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"What if I kill her by placing the void," John asked the system, and the word kill tasted the way rust smells.

[System Assurance: The system will regulate the field. Risk to target: low if the host follows breath and does not push. Risk to host: None. Emotional cost: unknown.]

"Can she still think for herself?"

[System: Yes. The Hollow Vow holds the dark intent to betray. It does not erase will. If she chooses to leave, she can leave. She will not be able to harm you by action or by sale of your life to another.]

"And if she tries?"

[System: Pain. Collapse. Death if the host commands it.]

"John," Fizz said aloud, soft, eyes not leaving Edda. "She talks fast. She has fast hands. I do not like fast hands."

Edda's eyes flicked to Fizz and back to John. She swallowed. The fear was open on her face now. She was letting him see it. That takes a kind of strength too, sometimes.

"I can clean this place," she said again, this time to John. "The street. Your name. Their names. I can carry messages to doors that will not open for your coat. I can be small in a way you do not know how to be because you learned to be big. Try me. Or end me. Do not make me sit here and count your breath while I wait for you to pick."

John let one long breath go. He did not hear it. He felt the way the air left and did not fight him. He had always been good at breath. Breath is just steel for the chest. Breath is forge work, done slow.

"Fizz," he said without looking away from her. "Ask your last questions. I will take her as a servant."

Fizz bared tiny teeth in a grin that was not friendly. "Listen," he said to Edda, voice a song and a threat both. "If you turn on us, I will ruin your week. I will ruin your month. I will do small, patient, mean things to your life until your soup always burns and your bed always squeaks and the stray cats look at you and pick someone else to love. Do you hear me."

"I hear," she said. "I like cats. I will not make them hate me."

"What will you do for us tomorrow morning," Fizz asked, fast.

"Buy bread you can stomach that is as good and fresh as you," she said at once. "Watch the academy south yard from the roof with a broken tile. Mark who watches John for money. Put ash in the lock of a door that should not open until afternoon. Drop a word in the ear of a clerk who will drop a different word in the ear of a better clerk."

"Tonight," Fizz snapped.

"Hide these," she said, jerking her chin to the bodies. "Clean the stones. Take the bell. Take the mesh. Take any coin. Break any weapon with a name on it. Keep my own hands clean of the kind of blood that brings guards. Sleep under a table in a house that does not mind me. Wake before the sun. Be outside your tavern door with hot water and a paper so you can pretend you had a servant who thought ahead."

Fizz blinked. He did not say anything for a beat. He looked at John. He looked back at her. "Fine," he said at last. "But if you go near my fur with bad intentions, I will end your life."

"I do not like fur in my teeth," she said, a flash of old humor lightning through the wreck of her face. "Deal."

"Enough," John said. He lifted his hand, palm open, the void quiet under the skin now, like a dog that knows it is time to do something serious. "I will put my power on your heart. That will make you my servant."

Edda's throat moved. She did not flinch away. She took one small step forward and one small step to the side, the little sideways step women take when they go around a puddle in a skirt they cannot afford to ruin. It made her chest square to him.

"Do it," she said.

John moved slowly. He put his left palm at her back, between the shoulder blades, not pushing, just there, the way you place a board before you drive the first nail. He set his right palm over her sternum. He felt her ribs under skin and cloth. He felt the bell of her heart under bone, angry and afraid and not giving up.

He looked down once, just to make sure his hands were where his body thought they were, then closed his eyes. He did not need eyes for this. He needed breath. He counted in four. Held, two. Out, four.

Inside, the system's voice did not count with him. It did not need to. It was him and not him, like a steady friend.

[System: Form seed.]

He called the void, but not like before. He did not ask it to be big. He did not ask it to show off. He asked it to be less than a pea, less than a mustard grain, less than the head of a pin. He asked it to be the idea of small.

It came.

A dense, tiny drop of night formed between his palm and her chest bone. He felt it like the weight of a freckle. He set its pull too small, too careful, to bind. He breathed out on purpose.

[System: Release.]

He let the seed go.

It moved through bone like sound does. It touched the red bell that had worked since before she could remember her own name. It sat itself not in flesh, not in blood, not in the sparks that leap when a person laughs; it sat itself in the thin shadow that lives in every heart, the dark that thinks mine when it should think of ours, the piece that sells a friend in a bad year and calls it a favor.

The seed curled there like a small black comma.

Edda gasped. Not a pain sound. A shock sound. The sound people make when their name is said in a room they did not think they knew it.

John felt it.

Inside his own chest, inside his own void, something brightened by getting darker. The cool room he had felt before —the place he had not opened— shifted. He imagined his black hole as a room. A small chair was there now in the corner. Someone sat on it, not whole, not the whole of her, just a shadow with her shape. He knew it was her because the shape lifted its head and looked toward him without eyes and he felt her see him, in the way two people feel each other in a room when both are too tired to lie.

A thin thread ran from that chair to his palm. It did not pull at him. It did not weigh him down. It just existed, simple and there, like a line drawn clean on a plan.

Edda sagged an inch against his left hand and then straightened. Sweat had sprung at her temples. She did not wipe it away.

"What," she whispered. "What did you do?"

"I put a lock where there was a door," John said. "I have the key. If you try to walk through without me, your chest will remember the lock exists."

She nodded once. She did not pretend to understand. She did not pretend to like it. She just heard that a new rule had been written in her own bones and accepted that rules are real if you cannot break them.

Fizz let his breath out in a long puff. "Good," he said. "Good. Excellent. Very nice key. Do not put locks on me. I am already locked. By snacks."

John took his hands away. He stepped back. The tremor in his wrist was gone now. It had moved to his throat. He swallowed and it went quiet.

"You have your first order," he said to Edda. "Clean this as you told me. Quiet. Fast. No blood where someone will see it at dawn. No names. No witnesses. No song about this in a tavern in a week. Take anything that would point to us and keep it or burn it. Take anything of theirs that is useful and keep it for us. Then go. Find a bed that no one knows you love. Sleep there. Be outside the Bent Penny at dawn with hot water. Do not speak to me in the street unless I look at you twice. If I call you, you come. If I do not call, you watch from far, and you say nothing."

Edda nodded again. She reached down with stiff fingers and picked up the fallen bell. She slipped it into a pocket and did not touch the ribbon. She crouched near Brann, hand careful, and closed his eyes with a thumb because she was not a monster and because dead eyes make people stare and staring makes storytellers and storytellers make work.

Fizz dropped like a stone on Brann's neat coat. His nose opens and smells something in inner pocket with a thief's expert sense. "Hello," he whispered. "Is there treasure? I can smell it."

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