He would remember if pressed and resent the palm that forced the memory to shape.

They climbed past cages of pawn: the museum of promises that time had called due. A ring that might have bought a roof. A sword with a single honest dent. A child's shoes tied together by a string that had learned too much. The jar warmed under Han's hands. The moth adjusted its balance by a measure that suggested it tracked strides and liked to be helpful. He disliked that possibility on principle. Tools should not try to know their owners; owners should know their tools.

The last landing before the street door waited with its honest draft. Hanna shifted the bundle and watched his face. "Erase the mark now?"

"Not here," Han said. "Chalk keeps its faith if you respect its ritual. He expects a sleeve in a hallway. We'll null it at our table, with our slate."

She approved, which meant her breath grew smaller and her attention larger. She shouldered the door, and the door remembered how to be obedient. Outside lay the market's natural smell: lamp oil that wanted to be sweet, copper that had learned work, paper that needed air. In the frame's shadow Han changed gloves and wrapped the marked one in clean kerchief. Some signs you erase; some you quarantine until the room knows how to listen.

A messenger waited near a barrel with the Vault crest on his strap. "Your receipt," he said, offering wax that still believed in heat. "And a note regarding a case, to be delivered the moment Lot Nineteen cleared." His tone had the careful neutrality of a broom.

Han took both. His seal stared back at him twice—once where he had laid it, once where the market had promised to remember. The note described a dispute in grammar so correct it refused to smile. The ink had weight. Thorns came this way, following the scent of promises because promises smelled like blood.

"We won," Hanna said. "With terms."

"Everything worth keeping has terms," said Han. The felt shifted; light slipped through and signed three small lines across his wrist like the first bars of a song.

They crossed a side court where tallow dreamed of candles in barrels that would never be opened with kindness. A woman counted copper and did not raise her head. A man laughed the way men laugh when they need witnesses. The Vaults give a thin courage that shines like paper and burns like it. By the time they reached the gate for the upper street, Han's breath had returned to its working rhythm.

A shape left the wall at the wrong second, hoping to become a person directly in their path. Hanna adjusted their speed by the width of one pace. The collision arrived early, brushed her sleeve, apologized to the air, and learned a lesson that would save the student's life another day.

At the curb a driver watched them from under his cap. Hanna watched him without turning her head. The horse discovered an urgent interest in its own hooves. They went on. Steam braided itself into ropes above grates, bells turned with paper tongues so their tapping refused to admit it was sound. In this quarter even time practiced clerical restraint.

"Home," Han said. Used properly, the word meant walls that answered to his voice, a table that had agreed to be still, a slate that would take his chalk and ignore a priest's.

Hanna led them along the tinsmiths' lane. "We'll need a null slate," she said. "Unruled. Unblessed charcoal. A bowl of plain water. Your clean glove. A temper that doesn't take offense if the moth behaves like a tutor."

"Does it make jokes?"

"It reads sequences," she said. "If your hands speak nonsense, it will be very polite about refusing you."

The bells behind them tapped—other lots closing, other bargains learning their weight. At the last corner Han let himself look back. The Auditor did not follow. He did not need to. His records walked faster than feet and knocked on warmer doors.

Streets that remembered rain kept the damp in their seams. A cat on a sill weighed them against dinner and deferred judgment. Yeast drifted from a bakery building mornings for strangers. Somewhere a child practiced the grammar of hunger. The city solved itself the way it always did, by repetition and habit, while one new term settled into its sum: the jar in Hanna's arms, light as a trick and heavy as a signature.

Their door obeyed when Hanna told it to. "Table," she said, already unwrapping the felt. Han cleared space—lamp, slate, water bowl, two gloves set side by side, one clean leather, one sleeping chalk. She lifted the bell jar, and the glass gave a last, brief sigh. The moth did not flee. It opened and closed its wings once, precise as the breath before a recital.

"We eat after," said Hanna. "If it answers."

"It will," Han said, because someone in the room had to say it first.

He placed both hands flat on the table with a calm that belonged to the work and not the hour. Hanna set her knuckles on the wood and the wood kept its promises. The moth tilted its head by a degree that suggested a question. Han counted four heartbeats and traced an arc in the air above the slate—the same curve he had seen when the light ran across the jar. Hanna's eyes warmed, cooled. Good enough.

The moth left its perch without fuss, traveling as if the air were a floor it could trust. It settled on the clean glove. Chalk on the other glove brightened by a breath, as if glad to be included. Han felt a shape gather in the room that was not a shadow and not a plan yet, only the spine of one. Not in the temple and not in the Vaults, but here on their table under their lamp with their tools and their names arranged exactly where they needed to be.

Outside, the city worked at being itself. Inside, the bell jar lay on its side like a crown retired without scandal. Hanna placed her hand next to his—callus neat, pulse steady, a story that had never betrayed him. The moth's wings lifted a fraction. Numbers waited to be spoken with hands. Han exhaled and matched his breath to the faint idea of flight. Then he listened for the instruction that would turn a rumor into work.

At ebb tide the Drowned Archive unlocked itself with a sound like wet breath held too long. A seam appeared in the seawall and widened into a low door where scurf and salt had taught stone to glitter. The porter on watch did not carry keys; he carried a sandglass and a book of times, and when the narrow cone of sand gave its last grain he nodded once and stood aside. The archive had opened; the sea had agreed.

Han and Hanna slipped under the lintel into air shaped by tides. The entry chamber was narrow and high, its plaster ribbed like the inside of a shell. Far ahead, beyond the vestibule's dark, an illumination seeped up from channel grilles in the floor: pale lamps under glass, their light tempered by green water, turning the corridors into capillaries of glow. Shelves stood on screw-jacks the height of a grown man; some were cranked aloft to keep their catalogues dry, others hung low with sodden ropes looped through pulleys, lifted in advance of the next swell. From somewhere below came the patient clunk of a clock and the heavier rumble of a sluice-gate beginning to respect an order.

"Two hours on the ebb. Less, if the wind backs," the porter said softly, as if the ceiling could fall if spoken to in the wrong voice. "Tide-clock says twenty-seven minutes before the lower stacks peak dry. If you need the Index, that will be your window." He looked at Han's unmarked glove, then at the other—folded in a kerchief and kept out of sight. Wise boys learn the shape of trouble without seeing it.

"We'll be quick," Han said.

Hanna answered with a nod and stripped her coat, revealing a plain undershirt and forearms that did more explaining than speeches. She coiled the coat and lashed it high on a crank shaft with a one-handed knot, like a sailor saving a chart from weather. "What are we lifting?" she asked.

"Index Leaf," Han said. "The one that tells a moth how to think like a book."

The path to the catalogue hall cut along a channel where water shouldered glass like a polite crowd. They crossed on iron grating. Chill rose through the soles of their boots; Hanna's breath drew tight only to even itself, a habit she did not know she had. In the next chamber, shelves made a grove, each trunk a column of leather and linen labeled in a script the sea had licked flat at the edges. The screw-jacks groaned once as the mechanism advanced another tooth and stabilized. On the far wall, a dial the size of a shield marked the Archive's internal cycle: an outer ring for tide, an inner for sluices, a third hand for the ward that made the place safe in theory.

Han traced the dial with a finger, calibrating the rhythm of this machine of rooms. "There," he said. "When the tide hand crosses the little bell, the Index case opens for two minutes."

Hanna weighed the chamber with her eyes. "And what breaks if we do it wrong?"

"The door reseals," Han said. "And we wait on the flood while the ward complains."

"Complains how?" Hanna asked.

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