Wren Whitlock wrote the sentence she had promised herself she would not write. Her quill moved before her hand could stop it. The ink read: The curse is winning. She felt the words settle into her wrist like a splinter pushed deeper. She snapped the page from the desk, held it to the candle, and watched it curl to ash. Three years of burning pages, and the fae bargain still tightened whenever she tried to study it alone. Her loft smelled of smoke and old paper. Manuscripts leaned in stacks taller than she was. Scrolls hung from the rafters on twine. She had built this place to hold every book that might name her curse, and none of them had. She pushed her spectacles up her nose and opened the relic on her desk. It was a flat slab of dark metal, edged with grooves that glowed faint teal and pink. She had bought it from a rag-picker who swore it came from a scribe like her, one who had failed. Its markings shifted when she stared. She had been trying for a week to read them. Each attempt left her fingers stiffer, her handwriting more binding. Study alone, and the curse fed. She knew this. She kept going anyway. A knock rattled the trapdoor in her floor. She shoved the relic under a cloth. "Whitlock. Open. I brought tea and I have not slept in six days." She lifted the door. Cornelius Tickworth climbed up, apron heavy with gears, eyes ringed red. He was the clockmaker two lanes over, the only other cursed soul she had ever met. His fae bargain kept him awake. Hers kept her honest. They had nodded at each other in the market for a year before either admitted why. He set a kettle on her stove and pointed at the cloth. "That's the thing you wrote me about." "It's killing me slowly," Wren said. The words left her mouth and hung true in the air. She flinched. Cornelius did not. He pulled the cloth off and studied the grooves. "I can't read fae. But I can read patterns. Clocks are patterns." He traced one line with a shaking finger. "This repeats every seventh mark. Yours does too, I bet. Write something. Small." She hesitated. Then she dipped her quill and wrote: My name is Wren. The relic's grooves pulsed on the seventh stroke. Cornelius exhaled. "You've been reading it like a book. It's a lock. You need a second hand on it." Wren stared at him. Her chest loosened for the first time in months. "You'd help me." "I don't sleep," he said. "I have time." She closed the relic and slid it toward the middle of the desk, between them. The next page she wrote, she did not burn. She folded it and handed it to him.

Cornelius folded the page and slid it into his apron. Wren set her hand on the relic beside his. The grooves warmed under her palm. For one clean second, she believed they might actually solve it. Then the candle guttered sideways, though no window was open. The scrolls hanging from the rafters swung. Wren smelled wet iron and crushed leaves. She knew that smell. Her curse had come with it, three years ago, on a road outside town. "Fae," she whispered. The word hung true in the air, and her wrist ached. Cornelius went white. "Here? Now?" A knock came at the trapdoor. Not the friendly rattle he had used. Three slow taps, spaced like a heartbeat. A voice slid up through the boards, thin as a draft. "Scribe. Open. You've woken something that isn't yours." Wren crept to the trapdoor and looked through the seam. A boy stood on her stair, hooded, small, wrong. His eyes were too dark for the lantern light. A hunter, then — the kind the fae courts sent when a relic stirred. She had read about them in a burned book. She had hoped the book was lying. "He'll take it," she said. "And me with it." Cornelius pointed at the relic. "Then lock it now. Half-open is worse than closed." "We haven't decoded it." "We have the pattern. Every seventh mark. Push them in order and it seals." The taps came again, harder. A knife tip slid between the boards and lifted a splinter. Wren sat. She dipped her quill. Her hand shook so badly the ink jumped. She wrote, small, on a scrap: I will not give it to him. The relic pulsed teal on the seventh stroke. Cornelius pressed the mark. The next groove lit pink. She wrote another true line — I am afraid — and he pressed the seventh again. They worked down the slab like that, her truths feeding the lock, his fingers counting. The trapdoor buckled. The hunter's voice came through the wood, closer now, almost kind. "Little scribe. I only want the truth inside it. You of all people should understand." She wrote faster. Her wrist burned. Ink smeared her cuff. On the last seventh mark, the grooves flared white and went dark. The relic clicked shut. The smell of wet iron thinned. The taps stopped. Wren crawled to the seam and looked. The stair was empty. A single black feather lay on the top step. Cornelius sank against the desk. "He left." "He didn't leave." She lifted the feather through the crack. It was warm. "He's waiting. He knows the lock only opens with two truths at once. He knows what I am." She set the feather on the desk beside the sealed relic. The scrap of paper in her hand still read I am afraid. For the first time in three years, she did not burn it. She folded it into her sleeve and looked at Cornelius. "We can't open it here again," she said. "We have to move."

The sealed relic sat on the desk between them, cold now, its grooves gone dark. Wren could feel the hunter through the floorboards the way she felt weather in her wrist. He was on the stair, or the roof, or the alley below. She did not know which. She only knew that if she carried the slab out her door, he would see it before her boot touched the second step. "He'll spot it," she said. "Wrapped, boxed, under a coat. Doesn't matter. He knows the shape." Cornelius rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. Eleven days without sleep had left him gray. "Then we don't use the door." "There isn't another door." "There's a floor." He tapped his boot on the boards. "Under this whole row of shops. Runs down to the river. My grandfather used it to move brandy he shouldn't have had." Wren stared at him. "A tunnel." "Smugglers' tunnel. Sealed at both ends now. The near end comes up through a coal hatch two buildings over. I can pick that lock in a minute." "And the hunter?" "Watches doors. Not cellars." She wanted to argue. She had no better plan. She wrapped the relic in oilcloth, then in a scribe's satchel meant for finished pages. It weighed like a paving stone. She tucked the folded scrap — I am afraid — deeper into her sleeve. They went down through the trapdoor slowly, one rung at a time. The shop below was dark and empty. Cornelius led her past the back stove to a low panel behind a flour barrel. He pried it up. Cold air came out, wet iron underneath it. Wren froze. "That smell." "Coal damp," he said. "Not him. I checked this morning." They crawled through. Two buildings over, he lifted a coal hatch from below and eased it aside. Wren climbed out into a soot-blackened cellar. A black cat sat on the stack of sacks, watching, its eyes catching lantern light. It did not move. It did not run. She thought, absurdly, that it belonged to no one. The tunnel mouth was set in the far wall — an old stone arch, stained, patched, older than the building above it. Cornelius worked the padlock with a bent pick. It gave. Wren looked back once at the ladder that led up to her loft. Her mentor would come tomorrow and find the door bolted from outside. He would think she was sulking again. She had no way to warn him without writing it. She stepped into the tunnel. The dark swallowed the lantern down to a coin of light. Behind them, the cat slipped through the arch and followed, silent as a held breath. Cornelius pulled the gate shut. The lock clicked. They were under the streets now, carrying a sealed thing a hunter wanted, and only one of them knew the way out.