The Registry smelled of lemon oil and dust and a hundred small, patient things: seals in wooden boxes, ink drying on the edges of paper, the faint sugar of someone's tea left too long on a clerk's desk. It was not the same smell as the dojo or the docks; it was quieter, like a room that had learned to keep its breath measured.
Kaito sat on a low wooden stool with the ledger on the table before him, the book's leather breathing a warmth that made his palms sweat. He kept his fingers curled so they would not slide over the edge and read what the book had to say. He had never been less interested in what a book told him and more terrified of the way people listened when one spoke.
Across the table, the Covenant man — the one with the closed-eye insignia — made his posture small and polite as if a bow could be a weapon. He had a thin smile that never reached the eyes. "We'll follow procedure," he had said earlier, voice like a seal being pressed on wet paper. "The committee will observe. This is—to be careful."
Kaito wanted to throw the ledger into the canal and watch the ink bleed away between the stones. He wanted simpler things: a boiled egg, a good laugh, a place where people did not look at the marks on your skin and then decide your worth by them. None of that was possible here.
Haru stood with his arms folded, a stone with kindness inside. Rein leaned against the wall with his notebook open, making tiny notes that always made Kaito think of someone measuring how much sky could fit in a jar. Mira sat close enough for him to feel the small, steady heat of her presence — not a dramatic thing but the way a lamp sits beside a bed. When she shifted, her knee touched his and the contact sent an odd, grounding little bolt through him. He could have pretended he did not notice. He did not pretend.
"Tea?" the clerk asked, like an offering and a test at once. He had the careful hands of someone who handled fragile things every day.
Kaito accepted. The tea was warm and too strong for a boy unused to merits of refined flavor, but it tasted like an ordinary thing and he liked it for that. He drank and realized he needed something ordinary more than he'd thought.
Across from him, the Covenant man unfolded a single sheet of paper and smoothed it like fabric. "We ask only for safety," he said. "A witness reading protects both host and ledger. You will be present. You will be allowed a guardian. The Registry will keep record."
Haru's voice was the sound of a hinge he trusted. "We will not allow private hands in the reading. We will not allow the ledger to be trafficked. If that requires force, we will provide restraint."
The Covenant man's smile bent. "All restraint has its cost, Master Haru. The Covenant must preserve balance. Transparency is part of that balance."
Kaito bristled at the word balance as if it were a plate someone handed him with one side already heavy. "Isn't transparency the reason your men let those buyers come to the Shelf?" he said before he could check himself.
The Covenant man's fingers paused on the page. "There are layers to governance," he answered. "Some matters require discretion before openness. We will act with both."
Mira's jaw tightened. "Discretion often means someone else decides," she said. Her threadblade sat at her hip like an exhausted sentinel.
A small sound made everyone look to the door: a clerk returning with a wrapped loaf, the cheap crust-tooth of bread that Kaito had always liked. He was saving it for himself, Kaito knew, because he would not touch the Registry's food meant for dignitaries. The clerk set it down and sat a respectful distance away, watching like someone peering at a slow moving thing.
There was also Toma, pale and eyes too large for his face, who had not slept. He hovered by the doorway like a moth that did not know where to land. When Toma caught Kaito's eye he offered the boy a half-smile that looked more like a question.
Kaito reached across the table and dropped a corner of his bread into Toma's hand without thinking. Toma's fingers closed around it as if the simple warmth of bread could replace a thread of shame. "Thanks," Toma muttered.
"Keep your head down," Haru said softly, and Kaito heard the stick-on-shoulder voice of someone trying to keep many small, dangerous things from tipping.
They waited. The committee would be convened within the hour. Kaito wanted to be angry at the ledger for having a voice that everyone found pretty. He wanted to be angry at men like Marcell who could turn names into commerce. He wanted to be angry at the world for being a market where a child could sell a memory to buy a roof.
Instead he felt most like a boy who had forgotten how to sleep. The lullaby in his chest kept surfacing—tiny, steady, not the roaring thing it had been when he had fought in the market, but a thread that reminded him of being wrapped in something warm. He hummed it under his breath without trying. Mira heard him and did not say anything. She simply pressed her thumb to his hand, and Kaito felt steadiness move through fingers.
When the committee entered they did so the way rain enters a room: quietly, then everywhere. There were three of them: a clerk with spectacles that made his eyes look larger than they were, a woman who smelled faintly of cedar and who moved like an editor deciding what to keep, and a tall man whose coat was the color of old paper and who carried a presence Kaito could not name.
They sat. The Covenant man took his place. Haru sat near the ledger like a father, Rein at the corner like someone willing to draw the border of the map, Mira by Kaito as if she could shelter him with a hand.
The clerk opened a ledger of his own, but smaller and less alive, and began the procedural phraseology that was meant to disguise the fact that this was a serious thing. "By order," he said, "we proceed to the witness read. Host Kaito Ashen will be present. Guardians will be noted. Observers will keep distance. The ledger will be opened for identification. No extraneous copying."
The words felt dull, but they were a map. Kaito listened as if the sound were something he could memorize. He did not like any of it. He did not like how his name would be spoken aloud again and how each syllable would feel like someone laying their hand on a part of him he did not loan out.
When they unfastened the ledger's cover the smell of ink reached Kaito like an old memory: not the smell of theft but the scent of stories tucked under a lid. The keeper's ritual had been designed to make the reader trust the book. Here, the Registry's ceremony tried to make the reader think the book was only a book.
Kaito watched as the clerk lifted the first page with gloved hands, and he felt, absurdly, the desire to curl and hide like a child under a blanket. He swallowed and tried to anchor himself in small things: Mira's knee warming his; the chair's wood under his palm; the grain of the table. The ledger hummed softly like something aware; its pages shivered when the light found them.
"Read," the clerk said.
The clerk's voice did not roll like Marcell's had. It was neutral, bored perhaps, the exactness of an official. He began to read, and names folded into the room like small birds landing on the windowsill: tradesmen, old keepers, signatures. The ledger's voice in this setting felt less theatrical and more like a bureaucrat reciting facts. Yet every name that passed set tiny ripples moving through the assembled: a nod, a cough, a hand that tightened around a pen.
When the clerk reached the line with Kaito's name he paused briefly, the way someone pauses before reading an unfamiliar word. The sound of the room lurching toward him was almost audible. "Ashen, Kaito," he read, and the syllables reached Kaito like cold water.
Kaito had prepared for that moment — trained his face to be a smooth stone, worked on the sort of grin that made the world say sometimes it was okay to be noticed. Instead when his name landed in the room he felt every pulse of his palms like a trumpet. He felt the ledger's page brush something inside him and he understood, in a small, sharp way, why men like Marcell kept ledgers: names are maps. Once someone reads your name, they may know where to find your memories, your bargains, your debts. They can map your edges.
The clerk continued. The ledger said details — dates, incidents, a notation in a handwriting older than most: bound under an old mercy; echo: ninefold; registry seal: archived. There was a line that Kaito could not understand, a tiny phrase in cramped script that made his breath catch: associated fragment: private index — Elys's shelf. The words felt like a doorbell pressed at the wrong time.
Across the table, Rein made a small mark in his notebook. Mira's thumb left a white print on his palm. Haru's jaw was a stone.
When the reading finished — and it ended with no dramatic fanfare, only the soft folding of a page — the room seemed to exhale. The Covenant man spoke first. "The ledger confirms the echo and the old binding," he said. "We will maintain custody. The Committee will review the ledger in private and decide the ledger's status."
Kaito wanted to say: don't put it away. Don't let those things that name us become private. But the words lodged in his throat like a stone. He tasted the risk of saying anything too loud here.
Instead he reached out and rested his palm on the ledger, small and unclenched. The leather was warm and the book's hum was a faint thing now, almost like a tired animal. He did not try to read it. He did not let the book read him. He simply put his hand there and felt the tremor of his own pulse.
Mira saw him and, with a softness that made something in his chest ache, folded her fingers over his. It was nothing dramatic: no promises said, no confessions made. It was a human touch that said, I am here; I will be here. The Registry's light felt less hostile for a second.
Someone in the committee cleared his throat. "We will secure the ledger," he said. "Host Ashen will be given a formal notice of the Committee's hearing and the option to present evidence of guardianship. The Covenant will oversee the process."
"Option," Haru repeated. "We will present. You will include witness statements on the collectors' attempted theft and the dojo's custody."
Protocol moved like a slow machine. It promised protection and it promised rules and it promised more men with small smiles who would decide what weight a name carried.
After the committee left, the Clerk — the one with the careful hands who had offered Kaito the tea — lingered. He dusted a corner of the ledger with the softest glove, then looked up at Kaito as if making a small decision.
"Someone has to watch the book," the clerk said quietly. "Even in custody, it is wise to know who is near it. The Registry will keep it. But if you can—" He hesitated, then closed his mouth. "—be careful who you trust."
It was not a secret. It was not a tip. It was a human thing: a clerk's warning in a room of rules. Kaito nodded. He thought of the hooded watcher on the rooftops, of Marcell's thin smile, of the scrap that had said Ashen and the way the city had moved like tides around that little stone.
That night, Kaito did something that surprised him: he asked to stay. He asked to keep a bed in the Registry's small caretaker room, by the ledger's safe. Haru looked at him with a mix of puzzlement and concession. "You need rest," he said. "You need watchfulness, two things that are hard to be at once."
"I sleep better when I know where my name is," Kaito said. Saying it aloud felt childish and true. Mira rolled her eyes in a way that meant she would not argue. Rein made a note and set it down like a charter.
They prepared the little room with a care that felt oddly like making a home: a clean blanket, a mug, the leftover bread in a paper. Kaito lay down with the ledger's safe across the narrow corridor — a dull, heavy thing with keys and seals and men who walked in rotation — and he hummed the lullaby until the sound folded into sleep.
He dreamed a small thing: a woman, in oil-light, wrapping a baby with black cloth and humming a tune that smelled of rice and rain. The lullaby answered and in the dream it was not a song to keep him trapped but a song that promised to return him what mattered if he could hold his hand steady.
When he woke it was almost dawn. The watch-thread at his wrist had not sung while he slept; maybe it had been polite. He sat up and felt the ledger's vibration like a distant heartbeat. Outside, the city was a soft noise. He dressed, pulled on Haru's old cloak for warmth, and stepped out into the Registry's small yard.
Mira was there, eyes rimmed with tiredness and kindness. Rein appeared with a thermos. Haru came last, bringing the gravity of someone who had lived long enough to keep children out of certain fires.
They stood in silence a long moment, and the world felt thinner, like paper the way the clerk's hands had smoothed it. Kaito did not know what the Committee would decide. He did not know which men would befriend him or which would sell his lullaby into a shelf. He only knew a few things as clearly as he knew how to tie a knot: his friends would not let the ledger slip into a private room without a fight; he would not hand his name away; and his lullaby would keep sleeping sounds for him when other people tried to make songs out of his life.
Haru gave him a look that was both tired and proud. "We go to the hearing," he said. "We speak with facts. We show our truth."
Kaito swallowed and felt the edge of fear and the point of hope line up like teeth. He wrapped his hand over Mira's for a second, grounding himself in the ordinary warmth of it. "We'll be ready," he said. The words felt small and true.
Above the Registry's eaves, a rooftop watcher tapped a shard and smiled. Somewhere a man in a private room drew a curtain and set an extra chair for a buyer who liked the sound of auctions. The ledger's safe clicked like a clock.
Kaito took a breath and hummed the lullaby under it — not as a charm or a secret, but as something human and stubborn and alive. It warmed his chest like a lighted ember.
They would go to the Committee. They would argue. They would tell their truth in a room of polite men. And if the ledger tried to sing them into cages, Kaito decided he would learn to sing louder.