Mara began keeping a ledger of her own. She took to bartering repairs for whispers and coin for a room above the bakery. She learned to move without being noticed, to slip through fences where chain met air, and to read the way the burgundy men’s cars parked: always with a wheel turned toward the exit. In the margins of her ledger she sketched faces—the mayor, the landlord, the head of Harbor Security, a name scrawled once in grease: Pelham Crane.