“At a five fix,” she said once, as if naming the trade, “things settle into their right pitch.”

People left with altered destinies: a seamstress who now stitched without fear of rulers, an old man who danced like a page had turned, a woman who lit matches and watched them burn without flinching. Each carried an invisible receipt—something small, tucked behind the collar of a shirt or folded into a book—proof of the trade made at a five fix.

At night, when the trains thinned and the station lights softened, Saika sat alone with her tools spread like tarot. She didn’t tally wins or losses; she catalogued the echoes of gratitude that clung to the wood. Sometimes she would open a vial and let a memory drift out—a laugh, a fragment of song—so that the station itself might remember the lives it had been part of.