The drill yard smelled of oil and old promises. Rusted gantries leaned like tired sentries over a patchwork of concrete where machines had once been tested and then quietly retired. Field Unit Zero had been one of those retirements: a prototype convoy unit, stripped of its official markings and left to rot in a corner where no magistrate's eye lingered. The Loom had learned to look where others did not.
Marcus found the yard by following a courier's manifest that had been notarized under a false name. The manifest led to a private dock, the dock to a broker's shed, and the shed to a yard whose gates had been left unlocked on purpose. He moved with the quiet efficiency of someone who had learned to read routes the way other people read maps. Thorne and Keeper Sera came with him—Thorne with a warded lens case and a list of countervariations, Sera with witness packets and a calm that made people tell the truth.
The unit itself was smaller than the rumors had made it. Field Unit Zero was not a towering machine but a compact frame of sigil‑pressed plates and a central node that had once been designed to stabilize grafted memory in transit. It had been tuned for mobility: a chassis that could be hidden in a crate, a sigil frame that could be threaded into a courier's manifest, and a dampening array meant to silence Remnants tiles. The device's geometry was clever and quiet; it had been built to be invisible to procedure.
Thorne fed a slow pulse through his lens and watched the microetch answer. The pattern matched the Saltport ledger's variant—cadence keys braided to scent orders—but it had been optimized for field grafting: a spool of silencer thread, a spool of donor hooks, and a small sigil frame that could be slipped into a crate and activated by a cadence. Whoever had built Field Unit Zero had not only known the committee's language; they had anticipated the Loom's counters.
"That's a field grafting rig," Thorne said, voice low. "It's meant to make a town believe a memory came from itself. It bypasses long custody chains by working in transit."
Keeper Sera sealed the unit in a double‑warded case and read the Remnants' witness slate aloud. Marcus photographed the crate under warded tiles and posted a public notice at the yard's gate: artifact seized under Remnants custody; neutral vault transfer scheduled. The notice was small and legal and meant to be read by anyone who might have thought the yard private.
They did not move the unit to the vault immediately. Field Unit Zero was evidence and a lesson. The Loom needed to understand how it worked without teaching anyone else how to build one. Thorne set up a controlled chamber in the Loom's low rooms and began to feed measured pulses through the frame while Keeper Sera notarized every reading. Marcus arranged for a neutral magistrate to observe under warded tiles. The goal was to make the device's harm legible without handing anyone a recipe.
The first controlled test was careful and blunt. Thorne activated a low cadence while a volunteer magistrate read a short, notarized passage. The sigil frame answered with a faint pressure that shifted the magistrate's cadence—small, almost polite, but measurable. The Remnants' tiles recorded the shift and the warded chamber logged the change in triplicate. The demonstration did not teach craft; it showed consequence.
The evidence was damning in a way that procedure could not easily dismiss. Field Unit Zero had been designed to be used in transit, to graft a memory into a town's rhythm while the town's attention was scattered by trade and weather. It explained the ledger's off‑manifest drops and the committee's preference for neutral routes. It explained why some towns had woken with memories that did not belong to them.
With the unit secured and the readings notarized, the Loom moved to follow the supply chain that had produced it. Thorne traced a thread of microetch variants through a set of private workshops—small, clandestine places that specialized in sigil framing and donor spool weaving. The workshops were not official; they were hidden in the seams of trade, in the basements of cooperages and the back rooms of clockmakers. Each one had a broker who moved parts and a courier who moved crates.
Marcus's patrols shadowed the couriers and documented every handoff. When they intercepted a crate at a Greyhaven private dock, they found halfassembled frames and a ledger of test runs. The ledger's shorthand pointed to a patron network: donor trusts routed through shell accounts, payments laundered through guild contracts, and a facilitator shorthand that matched the Saltport ledger. The Loom's map was filling in.
But following the chain made enemies. That night a small fire burned a cooperage where a suspected workshop had been. The flames were quick and precise, meant to destroy tools and ledgers. Marcus's patrols fought the blaze and recovered a scorched spool of silencer thread and a fragment of a ledger. Thorne coaxed microetch traces from the ash; the pattern was faint but present. Someone had tried to erase the trail and had failed.
The Loom's legal team moved with the same deliberate care. Keeper Sera prepared sealed subpoenas for the workshops and for a set of courier manifests. Aria presented the evidence to the Council in a public session that left little room for discretion. She did not dramatize; she laid out the facts: Field Unit Zero seized; microetch variants traced to private workshops; donor trusts mapped to shell accounts; neutral vault custody requested for all seized items. The public record was immediate and precise.
The Council's reaction was predictably mixed. Some delegates called for immediate arrests and for the Corrections Unit to be authorized to sweep suspected workshops. Others warned that a heavy hand would panic trade and that discretion was still necessary. The fracture in the Council deepened; the Loom's seizure had forced a choice between public accountability and private expediency.
Meanwhile, the Loom prepared for the practical fallout. Field Unit Zero had shown how easily a device could be moved in transit; the Loom needed to make transit costly to abuse. They expanded convoy protocols, added randomized escort rotations, and required that any private dock handoffs be witnessed under Remnants tiles. They seeded teacher cells with rapid diffusion modules specifically designed for transit scenarios—short cadences and scent swaps that could be taught to crews in minutes and notarized on the quay.
They also prepared a legal net. Keeper Sera drafted a set of joint subpoenas that would compel brokers, couriers, and private dockmasters to produce manifests under Remnants witness. The subpoenas were sealed and ready; when served, they would force the chain into daylight. Marcus's patrols practiced serving them with the quiet efficiency of people who had learned to make procedure visible.
The Loom's moves were not without cost. A midrank clerk who had been implicated in routing donor trusts through a shell account resigned under pressure; a guild emissary who had been slow to cooperate found his access curtailed. The smear campaign intensified—anonymous notes, thin accusations in hand‑run sheets—but the Loom's public seizures and notarized readings made the smears harder to sustain.
Field Unit Zero itself became a teaching tool. Thorne sketched countervariations that would make the unit's hooks inert in controlled conditions and fed them into the neutral vault's protocols. The vault's technicians could now render a field grafting rig harmless for study without teaching the craft. The Loom had found a way to preserve evidence while reducing the risk of replication.
At the yard's gate, where the unit had been found, a small crowd gathered the morning the crate left for the neutral vault. Marketkeepers watched as the convoy moved under Remnants seal; a magistrate photographed the handoff under warded tiles; a clerk from the guild's records office posted a public ledger on the quay. The act was legal and ceremonial and meant to be seen: custody as a public ritual.
That night, in the Loom's low rooms, Thorne fed one last pulse through the unit's frame and watched the microetch answer. The pattern was clever and human—someone had built a machine to take advantage of towns' scattered attention. The Loom had taken it apart and made its teeth visible. The work ahead was to follow every thread the unit had left behind.
Aria wrote the day's entry into the Spiral Log with hands that had learned to be both blunt and careful: Field Unit Zero seized at Greyhaven yard; controlled demonstrations recorded; private workshops traced; courier manifests subpoenaed; scorched cooperage evidence recovered; convoy protocols expanded; joint subpoenas prepared; countervariations drafted; neutral vault transfer scheduled; political fallout logged.