Kiran slipped through the gap in the outer wall carrying the sword like contraband.
The niche smelled of oil, damp cloth, and something Meira called treasure; a scrap of circuitry winked under a loose stone.
His palm throbbed where the wound had been, and the amulet dug a hard edge into his ribs when he breathed.
He had less coin than pride and a choice that would not wait.
Meira looked up from a pile of soldered parts and laughed.
"You found a relic, or a toy for stories?"
"Relic," Kiran said, setting the blade across two crates.
The metal clinked against wood with the sound of something abandoned coming alive.
He pressed his thumb to the cloth around his hand; motion steadied him more than words could.
She circled the sword, fingers hovering like a kid around a burnt-out engine.
"If that is real, it's worth a meal for a month. Or the price of a train to the interior."
"It's rust," he said.
He kept his fingers away from the blade's edge.
The word was practical; the decision to sell would be practical too—if it could be done without selling the amulet.
Meira whistled a tune she claimed came from a far market.
"You should see the junk I find. This? This is drama."
Her smile carried no pity, only the sharpness of someone used to scavenging both objects and hope.
They moved in a small orbit.
Meira stacked tiny lights into columns; Kiran wiped his wound with water scraped from a jar.
The lantern threw their shadows long and thin against the wall.
A patrol's lantern swung in the distance, slow and indifferent.
"You could pawn the amulet," Meira said casually, like offering a blade for sharpening.
Her voice had that barterer's edge; she loved to see what a word would buy.
Kiran's hand tightened against the cloth.
The amulet was a folded promise more stubborn than paper.
He slid his fingers inside his jacket, found its cool seam, and let the ritual of touch pass without explanation.
The memory that bloomed was a scent of wet earth and someone's humming—no face, only a cadence.
It did not help him pay for the train.
"Not that," he said.
One sentence.
No plea.
Meira shrugged.
"Suit yourself. But the Guild's at full chatter. Folks swear the Horizon is recruiting test crews again. Big pay. Big danger."
Her words shifted the air.
Kiran folded them into his plans the way one folds a map: neatly and with intent.
The train to the interior left at dawn for those who could afford a ticket.
The Guild's work meant coin enough to last until spring.
The risk could be traded for a passage and a chance to stop looking at the Borda every night.
"Testers of resonance?" Kiran asked.
He kept his voice flat, almost curious.
Meira tapped a soldering iron once, a spark on the tip like a punctuation mark.
"They call them that. Men who go where the crystals sing. They feed the Guild data and sometimes don't come back. But when they do, they are paid with mountains."
Kiran's jaw set.
The wound on his hand burned cold under the cloth.
He remembered the foreman's ledger, the merchant's coin, Lysandro's boot—small violences that had stacked into a single weight.
The sword was heavy now for reasons that had very little to do with metal.
"If I could join..."
His words stopped where uncertainty lived.
He had no credentials, no name on any list, nothing beyond a promise pressed into silver and the memory of two people who measured maps and then vanished.
Meira leaned forward.
"You have the look," she said.
"Hungry and stubborn. Two good things for breaking rules."
She pointed at the blade.
"Sell that, buy a ticket, get off the quay. Or keep it and sleep with worry."
He looked at the sword as one might examine a doorway one could choose to step through or lock.
The choice itself felt like work.
For a moment he considered the amulet's seam, the way its broken silver had once held a tiny map folded inside.
"Tomorrow," he said.
He folded the decision into a plan: try the blacksmith at the market; if that failed, try the collector at the east gate; if that failed—well, there were other failures to spare.
Saying tomorrow made the need real and immediate.
Meira's smile turned soft for a second.
"Don't get yourself killed for glory."
"Not glory," he said.
"Passage."
She tapped the table, a metronome of impatience.
"Passage, then."
The market smelled of frying oil and heated metal.
The blacksmith's stall was a low roar and light.
Kiran laid the blade on the counter and watched the smith's brow narrow like a gate closing.
"What did you bring me?" the smith asked, fingers already itching for the temper.
"A blade. Rusty. Solid."
Kiran kept his palms open.
He had learned where words invited sympathy and where silence kept the price fair.
The smith hefted the sword, listened to its dead song by holding it to his ear.
"Old iron," he muttered.
He took a small rod from beneath the counter, a piece of wire they'd call a tuner, and tapped the blade's flat with practiced rhythm.
Kiran felt the sword's weight shift in his chest as if it were deciding whether to be useful.
The smith smiled without showing teeth.
"We'll see."
He set two fingers on the hilt and closed his eyes, the old habit of forcing a tiny echo of resonance from the metal.
The air cooled.
For a breath Kiran thought the blade might answer, that a ghost of sound might shiver across the room.
The smith opened his eyes, disappointment mapped on his face.
"It holds nothing," the smith said.
He stroked his beard with an anxious gesture.
"No hum. No heat. It's cold as scrap."
He tapped the metal again, harder.
Nothing.
Kiran felt something like denial pass through him.
He had expected rust; he had not expected this absolute refusal.
The lack of answer made the sword a lie and the amulet suddenly the only honest thing he owned.
"How much?" Kiran asked.
The smith named a number that folded to copper.
It was a coin for nails, not for trains.
He pushed it across the counter with the casual cruelty of someone doing the math of other people's hunger.
Kiran stood very still.
He could take the coins, buy a ticket halfway to the station, sell the amulet later for the rest.
The path was practical and small.
He imagined his mother's humming as something that could be sold in two transactions.
He handed the blade back.
"No," he said.
The smith blinked.
"You'll walk away with nothing?"
Kiran wrapped his bloody hand tighter.
"I'll find another buyer."
The smith snorted, more pity than scorn.
"You'll end up back at my stall, boy. Or worse, you'll trade your promise for bread and wake with regret."
Kiran slid the sword under his arm and left without another word.
The smith's laughter curved after him like an echo in a tunnel.
They waited until the market's lanterns hissed low and the traders packed their bargains.
Meira held two cups of stew between her hands.
She watched him with a look that measured weariness and a fierce curiosity.
"You refused copper," she said, not surprised.
Her voice carried no judgment.
He ate in short bites.
The stew was thin but warm.
"It wasn't the price," he said.
He let the world's noise slip to a background hiss and focused on the blade's outline beneath his coat.
"It was the wrong kind of closing."
Meira's eyebrows went up.
"Wrong kind?"
He named no words.
He did not need to.
The call-back came as a small, private thing: the amulet's broken seam against his ribs.
That seam had been a map; now it felt like a compass with one needle missing.
Selling the sword for copper would have been a surrender—one he could not rehearse.
Meira reached across the crates and nudged his shoulder with an elbow like a vote.
"Then go for the Guild. Testers die. Testers sometimes come back kings. You'll have to charm, cheat, beg, and lie. And you'll need a story."
Kiran let that land like a spar.
He had no story that would open the Guild's doors.
His parents had been cartographers, not adventurers; their maps were learning, not spectacle.
Their disappearance in the Borda made their work a rumor wrapped in solemn threads.
"You have the amulet," Meira said softly.
The word soft was almost a prayer.
"Promise them you won't pawn it."
He drew a breath.
The decision took him like a tide: it changed where he would go and who he would be when he arrived.
He slid the blade back into its sheath with a movement that felt like sealing a letter.
"I'll try," he said.
The word closed the space between wanting and acting.
Night took the market in a slow fold.
Kiran lay on a narrow pallet while Meira kept watch on a stack of parts.
The city breathed around them.
He pressed the sword to his chest, the metal cold through the cloth.
Dreams came like distant thunder.
He walked along a rim of world and did not fall.
Instead the rim sharpened into an edge; the edge became a blade; the blade cut through something that was older than maps.
Shapes moved on the other side of the cut—cities without roofs, voices that measured distance in silences.
He woke with his lungs on fire and the sword's hilt under his hand.
The lantern's flame bent in the draft.
Meira slept with her cheek on a coil of wire.
The room fell quiet except for the slow scrape of cloth against metal.
His heartbeat was a single tool he could not put down.
The amulet lay like a stone at the base of his throat.
He did not move at once.
The dream had left a taste on his tongue, bitter and metallic.
A single droplet darkened the cloth at his palm.
It was small and certain.
It fell from where he had wrapped the wound.
The blade hummed faintly against his ribs, as if remembering a song it had once known.
The sound was almost nothing and everything at once.
That night, strange dreams.
He is not falling into the abyss, but the abyss is a blade, and he is cutting something larger than the world.
He wakes gasping, the sword cold against his chest.