Jolt Jinx crouched on a busted fire escape and counted walls. Twelve blocks of brick, and not one big enough for the piece she wanted to leave on this city. She had three jars on her belt — Pickled Surprise, Toxic Love, and Scream — and a slingshot loaded with a paint bulb the size of her fist. Her crew called her the queen of the dead zones because she painted where nobody else dared. Three of them had vanished in those same dead zones last month. No bodies. One of the missing had shared her bedroll. Jolt had decided, kneeling over an empty mattress, that she would answer the disappearances the only way she knew how: she would tag the whole city with one piece so loud nobody could paint over it, and whatever took her people would have to come look her in the face. But a back-alley tag would rot behind a dumpster in a week. She needed a wall the city could not ignore, and she did not have one. She went to Crownfall because Velvet Mirage always knew which walls belonged to who. The rooftop lounge smelled like smoke and cut limes. Velvet was already pouring two glasses when Jolt climbed over the ledge, grit on her boots, jars clinking. "Relax," Velvet said. "I already know why you came." Jolt set a paint bulb on the bar between them. "I need a wall. Something nobody can scrub." Velvet turned the bulb in her fingers like fruit at a market. "The road council commissioned forty miles of highway. One painter, one brush, first frost deadline. She's on mile one." Jolt's jaw tightened; she knew the painter, and the painter was a friend. "I'm not stealing from her." "I'm not asking you to. There's an old windmill above the second bend. Every car on that highway sees it. Every day. For years." Velvet slid the bulb back across the bar. "The wall is yours if you want it. I only ask one favor, named later." Jolt looked at the jar called Scream and thought about the bedroll and the three names she was carrying. She picked up the bulb. "Named later," she said. Velvet smiled without showing teeth. By dawn Jolt was on the ridge, rope in her hand, the windmill's white flank waiting above her like a page nobody had turned yet. She had her wall. She also had a debt to a woman who never forgot one, and forty miles of somebody else's paint about to run under her masterpiece.

Jolt reached the windmill's roof after dark. The rope burned her palms, but she kept climbing. She had come here at dawn once to claim the wall. Now she came back with a full belt and a plan. Three chaos jars knocked at her hip. The paint bulb rode in a sling across her back, too fat for her slingshot, meant for throwing by hand. Below her, the highway ran black to the horizon. She could see the first green mile her friend had laid down at marker one, a small bright stripe in the moonlight. Jolt turned her back on it and faced the blank stone. She pulled charcoal from her jacket and started sketching. Not letters. Faces. Three of them, big as doors. She drew the one who had shared her bedroll first, because her hand knew that jaw without asking. Then the second. Then the third. She wrote each name under each face in block letters a car could read at speed. She did not sign her own name. This piece was not about her. She uncorked the heart-shaped jar and dipped a rag. The pink liquid stained the stone violet and pulled the charcoal lines deeper, the way old bruises show through skin. She used it to shade the hollows under the eyes. Then she opened the green jar, the one thick with brine and tiny metal charms. She smeared it along the borders. The charms caught the moonlight and stuck to the wet paint like rivets. From the highway, the three faces would flash whenever headlights hit them. She climbed higher for the last stroke. She braced her boots on a sail, unwrapped the paint bulb, and threw it hard against the crown of the wall. The glass core cracked inside the cloth. Thick red paint burst in a wide arc above the three faces and ran down in slow streaks. It read like a warning, which was what she wanted. She wiped her hands on her thighs and looked at the whole thing. It held. She took the narrow dark jar off her belt last. The little bell chimed once as she lifted it. She had never told anyone what was inside. She pulled the wax seal with her teeth and yanked the cork. A sound came out that was not quite a scream and not quite a word, thin and long, aimed down the highway. It carried. Somewhere past the second bend, a dog started barking, then another, then a whole chain of them. Lights came on in windows she could not see. The city was awake, and it was looking up. Jolt sat on the roof and watched the first cars slow at the bend. Faces pressed to windows. Someone stopped on the shoulder and got out. The mural held its ground. Whatever had taken her people would hear about this wall by morning, and it would know where to find her.

Jolt came back to the windmill before sunrise. She expected new tags over her work, or a crew already climbing the sails to scrape her off. She had jars ready for both. Instead she found the hill quiet and one small pile of flowers on the grass under the wall. Yellow ones. Tied with brown string. She stopped on the path and did not step closer. A woman stood at the base of the mural. Older. Coat too thin for the hour. She was reading the names out loud, slow, like she was checking a list she had carried a long time. Rosa. Kai. Leo. Her voice was steady on the first two. On Kai it broke in the middle, the way a step breaks when you trust it. Jolt knew that break. She had made that sound once herself, into a bedroll that still smelled like him. Her hand went to the Scream jar at her belt and stayed there without opening it. She did not move. She wanted to run at the woman and grab her sleeve and ask every question at once. Instead she crouched in the weeds and made herself small. The woman touched the painted face. Just the cheek. One finger. "I thought no one remembered," she said. She was not talking to Jolt. She was talking to the wall, or to the boy, or to herself. Then she wiped her eyes with the flat of her hand, tucked the string tighter on the flowers, and walked back down the road the way she came. She did not look up. She did not look for a painter. Across the road, near the ditch, someone else was watching. Jolt saw the flower crown first. Willow sat cross-legged in the grass with her journal open on her knee and her pen still. She had seen the whole thing. She met Jolt's eyes and shook her head once. Do not chase her. Let her go. Jolt let her go. It was the hardest thing she had done since climbing the wall. When the road was empty, she crossed to the mural and picked up the flowers. Yellow petals, already bruised from the walk. She set them back down at the base of Kai's face, straighter this time. Under his name, in the last dry patch of stone, she used her thumb and the last smear of green from her glove to write one word. HERE. Willow came and stood beside her without speaking. Jolt kept her eyes on the paint. "She knew him," Jolt said. "She said his name right." "Then he wasn't nobody," Willow said. "Somebody took a somebody." Jolt nodded. The wall had answered her, finally. Not with the thing that took them. With proof the three had lived, and been loved, outside her crew. That meant other people were looking too. It meant she was not the only one owed a body. She wiped her hand on her thigh and started counting the flowers.