Chapter 106. Fear Does Not Open You

Night liked to pretend it was generous when it had eaten enough attention. The torch on the square took its polite arc back toward the water gate. The well traced a bracket around the names it had learned to keep and tucked BENCH into the corner of LEADER—OWED and forgot to be smug. The river stayed shut for the length of another name said right. Children went to bed with the sort of tired that doesn’t require stories to blunt the sharpness of dark.

Aria slept for half an hour, which is as close to sleep as a person gets when the air has been taught new verbs. She woke to quiet that had the wrong kind of edges: no mice, no wood settling, no neighbor-voice turning over a thought to see whether it was sharp enough for morning.

Jules was already up, dressing by the hinge’s dim light. “You heard it too.”

“What did you hear?” Aria asked.

“Polite,” Jules said. “Very, very polite.”

They crossed the square slow enough to teach their bodies not to rehearse panic