Chapter 7: The Name on Every Wall
Greve's stall was locked when we arrived at the Dim Market the next morning, which told me nothing. The stall beside it — a cloth merchant named Dessa, the one Luna said charged more but whose weave held — told me everything.
"Opens late, closes early, never here on Sundays." Dessa folded fabric with the mechanical precision of someone who'd been doing it for forty years. "Sells night contracts. Good money, if you believe the pitch."
"You don't believe it?" I kept my voice casual. Shopping voice. Just-making-conversation voice.
"I believe people take those contracts and some of them don't come back for more. In my business, repeat customers are the point." She smoothed a bolt of grey wool. "But nobody asked me."
I bought a scarf I didn't need — three iron coins, which meant day-labor earnings thinning further — and walked away with a piece of information that was worth more than the scarf: Greve's operation was visible enough that the vendors around him had noticed the pattern. They'd noticed, and they'd done what people in under-protected communities do with dangerous knowledge. They'd filed it in the category of things you know but don't say aloud because saying them out loud makes them your problem.
Kai was waiting at the canal walk, leaning against the railing with the controlled patience of a man who had spent four months learning that investigations in the Gloom ran on a different clock than investigations with a badge.
"Dessa confirms the pattern," I said. "Greve sells night contracts. People take them and some don't come back."
"The contracts." Kai produced his notebook — already open, already organized, the handwriting tight and angular. "I pulled labor registry records from my time in the Order. Greve isn't registered as a licensed contractor. He's listed as a Weaver-class materials vendor. The labor operation is entirely off-books."
"So nobody's checking his placements."
"Nobody's checking anything about Hollows." The pen clicked. Open, closed. "That's the system working as designed."
---
[Ashwick — Days 10-12]
We divided the work the way good partnerships divide it — by access, not by ego. I took the community. Kai took the margins.
I knocked on doors. I sat in kitchens and on stoops and at long tables in Hollow Hall, and I listened the way I'd been trained to listen — not for facts, but for the texture around facts. The change in someone's voice when they mentioned a date. The way hands moved when they talked about a missing relative. The small things that were wrong before someone vanished: a change in routine, an unexpected absence, a mention of extra work that paid better than anything in Ashwick normally paid.
Three families, three kitchens, three versions of the same sentence: Greve said there was good work near the bridge. Night shifts. Paid double.
Kai worked the employers. The night-shift warehouses and dock operations that operated on the legal edge of the Bridge of Sighs — businesses in the Formed district that needed cheap labor and didn't ask questions about who provided it. He came back with records. Timesheets. Names of foremen who confirmed that Hollows had arrived for shifts, worked, collected pay, and left. The trail went cold after the workers departed. Between the employer's door and home, people evaporated.
Luna made herself indispensable.
She appeared on the morning of the second day with a route already mapped — the fastest paths between the witnesses' doors, timed to avoid patrol rotations. She carried messages between me and Kai when we were across the district from each other, slipping through the market crowds with a speed that turned a thirty-minute walk into an eight-minute sprint through alleys and over rooftops I wouldn't have known existed.
"You don't need to do this," I told her on the evening of the first day, sitting on the Hollow Hall steps while she counted the coins she'd earned running errands for three different vendors.
"You need me," she said. Gap-toothed. Certain. Not asking.
I knew that sentence. I'd said a version of it myself at fourteen, to a social worker named Diane who'd tried to keep me from sitting in on a home visit that wasn't my case. You need me in that room, I'd told her. The kid won't talk to you. She'll talk to me because I'm not an adult with a clipboard. Diane had let me in. The kid had talked. And I'd learned something about the difference between protecting someone and letting them be useful, which was that the second one was harder and mattered more.
"Okay," I said. "But you don't go near the eastern canal after dark. That's the line."
"Yeah-yeah." Which in Luna's lexicon meant I heard you and will comply exactly as long as it makes sense to me.
---
[Greve's Labor Office — Day 12, Afternoon]
Greve's office occupied a cramped room above a tailor shop on Ashwick's commercial street. The stairs creaked on every step — a natural alarm system that told whoever was upstairs exactly how many people were coming and how heavy they were.
The room itself was sparse. A desk, two chairs, a shelf with ledgers. A window that faced east toward the canal. Greve sat behind the desk with the composed patience of someone who had been expecting company, or who had arranged his face to look like he had.
He was medium everything. Medium height, medium build, medium features. The kind of face you'd forget thirty seconds after looking at it, which for a man in his line of work was either natural luck or deliberate cultivation. His shadow — Weaver-type, thread-like, the strands thin and precise — sat perfectly still at his back.
Too still. I'd watched shadows for twelve days now, cataloguing their behaviors the way I'd catalogued behavioral markers in CPS interviews. Shadows moved. They shifted with their host's emotions, reacted to nearby shadows, adjusted to the room's energy. A Weaver's shadow should have been fluid — threading through the air, testing surfaces, the restless fingers of a creator's companion.
Greve's shadow was a statue.
"Tomas Greve?" Kai asked, settling into the chair opposite the desk with the deliberate ease of a man who'd conducted a thousand interrogations and wanted the subject to know it.
"That's right." Greve's smile was thin and professional. "And you are?"
"Kai Nightwren. Private investigator. This is Seren, community liaison from Hollow Hall." He'd assigned me a title without asking, which was either presumptuous or practical. Both, probably. "We're following up on labor placements made through your office. Specifically, placements for night-shift work near the Bridge of Sighs over the past four months."
Greve's expression didn't change. His shadow didn't move. Not a thread. Not a twitch.
"Of course," he said. "I keep records. Happy to help."
He opened a ledger and ran his finger down columns of names and dates, providing details with a fluency that suggested either excellent record-keeping or thorough preparation. He confirmed each placement — yes, he'd connected Tam to a warehouse shift, yes, Olla had taken a dock contract, yes, yes, yes — with the seamless cooperation of someone who had nothing to hide and everything rehearsed.
I watched his hands. Steady. Watched his breathing. Even. Watched the tiny muscles around his eyes that, on Earth, I'd learned to read the way a sailor reads the wind. Nothing. Clean. Except—
Except the shadow. That absolute, unnatural stillness. Every other shadow I'd encountered moved. Marci didn't have one, Luna didn't have one, but the possessors in the Dim Market, the laborers, the patrol officers at the bridge — their shadows were alive with restless, autonomous motion. Greve's shadow looked dead.
"Your records are thorough," Kai said, the way a detective says it when thorough records are exactly what guilty people prepare.
"I take my work seriously." Greve closed the ledger. "Is there anything else?"
"We'll be in touch," Kai said.
We left. The stairs creaked under our descent, and I imagined Greve sitting at his desk, listening to our footsteps, counting the seconds until we were gone. His shadow still as stone behind him.
Outside, Kai lit a cigarette. Three flicks of the lighter. The ember caught.
"His shadow didn't move once," he said, exhaling. "Not once."
"I know."
"That's not normal. Shadows react. Even trained ones. Even Master-rank discipline doesn't produce total stillness — it produces controlled movement. What Greve had was—" He searched for the word, drawing smoke through his teeth. "Suppression. Like someone pressing a hand over a mouth."
"He's lying."
"He's lying well. Record-perfect, answer-ready, nothing to catch on. But the shadow..." Kai's own shadow — the wolf — shifted at his feet, restless, scanning the street. Alive. "Something is very wrong with that man."
We walked back toward Hollow Hall through the twilight district, and the Shadow-lamps — those that still worked — flickered on in a ragged sequence, blue-white sentinels standing guard over a community that had learned to guard itself. On my first night here, this same light had filled a warehouse room where I'd lain on a cot and given myself thirty seconds to feel the full weight of displacement. Twelve days later, the light was familiar. The district was becoming readable. And the cold in the air was just cold, not alien, not wrong — just the temperature of a place I was learning to call mine.
"Where did you learn to interview people?" Kai asked. His voice was casual, which meant the question wasn't.
"Another life."
He drew on the cigarette. Exhaled. The wolf-shadow threaded through the smoke and came back to his side.
"Right." His verbal comma. His bookmark. "I'll pull what I can on Greve's financial records. If he's placing Hollows for someone else, there's money flowing somewhere, and money always leaves tracks."
He headed south toward Millhaven Street and the Charred Anchor, coat swinging, and I stood in the pooling lamplight with a pattern in my head that was tightening into something unavoidable: Tomas Greve was a net. Someone was holding the other end. And seven people had been pulled through it into a darkness that had no name yet.
The question Kai was asking — who holds the net? — was the right one. But standing in the blue-white glow with the canal wind pulling at my hair, a smaller question nagged at me. Not who was taking people, but how Greve's shadow had been so perfectly, terrifyingly still. What I'd noticed wasn't just an absence of movement. Something inside that stillness had pressed against my awareness like a hand pressing against a windowpane. As if the shadow wanted to move and couldn't.
I didn't have a name for what I'd perceived. But the shape of it — the trapped, coiled wrongness beneath Greve's cooperative surface — was sitting behind my eyes like a migraine waiting to bloom.
Support the Story on Patreon
If you are enjoying the series and would like to read ahead, I offer an early access schedule on Patreon. I upload 7 new chapters every 10 days.
Tiers are available that provide a 7, 14, or 21-chapter head start over the public release. Your support helps me maintain this consistent update pace.
Patreon.com/TransmigratingwithWishes