They gave her the hour after the rider left—an hour that felt like nothing and everything. The quay hummed with men who'd been told to look away and didn't, the sort who kept their faces blank until coin warmed them. Aminah pulled her cloak tight and walked like a woman carrying a ledger of sins. Nina sat wrapped in a blanket on a pallet, coughing ash into a cloth; she watched the world with a small, new ferocity that made Aminah both proud and terrified.
They met in a room beneath Klixin's offices—a low place with a long table scarred by plans and wine. The captains came in, faces notched with the night's small failures. Klixin had a bruise forming under one eye; Xazaz's jaw was set; Dzeko looked hollow in the way men do when they've watched friends be used like props. Zarki came in last, smelling faintly of oil and nonsense, and took a chair with the casual insolence that made her useful.
"Report," Aminah said. No pleasantries. The room didn't need them.
Hasb spoke first. His voice was tight as a bow. "We brought her back. Barely. The Northstar's men had ash—lots of it. They used it to slow us. The Empire's hands moved in quick when the signal flared. The launch shot at us. One of our oars is blown. Men are hurt but alive."
Meren set a small tray on the table: a scrap of kiln paper, a sliver of the token, a map with marks. "Relan's gone," he said. "His shop's empty. Not looted exactly—cleaned as if someone wanted to leave a tidy crime scene. Someone washed the floor. There's scorch in the back. An envelope hidden under a plank with one line: Don't dig. And a stamp I don't like."
Aminah rubbed at the bridge of her nose until the headache behind her eyes loosened. "Stamp?"
"A faint family mark, but wrong," Meren said. "They used a paste to blur the lines and then re-carved the center. Whoever made it wanted the resemblance to be obvious to the right people."
Dzeko leaned forward. "So Relan was told to shut up or move. Or both. He was small-time—he sells stories and tokens. He made pages look older for men who want history without patience. If he disappeared, someone wanted their trail cold."
"Someone who wants us to think the mark is real," Xazaz said. "Whoever altered it can make our families look like collaborators."
Klixin tapped the table. "And the Empire? We play them right now and they come down hard. We don't—someone uses their paper like a cudgel. We're boxed."
A plan is always a set of doors, some locked, some leading to worse rooms. Aminah listed what they had: the token, a photo, an altered manifest, a burned shop, a man who'd said they were paid to start a war. Names: Dalen, Venn, Relan, the petty boss Mace, the kiln foreman, the Northstar. Evidence was small and dirty and needed shaping.
"We choke the market," she said. "We pull every buyer who traffics in old things. We close the north hold and the kiln lanes. We make coin smell bad in the places that benefit. We arrest two small men tonight—show action. Calm the public. And we make a show of the token in the market—let people see it and see it's a fake. If they panic, we control the panic."
"You expect public calm?" Zarki barked. "You want them to see a token and think 'fake'? They'll think 'traitor' and run and then we'll have mobs."
"We want the shops to break," Aminah said. "We don't want the city to burn. We want the market to shrink so the buyers feel pressure. Push the buyers into daylight. They can't buy with a torch burning over their heads."
Klixin rubbed his temple. "Fine. Small arrests, public token, clamp on trade. But we need two other things: someone to smear the kiln evidence and someone to get a confession from a buyer. Dzeko, you handle the smearing. Hasb and I will pull the arrests. Aminah, you take Relan's trail."
Dzeko's face lit with a grim humor. "Relan's trail ends in smoke. But I can go talk to people who move things without manifest. I can bribe the right tongues."
Hasb's jaw creased. "And the Empire?"
"You remind them we're a city with law," Aminah said. "We don't cross their officers in public. We do things just under the public eye. Quiet but visible. We bait the buyers and follow the money."
They split tasks like surgeons: one incision left, another right. Time ran on a slow hamstring; the city waited for a choice to be made.
---
Aminah and a small party—Dzeko, a clean-faced man named Oth, and Leto for quick hands—went to Relan's abandoned shop with the taste of old varnish in their noses. The door hung ajar. Inside the place smelled like dead wood and lemon and absence. Tools lay in place, as if their owner had planned to come back. Then a shelf had been scrubbed raw; a small coil of wire had been removed. There was a smear on the bench where someone had tried to take a token and failed.
They found a hidden drawer with a single object left: a bundle of paper wrapped in oilcloth. Relan's handwriting curved on the top note: IF FOUND, BURN. FOLLOW THE SHRINE. Midnight.
Aminah felt the small flare of hope and a cold finger of doubt at the same time. The shrine again—the old, half-buried place that had been pried at in the field. Someone had sent Relan away for asking too much. Someone wanted silence.
Dzeko and Oth watched the alley. "This is bait," Dzeko said. "Or a breadcrumb. Either way, someone wants whoever shows to look guilty."
"Then we go," Aminah said. "We go with witnesses."
They left a man to watch the shop and took the note folded tight. As they crossed to the shrine's lane, the city felt thinner, like a place someone had taken the middle out of. The bricks leaned like tired men.
They reached the shrine at twilight. Rain had started again in a fine, gritty line. The shrine's stone glowed faintly with the night's mist. Someone had thrown a lantern high enough to cast a circle of dim light. In the center: a turned-up bowl and a small pile of tokens—cheap imitations, not the one they wanted—laid out like offerings.
A figure waited by the ruin: not Relan but someone else—a silhouette with hands in pockets and shoulders drawn in like someone avoiding notice. The figure stepped forward and a voice, low and rough, said, "You came."
Aminah's hand went to the small blade at her hip. "Who are you?" she asked. The party spread like a net; Leto had his hand on his dagger.
The figure laughed once. "You think I'd be so foolish as to meet you alone? They wanted me dead first. They sent men to torch my place." He stepped into the lantern light and Aminah's breath hitched. It was Rell.
Rell's face was raw—puffy, his beard unkempt, eyes wild with sleep and guilt. He'd been a guard on the north gate; she'd known him as steady. Now he looked like a man who'd been made to cross himself.
"You?" Hasb breathed. "You were paid—"
Rell held up both hands. "No. No. I'm not the hand. I'm the warning." His voice broke. "Someone paid me to lay a trail. I didn't know the weight. I took coin because my boy was sick. I followed them because I thought it was timber. I am not—" He choked and closed his mouth.
Aminah watched him like a woman reading a ledger. "Then tell us everything you saw."
Rell told a story that stitched into their minds: men with kiln-smudged hands, a broker who liked old family marks, an unmarked boat, a woman with a scarf who smiled like a person with nothing left to gamble. He said Relan had been scared—said he burned his own rear room in the panic. Then he said a name that made all their heads turn.
"Dalen," he whispered. "He paid them at the kiln. He paid with a crate manifest and sealed it. He said it was an old creditor's token. He said they'd take the cargo to Moulm. He said—" Rell started to whisper, then stopped.
"Say it," Aminah said. She hated the small pauses where people thought they could hide truth in breath.
"He said: 'Make them trade; make them name; pull the family out into daylight.'" Rell's eyes tracked to the token wrapped in oilcloth like it was the thing that might light on fire. "He said the broker wants a war in the city so someone else can take the docks."
A hush fell. Dzeko spat. "Dalen wants a war. Who pays him?"
Rell looked at his boots. "I don't know. I know he makes deals for men who prefer not to be seen. I know he travels with a broker named Mace. And he knows a name that gets men to fold."
"Which name?" Hasb demanded.
Rell's face went blank the way paper does when someone is trying to remember the shape of a word. He looked up slow. "He said—he said a name that sounded like power. He muttered the name and then he laughed like a man who'd swallowed poison on purpose."
Aminah felt tired in a way that wasn't just fatigue. "What name?"
Rell's fingers trembled. He reached into his coat and pulled out a small scrap—smudged with water, the ink half-washed. The letters were faint but legible if you squinted: T. Fulgur.
The room reeked of ink and old wood. The shard of evidence felt like the week's weather. For a second no one spoke. Then from beyond the shrine, like a baring of teeth, a sound: a single bellong—three precise knocks—cut into the rain.
They turned toward the sound and saw shapes moving at the edge of the lantern light: men cloaked, faces half-hidden. One stepped forward and lifted a hand. The moon caught the braid on his wrist.
It was militia braid.
He stepped into the light and smiled.
"Glad you found our friend," he said. "We wondered if you'd step blind into a trap."
Aminah's hand went for her sword. The man's smile was friendly, but his fingers flexed at his side. The world narrowed into the point of his boot.
Behind him, in the dark, more hands closed. The shrine's half-light turned their faces into masks.
Rell made a motion to run and someone moved like a blade across his throat. He dropped without a sound. The man in the front tilted his head and spoke softly, "You should have left this alone, Captain."
Aminah felt the city close around her like a fist. The token in the oilcloth felt heavier than any ledger. The man reached into his coat and drew a slip of paper, folded small.
The bellong at the quay sounded again—three notes—and the scrap read, in a hand she knew too well from burned edges and altered stamps:
Exchange. Tonight.
Hands closed on her from the dark.