Night didn't fall in the Lowlight so much as fold; the bridge ribs closed like a book and the margins filled with glow. Jars hung on string, their little hoards of lumen turned down to syrup. Somewhere a violin practiced the same four notes until they started pretending to be a song. The Halo above stayed bright for the districts that had names like hymns, but here, the light felt privately owned, cross‑legged and suspicious.
Kade came back the long way: past Nyx's stall (shut tight; the keys muttering in their sleep), past the aqueduct's spine where Clement's sign shone its polite orange, past the grin‑door where Riven preserved other people's yesterdays. The receipt tin rode against his ribs like a square animal trying not to breathe. The cold‑mirror warmed the other side—a second heart with better manners.
He could taste copper whenever rain nicked a tarp and let the smell of oranges through. Clement's savor mark had manners too: persistent, instructive, a collar that pointed at debt each time his tongue moved.
Lumi's workshop had the temperature of a room that refused to be eaten. The plastic strips lifted off his shoulders like reluctant water. Inside: copper veins, disobedient angles, mirrors leaned in arrangements that made their own weather. Lumi had rolled her sleeves again—rope‑braid stacked tighter up the back of her head, the kind of braid that said she expected to pull.
"You came," she said, which was funny because people always arrived before they were seen in this room. Her eyes flicked over his face, down to his left forearm where the mnemonic seal had learned to lie peacefully when watched. "How's the anchor?"
"Holding," he said. "Like a window we made behave."
"Good." She touched the rim of a saucer‑mirror with one fingernail, waking the reflect without waking the heat. "Then we baptize."
He waited for the price. Lumi poured water instead. Coil‑stove, kettle. Steam in the language of patience.
"Who," Kade asked.
"Bleached boy," Lumi said. "He started haunting around Vex's soup line at dusk. Won't take broth. Won't take light. Sits with his head turned like he can still hear a mother who isn't there. He's past the part where sermons help."
"Someone's child," Kade said.
"Everyone is," Lumi replied, not pious, just correct. "You don't have to go."
"I do," he said, and it was astonishing how often honesty sounded like vanity.
They took the side‑stairs that had forgotten why they were built. The aluminum treads gave back a tired song underfoot; the city's condensation had learned to bead along the rail in a pattern like Braille that didn't spell anything. Lumi carried the cold‑mirror in a felt sleeve against her hip, like a nurse palming a scalpel in a riot. Kade kept his hands empty and his mouth closed, because Nyx said the Lowlight kept score on breath some nights.
They found the boy near Pillar 17, where the bridge ribs came down like an honest cathedral. Vex's people had set up tables—thin bowls steaming, hard bread you could pay with a hymn. The boy didn't sit with the line. He sat beyond the last lamp, just near enough the glow made edges around him. He had that look—Bleached look—like the head was a jar with the lid off and everything inside had decided to be air.
"Hey," Kade said, from a careful distance. "You look cold without admitting it."
The boy blinked once. He couldn't be more than twelve. His hair had gone to that washed‑out color that made even black look forgiving. His hands were splayed on his knees like he'd forgotten which way fingers pointed.
"You thirsty?" Lumi asked, kneeling to make the angle kinder. She offered a cup. He didn't look at it. His eyes kept drifting to an empty space to her left, as if someone stood there with important instructions she'd better not miss.
"What's your name," Kade asked, and heard Nyx's warning in his own mouth. Names cost. But sometimes asking was a way of saying You are not nothing. "Or what should I call you if I have to shout."
The boy's lips shaped a syllable and let it roll away. He shook his head and laughed once, a small mismatch of sound that hurt worse than quiet.
"We won't take anything," Lumi said, and Kade felt the lie move through the air like a moth. Not a lie by intent; a lie by physics. Everything took. Even breath was a kind of theft from the room.
"Can I show you a trick," Kade said, softer.
That reached something old inside the boy—the scrap of a kid who'd wanted to see cards change or a coin vanish. He tilted his head. The empty space to Lumi's left got his eyes again, like he needed permission. He didn't get it; the space stayed space. He looked back at Kade. Gave the smallest nod a person can give and still be a person.
They moved him closer to the underbridge wash trough—Vex's people had left basins for rinsing bowls. Lumi touched the rim with her knuckle, listening to the metal's little reply. Satisfied, she slipped the cold‑mirror out of its sleeve and breathed on it once, not to fog it but to let it know a mouth existed near it.
"Here's how this works," she told the boy. "You hold it, but not too hard. You aim it at something you'd like to see again without getting hurt by it. If it shows nothing, that's the mirror telling us the angle is wrong, not that you are."
The boy wasn't listening with his ears. He was listening with the posture his bones made when someone else took the world.
Kade crouched so his face could pass for steady. "One rule," he said. "We don't aim at the Halo. We aim at small things on purpose. Like—"
"—the sound a spoon makes," Lumi offered gently, "on a chipped bowl. Or a smell. Or the way the edge of a blanket felt."
The boy's eyes widened at spoon. His mouth did the soft O of first weather. He reached. His fingers were clumsy, but Lumi let the clumsiness exist. He took the mirror out of her hands, surprised at the weight, then surprised again when the weight felt like approval.
"Hold it here," Lumi said, moving his wrist a notch. "If you keep your palm like this, the mirror thinks you're trying to grip it like a weapon. If you loosen—yes. Like you might catch rain instead."
Kade eased his own breathing so the boy could borrow the rhythm. He thought of what he'd tell Mira if she were scared: name three small things you can touch, two you can smell, one you can hear. He said none of that. He kept his mouth closed and let the boy try not to drown on dry ground.
The cold‑mirror went matte for a heartbeat, then took. Not a face. A surface. Kade saw the underside of a table. A particular knothole, a child's chalk mark that looked like a star with too many legs. The picture floated like a soap bubble that refused to pop.
The boy flinched. Not away—from habit. Then he leaned in, like he had remembered there was no price yet.
"Talk to it," Lumi said, sotto voce to Kade, and then to the boy: "Just in your head."
Kade thought: spoon. He didn't send it to the mirror; he put it on the air so the room could decide whether to carry it. The boy's hand tightened—wrong grip—and the mirror dulled. Lumi tsked, a tiny doctor's click. She tipped the boy's wrist, just so. The image snapped back: the underside of the table, then a tilt, then—her hands.
Small, flour‑dusted, fast. Cutting dough into moons. A string bracelet knotted tight on her right wrist; a fingernail half‑blue from a thin hammer strike he already recognized as a story—Tari hid from it, he heard, though no one had spoken the name, and found a story‑voice under his own: she laughed when I cried at the sound. He didn't know if the pronouns belonged to the boy or to the mirror or to some third witness the room made when a memory refused to die.
Kade's chest remembered how to thin. He had a sister; other people's sisters were allowed to exist. "Stay in the hands," he said, barely sound.
The boy did. The mirror showed: flour dust in floating continents; a smear of yolk at the base of a copper bowl; a spoon tapping the rim, three times, the exact rhythm of a home that meant if I tap this, we are ourselves.
Kade caught himself smiling and hated it for being honest.
"Good," Lumi whispered. "Now let the picture widen exactly one breath. No more. Let the room show you, not the light."
The boy breathed badly—too high, panicked—then corrected like a kid taught politeness on pain. The image widened.
A cheap high window. Rain arguing. The scratch of a radio dial turned too slowly. A voice he did not want to hear at first because it would confirm the theft—then he wanted it more than everything.
"Ma," the boy said.
The sound broke the picture the way dropping a pebble breaks perfect pond skin. The mirror caught the ripples, refused to split, and held. The voice came anyway, not from the mirror, from the boy's mouth in perfect counterfeit: "Leave the spoon. It knows the song."
Kade felt the marrow‑deep wrongness of what Solace called mercy. He had seen this before: a Bleached mouth remembering someone else's lines like the city had hired them to haunt themselves.
"Stay," Lumi said, careful, calm. Her fingers hovered near the mirror's rim. "Not a step wider. If you give the Halo the room it thinks it owns, it will tax this."
A footstep behind them.
Kade's spine learned alarm without telling his face. He didn't turn. Lumi's eyes flicked to his, a tiny angle that meant later we'll talk about knives. The footstep came again, slow, and then stopped—purpose paused. He heard cloth; he smelled clean metal. He took a coin of breath and turned his head just enough.
White cloak. Hood down. Helmet tucked under an arm. Scar along the scalp like a path the city had approved. The apologetic Mercy.
"Underbridge baptism," the man said, not mocking. The sort of observation you give a storm and hope it chooses someone else. His eyes fell to the mirror and softened, the way even a wolf's eyes go dog for a heartbeat when a child does something small and competent with their hands.
"We're occupied," Kade said, bland.
"I can see that," the Mercy said. "If you keep the angle, the Halo won't smell the part you're showing. If you widen by a hair—" He didn't finish. He didn't have to.
"Then help by not breathing," Lumi said coolly.
He obliged; he held his breath. It made his face interestingly purple.
"Ma," the boy said again, but not because the mirror told him to—because the throat needed to say it to keep going. Kade wanted to put a hand on his shoulder. He didn't. The rule in rooms like this was hands when asked.
The cold‑mirror began to cool in Kade's mind—not temperature, but that feeling a bandage gives when it's doing its job. The picture held, the spoon tapped: three times. The boy's mouth mirrored the rhythm. The Mercy let out the breath he'd been disobeying his lungs about and looked away to give the moment privacy.
And then the Halo noticed anyway.
Not with sirens. With something meaner: a brightness from the street‑lamps at the mouth of the alley turned sterile. The glow went from jar‑warm to hospital. Even with the mirror aimed at the truth's shoulder, light pressed forward, nosing like a dog that's been taught to bark at certain shapes.
The boy's pupils crushed to pinheads. He made the little sound some boys make right before they decide between running and hitting. The mirror bucked—not literally; the refusal inside it tried to turn to compliance by muscle memory.
"Hold," Lumi said, one palm out toward a machine she didn't believe deserved prayers. She moved her other hand so the cold‑mirror caught the boy's breath fog, not the alley's light. "Stay with the hands. Hands, only hands."
Kade dropped his own voice down where the boy could borrow it. "Count the taps," he said. "One. Two. Three."
The boy matched him: One. Two. Three.
The Halo tested the edge again, ugly‑polite. The jars hanging under the bridge ribs flickered. Vex's soup line went still; no one wanted to be caught looking when the city tried to make charity into a confession.
"Walk away," a distant Mercy said, at the alley mouth, template voice. The man with the scar didn't look back. He didn't raise his hood. His free hand drifted toward his belt where nothing helpful lived.
"Count them again," Kade said.
"One. Two. Three." The boy didn't just repeat this time—he tapped the mirror's rim with a fingernail, exactly the spoon rhythm from the memory. The sound was ridiculously small. It was also the exact coin the light could not eat.
The white from the alley stayed white, but it didn't advance. It had met something like itself and gotten confused.
Lumi's mouth let go of the line it had been biting. She wasn't smiling. People smile when the math is easy. She looked like something had stopped dying for a minute and she didn't trust that as a category.
"Good," she said, breath shaking once and then deciding that was enough weakness for the hour. "Now close it, gentle."
The boy didn't know how. The mirror knew. It swallowed the picture the way a lake takes back the face it had loaned you. The spoon's last tap hung in the air a second longer than the world; then even that became the same as rain.
The alley's white retreated like a bureaucrat who had filled in the wrong column and didn't want to write an apology.
"Who taught you that," the Mercy asked Kade softly. He still hadn't raised his hood. His face looked like a man trying to act like a human in a costume that made that a crime.
"My sister," Kade said, truth misused for camouflage. "Three taps if you're still you."
The Mercy's jaw moved like he wanted to tell a story and remembered his job. He looked at the boy. "You hungry?" he asked, not as a test.
The boy blinked, then nodded. Lumi handed him the cup she'd offered at the start. He drank in small, careful swallows, as if the liquid might remind him of rules he couldn't afford to break.
"You did well," Lumi said, not to the boy alone. The mirror had behaved; the city had behaved by accident; the Halo had been forced to act like a machine instead of a church. "You can come back tomorrow. The mirror can carry a little more for you each time."
"Price," Kade said, out of habit.
"Bring me the tapped rhythm," Lumi said without looking at him. "Not the memory. The rhythm. The difference matters."
He nodded. Somewhere behind his ribs, Clement's copper insisted on existing. "Debt," his mouth tasted. "Citrus."
The Mercy touched his helmet to his brow and then put it on. The transformation back into template was immediate and indecent.
"Underbridge gathering is over," he said to no one, to everyone. "Move along with your good deeds."
He made a point of stepping last, letting the soup line shuffle first. When he'd turned the corner, Kade exhaled. The breath had waited so long it felt like a second person leaving.
The boy stood and swayed once. He held the mirror like a child holds a bird: too soft to keep, too hard to trust himself with. He looked at Kade, not Lumi—unfair, habitual—and Kade felt the weight of being the taller liar in the room.
"What should I call you if I have to shout," Kade tried again.
The boy lifted the mirror a little, an answer made of fear pretending to be clever. Then, slowly: "Tari."
He said it like he was trying the sound on loan. It still fit.
"Good," Kade said, and meant the syllable was a kind place to stand. "Tari. Come back tomorrow. We'll teach the spoon a harder song."
He took the mirror very carefully from Tari's hands and wrapped it. The felt felt like a liturgy that didn't make you pick a god.
They walked back toward the clinic. Lumi didn't talk. She never talked when the math still had hot edges. Halfway along the orange‑smelling strip, Nyx slid out of a pocket of shadow, keys muttering, eyes bright with news.
"You made the Halo blink," she said, delighted like a child who'd seen a teacher trip.
"We made it remember what a door is," Lumi said.
Nyx's gaze dropped to Kade's jacket where the receipt tin lived. "Your other gift came to collect."
"Who," he said.
"Message under my stall flap," she said. "Same hand as the receipt. Same municipal breath. They want you at the drowned bell before the bellless hour. They used a word you like."
"What word."
"Brother," Nyx said, and even her sarcasm stepped back to let it pass.
Kade looked at Lumi. The math was easy here: clinic, Mira, an audit ledger ticking louder since morning; boy with a borrowed name; a mirror that could accidentally make a prayer; a vault with his childhood's knot in its teeth.
"Go," Lumi said. "I'll sit with Mira and teach Brook to pretend I'm furniture."
"I don't—"
"You do," she said, and for the first time she let the softness be command. "Bring me the rhythm when you come back. And don't point the mirror at god."
"Which one," Nyx said, amused.
"Any that likes being capitalized," Lumi said.
They split at the crosshatch of ribs. Lumi ghosted toward the tin triangle sign that still read BRO K. Nyx drifted the other way, keys spelling something light couldn't read. Kade turned toward the drowned bell tower, where the Archives forgot themselves for twenty minutes at a shift change and the city's chalk went soft.
The rain started, not to cleanse, just because gravity still had a job. He didn't lift his face to it. He knew what oranges would taste like.
"What you keep keeps you," he said to the pillars, and then—because a Mercy had told him to use the lie and he was trying to learn other men's tricks—he added, "and what you fake becomes true if you hold it long enough."
The drowned bell waited where the Lowlight ended and the city began pretending to be honest. He walked faster. Behind him, under a bridge that catalogued people by the sound of their spoons, the jars swayed out of rhythm for a moment like two coins tapping apology. In his jacket, the mirror stayed warm. In his other pocket, the receipt tin stayed cool.
And the Halo—patient, hungry—kept burning, like it had all the time in the world and was wondering who would spend first.