The voice did not ask for help.
It said Marek's name the way Ella had as a child when she wanted her brother to work out the request for himself. After his name came five more knocks. The storm gave no sixth answer.
Marek left the twelve direct sparks at the entrance and closed their tasks. The three local operators carried on working without him. He warned no one and followed the red scrap alone.
The false route had been assembled from the right small details. At the first bend hung an upturned lamp warning of salt. At the second lay a piece of the chalk Saya used to mark vessels she had checked. Even the prints of small boots looked as though Yuna had just passed that way. But not one sign marked the way back. The storm knew how to lure a person onwards, but did not understand why the living left themselves a way to return.
Yuna was the first to notice that the direct sparks at the entrance had gone still. The girl struck the pipe five times, but no listener came: Marek had forbidden the direct forms to enter the northern tunnel. Then Yuna showed the false light to the conductor.
Saya caught up with Marek beyond the second bend.
"You didn't wait for the answer," she said.
"She never answered with the sixth knock."
"You did."
Marek stopped. The five knocks were the call. The sixth meant he had heard. The storm knew the first half of the rhythm because it had drawn it out of Marek's memory. He held the second only as an action of his own.
When they were children, Ella knocked on the kettle in the kitchen when she was afraid to enter the workshop alone. Marek answered once on the pipe. Then she knew her brother was coming and did not repeat the call. On the night of the fire, he heard five knocks but gave no sixth answer: he thought he had time to open the next door first. Ever since, the unfinished rhythm had sounded to him not like a request but an accusation.
Ella's voice came from the tunnel again.
This time it said it was cold behind the wall.
Saya stretched the silver thread across the passage. It trembled although the air was still. Beyond the bend lay not one echo but dozens of fragments: the fear of a woman in a sealed carriage, the pain of a burned guardsman, a child's last attempt to crawl out from beneath a fallen roof. The storm was assembling them into a shape Marek knew.
A girl appeared in the grey light.
She had Ella's short hair and her habit of hiding her right hand behind her back. But the eyes belonged to different people: one was an adult's, the other almost a child's. Other people's lips moved beneath the skin, repeating unfinished words.
"I waited," the lure said.
The words struck precisely the emptiness Marek had been filling for years. He did not know Ella's last sentence and had imagined it in dozens of forms: she asked him to open the door, accused him, forgave him or simply called his name. The storm chose the shortest. The fewer the words, the more Marek supplied himself.
Marek took a step.
Saya's silver thread drew tight across his chest.
"Last words are said to someone," the conductor said. "Your sister wanted to warn you, stop you or ask you for something. This shape doesn't care what happens to you. It only needs you to come closer."
The figure held out a hand.
Irsa answered beneath Marek's collarbone. The bodiless anchor recognised the familiar movements and reached for them. Cold emerged from Marek's chest as a thin red thread. If Irsa entered the body assembled by the storm, she would have a shell again. With it she would take in dozens of other people's deaths and a false command to keep Marek close.
"Don't go in," he said.
Irsa did not stop. Ella's voice had once helped her show a will of her own for the first time. Now the bodiless anchor mistook the false figure for her lost body.
Marek felt the connection vanish: first the cold beneath his collarbone disappeared, then he could no longer remember why he called the spark Irsa. A few more steps and the storm would have an anchor capable of leading all the living ash.
Along with Irsa, the twelve closed lines at the entrance trembled. The sparks did not move because their tasks had ended, but every one of them turned towards the northern tunnel. Even without a direct order, the anchor pulled the network after her. If the storm took her, the three local operators would keep their nodes, but everything Marek ever connected directly would become a road into the city.
Saya could not cut the thread. She would sever Irsa herself along with the lure.
Marek struck the old lever for the salt curtain.
The lever would not move. He called one of his direct holders, but the task did not get through the storm. Then Marek hooked his fingers into the rusted ring and pulled with his whole body. The metal tore the skin from his palm. A narrow shutter opened overhead.
White salt poured down between him and the figure.
The image of Ella screamed in the voices of dozens of people. Marek saw the short hair, the hidden hand and the familiar tilt of the head. He could stop the curtain and preserve at least the shape. Instead, he wrenched the lever a second time.
The stream of salt cut the lure apart.
The other faces went out one by one. Ella's was the last to disappear. Irsa's red thread tore free of the grey light and returned beneath Marek's collarbone.
Dozens of tiny traces of other lives remained on the ground: a wedding ring, a child's buckle, a carriage key, half of a written name. Saya would not let Marek gather them. Each object belonged to a different echo, and none proved that Ella had been inside. The conductor covered the remains with salt, then recorded the location so she could deal with the surviving echoes one by one later.
He had not destroyed his sister. Marek knew that and still stood as though he had shut the door on her again.
Saya bound his palm with a cut length of her silver thread.
"I'm no longer sure an exact last word can be recovered," he said.
"Exact doesn't mean true. The storm copied the voice, the face and the rhythm, but it didn't know why Ella knocked."
Saya heard a second sound in the settled salt. A steady high note came through the lure's scream. The same frequency had passed through the Soot during the White Bell's full strike.
The storm had not invented it. It had received the sample from outside.
Saya's hearing could isolate the note, but not hold it accurately enough. A new form would need a physical resonator. The only suitable piece of metal belonged to Oven: the copper plate covering the old burn on his throat.
Marek returned to the entrance and opened the ledger of costs first.
"Write this down: I followed a voice without a witness and nearly gave Irsa to the storm."
Saya wrote it down.
Beneath the last entry, she added one of her own: a false echo can repeat a memory, but it does not know what the real person wanted.
Beside it Yuna drew her sign: two loops and a short line pointing towards the exit. From then on, red cloth counted as genuine only when there was a way back beside it. Colour alone could no longer serve as proof of a living person.
To gain protection from the Bell, they would have to ask for help from the man who, that very morning, had demanded that Irsa be given up for burning.
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