No crowds. No street mazes, just glass, labels, and four floors of stairs that multiply when you blink.
Museums day.
Translation: keep silence from turning into accidents.
We set the net at opening bell. Same mesh, different anchors: ticket hall, lacquer gallery, history wing, rooftop garden. Kunou charmed the guard cat (official title) with dried bonito and got us permission to "assist traffic." Sitri pre-booked time slots to thin the herds. Tsubaki color-coded the routes and taped over two "staff only" doors that looked like dares. Rias did her smile-that-gets-donations. Dragon promised to be quiet and then forgot he has lungs.
Ren rolled his shoulders until they clicked into place. "Stair checklist?"
"Handrails, landings, camera blind spots," I said. "Anything that makes feet forget they're feet."
He nodded. Hibird peeped proctor mode and puffed up like a badge. Roll trotted, tail leaving dust-fine sparks that only wards can see.
First warning came as a rhythm, not a sight—tiny stumbles, exactly every tenth step on the south stairwell. Subtle enough you'd call it clumsiness. Frequent enough to stack bruises by noon.
I ran two fingers along the rail. The metal hummed wrong. Someone had laced it with a stumble-coin chain: cheap charms glued under the bracket caps, tuned to trip attention, not bodies.
"Vendor prank?" Ren murmured.
"Amateur contractor with a spreadsheet," I said. "We don't bill for this."
He grinned and went to work. Ren's Mist doesn't lie; it… sands. He breathed over each coin until the note dulled, then slid a sticky note over the cap: maintenance. I palmed the charms into a specimen bag for later composting. By the third landing the rhythm broke. A teacher in socks exhaled like a prayer and did not know why.
In the lacquer room, the labels were singing.
Not metaphor. The ink itself held a whisper—barely there, just enough to call for wandering hands. Touch me, I'm older than your country. Classic museum curse.
Kunou tapped the glass with a fingernail and frowned. "Rude."
"Fixable," I said. Sky Crown sketched the room's lines in quiet gold—display cases as islands, people as currents, whispers like filaments between them. I didn't pull. Just… parted threads. The ink shut up. A docent's shoulders unknotted. Somewhere a security monitor stopped blinking orange.
Heaven's audit line brushed the roof again. Present? Yes. Interference? Preventative. Hostility? Miss me with that. The thread made a notation and drifted on like a health inspector who sees gloves and hairnets and decides not to ask about the knives.
We took the history wing next. Kids collected facts like trading cards. Ren shadowed a group near the Kofun case—clay haniwa soldiers staring with horse faces and patience.
"Your Mist is breathing too high," I said.
He exhaled through his heels. The air settled. Better.
Then the mirror called me.
Not loud. Not theatrical. A bronze disc, pitted, foxed, older than three systems of government. The card said "ritual object, unknown provenance." The ward said: do not poke the dragon.
Sky Crown ticked my ribs like a finger on a crystal glass.
Not now, I told it.
The reflection didn't agree. It showed the room without me, then with me, then with lines—thin gold filaments stitching case to case, person to person, ward to ward, like the museum was a harp and the city the song.
I could have plucked it. I didn't. Guardian is not "play with old gods on a field trip."
Ren followed my gaze. "Is it—"
"An antique," I said. "We leave antiques where they live."
We pivoted before curiosity got ideas. Hibird left one grain of sesame on the case edge as an apology to whoever was listening.
Lunch: noodles in the courtyard. Rias thanked the cashier and the cashier added a boiled egg for free. Sitri arranged benches by shade density like she was playing five-dimensional Go. Tsubaki caught Dragon before he tried to help a statue "hold" his tray. Kunou's tails did a slow, pleased sway; she likes it when the city hums instead of howls.
Two o'clock: the problem with crates.
Traveling exhibits mean wooden boxes with stencils that say IMPORTANT THINGS. Today's boxes said Textiles — Handle Dry in three languages. One of them said emptiness if you tasted it with the right part of the tongue.
Folding space in a loan crate. Fun.
The lid was inside-out—an origami trick scaled to furniture. Not malicious by itself. Add yesterday's beacon swallows and you get a mail slot for kids.
I didn't open it. I set my palm on the wood and let Cloud spread thin, pressure without puncture, domain like a glove. The fold tried to turn; I didn't let it. Ren's eyes narrowed as he felt the torque.
"Your turn," I said.
He slid Mist between the layers, not cutting—lubricating. The crease sighed. The inside rejoined the outside with a little pop no one heard but three gods and a bird. I chalked a ward on the seam that says, in bureaucrat, inspected—repack.
"Who signs the invoice?" Kunou asked, peeking.
"People who don't like phones," I said.
We followed the paper up the chain: shipping desk to curator's office to a back hallway that smelled like coffee and risk. The curator herself was clean—human, exhausted, loves pottery more than people, the usual. The intern on her floor had the wrong shoes and the wrong bag and the exact kind of neutral expression that belongs on a passport photo. His aura carried the same thread as the alley boys from yesterday: Hero-adjacent, subcontract mood.
He clocked us. He didn't run. He did the smarter thing: reached for the polite chemical in his pocket.
Ren was faster. He stepped into the doorway and became architecture. Not a threat. A geometry problem you can't walk past without solving.
"City ordinance," I told the intern. "No private apertures in public spaces. Also no chemical irritants in textile wings. We like visitors to keep their eyeballs."
He weighed three options and picked "pretend not to understand Japanese."
Kunou, helpful, switched to English and then to a dialect that makes devils itch. He understood all of it.
"Receipt," I said, and handed him a form. Confiscated Items: Two aerosol charms; one folding hinge; three beacon notes; one idea you should be ashamed of. Sign here. He signed like his boss would be mad either way. I gave him a copy and a map to the ward office. We are nothing if not customer service.
We didn't arrest anyone. Not our jurisdiction. We did something meaner: we called Collections. Museums are made of people who will fight you to the teeth over humidity ranges. The intern got a tour of rules he didn't know existed and left knowing the exact weight of a registrar's disappointment.
Midafternoon had quiet teeth. The kind where nothing is wrong and you don't trust it. Tsubaki caught it first, a wrinkle in the flow by the modern wing—a tourist family walking the same loop three times like a spell. The father's phone carried a loop overlay; his eyes were following a path only he could see.
"Let him finish," I said. "Then we erase the chalk."
Ren ghosted a Mist thread across the handset. The app stuttered and rebooted to "museum map for boring people." The family turned toward the café and became mortals again. He looked ten feet taller.
"Don't get cocky," I said.
"I'm going to get a pastry," he said.
"Bring two," I said.
The rooftop garden is where museums remember they're also buildings. Wind, skyline, a view of Kyoto that makes even devils stop talking. We timed it so our kids hit the railing when the light turned honey. Teachers took pictures that will be phone backgrounds for a month. Dragon discovered koi. Koi survived.
Heaven's thread flicked once more. This time it paused on me, like a heartbeat held too long. Sky Crown made a polite chime in reply—yes, present; yes, bound; no, not yours. The thread let go. Somewhere a scribe checked a box under non-hostile anomaly continues to self-regulate.
Good. Keep walking.
We closed in reverse. Stairs sang right; lacquer labels stayed dull; crates sat like boxes instead of bad ideas. I handed the confiscated charms to the registrar in an envelope labeled please don't put these near anything that has ever been blessed. She nodded like I'd just told her the fire exit was blocked and sprinted away.
Outside, the buses lined up on time again because the liaison fears Kunou more than traffic. Dragon conked out before the third seat squeaked. Presidents blocked the aisle and counted heads without looking. The queen folded the schedule and did not need it. Rias thanked everyone, again, and meant it. Shopkeepers pulled their shutters with the easy shrug of a good day.
"Stair bruise count?" I asked.
"Zero," Ren said, surprised at himself.
"Correct answer," I said. "You like pastries?"
He handed me the extra one he'd already bought and tried to look like he'd predicted this.
We walked the emptying halls once more. Hibird apologized to the mirror for existing. Roll left three atoms of Cloud on the south stair, a thumbprint of mine that only things with opinions can see.
Kyoto settled its shoulders. The museum breathed out. The map in my chest drew one more clean line from glass to garden to gate and tucked itself away.
No headlines. No fire. No "learning opportunities" for the Hero kids except a stern email and a ban from the good vending machines.
Just stairs that stayed stairs, glass that stayed glass, and a bus full of students who'll remember koi and wind and a bronze disc that looked like the moon.
Guardian work, keep the quiet from breaking.