"By lowering the stacks into water they don't prefer," Han said. "Slowly. With dignity." He did not voice the thought that if the stacks went down, men might go with them. The Archive did not care for flesh; its sympathy lay with paper.

They did not wander. The Index chamber waited three turns down and one short passage up, a room whose floor had been raised to a platform above the wet veins. The door was a circle of bronze set in a stone frame. In its face, a tide-clock's face repeated: three hands, three rings, a little bell where three marks met. Between the door and a niche with space for a reader stood a row of mirrors on adjustable arms and a single iron wheel connected to a shaft that disappeared under the floor.

Hanna put her shoulder beside the wheel and tested it with a slow lean. The assembly answered with a dull, reluctant movement, like an animal deciding whether to obey. The chain that rose from the floor toward a hidden sluice tightened by a degree. She let the wheel roll back, marking in memory how the counterweight wanted to behave. "I can keep it steady," she said. "For a time."

Han unwrapped the bell jar and set it on the reader's niche, then lifted the glass with care. The moth crouched on its brass perch as if it had never moved in its life, then opened and closed its wings once, as precise and disinterested as a clerk acknowledging a visitor. "We'll ask nicely," Han said to it, and the absurdity of saying it aloud made the words settle into the room like a promise rather than a joke.

He checked the clock. The tide hand crawled toward the bell. The ward hand sat at its sober mark. The sluice hand pulled against it, asking for permission to lower the channels another inch. Hanna set her palm to the wheel. "Tell me when," she said.

"When the bell and the tide hand kiss," Han said. "Then the lock releases. Two minutes of mercy."

He adjusted the mirrors by thumb-screw: one to the moth's height, one to the door's face, one to the niche where a reader would stand. The quartz bead in the moth's head, greedy of light, drank the greenish glow and broke it into patient specks. Han lifted his unmarked glove and traced in the air the arc he'd learned from the bell the night before. The moth tilted its head by the exact degree a question occupies.

"Now," Han said.

Hanna leaned into the wheel. The chain murmured. Somewhere underfoot, water obeyed. The tide hand touched the bell on the clock-face and a click sounded in the bronze door like a throat deciding to be honest. A seam broke around the central boss. Within the seam, a round chamber revealed itself behind thick glass: felt-lined, a single page resting on a cradle under a transparent lid, a lock-bar poised to snap shut the moment the tide hand drew breath again.

Han flicked two mirror arms and the moth's quartz eye gathered their small lamp into a thin line that laid itself along the glass lid. The parchment within was less a page than an absence of pulp: pressed thin, the ink faded by salt breath. The writing served as suggestion rather than instruction. Under the ink, though, the fibers told a different story. The moth's light ran across the lid; its wings opened in half strokes, closed again, adjusted. It was not reading letters but the pressure memory left in the paper: the ghosts of numbers where a stylus had bitten and lifted and bitten again.

Hanna's breath held on the steadying wheel. The iron answered with a wanting that lived in metal—this is heavy, this is heavier, this is what I will do to you if you let me. Her pulse took its measure and did not announce it.

"Thirty heartbeats," Han said, not because the moth needed it, but because he did. The tide clock's little hand ticked a mark forward with a democrat's politeness. The lock-bar in the door twitched toward ready. The moth's light drew a sequence of tiny squares in the air and a pulse ran through its wings like a phrase repeated to oneself to get it right the next time.

The lid in the round chamber lifted a finger-width. Enough for a page. Enough for a mistake.

"Hold," Han said quietly.

"Hold is happening," Hanna said through her teeth, and the wheel's spokes accepted her attention.

Han slid two fingers into the chamber and lifted the page by its cloth tab. The parchment was not soft; it had become something like dry leaf, strong and certain so long as you held it where it preferred. He withdrew the Index Leaf, eased the lid, and the lock-bar came down with a tender authority. The tide hand moved past the bell; the seam closed; the chamber returned to being a story the door told itself.

Hanna let the wheel be heavy again. Water coursed; the chain slackened. The ward hand on the clock face quivered and decided to permit another few minutes of dignity before the Archive began its slow descent back into its element. She straightened, rolled her shoulder once, and took the page in both hands without pretense. The moth, on its perch, opened and closed again with satisfaction: the mechanical equivalent of a scribe wetting a pen.

"Index," Han said. "Let's see if you remember your own bones."

The Leaf was a map that refused to draw anything except behavior. No cities, no names, no 'here.' A series of notations in tiny numerals pronounced the order in which a set of signatures should be visited, the length of pauses that must be held between them, and the direction of each turn at a cross-reference. It was dance notation for a scholar whose partner was a book. The last three lines referenced a set of pages that were not in the Archive at all; they belonged to a ledger in private keeping somewhere upriver of commerce and downwind of law.

"The foundry stamp," Hanna said, pointing. On the margin, a blind emboss had registered once when the page had been pressed between plates. A faint circle with a notch at twelve o'clock. Not the temple's seal.

"Bellhouse Nine," Han said. "Hollow Foundry. Their inventory marks are not on the temple's list." That fact did not bother him; it comforted him. Every city depended on what it ignored.

The moth stepped off its perch like a decision and let air be a floor under it. It hovered over the Index Leaf and shivered its wings one measure, then another. The quartz bead drank light and gave it back as a neat trembling line that ran across the page and then along Han's gloved fingers. The chalk on the folded glove in his pocket warmed, a heat like a thought passing near a secret. He did not take it out. He knew when he had been watched.

"Time," Hanna said, and not as a scold. The floor's faint tremor had changed, a lower tone settling into the iron: the Archive nudging its stacks to prepare for flood. The porter's sandglass would be half-spent.

They retraced through the grove of shelves. Han cradled the Index Leaf in a stiff folder as careful as you can be with something that will not forgive you twice. The moth rode his shoulder like a polite superstition. In the vestibule they caught a draft that tasted not of the sea but of something older: a mineral dryness like chalk baked and ground and passed through many quiet hands. Han stopped. "Do you smell that?"

Hanna did. She raised her chin, took air in through her nose, and rolled it across a memory of cellars and attics and courtrooms. "Not temple chalk. Not the cheap stuff from schoolrooms. Slaked and sifted. Audit-grade."

They were no longer alone.

Beadles of the Pale Tithe came with writs the way rain comes with clouds. Two stood in the threshold where the vestibule turned to the exit: leather aprons neat, ledger gloves tucked, faces arranged around the absence of personality. The third waited with a folded paper held palm-out, a blade's length from courtesy.

"Proceedings," he said. "To preserve evidence belonging to doctrine." He did not say please. Beadles do not practice that hand.

Hanna considered how quickly she could introduce the man to a wall. She did not indulge the thought. "We are in possession of an Index we lawfully consulted." Her voice did not lift. It never needed to.

"We will examine it," the beadle said.

"You will not," Han said. He did not reach for his papers. He kept the note from the Vaults folded, a thorn he chose to pocket. "The Archive leases access to memory. It does not lease custody. If you wish to challenge the Archive's rule, try the sea. It gives longer answers than the law."

The beadles looked at each other the way ink looks at blotting-paper: a calculation of appetite. The one with the writ tilted his head. "The Auditor expects cooperation."

"The Auditor may enjoy disappointment," Han said. He stepped left and discovered that the vestibule had been designed by men who loved the weight of books more than the angle of ambush: a narrow; a column; a buttress; and there the porter, not interfering, but holding a brass rod across the lower half of the passage in the posture of a man explaining a rule to a stubborn door.

"Two-hour leases," the porter said to no one. "No one squats on the ebb. Not even doctrine." His sandglass lay on its side in his palm; he tilted it a fraction and let a single grain jump. The Archive thrummed once as a sluice accepted a compromise.

Hanna moved when the room admitted motion. Not a fight. A redirection. She passed the beadle so close her sleeve acknowledged his, not touching hard enough to be a shove, not soft enough to be apology. The jar rode her other arm; the moth's shadow crossed the beadle's cuff; he flinched, small and involuntary, and she saw the kind of man he was: made of orders, good at them, frightened when choices were offered in small packages.

Han followed. The beadles did not try their metal on the porter's rod. The Archive owned that metal, and men who fought buildings in their own basements became stories no one finished.

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