Lunch was a bowl of stew that had opinions about salt and a heel of bread that might have been armor in a past life. Jorn ate the way veterans pray. Serah ate like fuel was a duty. Tessel moved beans around to demonstrate disapproval of beans. Maeron wrote between bites because sin was delicious. Lysa didn't touch hers until gravity decided the spoon was permitted.
Kael prodded his stew. It prodded back. "If this starts talking, I'm naming it."
"Name it 'Eat,'" Jorn said. "Then obey."
Kael obeyed. The stew argued less after the third spoonful. The bread confessed it had done its best. By the time they stood from the bench in a canteen that smelled of solder and souls, Kael's hands had stopped their Cloister-tremble and found their usual poor decisions.
They took the Inner Lash toward the West Spur with the purposeful stride of people trying not to collect followers. It didn't work. News in Aerialis moved like heat—up, everywhere, and not always to helpful places. Children in copper-thread caps pointed. Work crews looked up from plates and ropes to make the sign for don't fall and don't be stupid and sometimes blessings if they couldn't decide.
Tessel, affronted by the existence of children, quickened the pace. "We will begin with plates," he said. "Then prayers. Then people who think prayers are plates."
"Do we interrogate the soup?" Kael asked. "It felt complicit."
"No," Serah said, already scanning. She'd slipped into the cool state that made the air fantasize about meaning. "Plates first."
The anchors at the Spur were copper squares bolted into stone and struts, each with tiny sigils etched by hand and machine. They glowed faintly in lines too tidy for chance. A few wore charms: braided strings with cheap metal icons, stamped with little suns or chains. Those were illegal, Ossa had said. Those made people feel safe.
Jorn rapped a knuckle against a plate. "Still sings," he said. "Low, but there."
"Crack here," Lysa murmured, crouching so her voice had to climb to reach them. Her finger traced a hairline fracture on the stone just below a plate. "Someone over-tightened the bolt. The stone didn't enjoy it. The plate compensates until it can't."
"Human error," Tessel said, already happier. "My favorite culprit."
"Not all of it," Serah said. She'd stopped at a plate that wore two charms: one a crooked sun, one a stylized face with a too-wide grin. The face had been done with cheap pewter and a worshipper's bad patience. "We confiscate those," Serah told Jorn.
Jorn cut the cord with a neat swipe of a small blade and pocketed the charms with the bored professionalism of a man who would later throw them off the cliff.
Maeron leaned close enough to make Tessel hiss. "The grin is new," he said, light. "Not Choir. Not Church. Street iconography. A laughing king with chain-crown."
"Lovely," Tessel said. "The cultists found a craft day."
Kael squinted at the little grin. "My nose looks better," he said. "They should fire their saint-maker."
"Don't encourage them," Serah said, and handed the charm to Tessel instead of Jorn. "Trace the alloy."
He slid it into a leather pouch with the distaste of a man accepting a slug.
They moved methodically: plate by plate, bolt by bolt, charm by charm. Lysa's fingers found hairline cracks no ordinary inspector would have read as anything but good stone. Jorn tapped out flawed rivets like a dentist on a lazy day. Serah murmured and the plates brightened into obedience for a breath, long enough to show cracks in their attention.
At the fourth anchor, Tessel found something he could love. "Here," he said, crouching. He pried up a thin copper cover—legal—and exposed a wafer—not. It had been soldered into the plate's feed line with deceptively competent hands.
"What am I looking at," Kael asked, dropping into a squat beside him.
"An appetite," Tessel said, delighted despite himself. "This bleeds a whisper of current. Means nothing to the plate. Means signature to the payer."
"In common," Jorn said, "someone put a leech on your city's veins."
"Someone wants to know when the lattice yawns," Serah said. "Or when Kael makes it yawn."
"It isn't talking to the city," Tessel corrected, teeth showing. "It's listening to me. Which means it's a tuner. Which means they were near enough to lay it and not get seen."
He looked up at the Spur, eyes mapping angles, shadows, habit routes. "Riggers on shift?" he asked the closest foreman.
"Last team rotated out at midday," the foreman said, annoyed he hadn't seen this first. "Crew Two, plates. Crew Five, bolts. Crew Seven, rope." He spat between his boots as if apology to the Spur. "All ours. I'll put my hand in the bell before I say they're thieves."
"Don't," Lysa said mildly. "The bell bites."
"Names," Tessel said.
The foreman rattled off a list. Tessel nodded like a man committing enemies to memory.
Maeron tipped his head. "Listen," he said.
They did. At first: bustle, chain hum, the thousand small quarrels of a city. Then: a secondary sound, four platforms over. A chime in the wrong key. The sound of a plate making the wrong kind of agreement.
Serah didn't tell Kael gentle. She didn't have to; the Lash had. They crossed the struts at a controlled run, boots drumming in a rhythm the city liked. The fourth platform over was a maintenance gantry under a tower of pulleys and counterweights. Two riggers worked a plate with their backs to the walkway, copper covers off, tools out, the tidy confidence of men doing a job they knew.
They didn't jump when a Sovereign, an Auditor, a veteran, a heretic, a war criminal, and an idiot arrived. Which was interesting.
"Afternoon," Kael said. "How's your day in crime?"
The nearer rigger—broad shoulders, weathered neck, cap pulled low—didn't turn. "Plate was sulky," he said. "We're brightening it."
Tessel stepped close enough to knock a knee into a toolbox. "Which is why you've soldered in a wafer that isn't standard issue."
Now the rigger turned. His eyes flicked over Tessel's circlet, over Serah's staff, over Lysa's gravity like a dog glancing at three bigger dogs. He had the careful face of a man who knew what lies could live on it.
"Old fix," he said. "From before the copper runs. Handbook says—"
"Handbook doesn't say bleed me data," Tessel said. He didn't raise his voice. He didn't need to. Something in the plates in the walls sharpened, as if the city wanted to hear the answer too. "Step back. Hands out."
The rigger obeyed. His partner—a thinner man with scars like careless commas down his forearms—didn't. He held his tool steady, adding the last dot of solder with the serenity of a man finishing a signature.
Lysa's hand twitched. Gravity around the soldering tip became suggestive instead of encouraging and the molten bead obeyed, strolling onto the floor with a soft spatter instead of into the joint.
The thin rigger looked up, curious. He looked at Lysa as if gravity had just explained it knew his name.
"Hands," Serah said.
He lifted them, amused. "You found one," he said.
"One what," Tessel asked.
"Leech," the rigger said.
"Who put it in?" Jorn asked.
The rigger shrugged, elegantly insubordinate. "Wouldn't you like to know."
"Yes," Kael said. "We would. That's why he asked."
"Anonymous job," the rigger said. "Same as the murals: coin in a pouch, a piece cut just so, a note that said brighten this."
"Who carried the coin?" Serah asked.
"Kid," he said. "Gutter-quiet. Face painted. Laughing chain." His eyes slid to Kael. "Looked like you."
Kael spread his hands. "I have a good face."
"You have a face," the rigger said.
"Did you keep the note?" Tessel said.
The rigger's smile thinned. "Do I look like a poet?"
"You look like a man who believes in plausible deniability," Maeron said gently. "Which is the first prayer of cowards."
The rigger's jaw ticked. "You're the heretic," he said. "I read your little book."
"I write big books," Maeron said. "This city is a generous editor."
Serah interrupted the pleasant escalation by picking up the wafer with the tip of a cloth-wrapped finger. "These go to the lab," she said to Tessel. "We map their signature. We watch for twins."
Tessel nodded. "Arrest them."
The broad-shouldered rigger didn't argue. The thin one did. "On what," he asked, half-curious, half-daring. "Fixing a sulky plate? You want the Spur to fall with your tidy lattice asleep?"
"On sabotage," Tessel said.
The rigger's smile did not reach his eyes. "You don't know what that means, up here."
"Enlighten me," Tessel said.
"Sabotage is breaking a thing to hurt a person," the rigger said. "This is breaking a city to save it."
"My favorite heresy," Maeron said, delighted. "Proactive salvation through controlled collapse."
"Shut up, Maeron," Serah and Tessel said together.
Kael leaned on the railing, looked down through lattices of iron at drop and stone and the Shatterfront's great wound, and considered the rigger's posture, the way his hands held nothing like they were still holding a tool, the way the little copper plates around them had brightened without being told.
"Who taught you the trick?" Kael asked. "You didn't invent the wafer."
"The city did," the rigger said, lightly. "It teaches the hands that touch it. You could learn too."
"Offer stands?" Kael asked. "You run a class?"
"I run a meeting," the rigger said. "We make the lattice listen to the right songs."
Serah's eyes narrowed. "Where."
He smiled like a cut. "In a place the lattice can't hear."
"Quiet Room," Tessel said.
"Not quiet enough," the rigger said. "Silence Dome."
Everyone said something at once. Serah cursed softly. Tessel swore with precision. Jorn didn't swear. Lysa did nothing—instead gravity around her hand compacted the air until it squeaked. Maeron took a breath that sounded like a man trying to inhale text.
"The Dome is off-limits for you," Tessel told Kael, as if Kael had been winding up to run there for sport. "And now for them."
"It was already off-limits," Serah said. "Which is why they picked it."
"Or," Lysa said, voice the shape of iron, "they didn't pick it."
"What do you mean," Kael asked.
Lysa looked at the Spur, at the Lash, at the city that had taught her to kill valleys and then asked her to forget. "If the Dome is misbehaving," she said, "it picked them."
"Explain," Tessel said, strangling his wand of copper.
"The Dome is where you teach nothing to have a shape," Lysa said. "It is where you ask motion not to move and heat not to care. If the Dome grows bored with your lessons, it will learn other ones. It will call to people who think they can shout better."
"The rigger meeting," Jorn said. "Is a listening."
"Take them," Serah told two Spur guards who had arrived in time to hear none of the philosophy. "Hold them somewhere with good doors. No Quiet Rooms."
Tessel bristled. "I require them for questioning."
"You'll have them," Serah said. "After they can't get clever with your toys."
The thin rigger went peacefully. The broad one did too, after giving Kael a look that said we both know you'll come.
Kael looked back with the kind of smile you wear to a funeral.
"Cohort," Serah said. "We have two fronts: wafers on plates, and a meeting in the Dome. We do the first first." She pointed. "Jorn—crew rosters and cross-checks. Maeron—catalog the iconography and what you know of splinter cults in Aerialis. Tessel—trace the wafer and scream if the pattern repeats. Lysa—walk the Lash. If the lattice hum changes, I want to know before it remembers why."
"And me?" Kael asked.
Serah looked him full in the face. "You're with me. We're going to look at the Dome and then not go in."
"That sounds like a dare," Kael said, cheerful.
"It's a sentence," Serah said. "Come on."
The Silence Dome sat like a held breath two segments off the Inner Lash, a hemisphere of black stone nested in a ring of anchors that flickered so quickly they might as well have been still. It had no windows and a door that was not a door until a Marshal or Sovereign said it was.
Serah didn't say it.
They stood on the walkway outside and listened.
The Dome had its own weather. The air near it felt… simplified. Like someone had swept a table and left nothing but an iron nail and an argument about nails.
"I hate it," Kael said softly.
"It hates you back," Serah said. "We're not going in."
"You can look," Maeron said, because he'd caught up, because of course he had. "Smell the hymn through the shut door. The Cloister taught you how to not touch the harp."
Tessel arrived with a tech and a wand that made the air mispronounce itself. He circled the Dome like a man casing a bank. "Field's smooth," he said, unhappy. "Too smooth. Like someone ironed wrinkles into it."
"That's called polishing," Jorn said.
"Not in my fields," Tessel said.
A copper-plate runner sprinted up, breath ragged. "Marshal says—" he wheezed, then realized he wasn't talking to the Marshal and tried again, "Warden says—plate-sigils near the Dome picked up a null-chime last night. Two bells. Short."
Myrene, because of course the Church appeared when nulls were rung, arrived with two crimson-clad acolytes and the smell of polished brass. "The sunwell agrees," she said. "A sympathy in the night. Someone called, and something answered. The book says two bells means invite."
"Your book says many things," Tessel said. "Mostly wrong."
"It says we should bring him," Myrene said, looking at Kael as if he had been requested in italics by a deity she did not love. "To the sunwell. Now."
"After the Dome," Serah said automatically.
"Before," Myrene said, and the way the chain above the Dome vibrated at her voice would have been coincidence if you believed in coincidence. "The Veiled Sun's patience is thin. It will speak if it must. It will burn if it must. Which conversation do you prefer to have first?"
Serah's jaw ticked. "Tessel?"
"We're not opening the Dome," he said. "Not to go in. We're… listening. If the sunwell speaks, I want a trace. And if he melts, I want to know which note did it."
"Your bedside manner," Jorn said, "is a war crime."
"My bedside manner," Tessel said, "does not exist. Keep him from the bed."
"Romantic," Kael said. "Let's date the sun."
Serah folded, briefly, one hand around his wrist. "You breathe. You listen. If you feel the laugh, don't lean toward it."
"You make the worst rules," Kael said.
"Obey them," she said, and didn't let go for an extra heartbeat, which was unfair and therefore effective.
The sunwell lived beneath the Sanctum annex like a candle under a cathedral. The approach was a spiral. The walls were dressed in old stone carved by men who loved geometry and control; the air smelled of heated metal and old prayers. A pair of Bound Flame wardens flanked the final archway, armor bright and eyes brighter. When Myrene swept past, they didn't salute. They bowed.
The well itself was a shaft. No water. Just a vertical throat dug into the rock, ringed in copper. At the bottom—unseeable, unknowable—something bright. Not in the way light is bright. In the way a truth is.
The Bound Flame called it holy. The Crown called it infrastructure. The Choir called it an admission of guilt. Kael called it a mistake waiting to choose a shape.
"Place your hand," Myrene said, gesturing to a polished rail that ran around the shaft. It hummed with Radiant bias tuned to tolerable. Inset prongs pricked the palm without puncturing—prepared to taste and tell.
"Is this going to brand me," Kael asked. "Because I'm running out of skin for warnings."
"Only if you lie," Myrene said.
"About what," he asked.
"About yourself," she said simply.
He set his palm to the rail. The hum deepened. The sunwell stirred—not flared, not surged, not the melodrama of light—stirred like a thought waking.
Kael felt heat and didn't feel hot. He felt light and didn't see bright. He felt direction without motion—vectors to everywhere, pressed flat into down.
"Speak," Myrene whispered, and her voice carried like a chant through old stone.
Kael's mouth went dry. The old instinct to joke lifted its hand and for once he did not call on it. He leaned forward, as if the well were a person who preferred secrets told close.
"Hi," he said, ridiculous to the last. "It's me. The fuse with opinions."
The sunwell did not laugh. The veins of copper did. They thrummed once, twice, a note that made the hair on his arms stand and then smooth. The hum changed key.
Serah's hand appeared at his shoulder without touching. Lysa stood with her head bowed, as if gravity had told her something and she was deciding whether to believe it. Tessel watched his circlet as if the numbers could reassure him about theology. Jorn stood like a wall that could take a confession. Maeron put both hands on the rail, closed his eyes, and committed heresy by feeling holy.
"Do you," Myrene asked the well, "recognize this one."
The rail bit Kael's palm, gentle as a bloodless bite. Something—not sun, not machine, system—tasted his coupling and wrote a line into the space between notes.
The answer came like a bell heard three streets over on a crowded market day: present, insistent, inexplicably personal.
Yes.
It wasn't a word. It was function: a vector aligned, a constraint agreed, a line in a book underlined by a patient god.
Kael swallowed. Something in his chest tried to step backward.
"Clarify," Myrene whispered, the first time Kael had heard her ask. "By what name."
The hum at the bottom of the world changed again. The copper sang like a choir of very small bells. The hair on Kael's nape stood at attention.
Last.
Myrene's eyes shone with fear and triumph. The wardens' hands tightened on spears that weren't spears. Serah said nothing out loud and damn, that silence was loud.
Kael barked a laugh because there was nowhere else for the noise to go. "That's rude," he told the sunwell. "I haven't even killed a small town today."
Jorn reached and caught his elbow because sometimes a man needs a small anchor. "Breathe," he said.
"Ask again," Tessel said through clenched teeth. He hadn't looked up from his circlet's dance. "Ask if it means last as in terminal or last as in latest or last as in only remaining."
Myrene did not take orders. She considered the rail under Kael's hand like a woman deciding whether to tilt a mirror to see something it didn't want to show. She inclined her head a fraction.
"Clarify," she said. "Last—what."
The copper thrummed a third time. The shaft breathed like a beast turning in sleep. Kael felt the word without hearing it, which was worse.
Vector.
Serah's hand clenched and unclenched. Lysa's mouth tightened around a memory sharp enough to cut. Maeron hissed between his teeth like a man who had expected to be right and hated being right.
"Congratulations," Tessel said, brittle. "You've been canonized by plumbing."
Kael pulled his palm off the rail. The well did not demand his hand back. It had his attention anyway.
"So that's done," he said. "Now can we not tell anyone."
"Everyone will know," Myrene said, oddly kind. "Even if we say nothing. Names have gravity."
"We could name him Lunch," Jorn offered.
"Don't," Kael said. "The stew might get ideas."
A pulse feathered across the rail, too light to be heat, too exact to be accident. The well was not done. It had one more note and it played it.
Kael couldn't translate it. Myrene could. Her eyes widened, then narrowed; she was never surprised without immediately deciding what to do with surprise.
"It says two bells," she said slowly. "Invite."
"Invite whom," Serah asked.
The well did not answer. Or if it did, it answered by lightening the air for a heartbeat as if something very far away had smiled.
Tessel slapped his device against his palm. "Enough theology," he said, as if offended by awe. "We have plates bleeding to thieves and a Dome with a mood. Marshal wants models. Sovereign wants leverage. I want to lock something."
"Me?" Kael asked.
"Yes," Tessel said. "Ideally."
"Later," Serah cut in. "We start with who carried coin and wafers. That means neighborhoods below the Lash—where coin buys hunger and charms buy courage."
Jorn's mouth quirked. "Gloomstep by any other name."
"Everything becomes Gloomstep," Lysa said, soft. "Given time."
They climbed from the well into light that didn't feel like blessing. Myrene let them go with a gesture that said she would be there when the sun remembered it had opinions. On the Outer Lash, a wind came up that smelled of metal cooling and stone sweating.
"Two bells," Maeron murmured, pacing Kael without watching his feet. "Invite. The Dome calls and the sunwell nods. What a terrible choir."
"Do we go to the Dome now," Kael asked Serah.
"No," she said. "We go to the rookeries under West Spur and ask the wrong people the right questions."
"And if the wrong people sing," Kael said, buoyed by a dread he trusted more than comfort, "we listen."
They turned off the Lash into the city's underside: tight stairs between struts, walkways where the wind learned to whisper, nests of canvas and rope where people lived because gravity hadn't gotten around to evicting them yet. Children moved like local spirits. Men smoked with a defiance that smelled like old rope. Women eyed Serah's badge and decided whether their loyalties were worth their tongues.
Jorn led. He had a nonchalant stride that said I belong in places where I do not. He traded nods with three faces and three debts. A woman with solder stains on her fingers spat into a cup and then pointed with her chin toward a canvas curtain painted with a laughing chain. The paint was fresh; the hand that had done it loved laughing.
Behind the curtain: a room not large enough for a bad idea. A low table. A string of charms—sun, chain, grin, grin, grin. Two kids, twelve maybe, sitting like rocks. A third face in the back, older, mouth too hard for his years, hands already callused by precise sins.
He looked at Kael. He looked at the coat, the hair, the stupid grin Kael wore like armor.
"Hi," Kael said gently. "I think you've been using my face without paying licensing fees."
The boy laughed. It wasn't kind. It wasn't cruel. It was practice.
"We have a meeting tonight," he said. "You're invited."
Kael's skin prickled. Two bells.
"Where," Serah asked.
The boy's eyes glittered. "Where your city can't hear you lie," he said.
"The Dome," Tessel said, because sometimes even he could not resist being the smartest loud man in the room.
The boy's grin widened. "If you're brave. Or if you're stupid. I like both."
Jorn took a half-step, enough to loom. "Names."
The boy shook his head. "We don't keep them long enough."
"Who pays you," Lysa asked.
"The city," the boy said, and it wasn't a taunt. It was unhelpful truth.
Kael crouched so the boy didn't have to look up to feel like he wasn't losing. Up close, the kid's face trembled between hungry and holy. Gloomstep in any district.
"You put wafers on plates," Kael said. "You paint faces where parents will see them and wonder if they should be afraid or saved. You carry coin you didn't earn to men who think they did."
The boy blinked. "You talk like a church."
"I talk like a man trying not to be used," Kael said. "If I show up at your meeting, do I become a statue or a sermon?"
"Both," the boy said, frank. "And a door."
Kael's mouth went dry. "Into what."
The boy didn't answer him. He looked past Kael's shoulder, through canvas and chains and stone, toward where the Dome sat, patient and listening.
"Into the part where you stop laughing," he said.
The room didn't tilt. Kael did.
Serah's hand landed on his shoulder again. "We'll think about your invitation," she said, smooth. "If we come, we bring rules."
The boy looked delighted. "Bring bells," he said. "We love bells."
They left the rookery with more eyes than men should carry. On the Lash again, the air felt cleaner the way an empty room is clean after the guests leave with the silverware.
"Trap," Tessel said.
"Yes," Serah said.
"We go," Kael said.
"Yes," Serah said, exactly the same tone.
Lysa's mouth went to a line gravity would have been proud to draw. "If you step into the Dome when it invites, it will measure you."
"It already did," Kael said. "We just gave it a nice rail to lick."
Jorn cracked his knuckles, looked at the city with the fondness of a man who understood that love is maintenance, and said, "What time."
Maeron, who had looked happiest in the worst rooms of the city, glanced at the horizon where the Black Halo made sermons to anyone with eyes. "After second bell," he said. "When the lattice yawns between shifts and men think night is permission."
Kael smiled with too many teeth and not enough sense. "Perfect," he said. "Let's go ask the Dome what it wants."
"Not yet," Serah said, and the city relaxed on a rope no one could see. "We plan. We steal their wafers. We mark exits. We tie our own bells. We decide what gentle means when the room says no."
Kael thought about the Cloister and the sunwell and the boy's laugh and the way the rigger's hands had held nothing like it was worth more than the something. He thought about the word the well had given him and how last sounded like a door shutting with love.
"Fine," he said. "We plan."
He didn't look up, but if he had, he might have noticed a figure on a distant pylon, poised like a note, watching, the light around her bent as if even photons wanted counsel. He might have noticed her lift one hand in a warning that was also permission.
He didn't look. He didn't need to. The bells of Aerialis would ring when it mattered. Two short, one long. Invite with a tail of threat.
They turned toward the Cohort's workroom, toward maps and chalk and an argument with physics. Kael whistled a little under his breath.
The city listened.
Somewhere very far away and very near, the man wearing Kael's face did not whistle. He waited. That was the difference between them today.
The bells had not rung yet.