THE LIVING CHRONICLE

*Day 263. Tonight's feature is a dark one. Viewer discretion is advised. The System does not mean that.*

IF YOU HUM IT, IT HEARS YOU

*Day 263. Tonight's feature is a dark one. Viewer discretion is advised. The System does not mean that.*

The body had been laid on a door, because doors were the only flat things left in the east ward that nobody wanted back.

Dmitri knelt beside it with his sleeves pushed up and his kit open in the dust. He had cleaned the wounds twice already. He was not looking for a cure. He was counting.

"Same as the last one," he said. "Two shallow, one deep. Always that order."

Oren stood in the doorway with his arms folded, the way he stands when he does not want anyone to see his hands. This was the eighth time the medic and the ballad collector had met, and the first time they had met over the dead.

"Say the spacing again."

"Short. Short. Long."

Oren closed his eyes. His lips moved. Dmitri had stopped finding this strange a long time ago. Oren collects murder ballads the way other men collect bottle caps, songs from before the fall about drowned brides and hanged brothers. He hummed one now, very softly. Two quick notes and a long one, falling.

*She went down to the water twice, and the third time she stayed.*

Dmitri looked up. "Where's that from?"

"Nowhere. Nobody sings it anymore." Oren opened his eyes. "Nobody I know."

Outside, the wind dragged a sheet of tin across the street and let it fall. Both men flinched. Neither said so.

---

The System has a talent for noticing coincidences, and here is one. Only yesterday, Lamont took one of Oren's ballads and walked it, short, short, long, step for step, and the song led him to a buried cache. A song as a map.

Tonight a medic and a scholar are standing over a door, wondering whether somebody else has been using the songs as instructions.

---

Dmitri walked home the long way, past Ren's corner. They had met eight times now, and their arrangement was simple: Dmitri tells Ren which plants will heal and which will kill you, and Ren tells Dmitri which streets have gone quiet and why.

"East ward empties out after dark now," Ren said, tucking away the bundle of feverfew without looking at it. "Nobody says why. They just go in early."

"Somebody's singing out there," said Dmitri.

Ren laughed. Then he saw Dmitri's face and stopped laughing.

---

Elsewhere, the smaller lives went on.

Josie Cross traded Imara a fistful of clean, intact fabric, a treasure out here, for a knife Imara had resharpened so perfectly it seemed rude to use it. It was the seventh time they had met, and their trade now runs like a shop. Liam stood for a long time watching Tiber build a matchstick spire, one patient stick at a time, and said nothing, which was the kindest thing anyone had done for Tiber all week. On the far side of the ruins, Lamont sat with Tam over a blueprint Tam had drawn for a cathedral to house their precious book fragment, and listened while Tam admitted, quietly, that the design was slipping out of his head as fast as it had come. Lamont did not know what to say to that, so he held the paper still in the wind.

Milton and Jeremiah, allies ever since a ceiling came down on them both, cracked a fragment of old data together: Milton held the site, and Jeremiah read the pattern. And at the edge of the silt flats Darius finally met Petra, the woman who has been digging for something she will not name. They looked at each other's packs, and at each other's knuckles, and agreed without a word to talk some other time.

---

Late that night Oren sat by a fire that was not warming him and wrote out every verse of the drowned-bride song he could remember. Most of them were about the water. The rest were about the man who walked her down to it.

He did not sleep. The System did not expect him to.

*The System's verdict: two shallow, one deep, and a song that nobody sings. Somebody in this district still remembers the words.*