Her breath left in a tight hiss—admiration or calculation, he could not tell—and she lowered the candle until the flame almost kissed the paper. Ink gleamed where the soot-stick had laid it too heavily; elsewhere the strokes had already begun to drink the damp night, feathering at the edges.
"You ground this in the open air," she murmured, testing a blurred radical with her thumbnail. "Lotus-char dries thirsty. Without night-dew beads the edges bleed. See?" She lifted the page just enough for the light to skim across the sheen, and the characters looked suddenly soft, as though the knowledge itself were trying to escape back into vapor.
Jang felt heat crawl up his neck. "There was no time."
"There is never time," she agreed, tone more clinical than accusing. "But we must steal it anyway." The tip of one finger tapped three times—press, lift, flick—in perfect rhythm with the calligraphy strokes she was mapping in her mind. She inhaled, very faintly, as though scenting the ink's composition, then glanced at his arms again. "How far has it travelled?"
"Past the wrists." He extended his forearms further into the candlelight. Bruises no longer purple but deep iron-grey braided from oaths he had not yet spoken aloud. "Down the spine sometimes."
"And the cost?"
He considered the tar-thick bile he had scrubbed from shed planks, the nights of dizzy darkness when his own pulse sounded like a forge bell. "Manageable," he lied.
A smile—small, fox-sharp—ghosted across her mouth and vanished. She slid the parchment back toward him but kept her palm resting, feather-light, on a bare corner of the page. "All knowledge costs. The question is who pays at the end."
Moonlight, sneaking through the lattice, layered silver bars over her knuckles, cage-shadows trembling as cloud-torn wind hurried overhead. The smell of rain had grown sharper, carrying distant cedar smoke from the kiln hill; it mingled with warm tallow and the faint coppery breath leaking from the fresh cuts on their fingers.
"Do you mean to help me or to warn me?" he asked, voice low.
"I mean to bind you before someone stronger does." She turned, reached past the basin, and retrieved the rusty kitchen knife he recognised from vegetable duty. Edge chipped, spine pitted, yet in that moment it looked ceremonial. "Ink stains, cinders, bruises—those wash away. Words do not. Make a better vow and I'll risk the lash keeping it. Fail, and I won't follow you into the pit."
A wave sloshed in the basin when she set the blade down on the rim. Moon-silver rippled across the water's surface, then stilled. Mirror water, the old matrons whispered, hears every broken promise. Superstition, maybe, yet he heard Ma Gok's cane in the echo of that ripple, heard Seo Yun-tae's ember hiss, heard every lash strike that had counted the rhythm of his childhood.
He bent his head, gathered words, laid them out inside his skull like paper slips before a censor. What fire indeed? The fire was every bruise Kwan tried to smile through, every blister Won-Il still salved with coarse salt, every ragged breath Jang had counted while pretending fear smelled like nothing. He looked at Jisoo and saw callus-rings where mop handles had hardened her palms, saw the faint bump on her cheekbone from an older sister's mis-thrown bucket three winters past; saw a servant girl who had learned to keep her spine straight beneath the weighted gaze of masters.
"There is no pit," he said finally. "Only walls we're told cannot move. I want a gate—hidden." He touched the edge of the parchment where her fingertip still rested. "This is the hinge."
The knife waited, mute and expectant. Jang drew it toward them both, tested its bite with his thumb. A shallow cut bloomed ruby. Jisoo mirrored the motion without flinch; her drop welled darker, nearer garnet. They held hands over the basin, and two beads fell as one.
Water accepted the offering with a soft plink. Ink-black petals spidered outward, curling, merging, shaping a lotus silhouette that glowed rust-red beneath the wavering lantern. The swirl turned, thinned, until the basin lay iron-grey and opaque. Somewhere deep inside, their reflections distorted and merged, then slipped apart like ghosts returning to different graves.
He felt her fingers close around his wrist—heat, tallow slick, a tremor that was not fear alone. "If I fall," he whispered, "burn every trace. Let them look for ashes in ashes."
"If you rise," she answered, thumb brushing the ink smear on his skin, "stoke the ladder for one more rung."
Ink and blood mingled between their clasped hands; the warmth cooled quickly in the corridor draft. He heard her pulse as a faint wingbeat. She, perhaps, heard his bones clatter again—keys or something more dangerous.
Slowly she wiped the blade on her sleeve. The fabric drank the colour greedily. Her other hand, unnoticed by him, pinched a single parchment fibre loosened during the exchange—she tucked it beneath her thumbnail before turning to cap the candle. Shadows crashed in, sudden as shutters slamming. Only the pale rectangle of the open basin glimmered, a silent ear eager to keep what it had been fed.
A muted bell in the guard tower tolled the quarter. Cho Sun-kyu's lantern glow crept along the outer stones. Without words they re-rolled the copy, slid it into his hem, and eased from the alcove. Down the short hall, shoes from the late-shift laundry crew lined the baseboard like sleepy sentries; Jang's bare foot caught one and he steadied it just in time. Won-Il muttered in dream-speech about warm sake, turned over, resumed his snore.
The patrol light trembled through lattice slats, painting cage-bars that crawled across Jang's face then vanished. Cho's limp dragged chain links over flagstones—two steps even, one step awkward, the rhythm of resentment. When that scraping faded, Jang sank onto his pallet. Jisoo lay three berths away; he heard the subtle hiss of straw as she stretched out, heard her whisper to herself in a tone too small to trace.
Sleep did not come. Candle after-images ghosted his eyelids; basin water darkened behind them. He flexed his cut thumb—the sting a small, deliberate brand. Almost unconsciously he pressed the pad against the timber beam by his head. The damp blood-ink left a mark resembling half a lotus petal, curved and unsure but alive.
Two dawns left, the tally said. Two dawns until keys clattered for real and mountains were meant to bow.
Somewhere above the rafters, the rooster felt the same pull of approaching light. It cried once—ragged, defiant—against the smothering dark.