The Orphan's Church had a door for every loss.
Children had carved them in the stone when no priest would. Small doors, careful doors, doors made with the corners of coins and the edges of bones. Each had a name scratched crooked above it, and most had been crossed out and written again in smaller letters when memory ran out of room.
Lysa led them by night. Graywater's fog clung to her like a veil she had chosen. Serah walked beside her as one walking beside a grave she had not visited because she had not believed she could afford to. Kael followed, counting doors.
"It's not a church," Lysa said softly. "It's a ledger."
They reached the last door—the smallest, tucked under the lip of a step where only a child would look. The name above it was written once and not crossed out.
Mara.
Serah's mouth opened and closed soundlessly. Her hands didn't shake until she tried to fit the little door's edge with her knife. Kael knelt and pressed his palm to the stone. The Mark turned its face toward the name and was quiet like snow.
"Mother," Serah whispered, as if trying it on. The word fit and cut.
The door did not open. It sank back, stone remembering softer. Cold breathed out, dry and old and almost kind. Steps descended into a crypt that smelled like iron and laundry.
They went down.
Bones live where money dies. Along the walls, shelves held lack neatly: skulls lined like timetables, femurs bundled with twine, small piles of finger bones like spilled rosaries. Each bundle had a tag. Each tag had an amount and a prayer.
Lysa moved like she had not cried in a long time and would not practice now. She stopped at a shelf near the floor and shoved aside a jar of teeth. Behind it, a bundle wrapped in a shawl the color of river water waited as if it had been told its daughters would be late but would still come.
Serah sank to her knees. Her hands found the shawl as if they had never learned any other work. "She owed three loaves and a kindness she could not afford," Lysa said, voice flat as a bill. "They took the bones for teaching."
Kael touched the bundle and the bundle touched back. Not with flesh, but with a name remembering itself stubbornly. He felt a woman with hands cracked from water and soap, a laugh like a blade used properly, a back that had bent and bent and bent and had not broken until it did.
"I can pay," Kael said.
"No," Serah said. "I'll pay. With something mine."
She lifted her knife and cut a strand of her hair. Then another. Then more, until it lay in her palms like a river she could carry. She set it beside the bones.
The dark moved as if nodding. The tags whispered. Somewhere, a tally changed by a fraction nobody would notice unless they loved the woman it counted for.
"Paid," the church said, in the same voice the altar had used, because law wears many faces in a city and most of them are the same.
Lysa's breath left her in a laugh that was not a laugh. "Mother comes with us," she said.
They wrapped the bones in the shawl. Kael lifted them, and the weight was perfect: not heavy, not light, exactly what it should be. The Mark did not smile. It stood up straighter.
On the stairs, bells began to speak. Not the hunt bells. These were the soft ones that rang when a door that should not open opened.
"The nest," Lysa said. "He knows."
Serah took two bones from the bundle and slid them up her sleeves. "Then we bring our mother to meet the man who makes saints and monsters," she said. "And we teach him what a woman who owed three loaves taught us."
"And what was that?" Kael asked, though he knew.
Serah's smile showed every tooth anyone had ever tried to count in her. "That you pay forward what you can't pay back."
They stepped into the fog. Across the square, men in white moved like sharks learning to walk. Above them, a spire shone with sanctified flame. Between them and it, streets bent like the River and remembered who they belonged to.
Lysa took the lead. Serah flanked her. Kael followed, carrying a mother and the names of a city in his skin.
Graywater's bells hushed when they passed, as if making room for a different music.
Somewhere under their feet, the Rift turned in its sleep and smiled.