They woke to the market's ordinary chaos — hawkers shouting, tea steam rising, a child stealing an orange and making it look like a small triumph. It should have comforted Kaito, the way normal life keeps suturing itself over the sharp things that try to pry it open. Instead the ordinary felt thin, like paper.
Rein had a map spread over the table, charcoal smudges like tiny constellations. "Collectors shifted their signal nodes overnight," he said without looking up. "They're testing alternate channels — moving from the canals to the Saltmarket's lamps. Small squares, shorter binds. Less risk for them, more trouble for us."
Mira's fingers braided a spare thread into the crate anchor they'd kept. Her hands moved like someone making a promise you could touch. "We can't be everywhere," she said. "But we can be where it hurts."
Kaito listened and felt the lullaby in his chest thrum with impatience. The fragment in the lead-lined box was safe for now — inert under Rein's sigils — but that small safe felt like a single stitch holding a widening tear. He wanted to train until the stitch stopped quivering. He wanted to break every shard he could find. He wanted to find the men who wrote ESCALATE and make them cough up their lists.
Instead he dressed in soft cloth, tied the red ribbon to his wrist, and went to the market alone.
He told himself he was scouting. He told himself he liked the smell of frying oil and the way sunlight hit dust on rafters. The truth was simpler: the market made him human. Among those stalls he was not a ledger's name. He could be a kid who bought a burnt loaf and pretended like it was a feast.
A hand touched his elbow.
"Careful," a voice said. It was thin, edged with something that had been stolen long ago. He looked down and saw a girl no older than Toma, face pinched with the kind of worry practiced by those who sell favors and buy silence. She had eyes like wet coal and a sleeve tucked over her palm, the way someone hides a scar.
"You want something?" Kaito asked.
She looked surprised by his bluntness. "You Ashen?" she whispered. "I heard. You carry the ledger now."
He did not like how the word carry sounded when other people said it. He offered her half his bread because that's what he did when he wanted a truce. "Tell me what you know," he said.
She chewed and then spoke around the taste of crumbs. "They meet at the Saltmarket lantern-house tonight. Not the big auction. A private calibration. Someone called The Binder's coming — a man who can retune fragments so they speak to a new net. If he comes, the collectors can make old shards answer different ledgers. They'll sell the service." She swallowed. "They'll sell people."
Kaito felt his stomach drop like a stone. "Who told you?"
She shrugged. "A friend who owed a coin. He took a watch shift and saw ledgers moved for inspection. He saw a list. Haru's name on it. They called him an old sealer to be coaxed into the bind."
Haru's name. The paper cut through Kaito like a knife that was sharp enough to wake him cold. He had already known Haru had paid a cost yesterday — the relic, the seal. But to be listed as a thing to coax? To be bait? The idea made the lullaby in Kaito's chest trip into something like a sob.
He didn't think. He moved.
They met at dusk near the lamp-house: Rein, Mira, Toma wrapped in a spare jacket, and the courier-girl — Rin, she'd said her name was — with a patchwork scarf. The lamp-house stood like a small tower, its light a gull softly beating wings against the dark. Around it the market folded like a sleeping animal.
"The Binder's not here yet," Rein whispered. "Good. We wait. We listen."
Kaito walked the perimeter twice and his boots remembered all the alleyways like the lines of an old hand. He felt the market's breath: someone closing a stall, the clink of coin, a child laughing and then being shushed. The world had ordinary noise and extraordinary hush running beneath it, like a double track.
The Binder came as the moon scraped the rooftops — not with the swagger of a villain but with the calm exactness of a tradesman. He was a thin man in a neat coat with a leather satchel. He smelled faintly of iron and old books. When he spoke it was with the casual courtesy of men who count other people's breaths for a living.
"Calibration takes five minutes," he said, and he set down a little instrument that looked like a compass and a watch had a baby. A collector — tall, scarred, the kind who bought names like he bought pipe smoke — offered a crate and a coin. The crowd around the lamp-house thinned like a tide pulling away.
Kaito, too close, felt the plastic slickness of dread. He took a breath and hummed one small thread of the lullaby. It was a signal to himself. Something in the distance — a shard blink — answered like a bell.
Mira's thread snaked under a table. Rein's anchors gleamed faintly. Toma's hands were white. Kaito stepped forward and let his voice be small, the only weapon he trusted right now. "You're not opening anything tonight."
The Binder looked up. For a suspended second — long enough to be a lifetime — his eyes found Kaito's. There was curiosity there, the way men felt for new work. He smiled like a man who could recite a contract in his sleep. "And who protests? A host? Charming."
The collector laughed, and that laugh folded into the crowd like an agreement. Hands reached. A net of glass-thread struck down like a rain of needles.
Rein moved with math and muscle, snapping glyphs that arrested two of the collectors' wrists. Mira's threads lashed like fishing lines around legs. Toma shoved a barrel and the courier's satchel fell, spilling small papers that blew like startled birds. Kaito darted for the Binder's satchel with the kind of reckless bravery that used to get him scolded in the dojo. He did not plan beyond the moment. He only moved and the lullaby pushed the motion forward.
The Binder's compass spat a thin ribbon of light that snaked toward Kaito's wrist. It was calculating, precise — the kind of light that learns people. Kaito felt it like a cold brand. He cupped his hand and hummed the lullaby, a single bright note. The shard-light thudded and then hesitated, like a dog surprised by an offered hand. It scraped the lullaby's rhythm and lost purchase.
Kaito grabbed the satchel, yanked it open and found a roll of papers and a small glass vial curled in velvet. The vial hummed faint things. One of the collectors lunged, fury stapled to his face.
"Take him!" the collector barked.
And in that moment something small and honest became enormous: Haru's name on a list had been bait to draw the dojo into a spectacle. The collectors wanted a show; they wanted Kaito on stage. Kaito understood then — not with clever logistics but with gut — that the men had expected them to react with a bright fight, to make the ledger's song a spectacle that would bring more buyers. Instead they'd find a mess.
Kaito flung the satchel to Rein. "Read it. Now."
Rein's hands shook as he took the papers and his neat brain worked like a clock. He found lists. Names. A ledger of buyers clustered under a codename: Marionette. There were times, payment ciphers, and a small note scrawled in a hurried hand: Haru — entice — test seal response.
Mira's eyes were knives. "They used his name to make us walk into a trap."
Toma's cheeks were wet and furious. "We could have let them open it," he whispered. "We could have—"
"You did what mattered," Haru's voice came from the street corner, and Kaito's heart hit his ribs. Haru had come — as he always did — not to be rescued but to stand in the middle of things and count the cost. He looked tired. His relic warmed a faint ghost against his shirt. "You kept it from being private."
The collectors' leader spat and then laughed, a brittle sound. "You stopped a calibration. Congratulations, small heroes. Marionette will simply recalibrate with another Binder, another night. You cannot stop the market."
Kaito felt the lullaby coil into a different shape. He would not be content with small victories. The Binder's satchel held a list that could be turned into a weapon or a map. If they could get this list to the right hands — not the buyers' hands, not the collectors' hands — then maybe, just maybe, the market's merchants of names would have to look over their shoulders.
Rein looked up from the papers, jaw set. "There's a clerk in the East Registry — small, nosy, hates collectors. He'll take proof for a price: his conscience. We can use the ledger of buyers as evidence."
"Or we can burn it," the courier-girl said, voice small and steadier than before. "But then we lose who's buying."
Kaito's hand went to Mira's and squeezed. "Then we don't burn," he said. "We show the city the buyers. We make the buyers worry for their names."
They moved fast after that, a blur of small decisions: they handed the satchel and list to Rein for safekeeping, tied off their escape routes, and sent Toma with Rin for a clerk the size of a mouse who'd swallowed civic duty and never let it out. Haru walked with them, the relic at his chest humming like a tired friend. The market returned, slow as a tide, to its ordinary hum as if nothing at all had happened. People continued to buy skewers.
Later, in the dim backroom of a tea-seller who kept better secrets than tea, the clerk — a thin, sharp woman named Maris — read. Her eyes flicked. She tapped a coin on the table as payment and then, with the gravest of small smiles, promised to leak. "The Guilds don't like being surprised," she said. "If I show half this to the lesser guilds, they will start asking dangerous questions. The bigger buyers will get cold feet."
Kaito exhaled. The relief was brief and sweet. It felt like a patch on a wound, not a slather of healing balm. But it was movement.
They'd stopped a night. They'd stolen a list. They'd planted a seed that might make someone higher up fidget.
On the walk back to the dojo, Haru fell into step beside Kaito. He did not lecture. He did not celebrate. He folded the silence around them like a jacket.
"You did well," he said quietly. "But know this: exposure makes the hunted dangerous. Be careful who you trust."
Kaito's lullaby hummed against his ribs. He looked at Haru — the man who'd paid for a seal and would pay for it in other ways too — and he felt what he always felt: gratitude so thick it tasted like iron. "We'll be careful," Kaito said, and meant it.
They came back to the dojo with a small, human victory: information, a clerk who could spread it, and a market that had been stirred. But the scrap of paper someone had tucked into the Binder's satchel — three inked words, shaky as if written mid-breath — sat in Kaito's pack and breathed cold when he opened it later:
RECALIBRATE ALL CHANNELS.
The lullaby in Kaito's chest answered, not as comfort now but as a bell. The next verse had begun.