The children arrived in the gray hour between patrols, carried on wagons that smelled of straw and fear. They were not all wolves; some were small and human, some half shadowed, some with eyes that held too much silence. The magistrate at the neutral town's gate had sent a single, urgent note: a correction unit had cleared a village two nights before and left a handful of children who remembered nothing of their parents and everything of a ritual they had not lived through. The guild's manifests had traced the unit's route; the Remnants' packets had given the sanctuary the legal opening to take them in.
Aria met the wagon at the yard with Keeper Sera and a Remnants witness. The children's faces were a map of small, private catastrophes—blank stares, sudden sobs, a boy who kept counting to five as if counting could stitch a life back together. Luna stood at the edge of the yard, jasmine braided into her hair, and watched them with the fierce patience of someone who had learned to hold other people's pain without letting it become hers.
"These are Severing's children," the magistrate said, voice thin. "They were found near the old correction site. The unit said they were cleared. The villagers say they woke with other people's memories and then the unit left."
Aria felt the ledger's teeth close around the phrase. Correction units were supposed to remove dangerous anomalies, not leave behind fragments of other lives. The committee's methods had always been sold as mercy; now mercy had a ledger and a list of names.
They brought the children into the Loom's infirmary and set them in a ring of anchors—small stones, each with a scent and a witness. The Remnants' tiles hummed a counterpoint that made lying feel like walking on ice. Luna moved among them, offering a single line of a song when a child flinched, a small cadence that steadied breath and made memory feel like something you could hold and set down.
Aria sat with a girl named Sera—no relation to the keeper—who had the look of someone who had been taught to be small. The girl's hands trembled as she turned a carved token. "I remember a bell," she whispered. "A bell that called names. I remember a man with a limp and a laugh like a bell. He gave me bread and then I woke up by the road."
"That's a graft," Thorne said quietly from the doorway, his lenscase at his hip. He had been up all night cross referencing microetch variants and procurement manifests. "They used a field graft. The device maps a person by giving them another's past and then logs the response. Correction units should not be doing this."
Aria's jaw tightened. The ledger had already shown procurement lines that led to private docks and shell trusts; now the cost of those trials had faces. "We do Witnessed Undoing," she said. "Three neutral witnesses, a Remnants scribe, and a notarized record of the differences between the implanted past and the child's life. We teach them to narrate what's theirs and what was given."
They began the ritual with the smallest things: a warm cup of tea, a scent of river moss, a stone that fit a child's palm. The living cadence was a simple braid—anchor, scent, word—repeated until breath steadied. The Remnants' scribe recorded each narration in triplicate. When a child named a memory that did not belong to them, the witnesses wrote the difference and the tile recorded the cadence of the telling so later tampering would be obvious.
Some children recovered quickly. A boy who had been counting to five learned to count to his mother's name instead. A girl who had been mute for two days found a single word—"home"—and clung to it like a rope. Others were slower, their grafted pasts clinging like burrs. One child, small and fierce, kept insisting she had been at a harvest that had never happened. Her eyes would go distant when the word "bell" was spoken.
Virelle arrived at dusk, moving through the infirmary with the predator's patience that had once made her a terror and now made her a guardian. She did not sit with the children; she watched the adults who watched them. "Correction units are supposed to remove danger," she said, voice low. "They are not supposed to leave fragments. Whoever designed those field grafts treated people as nodes. That is not mercy."
"Who benefits?" Keeper Sera asked. The question was practical. The ledger had shown procurement lines; now they needed motive.
Thorne spread a map on the table and pointed to a cluster of private docks. "The devices were tested along trade routes. The grafts were small—market memories, harvest bells—things that could be used to nudge civic sentiment. If you can make a town remember a leader's generosity, you can shape votes. If you can make a caravan trust a route, you can control trade."
Marcus's hand closed on the map. "And the correction units? They give plausible deniability. 'We removed the anomaly,' they say. 'We left the children because they were not dangerous.' But the ledger shows the units were present where grafts were tested."
Aria felt the ledger's map tighten into a noose. The committee's experiments had not only been about stabilization; they had been about social engineering. The children were collateral damage in a program that treated memory as a commodity.
They worked through the night. Luna taught the children a chorus that changed its last line each time it was sung; the improvisation made the grafted rhythms harder to map. Thorne fed the microetch samples through the warded lens and sketched a new countervariation that made the devices hesitate. Keeper Sera prepared witness packets for each child and arranged for Remnants custody of their testimonies. Marcus organized patrols to monitor the private docks the manifests had named.
At dawn, a magistrate from a nearby town arrived with a small, trembling woman who claimed to have seen a correction unit take her husband. She had followed the unit's trail and found a ledger entry that matched the FACV code Thorne had cataloged. Her husband's name was not on any manifest. The woman's grief was a new kind of evidence.
Aria sat with her in the Loom's courtyard and let the woman tell the story while Luna braided jasmine into her hair. "They said it was for safety," the woman said. "They said he was dangerous. They took him at dusk and left a child who remembered his laugh. I have his laugh in my head and his name is gone."
The ledger had teeth and they bit into the sanctuary's conscience. The committee's experiments had been sold as mercy; now mercy had a bill to pay. The Remnants' packets would make the ledger speak in Highbridge; the witnesses would make it harder to bury. But the children were immediate and human and needed care that law could not buy.
Aria closed the Spiral Log and wrote the day's entry with hands that did not tremble: Severing's children received; Witnessed Undoing initiated; Remnants custody for testimonies; microetch countervariation developed; private docks under surveillance; petition Council for emergency protections for children and for Corrections Unit oversight.
She looked at the children practicing the chorus in the yard—small voices braided into a living cadence that refused to be stolen. The ledger had given them a path to accountability. The work ahead would be to follow the procurement chain and to make sure the Council's inquiry did not become a cover for more erasure. For now, they would teach the children to hold their stories and to name what had been given to them.
Outside, the dawn was thin and honest. Inside, the Loom hummed with the small, stubborn work of turning harm into testimony and testimony into law. The Severing's children had faces now; the ledger had names. That would make it harder for procedure to hide what had been done.