The dojo woke like a thing that had learned to be careful. Morning light came slow and polite, catching dust motes and turning them into a little parade of gold. Kaito liked that light because it lied — it promised normality in a world that kept rearranging itself; for a few breaths you could pretend names were not dangerous.
He found himself at the low training post before the others. His fingers traced the dented wood by habit, the same way somebody worried at a coin. The lullaby hummed somewhere under his ribs, softer than it had been when the ledger called his name, more like a thread being tested than a rope being pulled. He set his palm flat and felt the familiar prickle at his wrist where the watch-thread sat, a cord that made it harder for surprise to feel clean.
Haru came out with a pot of tea and handed a steaming cup to Kaito without ceremony. "Sleep?" he asked.
"Badly," Kaito said. He wrapped his hands around the cup like animal warmth. "Dreams about songs."
Haru's mouth tightened in a way that meant sympathy: an honest, human shape. "Dreams carry pieces of truth," he said. "Hold the pieces you trust."
Rein arrived with the list already open: routes, safe-houses, men who could be trusted to keep silence. He read aloud without drama. "Registry has agreed to the review window. Committee convenes in three days. Collectors may try pressure tactics rather than force. Keep anchors at points B and C; shift decoys nightly." His neat voice made the plan feel like a made bed.
Mira tied rope into a new knot and, as she worked, she hummed the lullaby back at him — not to mock it, but to make it ordinary. It had become a small map between them: a tune, a shared secret. Kaito felt steadier when she hummed it. He liked her without being dramatic about it; liking was easier that way, less dangerous than being loved in a ledgered world.
They spent the morning in small ways that mattered: checking anchors, seeding false sigils in the market, leaving a string of half-words with allies who could not be named publicly. Toma sat in a corner and mended rope as if the act could stitch dignity back into him. At one point Kaito slipped him another piece of crust. Toma blinked, then clutched it like a sacred thing, and the look on his face was enough to stop whatever small cynicism Kaito had been brewing.
The day folded into plans and the plans folded into muscle. Haru took Kaito aside and had him practice a new breathing: slow in, count three, hold, hum one line of the lullaby, breathe out. "The Shade listens to rhythm," Haru said. "Not words. Make the rhythm your wall."
Kaito did it until the rhythm felt like his bones. The practice made him less frantic. The practice made the watch-thread's tiny irritations tolerable. The practice gave him a small confidence he could carry like a stone in his pocket.
Evening came wrapped in the smell of frying oil and the honest noise of the market. Lanterns went up and people walked home with smiles that were cheap and beautiful. The city would not stop being a city because ledgers chattered in rooms. That reality — people living, laughing — steadied Kaito more than any plan did.
They dined simply: salted fish, cheap rice, the sort of food that glued fingers together. They spoke quietly of small things. Rein told a story about an apprentice who had signed the wrong ledger and spent a year learning to be careful with pens. Mira argued that a good knot could solve half the world's problems. Haru watched them like someone who had found small comfort in a pot of warming tea.
When the dojo crept toward sleep, they took shifts keeping the ledger's safe in their mind. Kaito volunteered for the first night watch, not because he felt brave but because it would put him closer to the thing that could name him. Being close was different from being owned; he liked that distinction.
He dressed in soft cloth, tied the red ribbon at his wrist so the Registry could see he was the host they had been told to watch, and took the path to the safe-room. The night air tasted like ash and salt, and sometimes that taste helped him pretend the ledger was only paper.
The safe-room door clicked shut with the weight of brass. Kaito sat on a low stool and unwrapped a small scrap of bread from his pocket. He hummed the lullaby quietly. The watch-thread at his wrist pulsed like a small metronome, nothing dramatic, nothing dangerous — until the thread gave a quick, insistent tug.
Kaito froze. It was the kind of tug he had learned to trust: not the roar of the Shade, but the whisper that said a thing had changed. He pushed his palm to his ribs and felt the lullaby answer with a single, sharp note. The room smelled like paper and rope and the sleep of the city. And then he heard a sound that had no right to be in the middle of the night: paper sliding.
He stood so silently he thought he might break. The safe-room's heavy chest sat in the corner with the ledger inside, its seals intact. He could see the wax, the knots. He could see the lock. He could not see the thief — not yet.
The paper sliding sounded again, but this time it came from beneath the ledger chest: a small scrap being pulled from some hidden slat or, worse, shoved into the seams of the floorboards. Kaito took three careful steps and pressed his ear to the wood. The scrap smelled faintly of smoke and iron. He heard a whisper of breath and the scrape of fingers.
Someone was moving under the dojo's floor.
A cold knot tightened at the base of his skull. The watch-thread tugged again, a map leading him somewhere. He did not think with the eloquence of a strategist; he moved with the quick, practical instincts of a boy who had once run from men and learned which roofs were safe.
He grabbed the lantern from the shelf and set it low so the light did not spill. He took the short iron bar Haru kept for emergencies — not to fight, but to test things — and crept toward the flaking boards near the hearth that had always creaked.
Kaito's hand found a loose board and lifted it with fingers that did not shake. The space beneath smelled of dust and the damp sweet of old paper. There, folded like a patient thing, sat a strip of paper with three neat words inked in haste:
WATCH THE WINDOW.
The scrap was damp and still warm; whoever had left it had been here not long ago. Kaito's heart went the size of a drum. He slid the lantern down into the crawlspace and peered along the seam. A small tunnel of shadow led away under the foundation toward the alley. Someone could have used it to slip gifts — or to slip messages. Someone could have used it to tap watch-threads on the cheap.
He closed the board quietly and slid the scrap into his shirt, finger pressed over the ink as if to warm it. He felt foolishly like a child finding a secret letter hidden under a mattress, but the childishness did not make the message less urgent.
Kaito climbed up and locked the board back as gently as he could. He set the lantern on the stool and leaned against the table like a man trying to make sense. Watch the window. Who? A collector? A friendly informant? A scared kid with a shard? He could not tell.
He padded to the small window that looked onto the alley. The pane was old glass, full of wavering lines. He pressed his forehead to the cool glass and looked out. The alley breathed in moonlight and shadow. There was no obvious watcher, no figure leaning out from an eave. The rooftops scrolled into each other like an unread book.
Kaito felt something like a laugh and a sob at the same time — the ridiculousness of being warned to watch the window in a house where windows had always been watched. He hummed the lullaby low, steadying his nerves.
Slow steps sounded outside. Not the spring of youthful feet nor the clumsy trudge of market laborers — slow, careful steps on stone that knew the city's pulse. They paused beneath the dojo, right where the alley turned and the night swallowed shapes.
Kaito swallowed the rest of his bread and tucked the scrap into the warm hollow at his sternum. He took the iron bar and a length of rope and eased the window open a sliver. He wanted to look without being seen.
A figure moved in the shadows. Hood up, hands in pockets, nothing flashy — the same sort of person who could be a messenger or a robber. The figure stopped at the alley's turn and pressed something into the stone, nuzzling it like a small animal. For a moment Kaito thought the man was tripping a wire. The alley was silent enough to hear a mouse move.
Then the figure spoke, low and careful. "Hold," the man said, as if replying to an absent companion. "He has the ledger."
Kaito's blood tightened like a wire. The man's voice had a neatness to it — practiced, not quite human in its warmth. "The bind will move at dawn. Prepare the archive."
The man's words landed like a falling coin: the bind will move at dawn. Dawn again. Elys's Shelf, Marcell's ritual, the Committee. The city was arranging itself for the ledger's next song.
Kaito saw the shape of someone slip a tiny shard into their palm and tap it twice — a quick signal. The shard flashed, not loud but enough for a practiced eye. The man stepped away and disappeared into the night like a seam pulled shut.
Kaito's hands shook. He did what he'd been practicing — he breathed in, count three, hum the lullaby line, breathe out. The lullaby answered like a small rope around his chest. He felt less alone.
He did not wake Haru. He did not wake Rein. He did not want to startle the others into recklessness. Instead he moved softly, the way someone carries a sleeping child, and set extra anchors by the window, pressed a glyph into the jamb that would twinge if weight shifted, and braided a thread through the latch so that any attempt to open the window silently would flick the braid like a bell.
Then he sat, lantern down low, and listened. He remembered the scrap under the floor and the figure at the alley, and in the quiet he made a small plan: tell no one everything, tell each person what they must know. Let the ledger be a thing they protected together, not a burden one could wield alone. He felt older, not because time had changed — but because the ledger's map made him learn fast.
The night hours dragged. He felt his lashes grow heavy. Once or twice the lullaby fluttered like a moth against his ribs and then quieted. He drifted, sitting upright in the safe-room like a child who sleeps without a blanket but keeps one hand on the hem. Sometime before dawn he dozed.
He woke to a sound he had practiced to dread: the faint click that comes when hot glass meets cold metal. The watch-thread at his wrist jolted as if stung.
Someone had tapped the shard on the Registry's rooftop and it answered like a bell. A slow, patient light drifted across the windowsill and Kaito felt it like heat. He moved to the window in one smooth motion and peered out.
Across the alley, on the roof opposite, the figure hunched over the corner, his shard in his palm. He tapped it twice and the shard winked — a single, careful pulse. The shard's light leapt along a thread of signals and struck something distant: a tower, a chimney, a small mirrored tile. The light traveled like a train and then stopped.
At that moment, from the doorway behind the figure, a second shape slipped. Not a messenger. Not a watcher. A small, gloved hand reached for the window latch of the dojo.
Kaito moved like a man who had learned to act quickly. He flung the window wide and yanked into the alley in a single motion. The gloved hand froze — then retracted. Footsteps retreated, soft and quick. The watchers on roofs shifted like people realizing their song had been heard.
"Who's there?" Kaito called, not loud but steady.
No answer. Only the soft echo of feet. The shard's pulse died down as if someone moved it back into a pocket. The night turned ordinary again, except ordinary had holes in it now, like the small scares that teach you which doors not to open.
Kaito walked back inside with his heart still pounding. The scrap in his shirt had gone warm. He folded it and set it on the table, then took a breath and hummed the lullaby until the notes steadied. Dawn was a promise five hours away, then three, then—
Somewhere, a shard blinked. Somewhere, a man in a room with a glass wall wrote a new line and tacked it to a ledger.
Kaito closed his eyes. He did not know who had left the scrap under his floor. He did not know if the figure outside was friend or foe. What he knew was smaller and truer: the ledger's song had a rhythm that others could hear, and those others were preparing the next verse.
He rose, tied the red ribbon again at his wrist, and walked toward the safe-room where the ledger slept under seals and watchmen and a hundred small, guarded promises. He would be there at dawn, and if the bind moved, he would not let the ledger travel without him knowing where the names went.
Outside, a rooftop watcher tapped his shard and wrote a quick line on a folded scrap: BEGIN THE BIND. He smiled. Someone else, somewhere, pinned the same words to their own ledger and readied a hand for the trade.
Kaito did not smile. He hummed the lullaby until the tune was small and steady and tucked it into his sleeve like something to protect. Then he sat with the ledger's sealed chest and waited for the morning to decide which songs would be sung next.