POV: Mara
Lantern Night leaves the city smelling like sugar and river. Morning leaves it honest. We sweep what joy abandons: ash rosettes, sticky footprints, the fragile bones of spent fireworks. Silvie calls the shift the Afterglow, as if we’re polishing the night’s teeth.
“Tiles first,” she says, handing me a stiff-bristle brush and a bucket that has known worse. “Ash turns to ink if you let water flirt too long.”
Pia croaks from a stool, voice shredded by last night’s patriotism. “I’m an instrument in ruin.”
“Drink salt tea,” Silvie orders. “Be ruin on your own time.”
I kneel on the south span and attack a ring of smoke black as old vows. The ash sits in a pattern almost too neat—like someone practiced being sloppy. Aster leans toward the shapes. “Not ours.”
“I know,” I think back, rinsing the brush, scrubbing again until the tile remembers it is tile.
Boots approach. The Afterglow makes boots kinder, or my mood edits them. I glance up and find Cael looking smaller in daylight for once, like a blade in a kitchen instead of a war.
My heart skips a beat right away.
God, how cliche. I can't stand myself. I can't stand him, too. And I still feel oddly warm when he's near.
“Thank you,” he says. He means Hearthworks; he means Silvie; he means the people who fed people while others watched the sky burn politely. He rarely thanks out loud. It lands like a coin on a quiet counter.
“You’re welcome,” I answer, too quickly.
I swallow hard. Don't look, I tell myself. Keep yourself busy.
Aster inside my chest wines. I try to keep my pulse steady. I fail.
He crouches opposite, wipes a line of soot with a cloth, studies the streak as if ash could confess. “Any soot that smells wrong?”
“Vinegar and shell,” I say before I decide to lie. “Like the dye room if you forgot to be kind.”
He nods once, unsurprised. “We found a smear on the south band.” A beat. “It didn’t spread.”
“I know,” I say, and when he lifts an eyebrow, I add, “I know because nothing else burned. Not because I watched.”
“Good,” he says, and the word feels like a stitched seam.
Silvie appears with the sweep ledger, ink and chalk and a bookmark made from a ribbon once tied to a celebration pie. “Sign your sections,” she tells us both, because she refuses to let rank insult routine.
Our hands reach for the ledger at once. Fingers brush—quick heat, honest shock. We both retreat like people who don’t like being predictable.
“Section seven, east,” I say, pretending voice is a wall.
“South band, checked,” he says, same wall, different stone. He writes his note with cramped efficiency; I add mine with the square script Silvie approves of.
Jax comes up the span at a clip that pretends not to be a sprint. He leans toward Cael, their murmured exchange a weather report that pretends it’s small talk. I catch enough to name the shape: “Moonfell couriers… probing gates… twice last week.” The words taste like old fruit, sweet and rotting.
“Tighter checks,” Cael says. “But not cruel. The city eats cruelty in winter.”
Jax nods, glances at me, then at the ledger, then away. When they move off, Silvie gives me a look that is ninety percent onions and ten percent pity. “Finish section eight,” she says. “Then eat.”
“Yes, Matron.”
I scrub until my shoulders consider mutiny. When at last I carry the ledger back to the pantry to file the day, the room greets me with its usual argument: jars wanting to be in the wrong order, flour pretending to be fog. I set the ledger on the table, open to the page for Afterglow, and see it: a hibiscus pressed flat and perfect between today’s entries. Red as a threat. Fresh. Exactly placed.
My mouth goes dry. Inside the ledger. Inside the pantry. Aster goes still as a cat sighting movement beneath a floorboard.
My mind flickers to distant memories. Kaden dragging me by my hair or beating me up for speaking up my mind, or for being too loud or too quiet, or just for being. Cold nights in Moonfell’s dungeons, alone, scrubbing dusty floors or dirty dishes. My mother—her early passing. Aster caged inside me.
Me myself caged.
I stare.
I do not pick it up. I do not even breathe on it. If I touch it, it becomes story; if I leave it, it remains evidence.
But I don’t call for Jax.
I close the ledger with a neat, calm motion, ribbon marking the page, hibiscus trapped peacefully as if it belongs to nobody’s menace. Then I slide it into the cupboard reserved for Tide Book cousins and turn the key with fingers that don’t shake until I tell them they can.
Moonfell knows my route. Moonfell knows the ledger. Moonfell knows the way I hold a brush.
I should tell Silvie. I should tell Jax. I should tell everyone with a key to my life.
I do not. I cannot find the shape of the words that won’t invite the flower into my mouth.
Pia’s ruined voice floats from the hall. “Mara? Dumpling bribe?”
“Coming,” I call, and leave the ledger sleeping like a live coal under a wool blanket.