Chapter 3

After escaping the waterfront job, Sancia changes clothes, slips into Foundryside, and obsessively checks her rookery room for tampering. She secures the shutters and door, hides the stolen pine box in a false floor, and keeps watch for hours, wary of retaliation for both the theft and the fire.

Alone, Sancia’s hypersensitive condition and ascetic living are detailed: she avoids touch, rich foods, and stimuli because of her implanted scrived plate and the overload it causes. Despite promising to hold the loot for three days, the enormous fee and her need to fund surgery to fix her scar make ignorance feel too risky.

She reopens the box. The top layer contains sketches and notes about the Occidental Empire’s hierophants, their alleged ability to alter reality itself, and rumors that Crasedes the Great used an invisible assistant and built an artificial god. These papers seem secondary to a sensed false bottom.

Sliding the false bottom aside, Sancia finds a small linen-wrapped object. She unwraps a large golden key with a butterfly-shaped head hole and impossibly fine scriving etched along its edge and tooth. Oddly, the key is silent to her senses, unlike other scrived devices.

When Sancia touches the key, a distinct voice speaks in her mind, startling her. Testing it again confirms the phenomenon: the key can converse, and it is aware and sardonic. The key identifies itself as Clef and is astonished she can hear it, while Sancia grapples with the impossibility and the danger of possessing a thinking artifact.