Morning came in thin light that smelled of salt and cold iron. Derrigan woke with the ledger at his elbow and the smaller child's slow breathing from the spare cot in the back room. The city moved like a ledger itself, each building an entry and every footstep a subtraction. He dressed quickly, the practical motions of someone who kept promises by habit, not by ceremony.
Seo‑yeon had already begun the manifest. Pages were spread across the table: names, makeshift descriptions, notations about ash marks and a crude sketch of the toy's sigil. She looked up when he came into the room, expression folded into professional worry. "I filed a temporary shelter request with the ward board," she said. "They'll send someone to verify by late afternoon, but the paperwork will buy us time."
"How did you—" Derrigan started.
"Trade routes and favors," she said. "I owe three people from the docks. Also, you bring a certain… reputation. Oliphym gets whispered about." She paused. "Not that the board cares for whispered reputations. But it moves conversation."
He let the name settle on his tongue. Oliphym was the shape he took when he did damage control: a quiet mover who closed gates and fixed what the city's law ignored. The ledger had given him the habit of keeping small accounts, and the name had given him the anonymity the ledger could not provide.
They moved through the day in a pattern of small, necessary motions. Seo‑yeon brewed a pot of hot tea and coaxed the larger child—she kept asking for the wooden horse—into the warmth of soup. Derrigan made calls to a doctor he knew who owed him a patch for a favor done months ago; the doctor promised to come that evening. He walked the warehouse's perimeter and found the union rep's card tucked beneath a loose board, a reminder that bureaucracy had teeth and patience in equal measure.
Yet even in the mundane, the ledger whispered. He had written the children's names the night before and the margin had rearranged itself then; now, on an open page, a tiny cluster of dots had formed like a constellation over the ash‑marked child's entry. He frowned, tracing them with a fingertip. The dots pulsed faintly under his skin as if someone had scribbled a rhythm only he could feel. He closed the book, the motion reflexive and reverent.
There were practical visits to make. The first came before noon: a woman from the neighborhood watch with a badge that belonged more to habit than authority. She moved through the warehouse with soft steps and quick eyes, checking names and nodding at the ledger without touching it. "The board will want more proof of guardianship," she said. "Temporary custody only holds if you can show capacity. Do you have references?"
Derrigan swallowed. References were a weird currency for someone who kept his deeds in ink and memory. "Seo‑yeon will vouch," he said. "I'll file additional entries tonight."
The woman's gaze skimmed the room and landed on the wooden horse set on a crate. "That sigil looks familiar," she murmured. "I'll ask my aunt at the market."
When she left, Seo‑yeon rubbed her temples. "We need to be careful. The union man with the emblem could start asking public questions. If the guild gets involved, they'll want to catalogue the children, and that becomes leverage."
Derrigan felt the ledger warm in his satchel, not with heat but with a sense of being observed. He did not like the idea of names becoming leverage. He moved to the workbench and began to make small things: a soft cloth cap to cover the smaller child's head, a patch for the larger child's sleeve. He worked with the same care he used when cataloguing entries, stitches like small promises.
Around midday a courier came with a simple envelope—no return address, only a single line in faint ink: For the keeper of accounts. Inside was a slip of paper with a short admonition: Keep careful watch. Names answer to more than kindness. The handwriting was old enough to have patience in it. Derrigan read it twice and felt a coldness his hands could not shake.
"Someone's watching," Seo‑yeon said when he showed her the note. "Not necessarily ill intent. Just—eyes."
"We should expect more," he said. "When you rescue people, other people mark them."
There were small gifts, too—bread from a dockhand who'd once lent a rope; a spool of warm thread left on the doorstep by a seamstress who preferred to remain nameless. The city accounted for kindness in its own clumsy economy.
That afternoon the ward board sent their verifier: a stern man with a mouth that held back both sympathy and impatience. He took the ledger in his hands with the professional curiosity of a man cataloguing property. "You understand the implications of this?" he asked, flipping through pages with an efficiency that felt like winter.
"These are vows," Derrigan said. "Not property."
The man's eyebrow rose. "Vows don't hold in court the way affidavits do. Still—this is organized. You'll have to file forms and follow protocol. We can arrange temporary guardianship if you agree to formal checks."
Derrigan agreed. The man recorded their signatures, took photographs of the children, and left with the slow, bureaucratic kindness of someone folding one life into a larger ledger.
When the man's step faded, Derrigan opened the ledger to a clean page and wrote the new entry: Temporary guardianship filed; ward board verifier; follow‑up appointment in three days. He paused before closing the book, fingers hovering. The cluster of dots over the child's name had sharpened into a thin line—no longer a constellation but something that read like an arrow pointing down the margin. He placed his thumb on the paper and felt a brief warmth like the press of a hand asking for assurance.
That night, after the doctor stitched the smaller child's hairline and Seo‑yeon settled the larger one with a story about the sea, Derrigan sat under the lamp and read over older pages. The ledger had many small secrets: marginal jokes, weather notes, a page where someone else—someone who had owned this book before him—had written an admonition in precise script: Bind with care; ledgers can keep more than names. Derrigan traced the letters and felt the not‑yet‑rise of a question: What else might a ledger hold when it has been fed a city's promises for years?
As he closed the book, he felt a different weight: not only the weight of names but the sense that those names wanted to be counted in a different way. The courier's note, the guild man's emblem, the ward board's patient kindness—threads pulled taut across the city. Somewhere beyond his walls, the world was beginning to notice the ledger for reasons he could not yet name.
He stood and walked to the window. The harbor lay black and patient. A merchant's lantern swung in the distance, and for a moment he thought he saw two figures on the pier—one watching, one writing. He pressed his palm to the glass and whispered the ledger's own small vow: Keep the accounts and keep them kind.
From the alley below came a sound like paper turning in the wind. The ledger answered, somewhere in the margins, and Derrigan felt the city's accounting tilt just slightly.