The Registry felt like a throat you had to walk through: narrow, polished, and full of measures. Even the light seemed to obey rules here — it came in thin, obedient bars through the louvers and pooled politely on the floor. Kaito had never liked rooms that kept their breath so very still.
He woke with a small start, like someone who'd been dozing and been told a secret. The ledger sat on the table across the room, sealed and heavy and humming with a sound only his skin could feel. It was ridiculous to anthropomorphize a book. Books did not hum, and yet when he put a palm near it last night it had felt almost warm, as if the thing had a pulse. He had not slept well — that was the first, plain truth — but he had slept better than he had expected, which felt like a small victory in itself.
Mira was already up. She moved quietly in the small room they'd made for him like someone who had practiced gentleness until it fit perfectly. Her braid was loose today; a few strands framed her face in a way that made Kaito suddenly very aware his neck felt cold. She handed him a cup of tea without asking. The tea was too strong for him, bitter in the very good way that made you feel alive.
"You look like you can fight paperwork," she said, offering a crooked smile that did not reach her eyes because she was tired. "Drink."
He sipped. The warmth of it rolled down, steadying. "Thanks." His throat had a dry, unfamiliar edge to it — a mix of nerves and too much thinking. "How long until…?"
"An hour," Rein said from the corner where he was still scribbling. Even in the morning he wore the exactness of measurement like armor. He had a neat stack of notes, every line a little promise to himself that the world could be made tidy by keeping lists. Rein looked up, pinched the bridge of his nose, and then offered a little nod. "They'll be punctual."
Toma hovered near the doorway, hands fidgeting with a scrap of rope. He looked smaller than the night before, the way guilt had a way of making a body fold inward. Kaito caught the boy's eye and pushed the last piece of crust across the table to him. The gesture was ridiculous in its simplicity and enormous in how it smoothed something inside them both.
Haru, as always, was examining everything with a teacher's patience. He touched the ledger's safe before the rest of them left, fingers lingering on the metal as if tracing a line in an old student's manuscript.
"You don't have to go in there and roar," Haru told him, voice low and weathered. "You only have to speak plain truth. They can only take what you give them by word or by law."
Kaito chewed the inside of his cheek. "What if I don't know the truth they want?" he asked. The awkwardness of being a person written about by others pressed on him like a cold hand.
"You know the life you lived," Rein said, precise and kind in his own way. "That is a better anchor than any ledger."
Mira squeezed his hand, the squeeze small but fierce. "We're with you," she said. "If they get clever, we get clearer."
They walked the path to the hearing like a procession: not triumphant, not defeated — simply moving, which felt steady by itself. The Registry's assembly room had high ceilings and a ring of chairs around an elevated dais where three officials would sit. The Covenant man with the closed-eye insignia took a seat to the side like a shadow that could not be dismissed. People in the room murmured politely; most of them were there because the Registry made rules for their daily bread. Some faces were curious, some thin with duty, a few were outright hostile in a way that made Kaito's stomach clamp.
When the committee convened, the clerk with the spectacles read the formalities — a practiced roll of language meant to make power sound like balance. Kaito kept his hands folded in his lap until they felt like an honest thing. He had practiced what to say if they asked him why he had been bound, what binding meant, what the lullaby was. He had practiced calm like a charm. But practice does not always survive the first real breath of a room.
The clerk flipped open the ledger in the center of the dais. The book's leather sighed, as if it were waking again. The official voice read facts: foundling status, the midwife's stitch, the registry's note of a Ninefold echo. Each fact landed in Kaito's chest like small pebbles in a quiet pond.
When the clerk reached the line that mentioned the "associated fragment: private index — Elys's Shelf," the room rustled the way a curtain catches a hint of wind. The word private hung in the air like a thing you did not want to touch.
"Does the host's guardianship appear?" Haru asked when his turn came. His voice was solid; he did not sound like a man pleading. He sounded like someone who was stating an account and expected it to be believed.
The clerk read the ledger's current lines: Guardian: Haru of Ashen Dojo; Witnesses: Mira Sora, Rein Veldt; Registry notes: binding sealed under clause of mercy. Rein's pencil made a soft sound as he marked the page.
Kaito felt something small and thankful stir — that the ledger at least recorded what they had already proved by doing. But the relief was thin. There was a breath, then a small cough from the Covenant man. He leaned forward.
"There is an annotation," he said. "A secondary mark." He looked not at Kaito but at the ledger, as if the book itself would explain what the paper could not.
The clerk turned another page, slower. "Annotation: Echo duplication — clarification pending. Associated guardian: Haru (noted for previous classification involvement). See cross-file: Registry sealer entries." The words slid into the room like a new instrument.
For a moment the world held. Kaito sensed a thread of something shift in the air. Haru's jaw worked. Rein's hand stilled. Even Mira's breathing seemed to pause.
Haru's hands, which had been steady as earth all morning, tightened for a fraction of a second. A small line creased the corner of his eye that Kaito had never seen before — not the lines of age but the lines of a man who had been measured in a ledger once and had found his margins unfair.
"Sealer entries?" someone in the back asked, voice curious and dangerous. The committee glanced at each other. "You mean—"
The Covenant man's expression did not change, but his fingers moved like a man adjusting a map. "We require a clarification," he said. "If the guardian has prior involvement with sealing or registry processes it may alter the ledger's protocol. We must verify."
Kaito's mouth went dry. "What does that mean?" he asked. His voice came out small, but he meant it like a bell.
Rein spoke up before Haru could answer, quick and precise. "It means the Registry will consult cross-files. It means more eyes. It means the Committee may call for an extended review." He had the neat tone of someone naming a timetable. "We will provide what we know."
Haru's face folded into a thing that was private and hard to read. He had not lied — he had told the apprentices the story of the midwife's stitch, but nothing more. He had been Kaito's teacher, his keeper, not a Registry official. The ledger's note had opened a window into a small closet in his life he had not intended to show a room full of clerks.
Later, when they were given a short recess and led outside into a narrow courtyard, Kaito found Haru alone by the stone basin. The old man's hands were folded around a cup and in the light Kaito could see the scars on the backs of them, pale lines like old maps.
"You should have told me," Kaito said, and it was more accusation than he intended. He was tired of surprises. He was tired of the ledger pulling threads he could not see.
Haru looked at him and the lines around his eyes deepened. "I did not think it mattered," he said simply. "The Registry keeps many records. I served as an apprentice sealer once, many years ago. I signed papers. I made entries. It was… part of the work. That was before you, before the choice to teach rather than bind. I thought those records were closed."
The confession landed like a stone in the pond. Kaito was not sure if he should be angry or relieved. There was a sudden intimacy in knowing that the man who had taught him to hide was not a stranger but someone who had carried his own ledger once.
"You kept it from me," Kaito said.
"I tried to keep you from it," Haru replied. "I thought being a teacher would protect you from being part of the Registry's wheels. I did not account for the ledger's curiosity."
They stood in silence. A cup trembled in Haru's hands; Kaito could see a memory there, something older than the market and quieter than the docks. Haru's voice softened: "When I was young, we made choices I regret. I have spent years atoning in small ways. If the Committee asks, we will show them why guardianship matters. We will show who you are without the ledger's hunger."
Kaito looked at him and felt a complicated thaw. "Okay," he said. "Then don't hide it again."
Haru gave him a short, private smile. "I won't."
They returned when called, the three of them moving back into the quiet theater of the room. The clerk finished the reading. The Covenant man announced procedures for the cross-file review — forms that required signatures, witnesses to swear to page counts. Everything felt procedural and final at once. Kaito signed with a shaky hand and felt like a child handing over a toy he didn't fully understand.
When the committee concluded for the morning, they gave them a small victory: the ledger would remain under Registry custody for the review, but they allowed Kaito a written notice of guardianship. It felt paper-thin and huge all at once — like something that tried to hold more than it could.
As they left the building, Rein was already calculating routes and contingencies: who to call, what allies to alert, what safe-rooms to ready. Mira hummed the lullaby under her breath the way you might count steps. Toma walked with his head a little higher. Haru tightened the strap of his satchel and for once let the ledger be the larger worry.
Outside, the city breathed in some ordinary way. A boy was hawking oranges at the corner, a woman hung linens, a pair of old men argued about the tides. It was almost too normal, and that normal made Kaito angry in a small way — the idea that people could go about buying bread while ledgers moved in rooms and decided the arcs of lives.
On the way back to the dojo they took a narrow lane that cut across old stone. A scrap of paper flapped in a gutter and a trapped moth beat against it. Kaito stooped and picked it up without thinking. The scrap was damp and the ink blurred slightly; someone had written in haste: OPEN THE LEDGER — ASHEN. The handwriting was the same as before.
He folded the scrap and kept it, not because he had any plan but because the little thing seemed to be a thread to follow. Rein watched him with the careful expression of a man who loved lists and feared unknowns.
"More eyes," Rein said quietly. "They'll come. Now it's not just the collectors — it's men with pockets and men with titles. We should move the dojo anchors to secondary lines. We should prepare false routes." He rattled off plans, each one a neat box.
Kaito let Rein's orderliness fill in the cracks of his worry. He had a ledger's page in his head now, the idea that someone else's ink could name him. It sat there like a small ache.
That night, before they slept, Haru told them a story they hadn't expected: a small, humbling thing about a woman in a storm years ago who had stitched a mark into a swaddled infant to keep a beast quiet. He spoke of mercy as a messy, human transaction — not heroic, not clean. "Things were done to keep a village from burning," he said. "Sometimes the right choice is not the pure one."
Kaito listened and thought of the lullaby and of the small woman in the dream who had wrapped a child with black cloth and hummed. The chapter of his life that had been written in the ledger would be argued now by men in tidy coats. He had the odd comfort of knowing one man in the world who could look him in the eye and say, I did what I could.
He lay awake long after the others fell asleep, humming the lullaby as if by repeating it he could stitch it to his bones. The watch-thread at his wrist felt like a small drum. Far off, like a thought carried on the tide, a shard pulsed somewhere on a rooftop and then dimmed — a tiny signal sending news to those who kept ledgers and those who liked the sound of names.
Kaito closed his eyes and, for the first time in a long time, made a promise that felt like a small oath you might carve into a fencepost: he would not let other people arrange the tune of his life. He would learn to sing the lullaby on his own terms.
Somewhere in the city, in a quiet room with a shutter partly closed, a man in a cloak pressed a shard into his palm and smiled. He was writing a note and tucking it into a ledger of his own. He scribbled one line, neat and cold:
Prepare the bind. Committee will feed the song.
Kaito did not know those words yet. He only knew how his friend Mira's thumb had felt against his hand, how Haru's confession had landed in the space between them, and that Rein would make plans until the night was small and ordered again. He wrapped his fingers around the scrap with the old command and fell asleep to the lullaby, which for once felt like something that belonged to him.