Beltin’s gates rose out of the thinning mist like ruined teeth. There were tall timbers banded in iron, scarred and soot-black from old fire. Somewhere inside the wall a bell tolled once, hollow as a bucket struck with a stick. It wasn’t a welcome, and it was a warning that someone had been seen.

Boaz felt the Sigil pulse under his tunic, small and steady. He laid a palm over it and glanced at Thorne. The lynx walked close, whiskers dripping from the fog, eyes fixed on the seam where the gates met.

Two guards stood in the gatehouse shadow. If “guards” was the right word. One wore a dented pot-helm and a breastplate a size too big; the other had no plate at all, only a patched leather jerkin and a wool cap pulled low. Their spears didn’t match. Their faces were all hollows and nerves.

“Travelers?” the big-helmed one rasped. He had a smoker’s cough and a voice like gravel pushed by a broom.

“Wardens on the road,” Jaxson said evenly.

The second man eyed their boots, then the beasts: Mika’s yellow eyes, Thorne’s slab of muscle, Kestel on Lyra’s shoulder, and swallowed. “You don’t want to be out at night,” he muttered. “Not this side of Beltin.”

“We weren’t planning to be,” Aldryn said, dry as old wood.

The big-helmed guard spat, then jerked his chin. “Open ‘em enough, Marden.” The smaller man heaved at an iron cross-bar; the iron squealed, and wood complained. The gates parted just wide enough for one to pass at a time. “Slip in quick,” the big one told them. “New blood draws eyes.”

Telen’s nostrils flared. “Whose eyes?”

Marden stared at the gap, not at Telen. “Keep moving,” he said. “You can ask the inn walls your questions.”

They slipped through one by one. The big guard closed the gates and shoved the cross-bar back into place the instant Thorne’s tail cleared the threshold, as if shutting the jaws on something behind them.

Ash stained the arch stones like old tears. Just inside the wall, the road passed a row of pyres sunk low to coals. The air had the heavy stink of burned rot and wet timber. Kiera lifted her sleeve to her nose. Lyra gagged and forced it down.

“Same rot as the river villages,” Telen said under his breath. “Older. Deeper.”

Boaz said nothing. He didn’t trust his voice yet.

The street beyond felt rehearsed, like a stage set for a play about silence. Shutters hung on bent hinges and snapped shut the second eyes met eyes. A child peered from a window, met Boaz’s gaze with the startle of a hare, and was snatched back by an unseen hand. Even their footsteps sounded too loud, boot-scrape and buckle-clink throwing themselves down the empty lane, then running to hide.

They crossed a square where a dry fountain sat, basin cracked with neglect. A stone girl stood in its center, one arm missing, the other cupping nothing. Black fungus had been scraped off her legs in ragged scours; new threads already pushed through the gouges, stubborn as weeds and twice as sure.

Theo crouched and touched one of the gouge marks. “They carve it out and it grows right back,” he said. “It likes what it finds here.”

A man swept ash from a threshold into a neat square with a willow broom, humming the same six notes over and over. “Keep the seams clean,” he told the pile of ash, not the street. “Keep the seams clean or it creeps.” A woman burst from the shop, grabbed his sleeve, hissed something, and hauled him inside. The humming cut off with the door.

“Friendly,” Theo said.

Kestel lifted off Lyra’s shoulder and cut a tight arc over the lane, wings whispering. Eira ghosted higher to a broken lintel, head cocked sharply left as if listening to something Boaz couldn’t hear. Mika trotted close at Lyra’s heel, hackles half-up, half-undecided. Thorne stayed glued to Boaz’s knee, ears flicking everywhere.

They turned down a narrower street where the houses leaned into one another like tired men. Wet laundry hung from a rope strung window to window with a sheet, two shirts with elbows gone, and a child’s dress mended so often the patches had patches. Smoke licked from a handful of chimneys, thin as thread.

At the end of the lane a painted sign creaked on a single chain: a smiling figure with a raised mug and too many teeth. The paint had cracked along the grin, leaving hairline fissures that made the smile more desperate than merry. The Last Laugh, it read in letters that once had been gold. Someone had tried to pick out the letters again with a newer hand and cheaper paint.

Theo squinted upward. “Comforting.”

“Or a warning,” Shaye said, smiling.

The inn itself leaned as if listening to its own story. Its timbers were blackened by smoke, two windows boarded, and one lantern unlit beside the door. Another lantern burned on the inside, a steady amber that made a little square of warmth on the damp cobbles.

Jaxson reached for the latch, but the door opened first. A woman filled the frame: tall, shoulders squared, hair pulled back and going iron-gray at the temples. A scar cut through her left eyebrow and gave her gaze a permanent severity. She held the door with one hand and the weight of the room with the other.

“You’ve got coin for rooms?” she asked. Her voice was the scrape of a whetstone. “Then you’re welcome. If not, the street’s wide enough to lie in.”

Aldryn nodded once, then said, “We’ll pay. And we’ll mind our boots.”

Her gaze ran down their line, taking measure: Jaxson’s bow, Lyra’s sword and the hyena pressed against her leg, Kiera’s sling and the steadiness in her stance, Telen and Shaye with river-country written under their skin, Theo with ink on his fingers and hope in his eyes, Boaz with a cat that wasn’t like a cat leaning heavy against him. The corner of her mouth moved by a thumb’s width. Approval? Surprise? Or just the effort of not sighing.

“The Last Laugh has stew and a roof,” she said. “No promises on either. I’m Tessa Varn. You keep trouble outside, I keep the door barred after last bell. Those are the terms.”

“What happens after last bell?” Lyra asked.

Tessa’s glance slid past her to the empty street. The mist had thinned, but the light there still felt wrong, like something crouched just out of sight, waiting for a reason. “You don’t want to be the reason,” she said. Then she stepped back and swung the door wider. “Inside.”

As they crossed the threshold, Boaz looked back once. The lane was empty. Laundry lifted and fell on its rope. The sign creaked, smiling its cracked smile. Far off, the bell that had tolled at their arrival trembled again, as if a hand had brushed it lightly and then thought better.

Thorne brushed his flank against Boaz’s knee, ushering him in with a firm push. Boaz obeyed. The door thudded shut behind them and the Last Laugh caught their weight the way a weary chair catches a tired man: without grace, but without breaking.

For the first time since the gates, they were inside something that felt like shelter. Not safe. Not in Beltin. But shelter, for a handful of breaths.

Tessa’s voice carried from the dim common room. “Coin on the counter. Mud off the floor. And if you’ve brought bad luck with you,” she added, tone sharpening, “teach it to wait outside.”

Aldryn’s mouth twitched. “Fair terms,” he said.

“Almost friendly,” Theo whispered.

Boaz let the corner of his own mouth lift. The Sigil settled to that same quiet pulse against his chest, as if it, too, were waiting to see what Beltin would ask of them next. He followed the others toward the glow and the smell of something trying very hard to be breakfast.

After dropping their packs at the inn, the company stepped back into Beltin’s streets. Tessa had waved them off with a flat warning: “See what you like. Just be back before the last bell.”

The mist had thinned with morning, though the light felt wrong: gray where it should have been gold. The city was not dead, not yet. But it wore its life thin.

Some shops were open, some not, doors propped on broken hinges, shutters hanging askew. At the first corner, a fishmonger leaned over a stall, cutting pale fillets from river catch laid on beds of damp reeds. The smell was sharp, brackish. Telen slowed, brow furrowed.

“Iridescent Trout,” he murmured. “Too long out of water. It should glow faint, but these …” He shook his head.

The woman behind the stall noticed his glance. “Buy or move,” she snapped, voice hoarse. “Don’t stare.”

Shaye tugged Telen’s arm, pulling him on before he could answer. “Not worth it,” she muttered.

Two stalls down, a man sold candles: stubby things poured from gray tallow, set in cracked clay dishes. His eyes darted constantly between the company and the shadows stretching across the square. “Three for a copper,” he said quickly, pushing one toward Theo. “Burn long. Keep them out.”

Theo lifted a brow. “Keep what out?”

The man’s mouth twitched, but he didn’t answer. He shoved the candles back into their tray and busied himself with another customer.

Farther along, a weaver’s shop still clung to life. Bolts of fabric hung faded in the window, patched and darned but serviceable. A woman with tired eyes sat at the door, spindle in her lap. She looked up once, then deliberately down again, twisting thread without pause. Her silence was pointed, practiced.

Children darted between stalls, carrying baskets of dried herbs or thin loaves of bread wrapped in cloth. Their feet slapped against the cobbles, laughter too soft to carry far. But when they saw the wardens, the sound cut off, and they vanished into alleys like minnows into reeds.

Boaz’s gaze followed one boy as he ducked into a doorway. For a breath their eyes met: dark, curious, sharp with hunger. Then a hand snatched the boy back, curtain falling hard.

“Not a ghost town,” Lyra murmured. “Just a town pretending.”

“Pretending it’s still alive,” Jaxson said.

The company crossed into a wider market square. Half the stalls were abandoned, canvas torn, tables broken. But the others carried on: a woman selling roots from baskets, a cobbler with worn shoes stacked neat, a man hawking strips of dried meat. Each merchant worked quickly, voices clipped, as though eager to be done before the sun lowered.

Theo slowed at the cobbler’s stall, running a finger along the cracked leather of a boot. “Not bad work,” he said. “If you like holes.”

The cobbler bristled. “Good enough for mud and ash. Last longer than most folks here do.” He snatched the boot back.

Theo raised both hands. “Just admiring the craftsmanship.”

“Admire with coin next time.”

Eira shifted on Kiera’s shoulder, feathers puffing. Kiera glanced at the cobbler, then shook her head slightly, steering Theo away.

Boaz kept his eyes moving. It was life, yes, but a brittle life. Everyone moved with tension in their shoulders, eyes darting to alleys, shadows, the line of the sky. Each face carried the same worn habit: never linger too long in one place.

At the far edge of the market, a bell tower leaned over a boarded temple. Its rope dangled free, worn by years of hands that no longer pulled it. Only once had the bell tolled, when the company had entered the city. The sound had felt less like welcome and more like alarm.

Kiera slowed, eyes on the tower. “No songs here,” she whispered.

Aldryn’s staff tapped once on the cobbles. “A city rehearsing its funeral,” he said again. His dry tone carried no humor this time.

Past the temple, the streets narrowed. Houses leaned into each other, their beams warped from exposure to the dampness. Laundry hung limp between windows.

“Where’s the heart of this place?” Lyra asked softly.

“You’re looking at it,” Shaye said.

They wandered the length and breadth of the city, each block struggling the same as the last. When the day was getting on, at last they turned back toward the crooked lane of The Last Laugh. The sign grinned down at them again, mug lifted, teeth cracked but stubborn. The painted figure seemed to mock the silence around it, but in the evening light there was something defiant in its smirk, too.

Theo pointed up at it. “She named it that for a reason,” he said. “If the whole city’s bent on dying, she’s making sure she does it grinning.”

Boaz didn’t answer. But as they ducked back under the sign, he found himself hoping Theo was right.

The common room of The Last Laugh smelled of woodsmoke, damp timber, and stew that had boiled too long. Its beams sagged low, blackened from an old fire, but the hearth still held a healthy flame, throwing shadows up the walls. A half-dozen tables sat scattered across the floor, most empty. Two merchants hunched over mugs in one corner, heads down, speaking in low voices. Another patron slept on his arms at a table near the wall, snoring softly.

Tessa led them in with her arms folded, scarred brow cocked as if daring them to find fault. “Rooms up there.” She nodded toward a narrow stair. “Food down here. Coin for both, and I don’t run tabs.”

Theo gave a little bow. “Gracious hospitality.”

“Gracious costs extra.” She turned on her heel and stomped behind the counter.

They chose a long table near the fire. The benches creaked under their weight, the wood scarred by years of knives. Boaz slid to the end, Thorne curling near his boots, head resting across his paws.

Tessa came back with bowls: thin stew, gray with overcooked roots and a few strips of rabbit. She set them down with a clatter. “Eat it or don’t. Better than nothing.”

Shaye poked at hers with the spoon. “Better with bark.”

Jaxson leaned over her shoulder, peering into the bowl. “That is bark.”

Aldryn scooped a spoonful, chewed slowly, and swallowed with deliberate patience. “Almost food,” he said, voice dry.

Theo tried his. He grimaced, then pushed it toward Tink. The raccoon sniffed once, chirped indignantly, and slapped the bowl away with her paw. It spun halfway down the table, sloshing gray liquid before landing upright.

That broke the tension. Lyra laughed, sharp and bright. Kiera’s shoulders shook as she hid a smile behind her hand. Even Tessa’s mouth twitched. She caught it too late, scowled to cover it, and returned to the counter.

When the laughter faded, the company ate in silence broken only by spoons on wood. The stew wasn’t good, but it was hot, and the heat settled their bones after a day of ash and fog.

Boaz set his spoon down and looked toward the counter. “This city feels hollow,” he said carefully. “Like it’s waiting for something. What happened here?”

Tessa didn’t answer right away. She wiped a mug with a rag, set it down harder than necessary, and came back to lean against the table. Her gaze swept across them, sharp and tired.

“What happened? Same thing that happens everywhere these days. The black fungus creeps, the bell rings too often for folks who die. Folks vanish if they step out after dark. And the rest of us,” she spread her hands, “we keep our heads down. Beltin has been haunted now for months, since that rot started.”

“Why stay?” Lyra asked.

“Where else would I go?” Tessa shot back. “This is home. My roof may sag, my stew may taste like bark, but the hearth’s still warm. That’s more than most can say.” Her words carried no pride, only the bluntness of survival. She pushed away from the table and returned to her counter, done with the conversation.

“Why did we decide to stop in Beltin again?” whispered Theo.

“Because we needed a break from the wilderness, and to re-supply,” answered Kiera.

“We might not get either, here,” Theo grumbled.

The fellowship lingered, finishing their bowls. Outside, the day thinned toward dusk. A faint toll from the distant bell drifted through the rafters, one slow note that seemed to sink into the wood.

The door opened on a draft of evening air and a figure framed in the light. He carried himself like a man used to being welcome, though not entitled to it: cloak neat, boots worn but polished, smile easy.

“Good evening,” he said, voice smooth but not too smooth. “If there’s a room, I’d be grateful. If there’s supper, I’ll call it fortunate.”

Tessa sized him up in a single glance. “Coin first.”

He set two silvers on the counter, clean enough to gleam in the lamplight. “Lucar,” he said with a little bow. “Historian. My trade is in stories, not trouble.”

That got him a second look from Tessa. Her mouth twitched as if she wanted to dismiss him, but she pocketed the silvers. “Plenty of stories in Beltin. Most not worth keeping.”

“Then I’ll be careful which ones I write down.” He tipped his head toward the fire. “May I?”

Tessa gestured with a flat hand. “Sit where you like. Stew if you want it. Don’t complain.”

“Never,” Lucar said with mock solemnity. “I learned long ago that stew is the backbone of civilization.”

That drew a short laugh from Theo, and even Kiera’s mouth softened. Lucar crossed the room, cloak swinging, and chose the empty bench near the company’s table but not too close.

The inn had filled while the day waned: traders, two different guards, a fishwife still smelling of her stall. Now, as the first evening bell tolled, chairs scraped back. Patrons began to leave in twos and threes, voices low, faces turned toward the door as though measuring how much light was left.

The guards drained their mugs, muttered thanks to Tessa, and slipped out. The fishwife pulled her shawl tight and followed, pausing only to light one of the gray tallow candles the company had seen sold in the market.

By the time Tessa brought Lucar a bowl, the inn had thinned to half its number. The hearth crackled louder in the quiet.

Lucar inhaled the steam and smiled. “A meal is a gift, however humble. Thank you.” He lifted a spoon, tasted, and, unlike the others, didn’t wince. “Reminds me of an inn in the North Marches. Their turnip stew tasted bland, but it kept travelers alive.”

Theo leaned forward, curious despite himself. “You’ve been to the Marches?”

“Studied there for a year,” Lucar said, brightening. “Terran ruins, half-swallowed by moss. I nearly froze my feet, but I came away with some old miner’s ballads. Crude, but full of heart.”

Lyra’s eyes lit. “You collect songs?”

“Stories, songs, poems. Anything that refuses to be forgotten.” He smiled at her, not too long, not too sharp. “They all say something about who we were. And who we might be again.”

Even Aldryn’s gaze flicked sideways at that.

Lucar gestured to Theo’s staff. “That notch work; it’s old script, isn’t it? I thought I recognized the curve.”

Theo straightened, both proud and defensive. “Just copying what I see.”

“A good habit,” Lucar said warmly. “Half of learning is having the nerve to try. May I?”

Theo hesitated, then angled the staff so Lucar could see.

“Hmm.” Lucar leaned closer, careful not to touch. “Half a binding rune, if I’m not mistaken. The shape is right. Voice is trickier. You need exactness; old makers didn’t forgive sloppiness. Still, ambition like this is rare. I envy you the courage.”

Theo flushed, but he smiled.

Kiera spoke next, cautious. “And what do you do with all these stories?”

“I remember them,” Lucar said simply. “Not everyone has the luxury of forgetting. Someone ought to hold the thread, or we lose the pattern entirely.” His tone was gentle, not grand.

Boaz found himself watching him more carefully. Something in the way he said remember tugged at him, though Lucar’s smile never faltered.

To lighten the air, Lucar reached into his cloak and drew a deck of cards, worn but neat. He shuffled once, the sound crisp. With a flick, he spread them across the table face-down, then drew one without looking. When he turned it over, it wasn’t a card at all but a folded scrap of parchment. He set it in front of Lyra with a flourish.

She raised a brow, opened it, and blinked. A single sketch stared back: a hyena running, lines quick but certain.

Her lips parted. “How…?”

“A trick of the hand,” Lucar said with mock gravity. “Cards hide many things. Sometimes it’s rabbits, sometimes it’s ash. Today it happened to be paper.”

Lyra laughed, genuine, the sound easing the tension that had clung to her shoulders since they entered the city. Even Jaxson cracked a small smile.

Lucar leaned back, satisfied. “I like a table where laughter isn’t afraid to sit down.”

That was the moment Tessa returned, wiping her hands on her apron. “Enjoy your tricks while you can. Last bell’s coming. Doors bolt when it tolls.”

As if on cue, the second bell rang out from the temple tower, long and low. The remaining townsfolk drained mugs, gathered cloaks, and hurried for the door. A woman whispered a quick thanks to Tessa, then slipped into the street. Only the fellowship, Lucar, and one other snoring in the corner remained.

Tessa shoved the bar across the door with a practiced heave. Iron clanged against stone. She lowered the second bar, shoulders taut. “That’s it. No one out, no one in.”

Boaz glanced toward the shuttered windows. The quiet outside had changed. The wind carried a faint, wet sound, slapping, dragging. It slid along the cobbles as if something heavy was being hauled without wheels.

Thorne lifted his head from Boaz’s boots, ears pricked. Mika growled low. Eira clacked her beak sharply. Tink stuffed herself deeper into Theo’s cloak.

The hearthfire popped. Tessa didn’t turn from it. “Stay inside,” she said. “They like newcomers. More than we do.”

Lucar tilted his head, as though listening carefully, then looked back to the table with a reassuring smile. “Well,” he said lightly, raising his mug, “here’s to newcomers who arrived just in time for supper.”

For a moment, even with the dragging sound outside, the fellowship smiled back.

Tessa pinched the hallway lantern dark and left only the hearth and two counter lamps to hold the night at bay.

They set watches without arguing. Jaxson and Shaye took the first, sitting angled to the door so they could see both latch and windows; Aldryn and Kiera the second, quieter and more listening than looking; Boaz and Lyra the last. Theo, by unanimous vote, was assigned to “do nothing risky,” which he accepted with wounded dignity and then ruined by grinning at Tink.

The inn settled into a sort of hush. The lone villager from before, sleeping at the corner table, snored once, sneezed, and folded his head back into his arms. The traders and guards had gone; Lucar remained by the fire with a book open and one hand wrapped around a cold mug. He didn’t read so much as keep the page company, glancing up whenever a board creaked or a log shifted.

Outside, Beltin exhaled. Not a wind, just the city’s long day loosening its hold.

The first sound came soft: measured footfalls in the lane, slow as someone counting. Jaxson’s head tilted, listening the way Kestel might. Shaye didn’t move at all, only breathed more deeply to control anxiety.

Thorne slid from beneath the table and planted himself between Boaz and the door, tail stiff, whiskers forward. Mika rose to her feet beside Lyra, the rumble in her throat no louder than a kettle on the first hint of boil. Eira pinched her beak once, sharp as flint, and then held perfectly still; Kestel fluffed, refused the window beam, and settled on the back of a chair instead. Even Tink, who had an opinion about everything, decided silence was her best contribution and disappeared down the collar of Theo’s coat until only the tips of her ears showed.

The footfalls paused beneath the nearest shutter. Wood and night seemed to lean toward each other.

“Stay as you are,” Tessa murmured, keeping her voice low as a pin drop.

A knock followed, four light taps, polite as a neighbor. Jaxson’s eyes flicked to Kiera without moving his head; her fingers were already wrapped around a smooth stone in her sling, though nothing in her posture said she meant to use it.

Another set of steps answered from farther down the lane, then another farther still: no hurry, just the suggestion of company taking its time. The knocks came again at a second window, then a third. Each time the rhythm was the same: four taps, patient, expectant. As if the night were content to wait for someone to remember their manners and see who had called. Then, for a long while, nothing happened.

The first watch passed hand to hand with a nod. Aldryn slid into Jaxson’s seat, Kiera into Shaye’s. Lucar did not change chairs, but he closed his book and set it beside him.

At the edge of hearing, a thread of melody drifted through the shutter. Kiera stiffened; Eira’s head tilted the same way. It was no more than four notes, hummed and left to hang: the opening of a lullaby Kiera’s father used to sing to her as a child who cried during storms. Kiera’s hand twitched toward the door.

Mika leaned her weight against Kiera’s knee, a solid, living pressure. Kiera exhaled and the song outside unraveled into ordinary night.

Aldryn glanced her way once, not asking. She shook her head once in return, not explaining. That was enough.

The footsteps went on, patient as a clock. Sometimes they paused by the door; sometimes they traced the wall; once they seemed to mount the steps of the building opposite and cross a balcony plank by plank. None of it felt rushed. If anything, the slowness unsettled more than any scrape would have.

They kept the second watch with breath measured, ears tuned to the rhythm of knocks and steps and long, deliberate pauses. Once a child’s laugh drifted through the shutter. It was too light to belong to any child they knew, too brief to be anything but memory. Lyra’s head lifted; Mika touched her hand with a damp nose, and the moment passed like a ripple smoothing out.

Boaz and Lyra took the last watch. Boaz stood with his palm resting lightly over the Sigil, not calling and not resisting, only listening for the way it sometimes answered the world. The pulse met his hand steady as his own heartbeat, neither urging nor holding back.

Lyra watched the windows. “Do you think it’s the same as the watcher on the ridge?” she asked, voice almost lost in the fire’s crackle.

“This seems to happen every night here. Why else does the city act this way?” Boaz said. ”I think this whole area is haunted by the past.”

The knocks came one more time, slow and almost courteous, at the door itself. Thorne’s ears went flat; he didn’t growl, which said more than growling would. Boaz pressed his hand more firmly to the Sigil, not in challenge but in declaration. The pulse answered once, cool and exact. The wood did not strain. The bars did not sing. The knocks stopped.

They sat out the rest of the hour counting small things: the hiss of sap in a log, the villager’s soft snore, Tink’s little sleep-chirp from the fold of Theo’s cloak, Lucar’s steady page-turn with no reading behind it.

Dawn announced itself with the light that crept into the seams of the shutters and turned the lamplight dim. Somewhere beyond the wall, the temple bell gave a single, plain note. The four-tap rhythm did not answer.

Tessa came out from her room, then moved with the kind of briskness that is half habit, half gratitude. She lifted the top bar, then the bottom. The iron left the brackets with the relief of a burden set down. When she opened the door, the lane beyond lay damp and ordinary. Only clean cobble, a coil of wet laundry rope hanging empty between two windows, and the tilted smile of the inn’s sign catching early light.

“Another night kept,” she said, and didn’t dress it in anything more.

Lucar closed his book and stood, not too quickly, rolling his shoulders like a man who’d sat long by a good fire. “My compliments,” he said lightly. “Many houses forget how to be gracious after last bell. This one remembered.” He nodded toward Tessa with simple respect. “And that is no small craft.”

She snorted as if to deny it and, failing that, accepted it with a short tilt of her chin. “Breakfast if you’ve coin. Then you’ll want your errands done before the bell thinks of ringing again.”

Boaz let his hand fall from the Sigil, which lay quiet. He met Lyra’s eye, then Kiera’s, then Jaxson’s. No one pretended the night had been nothing. No one pretended it had been everything. The inn had held; they had held. Sometimes that is the story.

They climbed the narrow stair for a few hours of real rest, leaving the door open to the square of morning. Thorne brushed Boaz’s leg on the way past, something like approval in the set of his shoulders. Outside, Beltin resumed its daylight shape: shop signs creaking, a broom whispering, the soft clatter of a cart turning the corner. Ordinary sounds. The kind a city makes when it decides, for one more day, to be alive.

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