The pistol cracked like a verdict.
For a second the night cleaved into two halves — before the sound and after. The stranger's shot cut across the little launch and the world folded into violence. A dark flower of spray rose, a man screamed, and the launch lurched like a beast with a broken leg.
Aminah felt the shock before she felt pain: a hot gust that ran up her arm where she still held the token. The token slipped from her fingers, a bright thing that made the lantern light stumble as it fell. Time stretched slow and glassy. Hasb's shout snapped in her ear; Nina's body twisted at her shoulder and went slack against Aminah's chest.
Then the oar snapped like a twig. The launch listed hard. Water climbed the gunwale with the horrible eagerness of something that knows when it's been invited. Men cursed, hands flailed. The stranger lunged for the token in the water with a practiced speed that belonged to people who lived in other kinds of danger. He dove.
Aminah lost her footing. The world tipped. Cold slammed up into her ribs. For half a heartbeat she was only a sound: air forced from a place that had not expected to be emptied. The token spun under the surface like a dead thing. She kicked, hands scrabbling at rope, at the gunwale, the strange tug of nothing between two worlds.
Hasb hit the water after the stranger, a dark shape cursing as he cut the current with a kind of blind ferocity. The launch lurched and suddenly the oarsmen were gone, swept into a scramble, one man clawing for a broken oar and another fighting a wave that wanted to take him under.
Nina slipped. Aminah's arm caught at her as the girl's body slid toward the black mouth of the water. She felt fingers close on the sleeve and a head pop up, coughing, hair slick with seawater. Hasb was a hand pulling her free. He hauled Nina to the surface with a strength that was part love and part animal. Aminah grabbed at the token's blur under the waves with fingers numb as if asleep.
The stranger surfaced first, token clutched like a small, defiant heart in his hand. Water streamed from his hair into his eyes. For a second they saw the thing whole — the mimic sigil, the hairline fracture, the way the wood had been worked to look like something older than it was. He spit seawater and laughed, a hard, ugly sound, and for a breath they all thought he'd won.
Then he touched the token.
His face changed. The laugh died. His hand jerked as if the token had burned him. He swore in a language no one used in taverns. The token slipped like an oily fish between his fingers and fell back into the water with a soft, accusing plop.
Hasb, moving like an animal that had found a bone, dove again and came up with the token in his fist. He punched the surface, heavy and angry and triumphant all at once, then he surged toward the launch, lungs burning. Aminah hauled Nina up into her lap and they clambered to the gunwale. Men around them were coughing and slapping water from faces. The launch tipped; some hands slipped free and the oarsmen cursed and fought the list. Leto yanked a broken oar and tried to push them toward the quay.
They reached the wharf like survivors climbing a beach. Men on the quay yanked ropes, hauled them up, grabbed them by collars and boots. The launch groaned and limped back to its tie. Men clung to planks and breathed like something had been stolen from their chest and returned.
Aminah sat there on the wet wood with Nina in her arms, water sluicing off both of them, the token wrapped in a cloth and pressed to Hasb's breast like a relic. Her limbs trembled but not because of pain; the tremor was the slow aftershock of a body that had been asked to survive.
The stranger stood on the gunwale, dripping, and faced them with an expression that had lost all the fun of scoring points. He peeled back his cloak and for a second Aminah thought she might see a crest — something official, something that could be asked for by papers and signatures — but the cloak was plain and the man's mouth was thin.
"You took the bait," he said finally. His voice was small and tired, not triumphant. "You came and you climbed. Good. That's the part people pay for."
Hasb spat a curse and handed the token to Aminah. The wood hummed faint and wrong when she touched it, like the after-note of a bell. Meren leaned over and peered; he muttered something about grain and varnish and where the wood came from.
"We still have the girl," the stranger said, mouth twitching as if his lines were trained. "For now."
Aminah's first breath was a sound like a broken bell. "Who hired you?" she asked.
The stranger's eyes narrowed in a way that suggested amusement at small questions. "You think like a captain," he said. "Whoever pays writes the zeros and eyes the lines. The name matters little compared to the coin."
"That's a coward's answer," Hasb growled. He stood with the token in his fist like a man who had found a sliver that kept him anchored.
The stranger shrugged. "Cowardice looks different when you hold a contract. But fine. You want a name? Think of a market that trades in ghosts and false crests. Then think smaller. Greed is the one thing everyone can afford."
Before Aminah could pull more from him, a trumpet on the quay blew three long notes that made everyone look up like birds startled. Lanterns swung. The night's noise folded into a new pattern. Men on the outer dock ran in lines, salutes sharp as knives. A shout came from the governor's house—someone with a voice trained for rank.
A mounted rider thundered down the quay, cloak flying, and dismounted with the wet-mud grace of someone used to being carried by urgency. He had a strip of stamped paper in his hand and a face that belonged to orders. He pushed through the crowd like a blade finding a seam.
His rider's seal was not the Empire's neutral sun. It was heavier, edged with a crest Aminah's stomach recognized with the same small pained precision she felt when someone spoke a family name badly. The rider handed a scroll to the officer who had been watching from the launch. The officer broke the wax and read as if the room had narrowed into a small, silent theater.
"Prime Head Yuta Colin issues emergency recall," the officer read, voice slow. "All militia actions on the Northstar are hereby suspended pending imperial adjudication. Reinforcements en route. No further interference."
The crowd around them shifted like a thing waking. Men looked to Aminah for something — a word, a plan. The rider's boots made no sound as he turned to leave, expression blank and neat. He had the look of someone who had been taught to do duty without a soul needing to ask if it was right.
Aminah felt the world tilt. Twelve hours had dissolved into a few small moments of choices that had landed them on different knives. The order pulled the thread from under her like a hand that uncared for the patterns it destroyed. She had a child who had been taken and found, ash in her hair and a man with a pistol who had tested the city's patience. Now paper had been raised against them like a shield the wrong people would respect.
"Why send that rider now?" Dzeko demanded. His voice was raw. "Why not call reinforcements to the Northstar while the trade is in motion?"
The officer shrugged with the civility of someone whose duty made him a safe receptacle for other people's instructions. "Orders are orders. The Prime Head asks restraint and deference to imperial process."
Hasb laughed and it sounded broken. "Process," he spat. "If the Empire had trusted us, we'd have brought her home before the ink dried."
The stranger watched all of this with a strange, flat interest. Finally he spoke, and his voice did not try to soothe.
"We weren't hired to kidnap her," he said. He glanced up at the Northstar as if the hull could answer. He spat into the water. "We weren't hired to kill her."
Aminah braced for some cruel flourish and then realized his face had the tired look of a man who'd been told too much about power and too little about clean death.
"We were hired to start a war," he said.
The words fell into the harbor with a weight that made men still. Around them, sailors clattered, soldiers rechecked belts, the Northstar's lanterns cut hollow lines across the water. The rider's horse shifted, impatient as a beast that smells storm.
Aminah tasted iron and the names of the list she kept in her head—Dalen, Venn, Relan, the kiln foreman, the wharf petty boss. She tasted the false sigils and the ash and the slow, patient hand that had turned them into currency. A war. Not theft, not ransom. A war.
Someone behind her—an old watchman who'd been in the city when the stones were younger—spat to the side of his boot and said something under his breath that might have been a prayer or a curse.
Aminah stood and the token felt heavy in her palm. She thought of the kiln woman's calm face at the hatch, of the empire's paper that stopped men's hands, of Nina's small, steady breath against her neck. She felt the city like a living thing under her boots: wounded, stubborn, hungry.
"Then we don't let them pick the field," she said finally, voice low and dangerous. "If they want a war, we don't play to their time. We make them fight where we choose."
Hasb's eyes found hers like steel meeting steel. "How?"
"We gather the people who still remember how to fight," she said. "We choke the market. We pull the names out into the open. And we make sure the first ledger that opens when someone asks for proof smells like our hand."
The stranger watched with a slow, blank amusement. "You think you can pick the field after tonight?" he asked.
Aminah smiled with a mouth that had little humor left. "I've been picking fields my whole life."
The rider mounted again and kicked his horse into a trot. The quay swallowed him. Lanterns swung, orders were barked, and the Northstar's deck tightened like muscle. Men prepared because men prepare when a war is whispered.
Aminah pulled Nina in and looked at her—young, ragged, ash-smeared—and felt the thin, iron thread of something old and ferocious tighten inside her chest. The harbor around them moved as if a great beast was breathing. The city watched. The Empire waited. The kiln woman had a token that looked like home and had almost bought a city.
And in the harbor, the stranger's last words drifted under the knife of night and made a promise they would not be able to ignore.
"We weren't hired to kill her. We were hired to start a war."