CHAPTER 47: GATE FOUR: QUIET SWEEP

Midnight made the academy feel like a different city. No student lamps, no patrol torches.

Liora met us at the service door: hair pale as new metal, soft blue eyes steady. Dorian waited behind her, hands loose.

"Cold kit only," Liora said. "No flares. No light that sings."

I tapped my pack. Bone Lantern, Bone Sapper, line, wedges, a stripped Warden frame folded flat. Marrow and Hollow sat in Shade, leashes tight.

We slipped into the Gate Four service run. I thumbed the Lantern to life. It didn’t glow so much as hush the dark—a gray guttering that didn’t poke the wards.

"Use the building," Dorian murmured. "Don’t wrestle it."

I put my palm to the wall, felt a faint vibration—ward flow. We moved.

At the first elbow, the smell hit: pine cut with iron. The same scent from Gate Six, but sharper. Someone had refined the blend.

Liora crouched by a junction plate. "Talk to me."

I set the Lantern on a ledge and eased the cover back. Flow lines crossed under a clay bed. A thin shim sat where two veins met, its edge showing tool marks.

"Not a clog," I said. "A brake. Slows the pulse. Won’t trip a basic check."

"Remove?" she asked.

"Log first," Dorian said. He passed me a wax slate. I sketched the plate, marked the shim’s seat, the tool angle, the smear.

"Now remove," Liora said.

I slid a bone blade under the shim and lifted. Sticky resin tugged, then let go. I wrapped the shim in oiled paper, labeled it, and bagged it.

We moved in short hops. I let the Sapper down on a thong. The crawler tapped tiles ahead with a rib tooth: tick...tick...tick. Where flow wavered, it tapped twice. I chalked those spots with Hollow’s snap-tap.

Two turns later, the smell thickened. A drop of resin streaked the wall under a vent lip, fresh enough to shine.

"Hollow," I whispered.

He slid from Shade and perched under the lip. I passed him a crumb of chalk. He clicked once, stamped a dot above the smear, and tucked back in.

"Same blend?" Liora asked.

"Sharper," I said. "Less binder. Whoever it is is learning."

We pushed on. A service stair climbed to a loft with old tool chests and a ledger desk. Lantern hush showed dust curls and a clean square where something had been moved.

Dorian checked the trick latch—nothing. He opened the ledger drawer. Inside: purchase logs. Iron-pine deliveries through a proxy shop at the market edge. Quantities small enough to hide as lantern oil. The ledger’s binding had a decorative stitch at the spine—tight, offset by one thread. I remembered that stitch on a dropped glove from the Gate Six sweep.

I traced it and drew the pattern on the wax slate.

Footsteps scuffed below us. Light weight. Nervous cadence. Not a warden.

I killed the Lantern. We held breath. A figure moved through the cut under the stair and froze when their palm slid in resin. A hiss, a stifled curse. A boy—grounds crew uniform, too big on him—backed away and then bolted down the run.

Liora didn’t move. "Mark. Do not hunt."

I flicked a bone sliver and Hollow snapped it mid-air. He kicked off the stair, skimmed the wall, and tapped the sliver onto the boy’s boot heel. No sound. No glow. Just a tag I could feel on the leash.

We waited. No alarm. The boy’s footfalls faded toward the contractor sheds.

"We step away," Dorian said. "We have what we came for."

We closed the ledger, set everything back, and left the desk as dusty as before. I relit the Lantern and let it hush us along another loop, checking throats, peering under plates, marking two more faint shims. Whoever did this liked corners.

At the last bend before the outer throat, Hollow clicked twice. Moving scent. Fresh resin. Close.

We snuffed the Lantern. The corridor calmed.

Liora lifted a hand without looking back. Stop.

A shadow passed the cut ahead, measured and slow. Whoever it was had learned our pace. Shoe leather, not work boots. The smell was sharper again, cut with something like mint—masking agent.

"Back," Liora breathed. "Now."

We slid three steps, turned, and flowed out through another service run. When we reached the court, the academy looked like it always did at midnight: empty.

In the yard’s white, Liora studied the bagged shim, the ledger sketch, the chalk on my sleeve.

"Same hand," she said. "Slightly different recipe."

"And bolder," I said.

Dorian nodded. "We keep this inside."

We turned for the infirmary door. Hollow, tucked under the eave, clicked twice again and looked toward the dark under the east arch.

Fresh resin. Moving.

Liora’s gaze cut to the arch and back. "We don’t chase shadows," she said. "Not tonight."

We didn’t. But the tag on the boot heel hummed in the back of my mind like a promise I’d collect later.

Inside the south infirmary, Liora set our bags on a clean table and locked the door. She washed resin from her gloves with grain alcohol and a pinch of ash, then handed the bowl to me. "Hands," she said. "That blend binds to skin."

I scrubbed. Dorian wrote a clean note: time, location, plate marks, removed shims, recovered ledger stitch. No guesses. He slid the slate to me. "Sign what you know. Leave what you think."

I signed the facts. The guesses I kept in my head.

Liora unwrapped the shim and held it to the Lantern. The hush light showed cross-grain cuts. "Same maker," she said. "New tool."

"Why leak at Four after Six?" I asked.

"Because someone wants us to chase noise," Dorian said. "While they do quiet work elsewhere."

"Or because they’re testing who shows up," Liora added. "Which is why we log, not strut."

She labeled the bag, sealed it with a wax stamp, and filed it in a chest with three locks.

A quiet knock sounded. She opened to a ward runner. Pierce’s hand: "Audit Spire anchors at dawn. Bring quiet light."

Liora looked at me. "You’ll assist. Lantern and Sapper."

"Understood."

She paused, then said, "Armand, this is good work. Keep it quiet."

"Quiet," I agreed.

We left by a different door. The east arch looked like any other arch. I could feel the faint tug on my leash where Hollow’s tag sat on a running boy’s heel, somewhere past the contractor sheds.

I didn’t follow. The lesson tonight was simple: mark, log, leave.

Back at the dorm, I stripped the Warden frame and cleaned resin from every joint. I sharpened two bone shims and put them in a pouch by themselves. I wrote three words on a scrap and burned it over the basin.

Mark. Log. Leave.

Before dawn, I walked the path above the east arch and watched the first pale line of day catch on stone.

The tag on the boot hummed once and then went quiet, either knocked off or thrown in a drain.

We had an audit to run, a spire to check, and a problem that had learned our schedule.

It would learn mine, too.