They answered the Council's slow teeth with a different kind of motion: not a single strike but a coordinated, stubborn pressure that made procedure creak. The Loom's reprisal was not vengeance; it was a set of deliberate, legal, and public moves designed to make hiding impossible.
Aria opened the night meeting with a slate of choices and a single rule: every action must leave a witness. The Remnants' tiles hummed in the strategy hall as if to agree. Thorne had stayed up until the lamps burned low, turning microetch variants into a language the public could read. Marcus had mapped patrol windows and private docks into a choreography that looked like a supply run and moved like a trap. Keeper Sera had prepared witness packets and warded subpoenas that would make later tampering obvious. Luna had taught a chorus that could be sung in market squares and magistrates' halls—an improvisational cadence that made mapping expensive.
"We do not ambush," Aria said. "We do not lie. We make the ledger speak where it cannot be buried. We protect witnesses and towns. We force the Council to answer in public, or we make the ledger public ourselves."
Their first move was legal and theatrical at once. The Loom released a sealed packet to neutral towns and to Haven's magistrates: copies of the Saltport ledger, the Greyhaven fragments, and a notarized summary of the Remnants' chain of custody. The packet was warded so it could not be altered and stamped with a public notice: any attempt to suppress these records would trigger immediate release to every market square in the Three Towns Network. The guild's emissaries had agreed to the contingency; the packet's arrival was timed to coincide with the Conclave's morning market.
The market that morning was full of ordinary things—bread, bolts of cloth, gossip. The packet's release was a small, precise earthquake. Marketkeepers read the ledger aloud in doorways; magistrates compared notes; mothers who had lost children to correction units listened and then told their own stories. The public framing Aria had drafted made the ledger legible: procurement chains, FACV invoices, facilitator shorthand, and the pattern of off‑manifest drops. People who had been nodes in the committee's experiments now had names and dates they could hold.
While the city listened, Thorne and Marcus executed the Loom's second move: a field interception that looked like a routine escort. A Corrections Unit convoy—officially authorized to move under the Council's emergency clause—was scheduled to pass a Greyhaven route that morning. The Loom's patrols shadowed it with the quiet efficiency of people who had practiced being invisible. When the convoy stopped at a private dock to pick up a crate, Marcus's team moved in with Remnants witnesses and a notarized subpoena. The liaison in the convoy protested with the practiced calm of someone trained to make refusal look like obstruction. Marcus read the warrant aloud and asked for the crate to be opened under Remnants tiles.
The crate contained a device: a small sigil frame threaded with silencer thread and a spool of microetch keyed to cadence keys. The convoy's technicians claimed it was a stabilization implement; Thorne's lens and the Remnants' seals told a different story. The microetch matched the Saltport ledger's variant. The device had been tuned for field grafting and for dampening witness tiles. In the questioning chamber, under warded testimony, a junior technician admitted the crate had been routed through a broker and that the convoy had been instructed to treat certain shipments as "sensitive" and to avoid Remnants witnesses when possible.
The public record of the interception was immediate. Marcus had arranged for neutral magistrates to be present; the convoy's liaison had been recorded refusing a full inventory until compelled by the subpoena. The Loom did not need to shout; the law and the witnesses did the work. The Council's oversight panel could no longer claim ignorance. The convoy's manifest and the device's microetch were entered into the Remnants' custody and presented at the next public session.
That session was the Loom's third move: a demonstration that made technical harm legible without teaching craft. Thorne stood at the lectern with a warded case and a plain, careful explanation. He explained cadence keys and sigildamp geometry in terms the Council could not dismiss: how a device could graft a market memory, how donor language reframed trials as mercy, and how silencer thread could make witness tiles unreliable. He refused to hand over microetch diagrams, but he showed the pattern's effect with a controlled, witnessed demonstration in a warded chamber. A volunteer magistrate read a short, notarized passage while Thorne fed a countervariation through sigildamp tiles; the passage's emotional cadence shifted and the device's response—measured and recorded—made harm visible.
The demonstration did what the Loom had hoped: it made the abstract concrete. Delegates who had argued for closed procedure found themselves watching a device's imprint on a human witness and feeling the political cost of secrecy. The Council's senior clerk, who had once argued for discretion, sat with his hands folded and a face that had learned to count consequences.
But the Loom's reprisal was not only legal and technical; it was civic. Luna led a public stabilization rite in Haven's market that afternoon, a living cadence taught in plain sight. The chorus was intentionally messy—voices slipping, scents swapped, lines changed each time the song turned. The rite did not hide the ledger's facts; it taught towns how to hold seams while the inquiry proceeded. Marketkeepers who had once feared correction units now learned a simple anchor they could carry in a pocket. The public rite was a demonstration of agency: communities could protect themselves without waiting for a distant committee to decide.
The reprisal had immediate political effects. The Council's oversight panel, faced with public testimony, the intercepted device, and a market that had learned to stabilize itself, voted to expand the inquiry and to place several artifacts under immediate Remnants custody. A handful of midrank aides resigned rather than face public testimony; a magistrate who had been slow to act was publicly censured. The committee's spokespeople tried to reframe the Loom's moves as theatrical provocation, but the public had seen the device and the ledger and had heard the marketkeepers' stories. Procedure could no longer be used as a burial ground.
Not everyone applauded. The Loom's actions hardened some factions. A conservative bloc in the Council accused Aria of grandstanding and of undermining trade; a few merchants worried that public exposure would scare clients. That night a small, anonymous package arrived at the Loom's gate: a single, charred sigil tile and a note that read, in careful script, Stop pulling threads. The threat was thin and human and meant to be read as a promise.
Aria did not flinch. She added the tile to the Spiral Log and wrote the day's entry with hands that had learned to be both blunt and careful: Public packet release to neutral towns; Corrections convoy intercepted and device seized under Remnants subpoena; Thorne's public demonstration of device effects; Haven market stabilization rite taught and notarized; Council expands inquiry and places artifacts under Remnants custody; midrank resignations and public censure; anonymous threat received and logged.
Before dawn, the Loom moved again—quieter this time. Thorne and a small team visited the Veiled Crossing workshop under warded escort and recovered a set of halfassembled frames and a ledger of test runs. The frames were quarantined; the ledger was copied and sealed. Marcus arranged for the families of the Severing's children to be given priority in witness protection and for the Remnants to fund emergency care for those left with grafted fragments. Keeper Sera prepared a petition to the Council asking for expedited protections for children and for a legal prohibition on unsupervised correction deployments in neutral towns.
The Loom's reprisal had a cost: it made enemies, it risked trade, and it forced the sanctuary to move in public where politics could cut both ways. But it also changed the terms of the fight. The ledger's teeth had been exposed; the devices had been shown; the towns had learned a rite that made mapping expensive. Procedure could no longer hide the committee's work behind polite seals.
Aria walked the Loom's courtyard at dawn with Luna at her side. The child's small hand fit into hers like a promise that was also a demand. "Did we make them listen?" Luna asked, as if the world's complexities could be answered in a single breath.
"We made it harder for them to pretend they didn't hear," Aria said. "That's the work. Make the ledger legible, protect witnesses, teach towns to hold their seams. The rest is patient law and stubborn care."
They did not pretend the path ahead was simple. The Council's expanded inquiry would be a long, legal thing; the committee's higher patrons might still be hidden behind layers of procedure. The Loom's reprisal had bought them time and leverage, not victory. But it had also shown a truth the committee had tried to hide: when people hold their stories like stones and when witnesses are protected, memory cannot be bought or buried.