The supply cart's wheel hit the brick at exactly the wrong angle, and the crack was louder than it had any right to be.

Mateo heard it before he saw it. He was three rolls into his usual Saturday rhythm — left palm push, right palm push, glide — coasting along the western stretch of Patchwork Promenade with the morning sun warming the cobalt and terracotta tiles under his wheels. He knew this section of the path the way other kids knew their bedroom ceilings. Every dip. Every patched square. Every spot where the mortar had gone a little soft.

The cart trundled past him, hauled by a delivery guy with earbuds in and zero idea that anything had just happened. The wheel bumped, the brick gave a sharp, dry *snap*, and something small and pale popped out of the gap like a seed from a squeezed orange.

Mateo's hand was already moving.

He braked, leaned, and scooped the thing up before it could roll into the grout line. The cart kept going. The driver didn't look back. Saturday morning kept being Saturday morning, market shoppers drifting past with paper bags, the smell of cardamom puffing out of [[Sweetline Bakefront]] like the building itself was breathing.

Mateo opened his palm.

It was a tube of paper. Thin, the color of old tea, no thicker than his pinky. The edges were curled from being rolled tight for a long, long time.

"Okay, so —" he muttered.

He glanced at the cracked brick. A jagged piece had split clean off near the anchor post, and underneath the brick, in the little hollow where the paper had been, he could see a sliver of something darker. Copper, maybe. He didn't have time to check.

He tucked the scooter against the post, balanced his palm on his knee, and unrolled the paper carefully.

It wasn't a flyer. It wasn't a coupon. It wasn't a lost-cat notice with a phone number and a sad photo of a cat named Mr. Biscuits.

It was *dense*. Tiny inked symbols marched across the top in three tight clusters — circles with hooks, half-stars, little ladders, a row of nested squares. Underneath the symbols was a hand-drawn map fragment, a curving wedge of streets sketched in fine brown ink. And in the lower-right corner, no bigger than a thumbnail: a diamond inside a circle.

Mateo stared.

His first thought was: *pocket it, figure it out later, tell nobody*. His second thought was: *those symbols are not for me*.

He could read the neighborhood. He could not read this.

He rolled the paper back up — gently, the way you'd roll a moth's wing — slid it into the deep inside pocket of his hoodie, and pushed off.

His arms knew the route before his brain did. South across two cross-streets, around the slow tai chi cluster near the cream-tiled fountain, past the postal kiosk where the sandwich smell from Sweetline was already winning the air war. He threaded between a stroller and a man with a bouquet of sunflowers without losing a millimeter of speed.

"Watch the tile," he called over his shoulder at a kid who was about to step on a known wobbler.

The kid hopped. Mateo grinned.

[[Rivet Pocket Park]] opened up on his right, small and tucked and exactly where he needed it to be. The old oak threw its low branches over the mosaic benches. Acorns crunched under his wheels. He could already see her.

Juniper Cerami was cross-legged on the south bench — no, the north one today, the one with the rust-red ceramic chips — knees folded neat, a small notebook flat on her lap, a lanyard of fine-tip markers clinking softly against her chest as she bent over the page. She was sorting something into columns. Red column. Blue column. Green column. Her braids hung still.

Mateo rolled up and stopped without saying hi.

He just held out the paper.

Junie's eyes flicked up. Then down. Then went wide — actually wide, the way they almost never did — and then narrowed into the focused slit she got right before she said something correct.

"Sit," she said.

Mateo parked the scooter against the bench leg and swung himself onto the seat beside her. She uncapped a green marker with her teeth and pinned the unrolled paper flat on her notebook with one careful palm.

Her finger moved along the first cluster of symbols. Her lips moved with it, soundless, tracking some private rhythm only she could hear.

"Three," she said.

"Three what?"

"Clusters. This isn't one puzzle." She tapped each group in turn — left, middle, right. "Three. Different spacing. Different symbol set in each one. Look at the gaps."

Mateo looked at the gaps. He had not, in fact, noticed the gaps.

"Each cluster points somewhere different," Junie said. Her voice had dropped into the quick stacked version, the one she used when her brain was already four steps ahead of her mouth. "The symbols repeat inside a cluster but not between clusters. That's a directional encoding. Different zone for each one."

"Zones," Mateo said. "Of the neighborhood."

"Mm."

He felt something flutter inside his ribs — not nerves exactly, more like the moment before a really good downhill stretch. A cracked brick. A note older than this morning. Three puzzles, not one.

"Junie."

"Four seconds." She held up a finger.

He waited. He counted. He got to four.

"It's a route," she said. "Or part of one. The map fragment doesn't show the whole neighborhood, just a wedge. We need —"

A branch above them creaked.

Then it shook.

Then something dropped out of it.

Asha Tessaro hit the paved nook beside the bench feet-first, knees absorbing the landing like she'd done it twelve times this morning, which she probably had. A small mirror on a telescoping rod swung wildly from her vest. Three lengths of rubber tubing trailed behind her. A washer rolled away across the mosaic and pinged off the oak's root.

"Hi," she said, panting. "The mirror clearance is wrong. I need a longer pivot arm. Also — what is *that*."

She was already reaching.

"Asha —" Mateo started.

Too late. She had the paper in one grease-stained hand and was unrolling it on her own knee.

"Symbols, symbols, numbers, map —" Her eyes locked onto the map fragment. Her free hand dove into her vest pocket and came out with a folded square of paper, soft at the creases from being opened a hundred times. She slapped it down next to the note.

It was her own diagram. Hand-drawn. Every climbable structure in the neighborhood, every shortcut alley, every load-bearing post she'd ever leaned on.

"Andiamo," she muttered, and lined the two papers up.

The wedge of streets on the note matched her diagram exactly. The curve. The anchor posts. The line where Patchwork Promenade started bending toward the river.

"It's the western edge," Asha said. "Promenade. Right where you came from."

"Right where the brick cracked," Mateo said.

Junie was already writing in the green column. *Cluster one — Promenade west. Cluster two — TBD. Cluster three — TBD.*

"Where did this come from?" Asha demanded. "Whose is it? Why is it in this weird paper? Is this rice paper? This feels like rice paper."

"Cart wheel," Mateo said. "Cracked the brick. The note was inside."

"Inside the *brick*?"

"Inside under the brick."

"That's not random," Junie said quietly, not looking up. "Nothing is random."

Asha turned the note over. Held it up to the light. Squinted at the diamond-in-circle in the lower-right corner.

"Wait."

"What."

"I've seen this mark."

"Where?"

"Everywhere." Asha frowned. "Lower right of like — every fresh panel in Gasket Alley. Right? It's the —"

A voice cut across the park, dry and flat and unmistakable.

"It's mine."

All three of them looked up.

Nico Encaust was crossing the mosaic nook with their hands held slightly away from their sides, fingertips streaked in fresh cobalt and rust-orange, beanie crooked, eyes already on the paper on Asha's knee. They had stopped walking before they reached the bench. Their mouth was a thin line.

"That mark," Nico said, in the same quiet, deliberate way Junie had said *three*, "is mine. I painted it. And I have never — *never* — put it on a piece of paper."