They set the trap like cooks preparing a slow roast: small fires, steady heat, no sudden flare. Aminah liked that method — patience tasted like victory when you were starving for proof. She had a list now: Dalen, Carver Venn, the kiln, the north hold, and a string that led to the wharf. Tonight the crate moved. Tonight she wanted hands to land on the right men.
Hasb arrived at the docks with Dzeko and two clean-faced militia who smelled of river rather than city. He favored tight plans at the wharf: shadows that moved with purpose, men who spoke in clipped commands. Dzeko walked the gangway as if he owned the rust; he did not, but he understood how to make ownership feel persuasive.
"You sure no one's watching the watchers?" Hasb asked, eyes on the water where cargo blinked like a line of sleeping teeth.
"No one worth a damn," Dzeko said. "The petty boss took a coin to look away. He's the sort of man who counts his breath in other people's pockets." He spat a truth that belonged in taverns and not councils. "We got one advantage — tonight's tide. The north hold kids can't move heavy when the tide's in."
They waited in cold and smoke and the petty sounds of the wharf: a rope's moan, a gull's regret, the slap of water. Crate thirty-three had a number chalked in a hand that wanted to be unreadable. Two men in coveralls moved like a practiced duet, carrying the crate off the ship and into a cart. They worked with a man who had the kiln stamp on his gloves.
Hasb's jaw set. "Move on them," he breathed.
Dzeko grinned, a quick thing. "Let's be theater." He whistled low once. From a shadow three blocks down a man jogged out, stumbling into path. The lead man cursed and turned. It was clumsy enough to be real. The other man's head snapped up.
At the signal, militia closed. Two men grabbed the crate and held it, while Hasb moved to leap the lock. The world became a measure of lung and light.
"You're under arrest," Hasb said, voice short. "Hands where I can see them."
The kiln man swore and tried to wrench free. He was a worker two days into a sore back and a life he'd been told was permanent. He gave under pressure and the crate stayed stubborn.
They hauled the crate to a lantern-lit patch and pried at the fastenings. Nails bit. The lid gave with the smell of old sea and new varnish. For a second it looked like a crate full of salvage: bits of tile, a broken statue, padding like straw.
Then Dzeko's hand brushed a cloth tucked in the corner. He pulled it out with a scoff and unwrapped the padding. Inside, folded small and obscene in its ordinaryness, sat a shallow wooden box. It had a ribbon tied in an ugly knot and a tag—no official stamp—just a short, neat line of ink.
Someone nearby made a sound like metal scraped across teeth.
"Open it," Hasb ordered before he remembered himself. Command had that reflex—order comes first, thought sometimes later. They undid the knot. The box sighed when the lid lifted.
It was smaller than anyone expected. Inside lay a carved token the size of a man's palm. Its surface had been rubbed smooth by use and then etched with lines that made the eye start in the wrong place. The lines glinted faint gold and in the center a sigil was cut—tiny, precise, a mark made by someone who preferred secrecy.
Aminah stepped forward like she'd been moving along a seam her whole life. She did not ask to be handed things; things were given to her when they recognized the way she wore resolve.
She saw it and all the air left the space.
"Where did this come from?" Dzeko said, but he didn't mean the crate. He meant the idea that something in the city now bore their marks.
Hasb's hand trembled slightly. "It's… a sigil. Not ours."
Aminah stared until she could see the cut of the wood like a memory. The sigil was small and familiar in a way that made her teeth ache—an old family shape, a mark she'd seen in tapestries and in the carved beams of the estate where she'd been raised. But someone had altered it. The lines were wrong, the knot of the weave inverted. It was the family sigil but not the family. It was a mimic.
"That's impossible," Dzeko said. He kept talking like they could fix it with words. "Nobody would—"
"You'd be surprised," Aminah said. She put a hand on the box like a magistrate on a ledger. "This was meant to be seen by someone who knew how to read it and be punched in the gut."
They searched the crate more thoroughly. In a corner they found more—coarse cloth, a scrap with the kiln's stamp, a small bundle of ash wrapped in thin leather. It looked unremarkable until Meren, who had come with them in the dark because he liked being where curiosities gathered, tapped it with a gloved finger.
"Not a lot," he muttered. "But enough. Someone wanted the token to go with it."
A nameless anger rose in Hasb. "So they plant our mark with their ash?" he said. "Make us look like fools."
"That's one way to break a city," Dzeko said. "Make it doubt itself so it turns inward."
A cart clattered in the near lane. A man in a cloak—one of the minor nobles Aminah had to humor for the city's sake—stepped forward, face wet from the drizzle. He held himself like a man who expected to be recognized and was. He had a name that grated into the ledger: Lord Renly's cousin, small in power but large in appetite.
"Aminah Theodore," he said with the kind of politeness practiced by men who wanted favors. "Forgive my intrusion, but I was told of a disturbance at the wharf and I thought—"
"You thought you could ask questions," Aminah replied. Short. She didn't like nobles who sauntered into trouble to collect praise for solving it.
"It's the city's interest," he said with a smile that had been polished by a hundred empty dinners. "If a crate had the wrong—symbols—then, well, the Empire will find it important."
Aminah's eyes sharpened. "We are handling it."
"You are wise to do so quietly," he said, as if he were praising her and excusing himself at once. "You know how easily the Empire misreads. We're better off keeping this local."
"Just like that," Hasb said. He did not trust the noble's tone. "Just like that, someone steps in with a coin and we look foolish."
The noble's smile thinned. "We're a city," he said. "We cannot act like a militia and think we can avoid politics."
The conversation was polite violence. Aminah felt the city close in like a fist. The noble's presence was a reminder that she could snip one thread of treachery and have another tied from the other side. Political theater liked to dress itself as concern.
She let the noble talk. Let him speak of protocols and imperial temper. Let him pretend to counsel caution. Then, when the man finished, Aminah unclipped the token and held it up where the lantern caught it.
"You see this?" she asked, simple. The noble read it quickly and his face lost color where it had once looked practiced.
"That mark," he said. "That's—"
"Not ours," Aminah finished. "Not yet."
The noble swallowed. "Then perhaps the Empire will ask why a family token was in a crate of salvage."
"Perhaps." She kept her voice even. "Or perhaps we answer first."
He had a dozen ways to turn that back as a suggestion. He met the line of her gaze and left his smile somewhere in the wet street like a broken thing. He moved away with the slow dignity of a man saving his skin.
As the noble retreated, Dzeko slipped a hand into his coat and produced a scrap of paper someone had passed to him earlier—an unsigned note found in the north hold. He unfolded it, and everyone bent to read the single sharp line.
We can make signatures that look like blood, it said. Be grateful we chose ink.
Silence hit them with the weight of a door slamming. The rain thickened and the water around the dock made a new kind of noise like someone turning a page. Men craned their necks to look for the ship that had left the crate. The hull was gone—taken or moved. Whoever had sent the box knew how to vanish a trail.
Aminah tucked the token into her palm and felt the fancy edges like a lie. Her chest was tight in a way that tasted like old wood smoke. She thought of lists and names and the way a city could eat itself if left to doubt. She thought of home, of old sigils, of things stitched wrong by hands that meant to be clever.
She put the token in a satchel and handed it to Meren with a single order. "You keep this from everyone but me. Seal it. Burn any copies."
Meren's face went unreadable—scholars feared political ash as much as mortal men feared swords.
Hasb watched the water until it blurred his eyes. "So the mark is planted," he said. "They want us to suspect ourselves."
"They want us to cut our own cords," Aminah said. "We don't do that."
Dzeko bent and picked up the scrap of ash still clinging to the crate's corner. He put it in a small jar and corked it like someone sealing a specimen for a surgeon. "We take this back," he said. "We show it to the people who care. We scare the right men."
Aminah should have felt the small warmth of victory. Instead, she felt a tightening that lived below her ribcage and tasted like metal.
She turned to Hasb and spoke without the stagecraft of leaders, without the measured cadence she'd used at parades. "If the family mark's being used against us, someone wants me to look up at the past. They want me to pull."
Hasb's reply came slow. "Then we don't pull."
They loaded the crate back onto the cart with careful hands and walked it inland, each step steady, each face pretending to be less worried than it was. The wharf receded into the wet night, and the noble's carriage clattered away like an obligation.
When they reached the barracks and locked the crate away, someone in the crowd—an old watchman who'd been around before Aminah was born—muttered as he wandered off.
"They'll make signatures like blood, they'll paint names on walls. But marks forget," he said. "The living remember."
Aminah nodded like it meant something later. She set the token on her desk and pulled a clean sheet of parchment toward her. She began to draft a ledger of people who owed her answers. She wrote names slowly until the list felt heavy enough to be a rope.
Outside, the rain kept time. Inside, a bell tolled once in the distance. And in the satchel with the token, beneath the ribbon and the polish, a tiny hairline fracture ran across the sigil—one that, if held to light, looked like an eye.