The moon came down to the door and pretended to be light.
Salt sighed above us like a tired sea while the Echo Vault breathed its slow, underground breath. Lamps burned the color of tea. Shadows kept their manners. Somewhere deeper in the stone, a bell chimed once without metal, the sound of a throat deciding not to speak.
"We start now," said the silver-haired courier. Their cracked-glass pendant caught the lampfire and returned nothing. "Before the thing outside learns how to pronounce our names."
They led us through a corridor cut too straight to be an accident. Along the walls hung masks made of paper and ash, each tied with a red ribbon that color seemed to know how to stay new forever. Some wore painted smiles, but most wore nothing at all.
"First rule," the courier said, palm skimming a mask without touching it. "You are not your face. If you can be stolen by a mirror, you were never whole to begin with."
They stopped before a chamber whose floor was a shallow bowl of black water. The surface didn't reflect; it was listening. I could feel it listen to my heartbeat, taking notes of the rhythm.
"Sky Wolf," they said to Ji Ming. "Walk to the far side."
He stepped out over the basin. The water did not ripple, but the air did, a soft distortion like heat shivering above a blade. He moved with the discipline of a man who'd learned to keep his breath where no enemy could reach it. Halfway across, the pendant at the courier's neck made a small sound… glass realizing it could break.
"Now," they said, "walk back without leaving a shape."
Ji Ming glanced at me, and the bond stirred… silver, low, and reliably steady. He exhaled and went again.
This time, he did not silence himself. He became a series of small, human sounds: a boot whispering upon the stone; leather kissing leather at his wrists; the soft release of breath that wasn't a warrior's measure but a living man not counting. He reached the rim and set his hand on the rock beside mine. The water did not catch him. Instead it seemed to kindly forget him.
"Good," the courier said. "A reflection is greedy. Feed it emptiness, it eats you. Feed it life, and it loses its appetite."
They turned to me. "White Lotus. Speak across the bowl so I can't hear you."
I looked at Ji Ming. He gave a little nod that meant: you already know how.
I knelt and pressed my palms together, not for prayer but for shape. The Vault's air smelled faintly of salt and smoke and the brittle sweetness of old paper. I thought of the courtyard after the Forge broke, the lantern flame tilting in Ya Zhen's shaking hand. I thought of Ji Ming's fingers on my wrist when the envoy's blade had turned my name into a target.
When I spoke, the words did not leave my throat. I shaped them in the air between us the way a mother shapes warmth over a fever: Breathe here.
The black water did not stir. Across the basin, the courier's mouth tilted. "Better than silence. Silence can be heard. This…" They gestured to the space between my hands. "This is an absence that knows what it is."
They walked the rim with a slight limp I hadn't seen before. "You two are learning what the Court never taught: that power is politeness with a spine. Again."
We practiced until the lamps burned lower. We were not striking or resisting; we were refusing to be harvested. Ji Ming learned to carry his weight like a rumor no one could repeat correctly. I learned to put my voice where mirrors could not kneel. Between each attempt, we stood too near each other, and the bond hummed like a small animal asleep in both our chests.
At one pause, he touched the edge of my sleeve. "You're shaking."
"Only where I'm made of person," I said. "The rest is pretending very well."
His mouth softened. "Then let me share the pretense."
He lifted my hand, set it against his sternum. The beat there steadied mine because it refused not to… and I let it.
From the threshold, Ya Zhen watched us with a face that could have been concern, calculation or both. The burn on her palm had cooled to the color of dried plum flesh.
"Enough for tonight," the courier decided. "The thing outside is patient, but even patience has an appetite. So, we'll feed it a dull day."
They led us away from the basin and into a hall with a table made of doors. Steam curled from bowls of melted salt water sweetened with some leaf unyielding to death. We drank. The heat returned my hands to me. For a handful of minutes, none of us were weapons.
"Your Order," Ji Ming said to the courier. "You call yourselves an echo."
"We call ourselves what we are." They set the cracked pendant against the wood, as if giving it rest. "An echo is only a sound that refuses to die. It's not a voice. It's what a voice leaves behind that can still push a door open."
"And the Hand?" Ya Zhen asked, not quite idle.
"There is no Hand," they said again, patient as gravity. "There are only fingers that remember how to shut a wound."
A whisper of something akin to hurt moved behind Ya Zhen's eyes but refused to be seen. She took a long breath and pushed it away. "Then who sent the ribbons to the Lotus Court?"
"Everyone," the courier said, my skin prickling. "And no one. A myth is the only presence one can't blackmail."
They tipped their chin toward me. "The message you brought says teach it wrong. We will. We will make rebellion so ugly the Mirror won't wear it well."
"How?" I asked.
"By wanting without art."
They rose, took a lantern, and guided us to a narrow slit that opened in a shaft of salt. The moon had found a seam and was pouring itself down in a wash of pallid light. It moved across the shaft like a careful thief, touching nothing.
"Look," the courier said.
At first I saw only pale. Then a wrinkle in it, then a breath. A circle of light thickened, thinned, thickened… as if learning how to be a pulse.
"The Mirror," Ji Ming said softly.
"It's searching for your edges," the courier said. "It can't understand why you didn't break the same way twice. That's good. An enemy who thinks you're a pattern will always be late."
"You sound almost… fond of it," Ya Zhen said.
"I'm fond of puzzles that want to eat me," the courier said, and smiled with all the humor of a blade in its scabbard. "They make the living stay awake."
We slept in a room carved like a held breath. The Vault provided mats that gave forgiveness to our bones. However, at the doorway, Ji Ming hesitated.
"I can take the threshold," he said. "If it comes the way light does."
"It will come the way loneliness does," Ya Zhen said from her pallet. "When you stop guarding."
Ji Ming looked at me again. I lifted a corner of my blanket. "Share the wall with me."
He obeyed like a man following a rule he wanted to believe in. His shoulder found the stone near mine. We did not touch. We didn't need to. The bond lay between us like a rope crossed over a river no one else could see. Sleep found us not because we were safe, but because we agreed to act as if we could be.
We woke to the smell of iron.
The Vault's bell shivered once. The cracked-glass pendant around the courier's neck sang a thin, unpretty note.
"It's trying the old doors," they said, a lantern already in hand. "Listening for hinges."
In the chamber with the black water, the surface had begun to pucker as if the room were a mouth about to ask a question. The air had edges, and my skin tightened to hold me in.
"Positions," the courier said, and the word had the weight of years of people obeying it and living long enough to teach someone else.
Ya Zhen set her back to the wall, palms open, the burned one hidden like a secret that had learned discretion. Ji Ming stepped to the rim opposite me, sabers sheathed, hands empty. He looked wrong without steel, but more himself.
"Remember your lessons," the courier said. "Walk as if you have never learned to admire your outline. Speak where ears can't kneel. And want nothing beautifully."
They smiled at Ya Zhen without warmth. "That last one is yours."
The water dimpled. A circle of light lipped up like a child trying a new word. In it, the suggestion of a face: a curve that could be a cheek; a dark spot that could be an eye; and a brightness that could be a blade.
"Sol," Ji Ming said, the sound feeling like a hand softly cradling around the panic in my stomach.
"I'm here."
We breathed together. The Vault breathing with us.
The Mirror tried names—pushing them into the water the way a thief pushes different keys into a lock. Ji.Ming.Sol.Lotus.Wolf. Each failed, not because they were wrong, but because we didn't offer them anything to fasten to.
"Offer it something ugly," the courier whispered. "Quickly."
Ya Zhen stepped forward, and for once she did not choose grace. She pulled the burned palm free and pressed it toward the water, all the way open, raw old scar bright under the lamp.
"This is my wanting," she said. "It keeps me alive and wrecks everything I touch."
The water flinched. The circle rippled and spat itself back flat. The light recoiled, not far, but enough.
"Good," the courier said, surprised into honesty. "Again."
I lifted my hands, not arranged, not prayer, fingers ink-stained and still nicked from the fortress rubble. "This is my voice," I said. "It is selfish. It wants one man to keep breathing, even if the world prefers a story."
The water shivered. Ji Ming made a sound that might have been a laugh if it hadn't been so close to a vow.
"And this," he said, stepping where his outline would be most forgettable, "is my honor. It was useful once. Now it's a knife I only use to cut myself free."
The pool went still. The circle of light thinned to a thread, then a memory of a thread, then something even the Vault refused to keep.
Above us, the pale shaft dimmed. The moon went back to being a sky's habit instead of a mouth.
We stood there breathing like thieves who had stolen five minutes.
The courier exhaled the way a teacher does when a student has not died. "You see? It wants to wear you at your prettiest. Give it what's true at its worst."
Ya Zhen closed her hand slowly, as if trapping the last of her hurt where it belonged. "How long will that work?"
"Until your shame becomes art again."
She almost smiled. "So never sleep."
"Sleep," the courier said. "But dream gracelessly."
They turned away, then paused. "We leave before dusk."
"Leave?" Ji Ming said.
"The Vault won't hold a curious god twice," they answered. "It knows our tricks now. We'll teach it new ones somewhere uglier."
"Where?" I asked.
The courier's mouth made that not-smile again. "To the place where every reflection goes to starve. The city that forgot what water is."
Ya Zhen's eyes sharpened. "The Salt Fell."
"The Salt Fell," they agreed. "Where the Empire stored its lies and the sun did the rest."
The bell in the stone trembled as if it was brushed from the other side. The pendant sang once, softly.
Ji Ming looked at me. I didn't wait for the question this time.
"Yes," I said, it was easier than the first, because each one drew a path where the next could follow.
We began to pack what little we had learned to carry. The Vault's doors watched us without interest, and the masks did not envy our faces. Somewhere above, the moon remembered its distance and went paler with relief.
Outside, the salt would keep no tracks, because we would need to leave none worth following.
But as I tied the last strap, I felt the black water behind us remember the shape of a circle, just for a breath, then let it go.
Not everything that learns you gets to keep you. Not everything that keeps you learns you well.
We would have to travel on that distinction like a blade.