Dawn broke thin and determined over three towns that had never been asked to sing together. Each place had its own market bell, its own ferry rope, its own baker's token—small, stubborn anchors that meant more to the people who touched them than any law. The Loom's plan was simple in outline and fiendish in practice: deploy detectors at the Glass Lighthouse node, the Saltport market node, and the ferry town; run staggered diffusion rites so the Unnamed could not model a single cadence; rotate teachers and operators to blunt cumulative cost; notarize every step so the ledger could not be erased.
Aria rode between towns with the Spiral Log at her hip and a packet of witness sheets tucked into her satchel. Keeper Sera had arranged Remnants custody for the demonstration artifacts and a chain of magistrates who had agreed to notarize on sight. Thorne carried a row of detector plates and a spool of sigildamp tiles; Marcus organized neutral escorts and a ring of facilitators to hold perimeters; Luna moved like a current among teacher cells, jasmine braided into her wrist and into the pouches she handed to families as private markers. Calder rode with them, pale and steady, a man who had once built the tools they now quarantined and who now wanted to help undo what he had helped make.
They split at first light. Teams moved like a practiced braid: one to the Glass Lighthouse, one to Saltport's market, one to the ferry town. Each team set anchors in concentric rings—stones, tokens, a child's carved bead—then threaded a living cadence through the ring. The cadences were deliberately awkward: three phrases that refused to resolve, scent swaps that contradicted expectation, private markers that changed hands midline. Noise, Luna had taught them, was armor.
Thorne placed detector plates at seams and tuned sigildamp tiles to microvariations that would force any overlay to burn cycles. He set thresholds low enough to catch a probe's first brush and high enough to avoid false alarms from ordinary market bustle. Each detector had an operator and a rotation schedule: four hours on, eight hours off, with a Remnants witness present for every handover. The rotation was not convenience; it was a safeguard against the slow, insidious toll the sigildamp's tuning took on an operator's memory.
The first hours passed in a careful, human rhythm. Markets opened; bakers rang bells on odd beats; children swapped tokens and laughed with the awkward sincerity of people learning a new prayer. Magistrates notarized witness packets as teachers led cadences in small pockets—by the ferry rope, under the market awning, on the lighthouse's lee. The detectors hummed in the seams and the matchers recorded a steady stream of benign noise: footfalls, bell chimes, the occasional stray scent that drifted from a fishmonger's stall.
Then the probes came.
They were not a single, dramatic strike but a pattern—small overlay brushes at each node timed to the cadence's second phrase. At the Glass Lighthouse a detector plate flared and then dimmed as if someone had tried to blind it with a countermotion. In Saltport a courier's manifest that had been promised for notarization turned out to be a forgery; the clerk who had vouched for it looked suddenly pale and confused. At the ferry town a Shade Hare slipped into a supply crate and stole a child's private marker, leaving the child's eyes blank for a heartbeat.
Thorne's plates reacted like a net catching a fish. The detectors flared in sequence and the sigildamp tiles sang counternotes that forced the overlays to burn cycles. The probes stuttered and thinned. Marcus's facilitators moved with the quiet efficiency of people who had rehearsed for this: they secured witnesses, swept supply tents, and called Remnants escorts to seal any compromised manifests. Keeper Sera notarized each interference as it happened, stamping witness sheets and sealing them in triplicate.
But the probes had a cunning: they were coordinated to test rotation windows. At the Glass Lighthouse the first operator had been on duty for three hours; at Saltport the operator had just handed over to a fresh technician; at the ferry town the operator had been rotated out twenty minutes before the probe. The attackers had timed their brushes to find gaps and to force the Loom to reveal its rotation pattern.
Aria saw the pattern and answered with a move that had become their habit: make mapping expensive and public. She ordered staggered, overlapping rotations—operators doubled up for a short, costly window while teachers ran a rapid cadence rotation that changed the last line every pass. The detectors, now fed counternotes from two sigildamp tiles tuned to slightly different microvariations, forced the overlays to model a moving target. The probes burned cycles and then thinned.
At the ferry town a Shade Hare, startled by the doubled counternote, dropped the private marker it had stolen. A child's eyes cleared and the marketkeeper who had been given a borrowed memory blinked as if waking from a dream. The Remnants witness packet recorded the theft and the recovery; Keeper Sera's seal made the record a legal artifact.
The cost of the defense was immediate and visible. Thorne, who had tuned two sigildamp tiles in quick succession, felt a small fog where the taste of a particular tea used to be. One of the detector operators at Saltport reported a ringing at the edge of his hearing and had to be rotated out early. A teacher at the Glass Lighthouse admitted to a short disorientation after leading three rapid cadences back to back. Each effect was recorded in the witness packets and appended to the Spiral Log entries that Keeper Sera insisted be written on the spot.
They did not hide the toll. At midday Aria read a public notice aloud in each town: Interference observed; witnesses present; costs recorded; Remnants custody enforced. We will continue to teach and to protect. Consent required. The notices were plain and notarized; they made the defense a public thing that could not be easily buried.
The probes' origin remained shadowed, but the pattern had been forced to reveal itself: a chain of brushes timed to rotation windows, a forger's hand that could produce a convincing manifest, and a broker's flourish that had been laundered through a fence. Calder, who had been working the matchers with Thorne, found a procurement stub that matched the clerk's initial from the Moonforge accession. The rope tightened: Halv's slips, Rell's fences, a private dock near the Glass Lighthouse. The network was not a single face but a web of hands that preferred procedure to witness.
As dusk fell they ran a final, deliberate test: a three‑town synchronized cadence designed to be deliberately messy—anchors swapped midline, scents inverted, private markers passed in a new order. The detectors were set to the lowest thresholds and operators were doubled. Magistrates stood with witness packets in hand. The cadence rose like a tide and the three towns breathed together in a way they had never done before.
For a long, careful breath nothing happened. Then a probe brushed the Saltport node and the detector flared. Thorne fed a counternote and the overlay's echo stuttered. The probe tried to jump to the ferry town but the doubled counternote and the staggered cadence rotation made the attempt costly; the probe's model burned cycles and failed. The coordinated defense had worked: the Unnamed's pattern could not find purchase when communities changed the way they breathed together and when detectors forced overlays to pay for every attempt.
They closed the day with the small, human work that made law possible. Keeper Sera notarized the day's witness packets and stamped them in triplicate. Thorne fed the detector logs through the matchers and sketched the overlay's failed modeling attempts. Luna wrote a teacher's note about cadence rotation and the cost of rapid sequences. Marcus organized a rotation schedule for the next week that would stagger operators and teachers to avoid cumulative haze.
Aria wrote the Spiral Log entry with hands that did not tremble but felt the ledger's weight: Three‑Town Network — detectors deployed at Glass Lighthouse, Saltport market, ferry town; coordinated diffusion executed; coordinated probes observed and forced to burn cycles; rotation schedule adjusted to overlapping windows; interference recorded (forged manifest; Shade Hare insertion; detector plate interference); costs recorded: SigilDamp microvariation — operator memory haze observed (Thorne); Detector operation — operator ringing and fatigue (Saltport operator rotated early); Cadence Rotation — teacher short‑term disorientation (Glass Lighthouse teacher); Remnants witness packets notarized and sealed; procurement stub match found linking to Halv slips and Rell fences; next steps: prepare targeted subpoenas where magistrates allow; increase Thornkin patrols at Glass Lighthouse; rotate technicians and teachers on a 4/8 schedule; public packet to emphasize consent, witness protection, and recorded costs.
They sealed the log and sent copies to the Remnants' stacks and to the magistrates who had stood witness. The three towns slept with a new, awkward intimacy: marketkeepers who had swapped tokens now nodded to one another across stalls; ferry hands hummed the cadence under their breath as they tied ropes; children tucked jasmine pouches into pockets like talismans. The network had been tested and had held, but the ledger's map had shifted again. The probes had been repelled, the rope had been followed further, and the Loom had a longer list of names and slips to present at the Council.
On the road back, Luna walked close enough that their shoulders brushed and the jasmine braid in Aria's palm warmed against the hollow where a lullaby had been. "We teach," Luna said, voice low and steady. "We make them pay to listen."
Aria let the words settle like a benediction and a warning. The Three‑Town Network had shown that communities could be taught to sing differently and that detectors could make mapping expensive. It had also shown that every defense carried a cost—memory haze, ringing ears, short disorientation—and that those costs would have to be borne openly if protection was to be honest. They would follow the procurement rope with witnesses and sigils and public packets until the patron committee's face could be seen in the light.