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The first stone fell softly.

Arin didn’t hear it. He felt it – not as an impact, but as a gap. In the back courtyard of the salt store, the stairway forgot its weight. For a moment the steps carried nothing but the memory of heaviness. That was enough. A dockhand hauling buckets up them stepped into nothing. He grabbed at the air as if it could be held and slammed into a wall that hadn’t been there a moment ago. The wall swayed. It became a door no one had built, and then crumbling plaster again.

“Hold still!” someone shouted, too late for something that no longer knew how to hold.

Arin ducked under a line – damp sailcloth, salty, heavy – and pushed his way across the yard. He was small enough to slip between two barrels, quick enough to dodge the sparks spraying from a lantern. The lantern burned without oil, its flame standing motionless in the air, a golden thorn that didn’t flicker.

“Don’t touch it!” the foreman bellowed. He meant the stairway. Or the man now on his knees, laughing – a short, disbelieving laugh that broke into retching.

Arin stopped and breathed through his mouth. The smell of salt, wet wood, and tar lay on his tongue like a cloth. He should have turned back. Instead he took his fingers off the cold parchment in his breast pocket – he was supposed to drop off a courier’s note for the Scribehouse at the salt store – and raised the yard lantern higher. The light obeyed him, though his hand shook. It made no lee against the wind. It made no sense at all.

“Boy! Get out of there!” The foreman, a broad-shouldered man with a face like a crooked peg, stomped toward him. His boots sank into the mud, but they left no prints.

Fracture, Arin thought. The word crept into the back of his mind on its own. Not a pretty word. The kind people in the city said so quietly, as if it might multiply otherwise. Arin didn’t like words you were only allowed to whisper. He liked words you could write down so others knew what to do. The Scribehouse had taken him in as an orphan and given him more than he could ever repay: reading, writing, understanding. He wanted to give some of that back to the city. So that Varin would become a place where no one had to whisper words like that.

“I just have to –” Arin broke off. Below the stairs, where the plaster was crumbling, something lay in the soot. A round spot of wax, the size of a silver coin, dull, as if someone had stirred ash into it. It didn’t shimmer red, or green, or blue. Grey.

Arin knelt, his knees instantly cold and wet. He held the lantern close above it. The rim of the wax was clean – no smears, no thumbprints. In the center: three stampings so fine the eye could barely make out the lines – a crown with five points, a cog with an odd number of teeth, a set of scales whose beam hung ever so slightly to the left. Three symbols, cleanly set, and yet there was something unreal in them, like a painted mouth that keeps speaking after everyone else has fallen silent.