The Warden did not walk so much as occupy space in a new order. One moment it was at the alley's mouth, rain bending around its shoulders. The next, it stood three paces ahead of Lia, cloak brushing puddles that did not splash.
Lia walked.
Her boots made every possible sound—splash, squelch, scrape—because she had never mastered the art of complete silence and because her knees still wobbled. Her fingers had cramped around the shard; she forced them to unclench, hissing as the edges peeled away from her skin. Thin lines of red traced her palm.
The shard showed no sign of damage. It pulsed, slow and stubborn.
"You always move like that?" she asked. "Because it's very bad for my heart."
"There is an efficiency to direct repositioning," the Warden said. The voice—everywhere and nowhere—did not echo in the tight lanes. "Your arrangement of streets is inefficient."
"It's not my arrangement," Lia said. "The city was here before I was. Before my parents, too. Before anyone with sense, probably."
The Warrens folded in around them, a maze of leaning walls and sagging balconies. Laundry lines snapped in the wind between cracked windows, their bundles of cloth plastered to the lines by rain. Somewhere, a baby cried. Somewhere else, a drunk laughed, the sound thin and brittle.
Ghostlight bled down from the towers above, caught and warped by layers of grime-streaked glass. It painted the cobbles in bruised colors: blue here, green there, a smear of violet where an old pane had once been clear.
"You know where you're going?" Lia asked.
"Yes."
"Good. Because I don't take masked strangers home on the first night."
The Warden did not reply. Lia counted that as a small victory. If she could make the story skip a beat, she could pretend she had some control.
They cut through a narrow lane that spent half the year as a puddle and the other half as a mud trap, then under a crooked beam that marked the line between the Warrens and what people with money called Ardent Reach Proper. The difference was mostly smell and self-importance. The proper streets had less rot and more pride.
"Wait." Lia grabbed the Warden's cloak on impulse.
Her fingers passed through.
Not completely—something was there, some resistance like a curtain of cold. But the fabric did not crush under her grip. It did not wrinkle. Her hand tingled.
"Do not attempt to alter my manifestation," the Warden said.
"Don't walk into Fog's Lane, then," Lia shot back, shaking the pins and needles from her hand. "Unless you want to lose your very efficient repositioning to a knife."
Fog's Lane was not the lane's proper name. Proper names belonged to streets with lamps and patrols. Fog's Lane was the watch's blind spot, a knife's favored haunt, the place where people who had something valuable and no friends sometimes went and did not come back.
"What is significant about this vector?" the Warden asked.
"Men with knives," Lia said. "Who don't care how many points your star has. They'll try to pry you open to see what's inside. Or me, if they see me with you."
"You assume they can see me," the Warden said.
Lia stopped. "You mean they can't?"
"They perceive only the effects," the Warden said. "Not the source. Your watchmen saw the rain lean, the shadows skew, the world hesitate. They did not see me."
"And me?" Lia's throat felt tight again. "Can they see me?"
"Yes."
"Well, that's something," she muttered. "Be a shame if I'd gone invisible and never noticed."
She veered right, away from Fog's Lane. Left, down a passage that smelled of old fish and new oil. Up, over a low wall slick with moss. The route twisted in on itself, avoiding watch posts and dead-end courtyards and the home of a woman who threw pots at anyone who walked under her window after dark.
"You have many avoidance patterns," the Warden observed.
"You have a lot of eyes," Lia said. "Looks like we both do our homework."
She did not like how easily the word we came out. It felt like letting the cloak slide over her shoulders without checking for hooks.
The building she aimed for leaned into its own shadow, a narrow slice of wood and stone wedged between a cooper's shop and a boarded-up bathhouse whose sign still showed a half-faded mermaid. Its door had three locks; two worked. The third was for show.
Lia ducked under the low lintel and rapped twice in a pattern no one who valued their fingers used wrong.
The hatch opened at eye level, giving her a view of a single bloodshot eye framed by wiry grey eyebrows.
"You're late," Old Nerris said.
"You're awake," Lia said. "We're both full of surprises."
The eye narrowed. "You alone?"
"Depends how you count." Lia moved aside a fraction.
From inside, Nerris should have seen nothing but rain and the crooked line of the lane. The Warden stood there, tall and still, cloaked in its own refusal to exist for anyone else.
Nerris grunted. "You've been in worse company. Get in. You're leaking on my doorstep."
The hatch snapped shut. Locks clacked, scraped, groaned. The door opened inward with a soft whine.
Nerris stood hunched in the frame, a blanket thrown over his shoulders like a cape, wisps of hair clinging to his scalp in stubborn tufts. His nose had been broken at least once. His hands were stained permanently with ink and oil.
"And wipe your feet," he added as Lia squeezed past. "The river's outside, not on my floor."
Lia stepped onto the woven rag rug and did as told. The Warden stepped in after her. The air temperature dropped by a fraction; Lia saw her breath puff faintly.
Nerris shivered and tugged the blanket tighter. "Hells," he muttered. "You bring a storm with you?"
"Something like that," Lia said.
Nerris's front room was a clutter of shelves and tables, all laden with things no one wanted you to sell: cracked lenses, rusted gears, bits of crystal sunk in brass, wire coils, faded diagrams. A single oil lamp burned on the counter, its light layered over the ghostlight leaking in through the high, grimy window. The mingled glows gave the relics a sickly halo.
Nerris locked the door behind her, out of long habit rather than specific fear. "You look like something the river dragged in and decided was too sorry to keep," he said. "Job go bad?"
"Depends how you count," Lia repeated. "The watch nearly caught me. But they didn't."
"Nearly caught and didn't is fine by me." Nerris hobbled back behind the counter. "We'll go over the details later and I'll have a story for the boys when they come fishing for tales. For now—" He held out a hand, palm up. "Show me."
Lia swallowed.
She had come here intending to do exactly that. Nerris bought what she brought. He knew things. He was the closest thing to a mentor she had, if you squinted and ignored the fact that he would sell her out if he had to, and she would run if he did.
But the shard in her hand burned gently, a star under her skin. Her wrist still glowed, faint as banked coals under ash.
The Warden stood at her shoulder, a shadow with a sigil.
"Navigator," it said quietly. "The awakened nexus must not be surrendered."
Nerris's eyebrows twitched. "What was that?"
Lia almost dropped the shard again. "What was what?"
"That voice," Nerris said. "Deep as a bell in a well. You pick up some fancy echo to go with your fancy shine?"
"You heard that?" Lia asked.
"Course I heard it. I may be old, girl, but I'm not stone deaf. Now quit stalling."
Lia shot a look at the Warden. "He can hear you?"
"Yes," the Warden said. "He is attuned by proximity to relic fields. His work has rubbed the edges between his perception and my manifestation."
"He speaks much," Nerris muttered. "If he keeps it up, I'll start charging rent for the air his words are using."
Lia's heart did something strange and uneven. Nerris didn't see the Warden. But he heard it. That meant she wasn't entirely alone with the voice. The story had leaked.
"You recognize it?" she asked. "The voice?"
Nerris squinted at the empty space beside her, then at the shard in her hand. "Sounds like trouble."
"That's not very specific."
"Specific trouble." He tapped his ear. "Like the old engines humming when they start to think about waking up. Like the ward-horns in the old stories, when the sky bled."
"Not helpful," Lia said, because if she didn't keep talking, she might start listening properly.
She opened her palm.
The room changed.
Not in any way a sensible person might record. The shelves stayed where they were. The lamp flame did not flicker. But something under the floor gave a tired creak, as if an old house had straightened a fraction. Lia felt weight shift, subtle as a held breath.
The shard lay in her palm like a drop of frozen light. This close to the lamp, its clarity was startling. Nerris's lined face reflected in it, stretched and split into strange angles.
He hissed. "By all the broken gears," he whispered. "Where did you get that?"
"Temple quarter," Lia said. "Old wall, half fallen. It was stuck in the mortar like a tooth. One tooth among others."
She reached for the bag at her hip and spilled the other two shards onto the counter. Their milky glow looked dull now, cloudy. They were relics. The thing in her palm was something else.
Nerris did not look at the others. His gaze locked on the clear shard, pupils contracting.
"Don't," the Warden said, as he reached for it.
Nerris's hand hovered, fingers trembling half an inch above the crystal. Sweat beaded at his temple.
"You feel that?" he asked Lia softly.
She did. A tug. Not a pull on skin or muscle. A pull on the places inside her that she had no names for. Like standing too close to the edge of a high tower and feeling the air lean over the drop.
"Beautiful," Nerris breathed. "Terrible." His fingers curled into a fist; he pulled his hand back with visible effort. "I don't touch that. I don't know it, I haven't seen it, and if anyone comes asking, I'll tell them you brought me three ordinary teeth and nothing more."
Lia blinked. "Ordinary?"
Nerris snorted and picked up one of the milky shards with a pair of tongs. "Ordinary for this cursed city. Star-bones, engine chips, call them what you like. They hum and glow and sometimes bite, and the priests say they're sin and the scholars say they're salvation, and the watch says they're contraband if they're not in the right hands." He turned the shard, watching the dull gold threads inside catch the light. "These I can buy. Carefully. Quietly."
He put the shard down with exaggerated care. Only then did he look back at the clear crystal.
"That one's different," he said. "That one's awake."
"You said you don't want to know it," Lia said.
"I don't." Nerris wiped his hands on his blanket as if ridding them of something sticky. "But I do. Every part of me that's kept me alive this long says stay clear. Every part that ever picked up a broken gear to see how it fit says lean closer."
"The latter part is unwise," the Warden said.
"Who is that?" Nerris snapped at the empty air. "If there's a voice in my shop, it pays rent or it shuts up."
"This is the Warden," Lia said before she could think better of it. "I think. He says he is. It is."
Nerris went very still.
The lamplight carved new lines into his face. "You don't bring a Warden into my shop," he said, very quietly. "You don't bring a Warden anywhere. The whole point of Wardens is that they stay in stories."
"He followed me," Lia said. "Or I followed him. It's been a long night."
"The Warden is bound," the Warden said, as if clarifying a technicality. "To the engine. To the nexus. To the Navigator."
"You're bound to a girl who can't pay her debts on time," Nerris told the empty air. "You made a poor bargain."
"It was not a bargain," the Warden said. "It was a sequence."
Lia rubbed her forehead. "Can we pretend the impossible doesn't make sense for a moment and talk about something practical? Nerris, I'm freezing. I need a coat. And food. And maybe a blanket I don't have to share with rats."
Nerris's gaze flicked between her face, her glowing wrist, the shard.
"You need a coffin," he muttered. "Or a ship out of the Reach." But he sighed, the sound old and tired, and shuffled to the back shelves. "You pay me with the two dull ones," he called over his shoulder. "I'll take them at half the rate and that's charity, given the heat under this roof now. The bright one you keep. Or throw in the river. Or eat, for all I care."
"I'm not eating it," Lia said. "Probably. Yet."
She slid the two cloudy shards into the shallow dish Nerris used as a scale. He glanced at them, weighed them by habit more than need, and nodded. From a locked drawer, he counted out coins: small, worn, some from mints that no longer existed anywhere but in the Reach's pockets.
"Don't spend it stupid," he said, dumping them into her hand. "Better yet, don't spend it all. The city's going to go mad for that story on your wrist. Prices will rise on everything that keeps a body in one piece."
"Why?" Lia asked.
Nerris hesitated. "Because Wardens don't wake for nothing," he said at last. "Because if a Warden's out of its hole and talking to gutter rats, it means something down in the bones is shifting." He met her eyes. "And when the bones shift, girl, everything built on them cracks."
The floor creaked again. Lia didn't know if it was real or if her nerves had started to lace sound onto every stray word.
"You have information that may mitigate structural failure," the Warden said.
"Do I?" Nerris snapped. "Because it'd be lovely to learn that before my ceiling comes down."
"Historical records," the Warden said. "The last Navigator. The last sequence. You were there."
Nerris laughed, short and sharp. "Do I look that old?"
"The residual field around you," the Warden said, "indicates prolonged exposure. Multiple cycles. You were present when the engine last turned."
Lia stared at Nerris.
His lined face. His bent back. His ink-stained hands.
"Nerris," she said slowly. "How old are you?"
Nerris stared back, then dragged a hand over his face. "Old enough to know when to keep my mouth shut," he said. "Old enough to see a sequence starting and decide if I want to throw my lot in with it or hide under my floor."
"You have no floor strong enough," the Warden said.
Lia's head ached. "Stop," she said. "Please. One impossible thing at a time."
Silence fell, broken only by the soft tick of a heat-cracked gear somewhere in the back wall and the rain's steady whisper against the window.
Nerris shuffled back to her and dropped a bundle on the counter: a coat, patched but thick; a blanket rolled tight; a small heel of bread wrapped in cloth.
"Here," he said. "On account of me being old enough to remember when the Reach was quieter. On account of you having trouble written brighter than ghostlight on your wrist."
Lia touched the coat. The wool was heavy, the inside lined with something that, in a kinder city, might have been called fur. The blanket smelled faintly of cedar instead of damp.
"Thank you," she said.
"Don't make a habit of it," Nerris said gruffly. "Next time you pay full. If there is a next time."
"Bleak," Lia said. "Even for you."
"I deal in relics," he said. "Bleak is the house I keep."
She shrugged into the coat. Warmth wrapped around her, muting the shiver in her shoulders. Her wrist still glowed, faint through the cuff, like a trapped ember.
"What now?" she asked.
It wasn't clear who she was asking: Nerris, the Warden, the shard.
"The engine stirs," the Warden said. "Its dream shifts. You must reach it before it wakes fully, or before others reach it in your stead."
"Others like who?" Lia asked.
"Priests," Nerris said at the same time. "Watch. The Crown. Every fool with enough coin to bribe a scholar and enough faith to think they can steer a storm."
"And the things under the city," the Warden added.
"Wonderful," Lia muttered. "A full guest list."
She pulled her new coat tight and tucked the blanket under her arm, then looked at Nerris.
"You know where the engine is?" she asked.
"Under our feet," he said. "Under everyone's feet. The whole Reach grew over its ribs. But you want the heart. The place they built the first reach-tower to touch." He tilted his head, eyes going distant, as if listening to something only he could hear. "I thought they'd sealed it for good."
"They failed," the Warden said. "Seals decay. Time rends. Intent frays. The path is not as closed as they believed."
"Of course it isn't," Nerris muttered. "Nothing stays buried in this city. Not bones, not secrets, not bad debts."
"Can you draw a map?" Lia asked.
Nerris barked a laugh. "Map? Girl, if there was a map, the Crown would have framed it. You want a path, you follow the old things." He jabbed a finger toward the window, toward the suggestion of towers beyond. "The glass bones. The broken cranes. The places where the ghostlight's thicker. They built over the heart and then tried to forget where."
"Not helpful," Lia said for the second time.
"Very helpful," the Warden said. "Correlation between residual luminescence and structural density has been confirmed. We can model the most probable vector."
"Oh, of course," Lia said. "We can model the vector. Why didn't I think of that?"
"You thought to pick up the nexus," the Warden said. "That is sufficient."
Nerris pinched the bridge of his nose. "If I give advice," he said, "you going to ignore it?"
"Depends how good it is," Lia said.
"Leave the Reach," he said. "Tonight. Take a cart, a ship, a stolen horse. Go to the hills where the ghostlight's faint. Live a small life and die having never seen what wakes under us."
Lia swallowed.
She imagined it: hills, quiet, a sky that glowed only with real stars. Work that did not involve climbing towers or prying teeth out of old walls. Nights without the watch's boots pounding behind her.
The shard pulsed in her palm.
She was six again, arm in a gear, metal teeth closing. Pulling, dragging. The world a blur of pain and the sound of something old shifting. The scar around her wrist burning—
"Can't," she said.
Nerris's shoulders sagged, as if that one word had confirmed something he'd been braced against. "Didn't think so," he said softly. "Engine's marked you. Always did like to claw back its own."
"You will die if you stay," the Warden said. "You will die if you go. The path diverges only in who dies with you."
Lia glared. "You're very bad at comfort."
"It is not my function," the Warden said.
"Course not," she muttered. "Comfort is for people who don't wake ancient engines."
She tucked the shard into an inner pocket of the coat. The fabric lay flat; from the outside, nothing showed. Inside, warmth pooled, steady and insistent.
Nerris watched that small motion with the look of a man watching someone step onto ice he knew to be thin.
"If you're going to be stupid," he said, "be careful about it."
"That's my favorite way to be," Lia said.
He rolled his eyes. "Get out of here. And if anyone asks, you sold me nothing and we had a very dull conversation about the weather."
"The weather's been very interesting," Lia said.
"Then lie better," he snapped.
Lia headed for the door. Her hand hovered on the lock.
"Nerris," she said without turning. "You were there. Weren't you? When the engine turned."
Silence stretched. The lamp sputtered once and steadied.
"I was there when the sky burned," he said at last. "I was there when the first Reach rose. I was there when the last Navigator chose." His voice dropped, roughened by something older than age. "And I'm still here. That alone should tell you the choice wasn't as simple as the stories say."
"What did they choose?" she asked.
The floor creaked. Nerris moved, weight shifting, but he did not come closer.
"To break the fall," he said. "For a while."
Lia looked at the worn wood of the door, at the scratches where countless hands had pushed out into the city.
"A while," she echoed. "And now?"
"And now the while is almost over," he said. "Get out, girl. The city's listening."
She unlocked the door and stepped into the rain. The Warden followed, pulling cold with it.
The lane looked the same as it always had: puddles, crooked stones, a cat hunched under a barrel. But the air felt thicker, as if the ghostlight had seeped lower.
"Navigator," the Warden said. "We must move quickly."
"Where?" Lia asked.
"The heart," it said. "The engine. Before those who would control you find you."
Lia set her shoulders, pulled the coat tight, and started walking.
Behind her, in the cluttered shop, Old Nerris blew out the lamp and sat in the dark, listening to the faint, distant hum that had not been there in a very long time.