The registry's calendar hung over them like a thin, inevitable cloud: three days until audit. In a city measured by ledgers, calendars were teeth that chewed through excuses. Nox felt the weight of the days in small, private ways — a word that slipped, a face that blurred — as if the city were already cashing the first installment on whatever bargain he'd made.
They began the hunt at dawn.
First, Marek. He moved through the Half-Index with the confident sadness of a man who had made his living sewing other people's seams. His stall smelled of lemon and old paper, and when he saw them he blinked as if someone had set a ledger open to a new, interesting page.
"You look watched," he said, counting the letters on a strip of ribbon as if they were coins. "Good tokens usually do. Bad ones attract knives."
"We need witnesses," Lian said without preamble. "Courier receipt is in the registry now, but we need names that hold. Marek — can you vouch that Gus sent that plate?"
Marek's fingers closed around a small clay bead he kept in his pocket. "I can say what I saw," he said. "I can tell them a courier came by. But the registry likes their witnesses clean: stable handwriting, civic standing, no prior debts to people like Gus."
"Then who?" Nox asked. He felt like a man who had borrowed a ladder and was now trying to hold it upright while the house tilted.
Marek tapped his temple with one finger. "There is a tailor who keeps notes of transactions. He's careful. He remembers names as if they were stitches on his sleeve. He will bear witness for small coin. But he's been nervy lately; wardens asked him two nights ago about a ledger he keeps. He might fold."
They walked to the tailor. He was at his table, needles threaded, eyes like two slow moons. When Marek mentioned Gus and the plate he stiffened, the fabric of his patience drawn taut.
"The registry asked questions," the tailor admitted, voice a thread. "They wanted to look at my book. I've kept it small—names, times—just to be safe. If they come again, they will take it for review."
"We can pay," Lian offered.
"It's not that." The tailor's hands trembled. "They asked how I knew people like you. They asked whose names I kept. You do not want a tailor's ledger scanned like that. It has margins we are not ready to show."
Nox felt a cold slip through his ribs. A witness shrinking away was the registry's favorite kind of arithmetic: subtract before you can add.
They moved on. The courier who had brought the receipt had a name—Marro—who lived two alleys over and drank bad tea for courage. Marek sent a boy to fetch him. The boy returned pale. Marro had been taken in the night, a neighbor said, rounded up for questioning. The registry liked to put small men in rooms where memories were asked to confess. Someone would bring him later, or not at all.
"Taken?" Lian said. Her shoulders rocked with a tremor Nox had never seen.
Marek spat a quick, useless curse. "That ruins the chain." He folded his hands into the habit of someone who patched torn things but could not make them whole. "If the courier disappears, the paper is a claim with no blood to prove it."
They ran through a list: Marek could vouch for the transaction as a market purchase; the tailor might, if pressured; a woman who worked at the bridge remembered a man leaving a wrapped parcel—but memory there was thin, fraying at the edges. The more they sought solidity, the more it slipped away.
And then Oren appeared at the end of an alley as if a chapter had opened on its own. He had the soft, dry look of pages that had been read too often. When he came close he did not speak at once.
"You need witnesses," he said finally. "I can say I saw you in the square. I can say I saw hands lift the plate."
Lian's face went cold and hot in the same heartbeat. "Why help us?" she asked.
Oren looked at the street as if searching for a sentence to complete. "Because you pulled a thread that made noise. That noise will catch on others. There are things I prefer to remain soft and unread. Besides—I will ask a favor. Later."
"What favor?" Nox asked, though he did not like the sound of the exchange already.
"Later," Oren said. "Not tonight. For tonight I will speak." He stepped forward and tapped two names into his mental ledger, as if checking they were still true. "I will testify you were in the square. Enough for the registry to mark chain of custody. But I will not go into how the plate left the monument."
It was not the cleanest testimony. It was shade and breath where the registry wanted ink. But in a place that preferred margins, shade could be useful.
They had threads, then: Marek's observation, Oren's partial sighting, the bridge-woman's fleeting memory. Not ironclad, but a pattern. They rushed back to Lian's little stack of receipts, signatures, the courier's crude note Marek had produced. They compiled a bundle that read like a story someone had drafted in the margins of a book.
That night Thane appeared outside Marek's stall and watched with the delicate cruelty of a man who knows the value of fear. He did not speak to them. Later, a clerk arrived and took the tailor's ledger for "a simple verification." The tailor wept quietly as they carried it away; his hands, once sure, became small and uncertain.
"One down," Marek said. "One less witness."
They had assembled a case of sorts but the inventory had shrunk as they worked. The registry's gears did more than sift; they consumed witnesses the way a mold takes the soft parts of old bread.
Then, as stars leaned into the night, a new voice entered the ledger—clean, composed, without the dust of market stalls. A man arrived at the registry on official steps, moving with the measured grace of someone who wrote policy and then read its effects. He wore a slate coat and a narrow badge. His name was Severin, Procurator of Consolidation, and he carried within him the cold tenderness of Ilmar's essays made into statutes.
Severin did not storm in. He unrolled a small pamphlet and let its language do the work of a blade. "Order demands clarity," he said to a room full of registrars. "A community cannot function when its pages are frayed. We must offer reconciliation: selective surrender of communal fragments for stability. It is mercy by subtraction."
The sentence slid into the registry like oil. Thane nodded and Rell's eyes read the pamphlet as if tasting phrases. Ilmar's doctrine, translated into policy, no longer lived in the margins. It had come to townhall rooms and was shaping what counted as mercy.
Word of Severin's appearance reached Lian and Nox that night through an alleyway rumor and a clerk's whispered copy. The message was not polite: consolidation would mean sanctioned removals of fragments from neighborhoods to keep the ledger whole. In plain terms: the registry would ask some communities to cede small memories to preserve larger order—sacrifices made "for the many."
Lian clenched her fists until the ribbon strained. "They'll take our people's edges to make their count neat," she said. "They will smooth us into blanks."
Nox looked at his hands and tried to name the laughter he had lost. The city had placed a new, colder bargain in front of them: either navigate the registry's dangerous mercy with witnesses and favors—or be folded into a policy that would take bits of people for the supposed good of the whole.
The audit was closer than a breath. Their witnesses were fewer than they'd hoped. The registry's pens had begun to move in larger scripts, and Ilmar's doctrine had a procurator now to translate ideas into action.
They stayed awake that night like men listening to their own pages being turned. The ledger watched, waiting to see who would docket which losses next.