Night in the Lowlight wasn't dark; it was the color of saved things. Lamps hung beneath the bridge ribs in jars and old bottles, their light softened to a syrup glow, like the city had learned to whisper with its teeth still in. The Halo above went on beaming its clean, obedient daylight at the richer districts, but down here the splinters of brightness were private, hoarded, tended.
Kade arrived at Lumi's workshop with a morning in his pocket.
It wasn't metaphor. He had paid for it—an hour and a half, bottled lawful in a palm-sized ampoule he'd bought with Riven's advance. Riven's coin had felt like a wager, but the morning inside the glass felt simple: sky the color of salt, the scent of baking from a vendor he couldn't see, a child's footsteps somewhere to his right. Not his morning, but clean enough to anchor a knot.
The plastic strips that made Lumi's doorway brushed his shoulders. The room beyond was the same explosion of angles and copper veins as before, except now a ring of mirrors had been set on the floor around a high stool, chalked with a few symbols that didn't belong to the Luminist script he recognized from church walls. These were personal—utility sigils, the kind technicians scribbled to themselves when a machine had taught them how it liked to be treated.
Lumi stood with her sleeves rolled, hair braided back in a stacked pattern, which meant she expected to pull. A small copper kettle steamed on a coil-stove. She didn't look up when Kade entered; she was whispering to a mirror the size of a book, tapping its rim with her fingernail the way a physician might wake a stubborn muscle.
"You brought it," she said, not asking.
Kade set the ampoule on the table. "Morning to spare."
"Good." She slid the book-mirror into a felt sleeve and turned, her eyes doing the fast math she did when she was trying to be kind and exact at the same time. "Sit. Left hand inside the ring. We're going to tie the first knot where you can reach it."
Kade looked at the chalk ring. "You tie knots with mirrors?"
"You tie them with attention," she said. "Mirrors just stop you from lying to yourself about where your attention is."
He sat. The stool's legs wobbled once and then decided to do their job. He rested his forearm across the little table within the ring, palm up. The mnemonic seal—seven turns, last one backwards—lay like a quiet river under the skin. It had felt tight since the Mercy siphon this morning; a quiet ache had taken up residence along the tendons, like a violin string tuned just higher than honest.
Lumi brought the cold-mirror and set it on a stand so it angled toward the knot but didn't catch the room's other light.
"Breathe," she said. "Slow. Bring your sister into the back of your mind, far enough she's not a weapon you accidentally use."
He did. He moved Mira to the corner of himself where he kept good words: fig-stealer, star-namer, true-things-keep. He kept her far enough that if something pulled on him, it wouldn't yank her, too.
"And now," Lumi said, "think of your name."
He swallowed. "Which."
"The one you paid," she said. "We're not opening the drawer yet; we're pointing at it and letting it know we remember where it lives."
Kade looked at the ampoule of morning. Light swam inside like a tame fish.
He thought of a counter too tall for a twelve-year-old. He thought of chalk dust on a clerk's sleeve and of the way the clerk's eyes had gone soft and old when he said, You sure, boy? He thought of himself saying yes. He thought of the way the rope had looked when the clerk tied it into him, a good knot done slowly, because slow meant you respected what it was binding.
The seal under his skin warmed, like it had been waiting for someone to knock politely instead of kick.
Lumi moved the cold-mirror a fraction. "Hold your breath one heartbeat," she said. "Now let it out and say, without sound, the part of your name you know."
"I don't—" he started, and stopped, because his mouth had tried to form a sound his memory had erased. The echo of it slid around his tongue like a coin in the dark.
The seal tightened.
Lumi's hand hovered an inch above his forearm—close enough he could feel the air move. "Good," she murmured. "It knows you're here. Now we anchor it."
She uncapped the ampoule and used a dropper to lift a single bead of morning—just enough to pearl at the glass tip. The drop hovered like it was deciding if gravity was a suggestion or a rule.
"Ready," she said.
"Ready," he lied.
She let the morning fall onto the mirrored surface. The cold-mirror drank it like a quiet mouth. The chalk line ring shivered. Kade felt the slight, clean pressure of a good bandage laid tight.
The knot under his skin loosened—not much, not like a door, but like a window successfully pried after many years closed. The pressure in his forearm went from ache to bearable.
"There," Lumi said, satisfaction shaded with caution. "We gave it a handhold. You should be able to carry it without it sawing you from the inside."
He flexed his fingers. The pain slid to one side, revealing a space he hadn't noticed had been taken. He breathed like someone who had discovered an unbroken rib.
"How long does it last?" he asked.
"Until you tug," she said simply. "Or until something else does."
He nodded. For now, it was enough. For now, he could think without the seal crowding each thought like a heat source in a small room.
Lumi moved around the table with a towel and wiped away the drop's trace from the mirror, then slipped the ampoule's stopper back in with a precision that said the next drop might be spent to keep a stranger breathing somewhere else.
"Now," she said, and it was the now that meant the part of the conversation she hadn't wanted to rush. She drew a tin from her pocket—not Nyx's, not municipal; this one was plain steel, stamped with a simple crosshatch pattern like a net. "A client brought me this on his way to burning. Since you're going to be playing with vaults and receipts, you should see how a Name sigil fights."
Kade's back went straight. "Whose?"
"Doesn't matter for the exercise," she said, which meant it mattered a lot for everything else. "He died twelve hours after they took it out of him. He thought he'd trick the Halo by dying with his Name off his body. The Halo doesn't like being tricked."
She opened the tin.
Inside lay a piece of skin.
It was the size of a cigarette paper, pale and layered at the edges, as if it had once belonged to a place on a forearm where skin had decided to be paper for a while. In its center lay a sigil burned in—not Kade's knot, but a different family: a spiral fed by four lines, each line interrupted by a tiny square. It didn't move. It didn't need to. Looking at it felt like listening to a closed door that had chosen to be silent.
"Don't touch it," Lumi said. "Stand on the other side of the table and let it look at you."
"Sigils don't—"
"Kade," she said, not unkindly. "Some do."
He moved around. The ring of chalk put a half halo around the tin. The cold-mirror caught a slant of the sigil without a reflection, like the mirror and the mark had agreed not to make each other real.
He stared at the spiral with the squares. The longer he looked, the less it looked like a spiral. The squares at the line breaks were wrong for decoration; they were breath marks. A turning mind pauses here, the sigil said without words. A memory does this draw-in before the next thing. The spiral wasn't a symbol—it was a path built of breaths.
"Each family ties a name different," Lumi said. "Some like looped rope. Some use practical knots. This family believed names are a path you learn by forgetting how to breathe in the old way."
"That's evil," Kade said. It came out too quickly.
"It's efficient," she said. "Which is a kind of evil if you're the one being processed."
His forearm prickled. The knot in his skin warmed, then cooled, then—strange—aligned. He realized the orientation of his own seal in his head was wrong. He had been imagining one of the turns reversed; the last backward knot wasn't at the end of the rope—he had served it to himself at the beginning to make it hurt less. The seal corrected him, gently at first, then with heat.
The spiral on the piece of skin felt his correction.
Kade didn't move. He hadn't touched anything. He hadn't said whatever he had tried to say in his mouth. But the sigil in the tin, which had belonged to a dead man and now belonged to nobody, reacted the way an animal does when a familiar footstep hits broken leaves.
It twitched.
No. Not a twitch. A refusal to lie flat. The thin edges of the skin curled in a fraction, as if trying to move toward his arm and at the same time away from the mirror.
Lumi went very still. Her hands didn't rush; they had learned long ago that rushing was how you joined a mistake.
"It knows you," she said softly.
"How," Kade said through a throat that had gotten dry. "We've never met."
"The Archives met you," she said. "You think they don't mark who brought what to the counter? You think the letters at the edges of your receipt don't swim in their pool? The Halo knows the smell of everyone who handed it food. The vaults reflect it."
"What does it want?" he asked. He already knew the answer.
"To be obeyed," she said. "Or broken. Sigils don't like being neither."
The tiny curl at the sigil's edge made a dry, papery sound. It felt profane. Kade wanted to apologize to a piece of skin.
"Step back," Lumi said.
He didn't. He stepped closer instead, and the tin creaked—only a little, but enough to tell him the world around the sigil had weight and pressure like weather.
He remembered the clerk crying before he did. He hadn't thought about that in years. He had always told the story inside himself with his own tears at the center, clean, hard, reasonable. He had edited out the other person's.
"Don't," Lumi said, simple.
He reached his hand toward the tin anyway.
The cold-mirror flashed—not light; refusal. It threw his hand back with a sensation like a polite but unambiguous doorperson redirecting him. The skin in the tin went flat as if embarrassed by having been seen struggling.
He waited. The embarrassment passed. The skin made its decision. It rose.
Not far—no horror-show. A centimeter, maybe two. Enough for a breath to slide under. Kade realized he had matched its breath marks without meaning to. His chest had followed the squares. He had been reading this stranger's name like sheet music and his lungs had become the instrument.
"Close the tin," Lumi said, sharp now.
He did. The lid clicked and the room relaxed in a way his body didn't.
He sat back hard on the stool. The chalk ring had smeared under his boot. The kettle had boiled dry; the coil hissed, scolding. The cold-mirror had fogged along one edge, like a mirror does when someone says something they mean.
"What was that," he said. Not a question, a demand for a more useful shape around the thing he'd just seen.
"A warning," Lumi said. "That the vault won't treat you like a thief. It will treat you like a son who's come home to give back what he stole."
"I didn't steal," Kade said. "I sold. They paid."
"You can sell your hand to a machine for food," she said. "The machine still calls you thief if you try to take your fingers back."
He laughed. It sounded like a bark and he hated it. "So I go in to swap a sigil for a receipt and my own name tries to lay down on top of me like a second skin."
"It won't be that gentle," she said.
He put his face in his hands for a breath that didn't count and then came up again clean. "Good," he said. "I'm tired of gentle lies."
Lumi watched him the way an engineer watches a bridge under its first load—pride, fear, inevitability. She turned off the coil, poured water from a jug into the kettle to cool it, and then set two cups down without ceremony. She didn't ask if he wanted tea. She poured the leaves, the water, the time.
"When," she said finally, "do you have to meet the person who dangled the receipt?"
"Soon," Kade said. "Nyx will rattle her keys if I make her wait. And Riven will start naming prices I've already paid if I don't bring him his dinner."
"Two jobs," Lumi said. "Three, if you count the one we gave ourselves."
"We always count the one we give ourselves last," Kade said. "It's how we live long enough to regret it."
"Take the mirror," she said, pushing the cold-mirror toward him. "We're past my rule about not lending medicine to people who like their sickness. You hate yours."
He didn't reach. "What's the price."
"Bring it back," she said. "Not paid. Brought back. That's the price."
He nodded. Hands again; always hands. He picked up the mirror and it warmed like it recognized him. It had no right to, but the city was full of things that had taken rights for themselves.
"Do not point it at the Halo," she said, sudden. "Not even as a joke."
"I don't tell that kind of joke," he said.
"Good," she said. "Because it doesn't laugh."
He slid the mirror into an inner pocket near the receipt tin. The two objects did not acknowledge each other. That felt like a mercy, however temporary such mercies were.
He stood to go. Lumi stopped him with a fingertip barely touching his wrist—the kind of stop you don't ignore because it respects your momentum enough to risk insulting it.
"One more thing," she said. "Names are not true because they're old. They're true because we decide to keep them. If your name tries to climb back onto you and it feels like drowning, remember: you can refuse. That refusal will be as real a name as any syllable they took."
He thought about that in the time it took him to lift the plastic strips and step into the Lowlight. Refusal as a name. It fit his mouth. It tasted like metal, like the word keep had when he had told a woman to hold on to her child's hidden name. It tasted like the iron in bridge rain.
The jars along the walkway swung slightly on their cords as a train rumbled past above, the light inside making liquid ovals on the concrete. He walked the orange-scented strip toward Nyx's quarter, then slowed.
A Mercy waited at the far end of the alley.
Not cloaked, not on duty; the hood was down, gloves off, helmet tucked under an arm. The man stood like someone deciding to be less frightening and failing because bones remember uniforms the way dogs remember hands.
Kade recognized the scar across the back of the man's shaved head. The apologetic one. The one who had told him to register his seal or they'd burn it clean next audit.
"Kade Ileri," the Mercy said. Not a template voice. A real one, younger than the armor made it. "We should talk."
"About?"
"About your arm," the Mercy said. "And about the thing that's going to happen to you if you try to take a name out of a mouth that learned to eat because you fed it."
Kade's grip tightened on nothing. The cold-mirror sat a warm dark against his ribs, the receipt a cool rectangular promise.
"Who sent you," Kade asked, and didn't like how he sounded—government-scared instead of curiosity-hungry.
"No one," the Mercy said. "I took off my hood because I'm tired of the equation. My ledger doesn't care if I sleep. I do."
He paused, choosing a risk.
"Your name won't lie down for you," he said. "But it will lie about you. When it does, don't correct it. Use the lie."
Kade stared at him. The city had days when the alleyways threw up prophets just to see who would listen.
"Why," Kade asked.
The Mercy didn't answer. He put the helmet back on, hiding the face that had dared to be a person. "Register your seal," he said in the template voice. "Or we burn it clean."
He left.
Kade stood long enough for two jar-lamps to swing out of rhythm and knock, glass to glass, a dull chime like a coin saying sorry. The Lowlight kept moving. Nyx's keys would rattle. Riven's smile would angle sharper. Lumi's mirror would burn if he aimed it wrong. The Archives, which smelled like chalk and taxed breath, would open if he figured out how to knock with the part of him he hadn't sold.
He started walking, and for once the Halo's light on his cheekbones felt like being watched by a tired god rather than a machine. A dangerous distinction. People who fight gods forget to duck. People who fight machines forget to feel.
"What you keep keeps you," he said under his breath, then added, because the alley didn't have ears and he needed to hear it said by a human, "and what you refuse names you, too."
He didn't know yet whether the sentence had any business being true. But it fit the mouth and it steadied the hand. He would test it soon, where the city kept its deepest chalk, where doors learned to pretend to be walls.
He walked toward Nyx.
Somewhere behind him, in a tin inside a pocket inside a shirt under a bridge, a dead man's sigil turned once in a way that meant somebody was awake.