat. "He smiles like a host. Talks like a kindly uncle. Keeps a ledger of every weakness he has ever witnessed. Seishun does not exist without him."
Cire leaned over the map, and the wind lifted the hair off his nape. "We hit them?"
"Not yet," Ruby said. "First we count. You can learn a man's life by the number of doors he locks in the dark. If there are guard rotations, someone writes them down. If there are drones, someone trains them and they have names." She slid a second slate overtop; he saw photos now—grainy, night-vision green: a scarred man smoking beside a loading bay; a tilt of a mechanical arm with fresh solder across a joint; a set of crates stamped with a municipal seal that had no business being on a private dock. "We gather the names. We twist only two screws at a time. No raids. Not yet."
"Quiet," Cire said. "And tight."
"Quiet and tight," she agreed. "If Uncle Bao believes in the benevolent gaze of family, he will never imagine a cousin standing in the shadow of his own wall, counting the bolts."
Cire let himself smile, this time without any lopsidedness—just a quick flash that admitted he enjoyed the idea of slipping past a man who leaned on his family like a crutch. "You've thought about this a long time."
She did not answer that. She didn't need to.
The Warden System shivered inside him then—like an instrument finding pitch, a thin pure tone under the noise.
—judgment is a door, it breathed, and Cire almost jerked. The words weren't words, exactly; they were the sensation of a doorframe beneath his fingertips, the grain of old wood, the whiff of smoke. —some must be invited to cross. some must be carried.
He set his fingers to the balcony rail to keep from frowning. The System rarely deigned to be poetic. "Not now," he told it silently. But after a beat he added, because it felt wrong to be only ungrateful: "Thank you."
"What is it?" Ruby asked. Her eye for small shifts was too good.
"Nothing." He lifted his bowl again, let the steam blunt the edge of whatever message the System had wanted to impart. "Ghost of adrenaline. It's been a week."
"Weakness is not a crime," Ruby said.
"Neither is listening to the wrong voices." He forced another mouthful down and felt the warmth spread outward, like ripples in a rice paddy after a stone. "Let's get the names."
Sanio by daylight had a thousand faces; by night it had two. The first was the tourist mask—lantern-lit canals, musicians skimming bowstrings on floating platforms, lovers leaning against bridges and taking photos in soft filters to make their happiness look old. The second belonged to the people who worked under that lantern light so it could exist—the dockhands who climbed out of the water at dawn with their skin cut to paper from fish scales, the warehouse clerks who ritually broke their backs, the night-shift technicians whose coffees smelled like burned sugar. It was in those places the Nguyen family floated—too rich to be seen, too poor to be named.
Cire and Phuong walked the Canal Quarter together while Ruby attended a midnight tea at the House of Peacock Feathers. He had argued about the timing until Phuong showed him, with a single look, that he was being childish.
"We do not honor our lady by making her carry every door," she said. "You and I will carry this one."
So he pulled a hood over his damp hair and kept pace behind her, a step back and to the right the way she had instructed, while the wind scissored the canal's surface into tatters.
Warehouse F-37A hunched against the water like an old cat. Its roofline sagged—deliberately, Phuong said, an aesthetic program meant to blend with its neighbors—but the gutters were new and the security cameras had cerulean irises that tracked motion with premium smoothness. Two loading bays opened onto the street; a third opened directly onto the canal. A municipal barge was moored there now, bobbing gently, its driver asleep with his cap over his face. Cire knew that trick—the cap had a slit you could keep wide as a smile, enough to watch anyone who approached.
Phuong did not approach. She stood in the doorway of a tea shop across the lane and ordered, in a voice that sounded bored enough to be safe, two cups of chrysanthemum and a plate of sugared lotus seeds. Then she waited. Her patience was an object you could set a clock on; Cire admired it even as his muscles ached for motion.
The door on the canal bay rolled up at one in the morning. A man with the soft build of an accounts clerk stepped out, smoking. A second emerged two minutes later to relieve him, the way Cire had seen shepherds at home watch the storm line change handover across a ridge. The first man lumbered back inside. At one thirty, the municipal barge burped its engine awake and slid away without a bump or scrape, too practiced to be anything but routine.
"Not medicines," Phuong murmured for Cire's benefit. "Medicines leave with labels, and they don't go out in the darkest hour of night unless they are illegal organs or they are the sort of 'medicine' men cannot admit they need."
"So which is it?"
"Organs are stored at the hospital. And this city is not that sick." She sipped her chrysanthemum. "Seishun."
Cire leaned his shoulder to the tea shop's timber frame and watched the barge's lights thin to pearls in the distance. "How does a man like that find his pillow?" he asked softly. "He counts coins. But does he count the faces?"
"If he starts counting faces," Phuong said, "he never sleeps again. Most people want to sleep. It is our advantage."
He looked at her hands then—small, neat, callused only where the rainbow knife sat against her palm when she tucked it out of sight—and wondered how many nights she had chosen not to sleep. "How many names?" he asked.
"I saw six," she said. "There will be twelve. Two per door. One per drone station." She tapped the tea shop counter with a fingernail and the old man who poured tea there, her informant in a faded apron, passed her a small paper packet instead of a receipt. She did not look at it. "We have their schedules," she said. "Now we need their friends."
"My grandmother always said if you want to know a man, you follow him home," Cire said.
"Your grandmother was wise."
"She also said never follow a goat home. All goats live in the same house, and it's not a place fit for soup."
Phuong didn't smile, but her eyes crinkled with manufactured indifference. "We will leave the goats to you, Mountain."
They followed the clerk who smoked. He walked with the steady cadence of a man who had not had to run in years; when he looked over his shoulder, it was only to avoid stepping in the canal where the paving stones dipped and pooled. He crossed a bridge, then two, and veered down a residential lane striped with laundry lines. He did not stop at the game parlor, at the old woman who sold dumplings from a steamer the size of a rice washer, at the communal bath. He stopped at a door with a bright blue paper charm stuck above it to ward off debt collectors, and knocked with an irregular rhythm—two long, three short. The door opened.
A small child flung herself at his knees, then bounced back when her mother hissed, "Shoes, shoes," and he laughed with a tired brightness that was either love or a very good imitation. Cire held his breath without meaning to, pressing his back to the shadow of a ficus pot while Phuong pretended to fuss with the strap of her sandal.
"That's someone's father," Cire said when the door closed.
"Yes." Phuong beckoned him on, already turning away. "And tonight he carries a box that breaks someone else's father."
Cire had no answer for that. He saw his own father's hands instead, chapped and chapped again, and wondered if the man had ever done anything because it was the only way to keep a house warm. He told the Warden System, quietly, that he was not ready to judge a clerk with a paper charm over his door.
—carried, said the System, the trace-pulse tickling his wrists like a distant drum. —some must be carried.
They shadowed three more workers that night. Each life felt like a room he barely entered—saw a shelf of books, a worn cushion, a stain on a wall where a pot had boiled over and bubbled its sugar into stone—and then passed by, leaving behind nothing but the time of the lights going out. It would have been easy to hate nobody and nothing; it would have been easy to hate Uncle Bao completely.
They ended on the roof of a bathhouse that had closed an hour ago, its domes radiating steam into the night, coils of it unwinding like breath. The city below had a low, contented murmur—chairs stacked in restaurants, a missed laugh found again on a balcony and made good on. Phuong laid out the names they had taken like tiles: Ha Tham, clerk; Yen Bai, drone technician; Minh Qiao, dockman; Duyen, security; Duyen's lover, who worked mornings at a stadium kiosk; the uncle of the drone tech, who wanted to retire to a village with three pear trees; a mother whose shoulder had begun to ache in the way that warned of winter.
Phuong closed the packet the tea-shop owner had given her and slid it away again. "We will visit again tomorrow," she said. "We will watch five more. There is no hurry."
"Ruby will be in rooms with men who enjoy watching others eat," Cire said. His voice made it sound like a joke. It was not one. "If they know she is watching them back, they will smile wider."
"Lady Ruby is not alone," Phuong said. "We trained for this. She for rooms. I for streets. You for whatever waits under the skin."
Under the skin. He knew what she meant. He also knew what she did not: that the thing under the skin watched back more and more.
He rubbed his thumb along the seam of his palm. It throbbed with heat that had nothing to do with the bathhouse beneath them.
"Go sleep," Phuong said, in a voice that brooked no argument. "I will file the first report. We move at dawn."
Dawn in Sanio did not roar. It yawned and stretched, sliding light along the canal and licking it silver. Cire dreamed of his grandmother's needle kit rolling off a table and waking the whole village with the clatter. When he opened his eyes, he had the prickling sensation of a thought that had fled just as he seized it—something with a smell like disinfectant and sun-warmed tile and men shouting in a language he couldn't place. He lay very still and let it go. He'd learned from the mountains not to chase things that ran from you at first light.
The Academy had given him a narrow room with a bed and a small desk and a window he could open by pressing his palm to the glass until it recognized his pulse. He pushed it open now and the air licked his face. He looked out at a strip of campus green—students running at this hour, the sound of feet on gravel, the indecent optimism of youth who believed in morning. He had believed in mountain mornings: in the way the cold bit your teeth clean. This was different. This was a city morning; it belonged to people who thought phones were prayer beads and that the collective noise of ten thousand lives was better than wind alone.
His slate chirred. A message from Kingston.
KINGSTON:Check the courier feed. I sent over a sandboxed packet. Don't open it on public network. And eat.
Cire's mouth tugged. He made himself eat a steamed bun one of the dorm stewards had left on his sill, then opened Kingston's packet on the Academy's isolated line. It bloomed into four nested windows: one all numbers like falling rain, one a topographic line of data usage across the Canal Quarter, one a heartbeat of encrypted comm-bursts going off like distant lightning at the same minute every night, and one that simply stated, in Kingston's neat, unassailable text:
MIRRORED INVENTORY.TAMPERED BY UNITY PROTOCOL.MEANING: Someone has cloned the municipal inventory system. We see shipments of "medicinals." They are shipping Seishun.NEXT: We need the human hand that presses "confirm." Names? Ruby has tea with the people who bless stamps. You and Phuong find the fingers.
Cire sent back a line without thinking: What about your hands?
Kingston's reply came fast, too fast for it to be anything but a prepared line: My hands will be very clean, and that will be their mistake.
Cire snorted out a breath, affection and worry in the same release. He'd never learned to put them in separate jars. It was a mountain habit.
He pulled on a plain jacket and tucked his needle roll high under his sleeve. His hands felt light. He told himself that was because he planned to use them to heal today, not to fight. The Warden System stirred at that—a cat, at the mention of cream.
—balance, it sighed, a leaf-blade whisper.
"Later," he told it. "We're early in the dance."
Ruby's morning began with the click of porcelain and the smell of jasmine. The House of Peacock Feathers had a courtyard set about with tiny citrus trees in porcelain pots; their fruit had not been picked in weeks, and their decay perfumed the undeniable elegance of the place with the reminder that things rotted here too, under all the silk. Ruby took tea with three women whose jewelry cost as much as a clever man's life in a poor district.
Lady Chau, whose family underwrote half the hospitals in Sanio. Madam Vi, whose ballet company performed for the monarchy and whose accountants laundered a tame fraction of the city's gambling profits. And Aunt Hy, who was not Ruby's aunt, who was everyone's aunt, which meant she could walk into any kitchen in power and take a tureen off the stove without being asked a single question.
They hugged her with their eyes and told her how proud they were of her and how fearsome her flames had been.
"You made the boys pee their trousers," Madam Vi said, delighted.
"A disgrace," Lady Chau scolded, and clicked her tongue. "To lose to a child. In public."
Ruby smiled as court demanded her to: serene, grateful, humble, dangerous. "They were very skilled," she said. "It was close."
"It is never close when the phoenix chooses a head to land on," Aunt Hy said, and motioned to the maid for more tea. "You have your mother's hands."
Ruby did not look down. The steam from the cups hid too much of the truth on mornings like this. "Thank you," she said, and asked, "How is your son? He still wants the hospital board seat?"
Lady Chau laughed. "No one wants the hospital board seat. They want the catering budget and the open line to the research fund. He wants it, yes."
"Have him apply." Ruby set her teacup on its plate in a gesture that suggested she had the power to grant the favor and the graciousness to pretend she did not know it. "I'm hearing the board might reconsider how it screens candidates."
"That would be a mercy," Lady Chau said drily. "They have been screening for spinelessness and docility for five years."
"Your words, not mine."
Aunt Hy tapped the side of her cup. "You didn't ask us here to talk about ballet and boys," she said. "Tell us what you want, child."
Ruby lifted her gaze. It was like a blade moving through a scabbard—soundless, but every eye felt it. "I want to know," she said, "who signs the municipal inventory receipts at the Canal Quarter warehouses."
"Inventory receipts?" Madam Vi blinked, wide-eyed and being a very good actress about it. "What a small thing to ask."
"Small things knock whole houses down," Ruby said. "I just want to know whose writing is on those little green lines. We can all sleep better with the city's medicine in safe hands."
Lady Chau pursed her lips. Ruby watched the thoughts cross her face: green lines equaled shipments; shipments equaled graft; graft equaled favors; favors currently lived in the House of Nguyen, which meant the shadow of a patriarch who still commanded the city to shift its weight when he coughed. It was dangerous, but it could also be useful.
"Uncle Bao keeps the signature books," Aunt Hy said, addressing neither of them and both. "He thinks putting his little dog-eared notebooks under his pillow makes them safe."
Ruby let her spoon stir the tea: round and round. "Do you know where he rests his head these days?"
"Not where his wife thinks he does." Aunt Hy's earrings swung in her earlobes. "Over the fish market. On a bed that smells like durian. I would slap a man who made me sleep in a room that smells like that, but his wife is a saint."
"I like durian," Madam Vi said.
"You like showing people you are braver than they are," Lady Chau said. "Which is not the same."
Ruby listened to them argue for three breath-long minutes, the way you let a kettle sing itself down before you lift it. Then she folded her napkin, smoothed it, worked her mouth around a truth she did not want to speak and did not want to lie about.
"Uncle Bao killed two girls," she said.
The breeze in the courtyard dropped. The citrus scent swelled and then folded back in on itself, the way a hand drops when it realizes it has been waving to a person who isn't there.
"He did it with his kindness," Ruby went on, softly. "With his little boxes and his loans that forgave themselves if you took one more. One of them worked in my grandfather's garden. She had a laugh that made the old men at the gate forget to stamp passes. He watched her die and told himself he had never met her. He will do it again. He will talk about family when he pushes the pen across the page."
Lady Chau's mouth pressed flat; she was too intelligent for theatrics. Madam Vi's eyes went bright and glassy, not with tears—she was the sort who cried in private—but with anger dressed as pity. Aunt Hy did not change expression at all, which meant she was thinking about ten moves ahead and where everyone in the room would be when they landed.
"Tell me what you need," Lady Chau said.
"An invitation," Ruby said. "To the hospital gala. Not the one for the donors. The other one, the one that happens in the pharmacy. Where Uncle Bao smiles at the pharmacists and says how proud the family is of their diligence."
"You want him to see you there," Madam Vi said.
"I want him to think I don't see him," Ruby said.
Aunt Hy leaned back in her chair, calculating. "You have your mother's hands," she said again, and this time Ruby heard the rest of the sentence: and your grandfather's teeth.
Cire spent the afternoon not breaking anyone.
It was harder than he expected.
Phuong took him to three dispensaries. In the first, he stood beside a woman whose skin had the pale yellow of someone whose liver had given up on her and showed her how to breathe while the pharmacist counted out her pills. In the second, he watched an old man with a torn lapel take the last of his money and put it on the counter for the cheap cough serum that everyone knew was three percent Seishun and ninety-seven percent water. In the third, a boy with a scabbed knee and dark circles under his eyes waited too politely for the pharmacist to look at him, and never met Cire's gaze, and smelled faintly of the sour-sweet rot that lived under the canals where the rats made their homes.
Cire did not speak in any of those places. It wasn't because Phuong had told him not to. It was because the Warden System had lifted its head inside him and was listening like a hound.
—greed, it said, appraisingly, and the sound it made was not disgust. It was recognition. —envy. hunger. an old hunger with a new name.
He found a place in the alley between the second and third dispensaries where the smell of bleach fought hard with damp cardboard and waited it out until his breath came in without hitching. Then he walked to a corner with a monk selling paper talismans and asked for the kind that didn't work but made parents feel better anyway.
"You do not have a face that belongs to my buyers," the monk said, perfectly amiable. "But you have the hands."
Cire looked at his hands. "What kind of hands are those?"
"People who think their hands can stop water," the monk said. "It is good to think it, Until you learn how to build a channel."
Cire paid for three talismans and pinned them up under the roof of the dispensary lobby where only the boy with the scabbed knee would see them.
He wanted to fight. He wanted to fight something he could hit. But the quiet rooms Ruby had promised were building inside the city, and he knew that if he bled too noisily in the street, the men who built those rooms would close their doors.
So he and Phuong went home when dusk came down like a shawl and the canal turned black. They climbed the Academy stairs quietly not because they had to but because the building had a way of taking your footsteps and making them sound guilty.
When they reached the hall that connected to the guest suites where Kingston had nested himself among cables and dataslates, the lights were low and warm and the smell of frying scallions drifted under his door. Cire knocked without ceremony and went in.
Kingston had a wok in one hand and a stylus in his teeth. He wore a soft shirt rolled to the elbows, and his hair was half tied up in an attempt at practicality that did nothing to keep it from falling in his eyes. He grinned around the stylus when he saw Cire and Phuong, and then used the stylus to flip a scallion cake.
"Dinner," he said. "Because I am the only one of us with the sense to eat before we do something stupid."
"We already ate your sense," Cire said, uncoiling enough to flop on Kingston's couch. The cushions breathed up around his back and the ache there spoke to him like an old friend. "And left you with charm and unnecessary adjectives."
"Accurate," Kingston said cheerfully, and plated three scallion cakes with an economist's precision. "I have three things. One: mirrored inventory confirmed at three additional nodes this afternoon. Two: we have a galley map of the hospital pharmacy and a list of who shakes who's hand when they think the cameras aren't watching. Three: I found Uncle Bao's other wife."
Phuong's eyebrow went up, an event rare enough to count as lightning. "Other," she said.
"Other," Kingston said. "He keeps his official one in a villa where the jasmine's trained to crawl over the balconies and put the neighbors to sleep with jealousy. He keeps this one in a dorm room over the fish market. She sells fermented tofu. She hits him when he lies. It is very educational."
Cire lifted himself on an elbow. "You followed him?"
"I followed his scooter," Kingston said, sitting and tucking his legs under him like a schoolboy. "It doesn't matter if Uncle Bao is careful. His scooter deals in faith, not evidence. It trusts anyone who puts a signal near it. I put a signal near it."
"Is he moving tonight?" Phuong asked.
Kingston chewed, swallowed, set his plate on top of a pile of code printouts, thought about their question the way he thought about everything—tilting the angles until the light changed. "No," he said finally. "Tonight is the gala in the pharmacy. He will be there to show his best smile to people whose own smile budgets are larger than ours."
"Then we go shake hands," Phuong said, sliding back to her feet already. "I will bring the invitations."
"Careful," Kingston said, and for a heartbeat the glint of play under his voice shuttered. "He's not stupid. He's never been the kind of stupid that dies fast. He's the kind that kills slowly."
"I know," Phuong said. "I grew up three doors down from him."
That shook Cire a little. He hadn't known. He hadn't thought to ask. He looked at Phuong with new eyes then, saw the precise ways she cut corners of rooms with her body, how she never left her back to a window even when that window was on the fourth floor and had a grill welded over it. He looked at Kingston, who was not from here and belonged everywhere, and understood that each of them carried the city on a different shoulder.
"Ruby?" he asked.
Kingston set a slate on the table and expanded an image. The pharmacy gala. Rows of glass cases filled with boxes that looked like benevolent candy, the ones with the neatest fonts always hiding the most money. Pharmacists in white coats with stiff collars. Administrators in silk whose rings looked like they belonged on statues. Ruby in a dress that treated modesty like a contract—a high collar, a cut that showed nothing except that she could set the room on fire if she chose. Her dress was charcoal, like the night before a spark. Her hair was up. She smiled at Lady Chau with perfect warmth; it was a smile you could build houses on.
"She's working," Kingston said, and his voice held a tenderness he would not have allowed into a battlefield, and perhaps did not even realize had snuck into this room. "She's doing it right."
"Of course she is," Cire said.
"Sometimes stating the obvious helps." Kingston leaned back. "You two go to the back entrance at thirteen past the hour. That's when the dock doors cycle. You'll see the signature book if you have eyes. Don't get seen."
"Is that an order?" Cire asked.
"It's an equation," Kingston said. "If you get seen, Ruby has to spend the next three days pretending she didn't see you. If you stay invisible, she can put her hand on a scale with a smile."
Phuong's mouth tilted. "Mountain," she said to Cire, "put on your softest shoes."
The pharmacy gala was the kind of performance that made Cire's grandmother roll her eyes until only white showed. It did not pretend to be for the poor; it pretended to be for the people who thought they were helping the poor. The walls were glass that dimmed itself in tasteful gradients where the ambient light would otherwise have reflected off rings. The music was the kind that made conversation feel more intimate than it was while informing everyone that nothing here would be allowed to become private. The canapés were bite-sized, edible in such a way that the hand that took them never had to show need.
Cire and Phuong were not in that room.
They were in the long throat that fed it—the service corridor, where an old servant had scoured the tiles so often they had a soft, resigned shine. Phuong had bribed a janitor with a bottle of plum wine and a sincerely sympathetic look about his back pain; he had given them five minutes and a keycard that was someone else's. They moved with the patience of ghosts, as if the corridor belonged to the people who had rubbed their lives against it for years and they were just borrowing it for a moment.
At thirteen past the hour, the dock door cycled with a sigh. Cire caught the lip of the door with his fingers and breathed heat into them, just enough to keep the sensor from chiming that something irregular had brushed it. Phuong slid through like silk. He followed.
The back office was small and officious. There were two chairs that didn't want to be sat on, a fake plant that insisted it wanted sunlight, a safe that was old enough to be proud of how many times it had been installed in different walls. There was a desk with two blotters. There was a ledger on the second blotter.
Cire had never been grateful to the mountains for his patience with penmanship until that moment. He could read the shape of a hand like the shape of a tree that told you where the wind had come from. This one was neat. It did not hurry. It made its numbers legitimate by writing them stubbornly the same way every time. But in the bottom right-hand corner, a flourish had begun to creep in—the way a man takes to wearing hats when he discovers they make him taller.
"Uncle Bao," Phuong breathed. She took a picture. Then a second. Her hands were quick and calm. "We have him."
Cire's heart did not climb his throat the way it did in a fight. It sank. It sank because seeing the line of that hand on so many pages told him just how many quiet deaths a smiling flourish could rewrite as compliance.
He set his finger lightly, briefly, to the ink. It had dried hours ago. But the Warden System inside him stirred like a beast experiencing scent, and the room filled with a taste that was not taste—a sensation of slickness along the tongue, the back of the jaw clenching as if at sweetness too sharp. Greed did not feel like gold. It felt like teeth.
—carried, the System reminded him, as if it needed to rein in his need to rend. —some. Not all.
The door handle clicked.
Phuong didn't move. That was her excellence—she could make a plan that included failure and not let her breath change. Cire's excellence was uglier. He was fast.
He caught the wrist that came through the door and turned it so the man attached to it came with it, flipping his body into the room with a soft thud. Cire pressed him against the wall. He put a palm to the man's sternum and leaned, just enough to remind the body of gravity. The man was not a guard; he was an assistant. His fear smelled raw and stupid.
"I'm going to let you go," Cire said, in the tone he used when he was telling goat kids they were safe. "You were never here. Your shoes never squeaked. You went to the bathroom and thought about noodles."
"Noodles," the man squeaked, obligingly.
Phuong stepped in and smoothed the man's collar with a touch kind enough to humiliate him. "Go," she said. "Wash your face. You look honest. It's a dangerous look tonight."
He went. The door closed. They breathed again.
Cire had his hands on the ledger without remembering moving them there. His palms warmed. He didn't need to call the System. It came.
A whisper outside words poured through him—the sense of a dark room with a window that looked onto nothing, the smell of antiseptic cut with incense, the feeling of being twelve and trying to tie a bandage while the patient thrashed because there was no more morphine. He saw—no, felt—the afterimage of a clinic corridor on a world that was not this one. He knew that world was not here because the lights were too clean and the sound of footsteps on tile was coded by a language his ear did not have a box for yet.
He was Dr. Kiran for the length of a heartbeat. He loved a woman whose laugh came down the hallway with a coffee cup. He hated the budget that had made him have that laugh as his only pain management for an entire ward. He believed in the oath he had taken even when it broke him. And then the ledger stretched this feeling on a rack and hammered a nail through it: this is how they take your oath and sell it back to you in boxes.
He swayed.
Phuong's hand touched his shoulder. The world did not spin away, which he appreciated.
"Careful," she said. "You are bleeding something. Not blood."
He shut the ledger. The echo dulled. The office became a room again, with a plant that wanted sunlight and two chairs that still didn't want to be sat on. "We have what we need," he said. His voice rasped like old paper. "Let's go."
They ghosted back into the corridor. At the corner where the service hall opened into a larger foyer reserved for donors who liked to see a little machinery with their donation, Cire stopped. The Warden System prickled his skin.
Through a cutout window, he saw Ruby.
She stood under a chandelier that had cost someone's entire life to purchase. Uncle Bao stood five paces from her, holding a glass of something that pretended it did not share a name with sugar. He was not what Cire had expected, which meant he was exactly what he should have expected: a man whose face belonged in a kitchen, who could remember your preferences for sauces and then ruin your life with a napkin. His hair was salt perfect. His hands were soft. He smiled at Ruby with an indulgence that made Cire want to dislocate his jaw.
Ruby smiled back. It looked like she had been born with it. She stepped closer into his air, into the radius where a man has to decide whether to back up or admit he doesn't own the floor. Uncle Bao did not back up; he stood and let her enter his space like a challenge delivered in perfume.
Cire watched her take his hand between both of hers, gently, like a niece comforting an uncle whose back hurt. He watched her turn his palm up, laughing at something someone else said as if it was not the most important thing in the room, and set two fingers briefly, innocently, to the patch of skin that controlled the nerve to the thumb. It looked like nothing. It looked like everything never started. Cire knew what it was: a map. She was taking the lay of his hand and writing it under her own skin, the way she took every room and stored it.
Uncle Bao said something that made everyone near him smile the way people smile when a clown entertains their children. Ruby's eyes flicked to the mirror and found Cire's reflection. The brief acknowledgement, the warning to stay still. Then the smile again, exactly where it should be, as if it had never shifted.
They left. The city breathed.
When they reached the Academy, Kingston had three new windows open and a noodle bowl he had forgotten to eat. He looked from their faces to their hands to the way Cire had set his jaw as if it ached.
"Ledger?" Kingston asked.
"Ledger," Phuong said. She tossed him the slate. He caught it one-handed, eyes already going sharp. When he looked up, he did not have a stylus in his mouth anymore. He had a knife.
"This is enough to cut the tail," he said. "Not the head."
"Good," Phuong said. "Heads look at movement. Tails feel."
Cire lowered himself to the couch and watched the ceiling until the blood stopped humming in his ears. He wanted to fall asleep. He knew he couldn't. Not yet. The Warden System ticked along his spine like the slow dismantling of a clock.
"Tomorrow," Ruby said from the doorway. She had shed the charcoal dress for a shirt a schoolgirl might have borrowed without permission from her scholar brother—white, crisp, clean. Her hair hung like a blade of ink down her back. She looked like war at rest. "We make our first pull."
"Where?" Kingston asked, already setting his map to recalculate routes based on public transit outages and festival road closures and how many rice cookers were sold on a given block in the last month.
Ruby's mouth shaped a name like she was testing how it would taste when it bled. "Warehouse F-37A. Canal Quarter. We will not cut. We will press. See who squeals."
"You'll have eyes," Phuong said. "And hands."
"I need you two to be shadows," Ruby said, looking at Cire and Kingston in turn. She didn't plead. She didn't order. She told the truth of necessity. "If Bao sees your faces there, he will move the head. If he smells you, he will set bait."
Kingston nodded once. "I can be a breeze," he said. "I can be a rumor. I can be a power outage that makes the drone dock sneeze."
Cire dipped his chin. "And I can be a doctor," he said. "If someone needs to wake up."
Ruby's gaze lingered a second longer on him than propriety required. "You were born for that," she said softly.
He didn't ask which life she meant. He didn't need to.
"Sleep," she told them, and the word fell over the room like a blanket whose weave had seen many winters.
When the others had gone and the Academy's night hum settled into the soft-shoe rhythm of cleaned floors drying and servers muttering their little digital prayers, Cire sat at the window and let the Warden System speak if it wanted.
It did. But it did not speak of rage or of chains. It gave him a memory instead, unasked for and not entirely welcome: a tiny room with a poster of a mountain on the wall that wasn't his. A woman's hand brushing the back of his neck with fingers that smelled like coffee. The sound of rain on a tin awning that did not exist in Sanio. The understanding that love could be quiet and still be the loudest thing in a life.
He didn't know if the woman was Ruby. He didn't know if he was supposed to carry this memory or let it carry him. He did know that when he closed his eyes, the door the System had talked about—judgment as a door—stood in front of him, ajar. Behind it, the sound of water.
Cire rested his head against the cool glass of the window. He listened to the city breathe. He waited for the surge.