The strand around Aylin's boot pulled toward the basalt gate.
She planted her other heel and nearly lost that one too. Black-green ice stretched from the false river, climbed the leather, and tightened around her ankle with the patient strength of a root finding stone.
Jiang lunged for it.
Aylin raised two fingers. "Wait."
He stopped with his cracked beak above the strand. Black-Crown watched from the lee, body still lowered over the worn-grey chick. A strike at Aylin's boot would put Jiang's face within reach of both the root and the adult's bill.
With a chip of basalt, Aylin pried under the frozen ring until green scales peeled from her boot. The strand stayed joined to the seam and pulsed toward the uphill water.
Copper struck stone beyond the rise.
Three uneven blows. A pause. Two quick answers, then the clatter of workers joining late.
Aylin went still before the sequence began again.
"It should have stopped," she said.
Black-Crown rose. From beneath its breast, the worn-grey chick emerged, pecked once at the dry seam, and swallowed only cold air. The adult turned uphill.
"The slope is wrong," Aylin told Jiang. "That is enough for us. It will not be enough for them."
Black-Crown began climbing.
The empty adults followed. They moved across the low rise in short pushes, resting whenever the wind met them. Nobody marched to Aylin's voice. Heads turned to the cups, to the sealed sea behind them, and to the partners or chicks calling from lower ice.
Jiang dragged himself after the worn-grey youngster.
Aylin caught the loose rear of his sling. She waited for his good foot to bite before giving him the smallest lift. The help shortened one bad step and pulled at her injured arm hard enough to pale her face.
"I know," she rasped when he looked back. "You dislike being carried. I dislike being useful in only one direction."
The cups repeated their three uneven blows.
They crossed the top of the low rise. Beyond it, pressure had lifted the ice into shallow ribs. Snow filled the hollows between them. The counterfeit seam climbed each ridge in a straight black-green stroke, indifferent to the land beneath it.
An older chick followed an empty adult onto the first rib. Its claws broke through the crust. One foot dropped into the hollow, and the chick pitched forward with its breast over the ridge.
Aylin released Jiang and ran two steps. Her knee struck the ice beside the chick. With her good hand under its belly, she pushed until the trapped foot scraped free.
The youngster beat both flippers against her sleeve.
Its parent came back calling. Aylin let the chick slide away before the adult reached her, then lowered her face as the bill passed close enough to stir her hair.
Green light had already gathered in her palm.
"One cut," she said. "I can break the sound here."
Jiang drove his beak against the basalt chip she had dropped.
The knock turned Aylin's eyes toward him. He struck again, then pointed his beak along the black-green seam. Three adults stood over it. The worn-grey chick had one foot on either side. Breaking the ridge beneath their weight could trade a false road for broken legs and a wind-scoured hollow.
Aylin closed her hand. The light went out.
"Then we need the part I kept."
She moved uphill on one knee and one boot until exposed basalt rose through the ice. Old grooves crossed its face, broad at the gateward side and thinning toward the rookery. Through every channel, loose snow spilled downhill while the false river rushed the other way.
Aylin laid her fingers inside the deepest groove. For a moment she looked like she was touching a name cut into grave stone.
"I told you about my father's cake," she said. "I told you the crews cursed whenever the children drowned a warning. That was the version I liked."
Jiang settled on his breast beside her. Black-Crown had stopped farther up, where the worn-grey chick needed another rest. The adult looked back once, then faced the cups again.
The rhythm restarted below the wind.
"Children struck until the gate crew called for quiet. Every cup stopped. Even the councilors listened, because a missed call could put a whole street under water."
Aylin dug ice from the groove with her thumbnail.
"I had stolen Councilor Vey's cup. I wanted the first strike after the silence. I thought everyone would turn and see me standing on the rail."
Her damaged voice failed on the last word. She swallowed, waited, and continued without looking at Jiang.
"A worker below shouted that the lower gate had caught. I hit the cup over him. The others answered me because they thought the water was through."
Copper rang uphill, bright and empty.
"My father was at the lower wheel. He heard the second warning. By then the gate had opened crooked, and one of the workers was inside the spill channel."
Aylin's fingers closed around the snow she had scraped free.
"I hid under the west rail. His lamp came out first. It went down the canal, past the old salt road. The worker went through after it."
Jiang remembered the false Edric naming the stolen cup and the west rail. Gredudande had worn those facts like proof of a living father. It had never named the worker. Aylin had protected that absence while feeding it wet lime, seed cake, torn gloves, and every warm detail she could bear to lose.
"The cups stayed silent for the rest of that night," she said.
Above them, the captured festival reached its pause. Three blows followed exactly where silence belonged.
Aylin flinched at the first. By the third, anger had steadied her hand against the stone.
"That is the drowned gate," she said. "It keeps celebrating because I never gave it the death."
A gust caught her loose hair and laid it across her mouth. She pushed it back with dirty fingers, smearing basalt grit over one cheek.
"My father kept calling it the lower gate. The crews called it the drowned gate. I stopped calling it anything."
Jiang pressed his beak into the groove. Melt polished nothing there. Grit and snow moved toward the rookery, tracing the same downhill path as the lost lamp. He scraped once, sending a small white spill over Aylin's fingers.
She watched it fall.
"Yes," she whispered. "That way."
The proof belonged to stone and gravity. Birds needed neither her words nor her guilt to test it.
The parent whose chick had fallen turned first. It called uphill, received the youngster's answer beside its feet, and steered both bodies back across the rib. Two other pairs followed after checking the dry grooves with their bills.
Far below, White-Nape answered Pale-Cheek from the stable huddle.
Hungry adults remained on the rise.
Black-Crown pecked into a scour mark. Snow slipped past the bill on its downhill path. Under the adult's feet, the river sound climbed. Black-Crown watched the contradiction reach the bottom.
Then it stepped over the basalt and continued toward the saddle.
Aylin laughed once, without humor. "Your rival is very committed to being difficult."
Jiang glanced back at the closed hunting ice. The false route was exposed. Hunger remained true.
He pushed up on his good foot.
Aylin put the basalt chip in front of him. "If we follow, our steps teach it a road."
Jiang knocked the chip against the empty seam, then pointed his beak toward Black-Crown and the chicks stretched behind it.
"That is not an answer."
He struck the seam once more. Dry ice. No river. Afterward he turned his breast uphill and dragged the sling forward.
Aylin stared at him until the worn-grey chick called from beside Black-Crown.
"No," she said softly. "It is the answer I disliked."
She rose and followed. Her confession had kept several chicks on sound ice; it had not earned her the right to spend the bodies still climbing. Jiang stayed below the worn-grey chick, while Aylin took the outer side where a fall would meet her legs before the hollow.
Black-Crown reached the wind-scoured saddle first.
Its claws left a shallow print in the snow. When the adult lifted its foot, black-green light seeped into the hollow from below.
Another adult crossed. Light filled that print too.
Ahead of Jiang, every abandoned footprint began to glow.