The Whispering Shroud wanted every noble in Bellstorm to whisper his name in fear. Tonight that name was becoming a liability. He sat below the street, in the lair he reached through a dark gold clockwork hatch. On the wall hung a rack of glass jars. Each held a thing he had recovered and locked away. He had taken three stolen items. One glowed green in its jar now. Two others still moved through the city, and his clockwork tools ticked toward them. But he could not chase them. Not yet. A folded newspaper lay open on his table. A detective had cleared a merchant framed by his own partner. She had refused the extra fee. Now she was working the recent recovery of the green item, the one people called the Shroud. She had traced it back toward him. If he kept moving in the open, she would fix the thefts to his name too early, before the whisper became terror. Her name was Lin Su. She ran her own agency. She had taught herself to read heat and cracks in stone. He needed to see how close she stood. He went up through the hatch and found her already at the mouth of an alley. She knelt on the cobbles, holding a clockwork magnifying glass to the ground. She did not look up. "You walk very quietly," she said. "But you left warmth on this stone. My glass reads it. A man your height stood here two nights ago, watching that shop." He stayed in her blind edge, where she was not quite looking. "You've been busy," he said. "I close cases the police won't touch." She stood and faced the dark, but her eyes slid past him. "Three thefts. One item back in strange hands. Yours, I think." He felt the trap she was building. She had almost enough. He could kill her quietly. The dark gold weapon sat ready on his belt. But a dead detective becomes a case the whole city studies. That would burn his name, not raise it. So he chose the harder path. He let her chase a lie. "You're right about the warmth," he said. "A tall man stood here. He works out of the eastern docks. He moves the stolen goods through a broker there." Lin Su tilted her glass. Heat, chemistry, cracks. It could read stone, not truth. "Why tell me?" "Because I want the same man gone." She studied the space where his voice came from. Then she folded her glass shut. "The docks, then." She walked away toward the wrong end of the city. He watched her go. He had bought time. He had turned her aim from his name to a stranger. But Lin Su did not fully believe him. He had seen it in the tilt of her glass. She would chase the docks, find nothing, and come back sharper. He had days now, not hours. And the two stolen items were still out there, ticking, waiting to be seized before she returned.