23. Lucy
LUCY
Celia won’t leave the oven.
The bakery has emptied of Helix uniforms, but not of damage. Flour coats the floor in pale drifts. Broken glass glitters beneath the front windows. The proofing shelves lie on their sides, trays crushed flat where armored boots stepped through the morning’s work.
Celia stands in front of the brick oven with one hand pressed against the loosened hearth tile, as if she could hold the whole place together by touching the spot where her grandmother hid a key.
I come in quietly.
Rethan stays near the doorway with Jessa and two council witnesses, recording the room without crowding it. He has learned when not to step forward. That matters more to me than I want to admit.
Celia doesn’t turn. “I told my grandmother that tile was ugly.”
I stop beside her. “What?”
“When I was seven. I said it did not match the others.” Celia gives a thin laugh. “She said ugly things are safest because no thief believes they are loved.”
I study the blackened tile. “She was right.”
“She usually was.”
The older woman’s sleeve has been bandaged, but a red stain has already begun to bloom through the cloth. I notice. Celia notices me noticing and lifts her chin.
“Do not start fussing.”
“I was not.”
“You were forming the intention.”
I almost smile.
Then I see Celia’s hands. Flour has settled into the wrinkles. Her fingers shake whenever they’re not pressed to something solid.
Guilt moves through me, sharp and useless. “This happened because we used your ledger.”
“No,” Celia says at once.
“Celia—”
“No.” The word cracks through the bakery. Celia turns then, eyes wet and fierce. “This happened because men with ships and lawyers are afraid of old women who keep accounts. Do not give them the dignity of making this your fault.”
I feel the words settle where guilt had been.
Celia bends, picks up a torn bread cloth, and folds it with slow care.
“My grandmother knew this day might come. So did her mother. So did the people who hid covenant clauses in cisterns and burial stones. They did not do it because they believed we would never be hurt. They did it because they believed hurt should not be the end of memory.”
Jessa enters with a slate. “The witness settlements are still connected. Most of them stayed after Helix left.”
I turn toward the square. Relay screens still hover outside, faces watching from Stonebend and Lark Hollow, from Tamsin Ford and the settlements past it. They saw Celia handled like evidence. They watched Helix try to walk away with a ledger and leave a bakery gutted behind them.
Fear has not left.
But it has gained witnesses.
Rethan crosses the room only after I glance to him. “The note says First Hall. Your current council hall was built ninety-one years after settlement.”
Celia wipes flour from the edge of a surviving table. “Then it is not that.”
“Do you know what the phrase meant?”
“I know songs. Not maps.”
I straighten. “Songs?”
Celia looks embarrassed, which is almost absurd given the state of the bakery. “Children’s song. My grandmother sang it when storms pinned people indoors.”
“Sing it.”
“No.”
“Celia.”
“I am not singing in front of half the outer valley.”
Torren’s voice sounds from the doorway. “For the record, I support the song.”
Celia points at him without turning. “For the record, be silent.”
A few people laugh. The sound is small but alive.
I take Celia’s good hand. “Please.”
Celia looks suddenly younger, and far more tired.
Then she sings under her breath, low enough that the room leans in to hear.
“Where first we stood when waters rose,
beneath the grain and over stone,
three knocks for bread, two knocks for bone,
the hall below will know its own.”
The final word fades into the broken bakery.
Rethan’s eyes sharpen. “Beneath the grain.”
“The old threshing yard,” Samuel says from outside. He has arrived with his hat in his hands, face grim. “Before the council hall, before the schoolhouse.”
I turn to him. “You know that from Grandfather?”
“Partly.” Samuel steps inside, careful to avoid the glass. “He said the first gatherings were held under the threshing platform during flood season.”
I remember suddenly: being nine years old, chasing dust-mice near the abandoned yard, my father warning me away from the old grain floor.
“You told me there was hollow ground beneath it,” I say.
Samuel nods. “Storage cellar, maybe. We sealed it when the new granary went up. Too unstable.”
Rethan lifts a hand. “We do not enter without witnesses, structural support, and a live record.”
I give him a look. “You say romance differently than other men.”
His expression remains solemn, but the bond warms. “I will attempt poetry after survival.”
Celia makes a sound that is not quite a laugh, not quite a sob.
We move before full dark.
The square becomes a line of lanterns, beams, rope, medical kits, and recorders.
Nara Venn carries a light with her sleeping son wrapped against her chest. Celia comes too, refusing three separate offers to sit down.
On the relay screens, Stonebend and Tamsin Ford stay connected, their engineers talking Torren through old flood bracing methods.
The bakery has been attacked.
The valley answers by becoming larger.
The old threshing yard waits beyond the school road, half-hidden behind dry grass and rusted grain frames. The main platform has sagged in the center. Rainwater pools in dark patches between warped boards. The place looks abandoned enough that even memory might have walked past it.
I raise my lantern.
Fresh boot marks cut across the mud.
Not valley boots.
Heavy. Armored. Recent.
Every conversation stops.
Rethan crouches near the first print, careful not to touch it. “Helix.”
Torren swears softly. “They understood the song.”
“No,” Rethan says. “They understood enough of the scan.”
I face the platform’s center.
The old boards have been pried up.
Beneath them, a square hatch lies exposed, its iron ring newly scraped bright. Three dents mark the frame, close together. Two more cut the stone beneath.
Three knocks for bread.
Two knocks for bone.
Celia covers her mouth with her good hand.
Samuel lifts his lantern higher, and the beam drops through the open seam around the hatch. Far below, something metallic reflects the light.
Then a sound rises from under the threshing floor.
Not machinery.
A scrape.
Someone is already inside.
Rethan turns to me.
I don’t wait for him to ask if I’m ready.
“Record everything,” I say.
Then I step toward the open hatch.