They went to the pipe yard at first bell with the kind of quiet that makes doors forget to creak. The rusted crane held its arm like an accusation; the puddles wore a skin of oil that made the light crawl. Three shadows became three men. Breuk kept his knife low and his jaw tighter. Lig counted corners. Silas didn't bother pretending to be calm; he simply was.
Kane's signal never came.
What came instead was a sound with rank. Not the quick cough of a van, not the greedy purr of a smuggler's engine—boots, and the kind that know they're allowed to be loud. Then the square filled itself with angles and guns. Paint too fresh for Skell, visors too clean. The city's army had decided to learn this neighborhood's name the hard way.
"Scatter," Lig said, already pulling them toward the back run.
They cut left under the crane. A flood of orders hit the air—ON YOUR KNEES!—HANDS!—SEARCH THE HOUSES!—FIREBREAKS!—the last word in a soldier's mouth meaning burn it so it stops being a map. Someone cracked a flare; it wrote red cursive across the low sky and got on everything.
Breuk, Lig, Silas slid into the alley between a wall of stacked pipes and a row of shelters that hadn't asked to be brave. The first line of soldiers fanned to the doorways; behind them came the men with canisters and hoses. One pulled the pin and walked the hose along a roof as casually as marking a ledger. Flame took the order and did a better job of shouting than any officer could.
"Back steps," Lig said, and they moved, soft and fast. Silas, for the first time since the cell, looked like a man who had run out of polite names for fear. "They know you're here," Breuk said, not accusing.
"They know someone is," Silas said, and because he was honest even when stupid, he added, "They probably know it's me."
They reached the ladder down to the service trench. Two rungs were rotten, a third sworn enemy of weight. Breuk went first, then Silas, then Lig bringing up the doubt. Smoke was already a thought in their mouths.
A scream cut the square in half.
Not the general sizzle of panic, not the bark of a man discovering he bleeds. A woman's voice. High and ragged and specific, ripped from a place that still believed someone would answer. It came from the direction of the pantry house, and it sounded like a name learning to be a wound.
Breuk stopped like a door found a wall.
Lig's hand was on his shoulder in an instant. "No," he said, without court, without sermon. "We move."
"Mara," Breuk said. The word hurt leaving. He could see the chime above her door, the stupid bolt and washers he and Iben had strung, the way the sound would tell soldiers this door moves, this door moves, this door moves. He imagined a boot, and the chime saying yes.
"Breuk," Lig said, pushing now, "we don't change the board for—"
Another sound—smaller, faster. Iben. Not a scream; a shout swallowed too soon. It was enough.
"Get him out," Breuk said. He looked at Silas, at the man they had cracked a convoy for, the man with a sentence still smoldering on his name. "The siphon mouth, like you said. If I'm not there in ten, you go."
Lig's mouth was a line. "You go in there and you die for a story," he said.
"Then it's a good story," Breuk said, and tore his shoulder free.
He moved the city way: not the shortest line, the least likely. Up and around, through the scaffolds that remember better hands. Smoke dropped like a curtain; heat took it personally. An officer shouted for a cordon and got a chorus of boots in reply. Someone laughed the wrong kind of laugh. Fire learned the streets with the eagerness of a tourist.
He came around the back lane and into Skell's small square. The well stuttered steam where flame had tried to drink it. A woman had a pot, and that was bravery until it wasn't. A man tried to stand up to a baton and met a doctrine. A door went down under a boot. The chime over Mara's door gave its stubborn, ugly music.
Breuk kept to the nail-heads, to the shadows that smoke hadn't rented yet. A soldier turned and saw movement and made his weapon do the same; Breuk made nothing out of himself and became a bracket on the wall. The soldier's visor turned away like a blind eye.
He slid along the wall of the pantry house and saw the door gaping. The room beyond had the same shape; it just wore different colors now: orange, black, and a red that refused to name itself. The shelf that had held the candle had collapsed, its small gold ghost burning on the floor. The quilts had become smoke. The pump in the corner coughed and died.
Mara lay between the door and the table, her body answering a geometry no one teaches. One arm reached toward the pallet where Iben slept when the world behaved; the other was under her, elbow crooked like keeping a secret. Breuk thought the word trip and then saw the spreading darkness under her and realized he had chosen a smaller word on purpose.
There were voices—next room, outside, in his head. He moved to her on knees that had never seen prayer. He touched her neck and felt the terrible mercy of certainty. Her face had learned to relax. A bruise bloomed at her temple, small, mean. The place on the floor beside her palm—damp, round, the shadow of a bowl—looked like an absence he could fall into.
Breuk woke on the pallet in the low hut, on the wrong side of a life. The book lay open where he had left it, its last page charred as if someone had read it too fast. The candle stub was a pale tooth. Outside, a child's laugh rang like a lie; then the laugh resolved itself into the drip of water from a root to a bowl.
His chest hurt. He put his hand there and found the necklace through cloth—cool again, quiet again, an accomplice that pretended to be an ornament. He lay very still and watched his breath prove he was not the smoke.
The girl in the white room. Mara on the floor. A boy's small bare prints in soot. A chime that would never ring the same way again.
He closed his eyes and saw none of it leave.
The Grund waited for him to sit up. The Schlund waited under everything. Somewhere above, in a city that has never yet learned to whisper, men would write new paragraphs and call them order. Somewhere else, in a place between layers where drafts live, a boy with an impossible coin would learn a trick until it was a fact.
Breuk rolled to his side. He put his feet on the ground. He did not stand. He pressed his palm to his chest until the shape of the glass hurt less.
"Okay," he said to the room that had no say. "Okay."
The hut breathed with him. The Grund listened without blessing. Outside, the water made its soft, indecent sound, louder at noon and eighteen, punctual as always.
He did not pray. He got ready.