Dawn came like a question mark — gray and hesitant, with gulls making scratchy answers over the harbor. The dojo felt smaller in that light, as if the walls were folding in to listen. Kaito woke to the thread at his wrist humming a little faster than usual; the scrap in his shirt with the words OPEN THE LEDGER — Ashen had warmed against his ribs like a small, hot stone.
Haru was already up, moving through the yard with the focused slow of someone counting everything that could go wrong. Rein sat at the low table, inked fingers tracing the same map from the roof. Mira checked knots and braided seals as if she were tuning instruments. Toma, restless and bleary-eyed, curled on a pallet in the corner like a man who'd been given a clock he didn't understand.
"You look like you slept on ledgers," Haru said without looking at Kaito. It was partly a joke and partly a report.
Kaito swung his legs over the mat and gave himself a brisk shake. "I slept on a lullaby," he said. It was true — the lullaby had been the last thing in his head at every dark minute since the market — and it steadied him. He wanted to do something bigger than steady; he wanted to act.
Today was the day the collectors would decide how bold they would be, Haru had said. The trackers on the docks had gone silent overnight; either the collectors had vanished to the Shelf sooner than expected, or they were setting a trap that hummed in the water like a net.
"Plan," Rein said. He set the map down between them with the precision of a man laying out a letter. "We move the crate under guard to the Registry at noon. A public, escorted transfer. The collectors will be tempted to interfere at the public route. We keep the ledger visible; make the threat of a theft a theater move to flush out those who watch by rope or by shard."
"You'd let them watch it in public?" Mira asked. She braided another thread into the crate-anchor straps with a grim mouth. "If the collectors are as bold as last night, the theatrics could turn violent."
"That's why we use two escorts," Haru said. "One real, well-guarded—Haru, Rein, Mira, myself. The other a decoy: a small crate of old ledgers and the dojo's banners. If they take the bait, we follow the bait. If they don't, we deliver the real crate to the Registry and keep an eye on the Shelf."
Kaito's fingers worked the scrap inside his shirt like a talisman. "And if they try to steal it early?" he asked.
"You don't run at a hunter," Haru said. "You let them show themselves and then you decide. Tonight you learned to choose your fight. Today you learn to choose your place."
They moved through the morning with a choreography of small, certain actions. Rein painted sigil anchors along the route in chalk that smelled like wet ink; Mira looped the dojo's cords into fail-safes; Haru organized watchmen at corners and asked for a Registry guardsman to parade in plain sight as a lure. Kaito felt the calm of a man tying the last knot before a climb.
At eleven, the crate lay on a low cart. The decoy crate — rough planks and rusted bands — smelled of old dust and false value. The real crate rested in a safe-room, sealed with three threads and Mira's small woven charm. Kaito's job, Haru said, was to stay visible enough to be interesting and remain hidden enough not to be useful.
They set out like a ceremony: Haru at the cart's head, Rein at the flank, Mira beside the wheel, and Kaito walking with a thin red ribbon tied to his wrist so the Registry watchers could see him as the host they'd come to escort. The city looked busier than usual; people peered from doorways and hawkers paused. The public route they chose was a straight line of market and law — the kind of path that kept hands in sight.
Everything was deliberate. They passed the dock where the ship lights had sputtered the night before. Kaito felt, more than saw, tiny pulses under the ground — the shard-net under the canals twitching as if someone below had touched a chord. He hummed the lullaby; the thread answered like a small fiddle.
They reached the square and the Registry doors. A thin crowd had gathered — curiosity mixing with the weather. The guard officer who had been planted by Haru feigned a clumsy stumble that sent a ripple of nervous laughter through the watchers. Haru set the decoy crate in the square and, as practiced, had it inspected by clerks who asked questions and pretended they were worse than the noise.
It was exactly as Haru had predicted: the collectors watched and did not move. They waited for a signal.
Then — a whisper in the crowd, not loud but like a stone dropped into a pond — someone shouted.
"Fire!"
Lantern flames leapt into motion near the eastern alley. A scuffle, screams like old paper tearing. Panic smoothed outward like oil. People shoved to see, buying time for those who waited to act.
Kaito's heart hammered. He could feel the shard-net yawned open like a mouth. The decoy crate — the bait — was supposed to go, not the real one, but men in cloaks slipped through the crowd like knives. One of them had his hood thrown back, face a grate of teeth and ledger ink. He lunged at the decoy.
Haru's hand flashed. Rein's anchors ignited like tiny beacons. Mira's threading hand shot out and caught the man's wrist.
But movement in the crowd was riotous; a second hooded figure — not a collector's man but someone in the plain dress of a Registry clerk — pressed forward with an official bearing, and people did not stop him. He moved to the cart and, with the practiced ease of someone with permission, set a palm on the real crate.
The world narrowed to the feel of a hand on wood and the thought: Not the crate. Kaito lunged.
His hand closed on the Registry clerk's sleeve. The man's eyes were ordinary and bored — until Kaito saw the shard glint at his belt. It was the shard-light he had been detecting since the docks that first night, the precise, impatient glint of a collector's tool. A breath of cold ran through the lullaby as if someone had run a finger along a harp.
"You!" Kaito shouted. Not a roar, but a cleaned shout that cut through panic. "Hands off!"
The clerk's face did not change. "By order of the Court," he said, and his voice held the flat authority of a penned sentence.
Mira's thread snapped taut. Rein's sigils shuddered and then bit. Haru moved like a solid thing between them. But the clerk's hand on the crate did not tremble. He nodded with the almost perfect politeness of a man delivering a package to its rightful owner. "I have registry clearance," he said. "Special Committee writ."
Haru's voice was slow. "Let me see it."
The clerk's eyes flicked as if he had rehearsed this answer for years. "It is sealed," he said. "Public reading scheduled. Move the real crate to the Registry under escorts. The committee waits. We must obey protocol."
The crowd swarmed in confusion at that. Protocol had teeth. It had been the Registry that first gave the collectors their power — but protocol also opened doors.
Kaito's chest turned a little cold. He looked at Haru, expecting the old man to smile and break ranks. Haru's face was a map of carefully packed storms.
"This doesn't feel right," Kaito said, and the lullaby hummed a long low note like a bell under water.
"Then don't trust it," Haru said.
Before Kaito could answer, a sudden movement split the scene: a cutter of light running along the ground. From the rooftops, someone had dropped series of thin wires that snapped across the public square like bright fishing lines. The collector's net reacted; the shard signals flared.
A dozen cloaked men poured out from the shadow of the alleys — the collectors' strike team. In the confusion they moved like a swarm, cutting the square into pockets of fear. Two of them bore kites of pale glass that threw shard-light over the crowd and over the cart.
Kaito felt the lullaby spike into a warning and then a rope of resolve. He did not have Haru's age or Rein's precise hand, but he had learned a thing or two: naming, offering, and choosing.
He saw Mira go for the decoy with a graceful, efficient motion to draw attention. Haru blocked a collector who tried to break into the Registry staff lines. Rein threw glyphs like nets that knotted legs, toppling bodies. Kaito—small, quick, noisy—ran for the real crate.
A collector with a shard-kite swung his hand and a thin blade of light skimmed toward Kaito. It grazed his shoulder; the touch burned like a stamp. Kaito did not cry out — he had learned the small discipline of not giving pain a stage. He dived, hand on the crate's iron band.
He felt the crate's freight in his palm, and something under the wood scraped like a trapped animal. The lullaby in his chest roared approval and fear. He called a memory like a coin — the laughter of the market child, the rhythm of Haru's footfalls, the smell of burnt crust — and pushed that offering into the crate's edge.
The shard nearest him flinched as if stung. A thin ribbon of glass-light struck the water-filled gutter and fizzed out with an angry sizzle. But movement elsewhere had found purchase: a collector at the square's edge had latched onto a shoulder and the man tugged — his partner — and for a frantic breath Kaito was pulled from the crate.
He hit the ground and tasted dust and salt. A shouting match broke out near the registry doorway — a man in an official seal trying to keep order while his papers were snatched and stamped. Mira's thread wrapped Kaito's ankle and he nearly went down a second time; Rein knocked a collector's knee with a laugh that was not happy.
They were winning, and they were losing, and the two things felt the same. In the comet of motion, Kaito saw a flash of the same bored face he'd held earlier — the clerk with the shard — stepping back from the crate with a smooth hand. Behind him, a small boat, fast and low, had slipped to the quay like an empty thought.
The crate — the real crate — tilted as if a hand under the cart had shoved it. For a moment it looked like it would stay. Then the cart's wheel hit a sunk cobble and the crate slid, skittered, and the men around it were split like paper. The boatman pushed off with quick, wet hands and the crate — or perhaps a man carrying its weight — leapt into the waiting craft.
Kaito scrambled to his feet and reached out; his fingers closed on a splintered rope, and for an instant the world hung on the feel of a single palm.
Then the boatshot. The rope snapped. The craft threw a spray of water and the quay fell behind like a forgetting. The collectors had taken the ledger.
He felt the lullaby go mute like a throat that had been cut. Not of blood — only a small, cold silence. Kaito's legs turned to wax. A dozen shouts flared around him: curses, orders, the whine of a shard trying to pick up a signal.
Haru's hand closed on Kaito's shoulder. "Move," he snapped. "We follow, but not blindly. Rein: anchors. Mira: thread the net. Find the web, not the boat. The boat is a bait; the web is the trap."
Kaito did the only thing he could think of: he leaned into the harness of his new learning. He hummed the lullaby like a thread and let it become the map he needed. He stepped forward and met Haru's eyes.
"We'll get it back," Haru said, not certain, but certain enough.
They moved as one through the breaking crowd, following the wake. Above them, where the rooftops held watch, a hooded figure pressed a shard to his palm and spoke, voice a small, satisfied thing.
"Elys's Shelf," he said. "Open the ledger."
The lullaby stopped humming and began to call — not a lullaby now, but a different song. Kaito felt the change in his chest like a bell changing tone. This was not a beginning; it was acceleration.
They were late by one tide.