NONE

Demba asked to see him the next morning.

Not through the court. Not through King Maret. Not through counsel.

Demba.

The palace runner found Sori at the dye wall before work, where a dozen people had already gathered beneath the chalked SORI arrow even though the sun had barely cleared the roofs. One woman held a board covered in a question about inheriting a fishing boat. A boy had brought a cracked toy lion and seemed to believe Sori’s experience with construct law made him responsible for every broken clay object in Ketara.

Sori had just written NOT THE SAME KIND OF CLAY when the runner approached from the front, touched two fingers to his own chest, and waited to be noticed. No grabbing. No shouted words Sori could not hear. The runner knew how to get his attention.

The runner offered a plain folded sheet. It carried no household black, no civil-court cream, no green counsel seal, and no black lion. Just ordinary paper, folded twice. Sori opened it.

YOU HAVE THE PAGES NOW. COME TO THE TOWER.

He read the line again, then turned the paper over. Nothing on the back. No reason, no terms, no lawyer’s careful description of what the meeting was not supposed to mean.

The tower.

The old royal magical workshop stood three districts east of the palace wall, close enough that Sori had spent half his childhood moving between the two without learning most of the streets in between. Demba’s upper rooms had been Crown estate property even when Demba lived there. After his first legal death, the tower went under inventory restrictions. After his second appearance inside Sori’s body, those restrictions became a maze of seals, clerks, and supervised access.

Come to the place where it happened.

A month ago, the invitation would have worked because it looked too much like a challenge. Sori looked instead toward Mara’s district. His shift began in less than an hour, and Demba no longer owned the order of his day.

Alieu waited near the corner with the black replacement shield resting against one leg. Eight paces today. The lane was too narrow for twelve without putting him in a spice seller’s doorway.

Sori held up the message. Alieu came only close enough to read, then looked at him with a question in his face. Sori signed, Go?

Alieu glanced toward the palace, then Mara’s district, then back at Sori. He did not answer for him. Instead he took Sori’s slate and wrote:

IF YOU GO, I GO TO THE STREET OUTSIDE THE TOWER UNLESS YOU ASK OTHERWISE.

Sori nodded. No advice. No do not. No the king should know. Alieu gave him the part that belonged to Alieu and left the choice where it belonged.

The woman with the fishing-boat question waved her board impatiently. Sori folded Demba’s message into the dry compartment behind his chest panel and turned back to her. The runner remained.

Sori pointed toward the palace. Go.

The runner hesitated, probably because Demba expected an answer. Sori pulled the message back out, wrote AFTER WORK on the corner, and returned it.

That was the answer for now. The woman immediately shoved her board forward again.

IF MY HUSBAND DIES AND THE BOAT IS IN BOTH OUR NAMES BUT THE SHRINE PAPERS ARE IN HIS, CAN MY SON’S UNCLE TAKE IT.

Sori stared at the question. Apparently becoming publicly associated with one impossible legal problem made him available for all of them.

ASK CIVIL COURT. DO NOT LET UNCLE MOVE BOAT BEFORE YOU ASK.

The woman nodded as if he had delivered deep law. He had not, but the advice was probably useful.

He answered three more questions and left for work. Demba could wait.

Demba could wait until Sori had finished work. The fact pleased him more than refusing the meeting would have.

Mara noticed the folded message when Sori opened his chest panel to put away his work slate. She pointed, and he handed it over.

She read the single line, looked at him, and waited.

Sori signed, After work.

Mara nodded once. That was all.

Binta, unfortunately, had seen enough to become interested. She leaned over Mara’s shoulder, read the message, then made the household sign for old man followed by an exaggerated stealing motion toward Sori’s face.

Sori gave her the work-yard sign for idiot. Binta looked delighted.

Mara put a wooden brace into Sori’s hands and pointed to the bench. Work.

For most of the day, Demba remained folded behind Sori’s chest while Sori repaired things belonging to other people. A water-lifting frame with a split axle sleeve. Three municipal carrier joints. A household construct whose left foot had been rebuilt so many times that even its owner could not identify which piece was oldest.

That owner kept pointing at the worn outer clay and shaking his head whenever Mara indicated the central crack. He wanted the old foot preserved. Mara wanted the unsafe inner brace replaced. After the third round of gestures, she pointed at Sori.

Sori stared back. The owner recognized him now. Everyone did. Clay prince. Body problem. Apparently that made Sori an authority on sentimental feet.

He crouched beside the construct and examined the damage. The old outer shell could stay. The load-bearing support could not. Sori pointed first at the brace and signed new, then at the outer clay and signed keep.

Mara nodded, the owner relaxed, and Binta signed, Important man saves foot. Sori ignored her.

The message inside his chest seemed to grow heavier as afternoon passed, not because of the paper but because the tower belonged to a part of his life he had once believed could be recovered whole. Demba. Lessons. Clay scattered across the floor. North windows shuttered against rain. His own young hands learning to hold a self-knot stable while changing the material around it.

Before the transfer, the tower had been proof that Demba knew him better than anyone. Afterward, the same room had become evidence. Sori hated places that changed categories without moving.

Mara ended the shift at sunset. Sori washed clay dust from his hands even though dirt bothered him now mostly as maintenance. The black scorch across his right hand remained. Mara had repaired around it exactly as he asked.

Mine.

Binta touched the edge of his chest panel before he closed it and pointed toward Alieu, then toward Sori, then made a two-person walking sign. Going together? Sori nodded.

She pointed at Demba’s message and made the sign for hit. Sori stared at her. Binta immediately added not. Do not hit.

Sori signed, He has my face.

Her expression changed. Yes. That was the problem.

She made the sign again, slower this time. Do not hit.

Sori looked at his clay hands, then nodded. Promise was too strong. The intention was true. He left.

Demba was still at the tower after sunset.

The outer door stood open. No royal seal crossed it now because inventory had been completed, but the building remained restricted in the way Ketaran institutions preferred: visitors recorded, certain rooms closed, removed materials accounted for, no private magical work.

A city clerk sat outside at a folding table beneath a lamp with a cup of something hot beside one elbow. He looked deeply unhappy to be guarding a dead magician’s not-dead tower after dark.

Alieu stopped across the lane, exactly where he had said he would.

The clerk pushed the visitor register toward Sori.

VISITOR NAME.

Sori wrote SORI. The clerk glanced at the court cord tied to Sori’s chest strap, then added CLAIMANT in smaller letters. Sori watched him do it and let it stand. Not every fight needed to happen at the door.

The clerk turned the page enough for him to see the prior entry.

SORI MARET.

Demba had signed in under Sori’s legal name.

Two Soris in one tower again.

Sori’s fingers tightened around the chalk, but he gave it back and entered.

The ground floor looked different before anything else did. Sori could not smell the missing herbs, the old resin, or the clay dust, but the room had a visual version of absence. Shelves were bare. Practice limbs had disappeared from their pegs. The wall where drying plants once hung showed cleaner rectangles against smoke-stained plaster. The long ceramic wash trough remained only because it had been built into the floor, and even its copper fittings were gone.

Broom streaks crossed the floor in uneven arcs. Sori resented that he now knew enough to see where the sweeper had missed.

The stairwell narrowed above the second floor. His clay shoulders had to turn slightly to avoid scraping the wall. In flesh he had once taken these steps two at a time when Demba summoned him late. At sixteen he dragged his feet deliberately because Demba disliked waiting less than Sori disliked being summoned. At twenty-one he had climbed them half asleep after a banquet and found Demba still working at midnight.

Those legs had been lighter.

These did not tire.

The third-floor training room stood open.

Sori stopped at the threshold because the room looked wrong in the simplest possible way: it looked large.

For ten years the walls had been crowded with shelves, prepared materials, drying frames, old models, body diagrams, chalkboards, copper lines, and Demba’s endless collection of things that might become useful if he kept them long enough. Now almost everything portable had been removed. Dust rectangles marked missing cabinets. Four pale circles on the floor showed where anchor posts once stood. The workbench remained because it was bolted to the wall. The height marks remained because they were cut into plaster.

Demba stood beside them.

Sori’s body wore a plain cream robe and no jewelry. Bare feet on the old floor. No court cord. No visible guard. The human right hand rested against the height mark labeled nineteen.

For an instant Sori had the old reflex of stopping his breath. He had no breath to stop, but his self-knot tightened around the memory of lungs anyway. That hand was his hand. Long fingers. A pale scar beneath the thumb from a blade lesson Barek had never been supposed to know about.

Demba looked at him, then at the black scorch on Sori’s right clay hand. Concern crossed Sori’s own face.

Sori hated him for having access to that expression.

Demba lifted one hand, not in court sign or ordinary household hand but in the private shorthand of the tower.

You came.

Sori answered, After work. Demba’s mouth moved, probably a laugh. Sori did not read it. He watched hands, shoulders, eyes, posture. Mouths belonged to other people unless they chose to write.

Sori pointed around the stripped room. Why here?

Demba looked at the empty shelves before answering.

Because this is where the argument began.

Sori shook his head. The argument began when Demba stole his body.

Demba understood the correction without needing it spelled out. He pointed toward the western wall, where a clay leg had collapsed during one of Sori’s first lessons. Sori remembered throwing the leg and accusing the material of being bad.

Demba signed the old sequence: Again. Again. Again. Then he pointed to the height wall, to marks running from twelve through twenty-one, and finally to the human chest. Continuity work. Years.

Sori opened his chest compartment, removed the copied ledger page, and tapped the line that mattered.

DISPLACEMENT PHENOMENON, NOT MULTIPLICATION.

You wrote displacement.

Demba nodded. Sori tapped the second phrase.

Not multiplication.

Another nod. No denial, no attempt to claim the handwriting belonged to someone else or the court had stripped away crucial context.

Demba signed slowly, Before severance. The filing had already made the same distinction.

Sori pointed toward the empty places where detached teaching bodies had once stood.

Escape routes.

Demba’s eyes narrowed. Every party had received identical sealed extracts. He knew which pages Sori had seen.

Technical term, Demba signed.

You closed them.

Demba remained still long enough that Sori thought he might refuse the premise. Instead he nodded.

Yes.

Sori pointed at his clay chest, then the room, then Demba.

Failed.

Demba looked toward the old workbench before answering.

Yes.

No qualification. No theory about dependent structures. Just yes.

The satisfaction was smaller than Sori expected. For weeks he had imagined Demba’s errors as doors. Break the right one open and truth would be standing behind it, embarrassed to have been caught. Instead Demba admitted the hinge was broken and remained inside the room.

You did not expect me to survive.

Demba looked directly at him. Sori counted three remembered heartbeats before the answer came.

Not like this.

Sori’s hands curled.

Not like this. Neither no nor yes. He stepped farther into the room and pointed first at the human chest, then at himself.

Where did you expect me?

Demba did not answer immediately. Sori let the silence stand. Demba had taught him that too.

Finally the old magician signed one word.

Contained.

Contained where?

Demba touched two fingers to the human sternum.

Inside.

Sori’s chest lines brightened.

The continuity structure was supposed to remain dependent on the primary anchor, Demba signed. No independent claimant.

The admission was private, unrecorded, and probably useless in court unless Demba repeated it under conditions counsel could survive. Between the two of them, it still changed the room.

Sori took one long step closer.

And you?

Demba stopped. Sori pointed at his own human face, then at Demba.

Where were you supposed to be?

Demba’s jaw tightened, but his hands remained still.

Sori took another half step until one arm’s length separated them.

The Hall had taught him that distance mattered. Three heartbeats. Pepper oil. A hand becoming his and then not his. Here, now, he felt no sudden pull from the human body. No borrowed smell. No pulse. No human sensation at all.

That should have made him safer. Instead it made him want to touch. One finger against the wrist. One test.

No.

Mara had made him promise: no private testing.

Demba lifted one hand. Stop.

Sori stopped. Not from obedience. A stop around dangerous body magic did not become invalid because Demba was the one asking for it.

Demba moved away first. He crossed to the north window and looked over Ketara. Sori knew the view without joining him: palace roofs to the west, the old river road below, market awnings farther south.

Demba signed without fully turning: I was dying.

Sori knew. He remembered blood on the transfer floor, hands that had trembled for months finally unable to hide it, and the old man’s body failing while Sori believed he was helping complete one last stabilization lesson. Demba continued.

I built the continuity work for you before I needed it for myself.

Sori’s chest flared bright enough to paint gold across the wall. Needed it.

Not accident. Not reflex. Demba turned, saw the light, and did not pretend he had misspoken.

You used me, Sori signed.

Yes.

Sori could cross the room in two strides. His hands were strong enough to break the human throat, the skull, the spine. He had almost killed Saikou Fen with less time to think. Here there were no plaster workers nearby, no Alieu inside the room, no one to sign stop.

His body. Demba’s will. End both.

The equation remained ugly: killing the occupant could also destroy what Sori wanted restored. He did not move.

Demba watched him choose not to, which made Sori angrier. He did not want restraint observed by the man he most wanted to hurt.

I did not call you here to confess, Demba signed.

Sori’s shoulders moved in a silent laugh. Too late.

Demba pointed at the stripped room, then at Sori’s clay body.

I called because you know enough now to understand the danger. The court wants a fork. You want no fork. If you win completely, the law may treat the human body as yours and me as an unlawful occupant.

Correct.

Demba’s expression hardened. He signed, Then? The sign was small. The question was not.

Sori knew the answer before he admitted it. Removal, somehow. Except there was no safe test and no safe transfer, no established method to extract Demba without risking Sori’s human body, his clay body, Demba, or all of them at once. The Hall would not run a destructive experiment merely because Sori hated the present arrangement. A court could name a wrong it could not physically reverse.

You are litigating toward an order nobody knows how to execute, Demba signed.

Sori hated the sentence because it was true.

First truth. Then method.

Demba shook his head: Courts do not restore what magic cannot separate.

Sori pointed at him. Then leave.

For the first time that evening, Sori’s own face looked old. The skin was twenty-two and the shoulders were broad from the years Demba had spent building them, but something in the expression belonged to an exhausted man who had once died.

I cannot.

Will not.

Demba held his gaze, then signed, Both.

He touched the human sternum and then his own temple.

I do not have another anchor prepared.

The answer arrived in Sori’s hands before he let himself make it: Build clay.

He stopped. The cruelty of the thought was not that clay was beneath Demba. Sori knew exactly what building a body in panic had cost.

Demba saw the unfinished sign anyway. His mouth moved, but Sori refused the words and watched only the bitterness in the expression.

You think what you did was simple because you survived it.

Sori looked down at himself. Mismatched arms. Mara’s chest panel. Crude knuckles. The memory of a sixth finger broken off near the dye market. Work-yard scratches. The black scorch. No lungs, no smell, no food, no sleep.

No. He did not think it was simple.

Demba seemed to understand that answer without signs.

He turned toward the old workbench and crouched, reaching underneath it. When he straightened, he held a flat wooden board.

Sori knew it immediately.

The base from his first construct lesson.

The little figure itself was gone, reclaimed years ago or cannibalized into another teaching body. The board remained, with five shallow dents where its feet had stood.

Sori approached before remembering to be suspicious.

Sori signed, Why keep this?

Calibration, Demba answered.

Of course. Everything sentimental first required a technical excuse.

Demba touched one of the dents.

And because it was the first thing you made that stood.

Sori looked at him. Demba had kept the board because it mattered technically and because a twelve-year-old boy had finally made an ugly little construct stand after throwing two failed legs across the room and accusing the clay of incompetence.

Affection.

It did not make the theft smaller. It made Demba harder to reduce to the theft.

Sori wanted Demba simpler. Demba had refused that request for ten years without being asked.

Memory returned with painful clarity. The little figure leaning forward because one leg was too short. Demba pressing two fingers against the crooked shoulder and signing Again. Sori refusing. Demba sitting down on the floor and waiting. Sori rebuilding the knee out of spite.

The figure had stood for seven breaths.

Sori had looked at Demba expecting praise. Demba only nodded once and signed Again.

At twelve, Sori had hated the answer. At twenty-two, he understood it had been praise and hated that knowledge too.

Demba slid the board across the bench.

Yours.

Sori did not take it immediately.

Everything here was mine.

Demba flinched, small and real in Sori’s own face. Sori picked up the board. Recovery, not gift.

Demba let him make the distinction.

Then he signed, Withdraw the identity action.

The actual purpose of the meeting finally stood in the open.

Demba continued before Sori could answer.

Keep your name in common use. Keep Father’s recognition. Take household maintenance. Take an estate. Choose no second name if you wish. I will not oppose permanent recognition of your person, inheritance provision, access to family, or independent title.

Sori almost admired the offer. Money. Land. Family. Recognition. A legal identity no one could take away. Generous enough to make the missing thing obvious.

You want to buy me out of myself.

Demba shook his head. I want both of us to live.

Sori pointed at the human body.

That is not both.

Demba’s hands stopped. Sori stepped back until two arm lengths separated them. He thought about Room Seven, about rent and copying fees and the maintenance purse he had refused. He imagined an estate with enough courtyard space that no guard would irritate the keeper, a private workshop, servants if he wanted them, people clearing paths again, family correspondence addressed without argument.

The offer tempted him, and Sori refused to make the temptation smaller after the fact. It might work. He could build a life inside the compromise because he had already begun building one outside it.

Work. Friends, perhaps. A father who called him son. A brother who believed him more than before. A room full of objects nobody curated for him. A black mark on a clay hand.

He could stop fighting and keep all of that.

Let Demba keep the body.

Sori signed once. No.

Demba closed his eyes. When he opened them, Sori expected argument, threat, Maret, Barek, succession, the kingdom. None came.

Demba nodded once and accepted the answer, at least for now.

Sori turned toward the stairs, but Demba struck the wall lightly with two fingers to catch his attention.

I was wrong about the routes, Demba signed.

Sori waited.

Do not assume I am wrong about the fork.

Teacher again. Sori almost smiled and answered with the old training word. Again.

Demba’s eyebrows rose. The word was not agreement. It was challenge.

Sori descended the stairs carrying the calibration board.

The city clerk looked at it but did not ask.

Alieu waited across the lane. He saw the board under Sori’s arm and lifted his brows.

Sori crossed the street, took out his slate, and wrote:

HE OFFERED ME EVERYTHING EXCEPT MYSELF.

Alieu read it, then looked toward the tower window. He did not ask whether Sori had accepted.

Alieu only fell into step beside him. They walked home.

The House of Kept Names was quiet when Sori returned. The child from Room Nine had gone to sleep. Room Five’s broom leaned outside his door. The old clay ancestor woman sat in her niche with two kola nuts, three pebbles, and a strip of faded cloth someone had tied around one wrist.

The keeper glanced at the board under Sori’s arm.

Sori held it up and signed, Old. Mine.

The keeper nodded as if that explained anything.

Room Seven’s lower hinge scraped when Sori opened the door. He had noticed yesterday and failed to oil it. Tomorrow.

The shelf was almost full now: the old wooden sign tablet, the white pebble, the useless clay hand, Maret’s notes, court copies, Alieu’s first witness arrangement, Saikou’s sentence, and the washed sweet-bread cloth the child insisted Sori keep.

Sori set the calibration board against the wall beneath them.

Five shallow footprints.

The first thing he made that stood.

Demba’s private admission could not be filed. His settlement offer could not be proved. His affection solved nothing.

His old ledger language did matter.

Displacement, not multiplication. Escape routes. Suppressed. Wrong.

And now the court had asked the question Demba had spent years avoiding in different forms.

Where did one Sori become two?

Demba placed the fork on transfer night. Sori placed no fork anywhere.

Between those positions lay ten years of records, one hostile former apprentice, one stolen body, one clay body full of new marks, and a method dangerous enough that everyone responsible refused to test it again.

Sori sat on the floor even though the stool was available. The board was on the floor. That was reason enough.

He placed his right hand over the old foot dents. The hand was too large now, with five current fingers, crude knuckles Mara had improved but never made elegant, and the black scorch crossing the back.

The first teaching figure had been smaller than Sori’s forearm. Demba made him rebuild its feet three times.

Balance before movement. Stand before walk. Walk before reach.

At twelve, Sori thought the sequence insultingly slow. At twenty-two, he had acquired his own version of it.

Truth before method.

Demba would reverse it if he could. Method before truth, because method kept both of them alive.

Sori looked from the burn mark on his clay hand to the old footprint dents.

The first thing he made that stood.

He had hated clay then. He still hated it sometimes.

Wrong body.

Same hand.

Maybe.

He stayed there until dawn, not because he was waiting for anyone, but because nobody could tell him to move.

The court runner arrived before Sori finished sweeping.

The keeper saw the seal from across the courtyard and immediately pointed at the broom.

Finish first.

Sori stared at him. The keeper stared back. Sori returned to the courtyard. Room Seven’s turn. Three short strokes, one long, dust into a narrow row, leaves into the basket. He worked around the old ancestor niche without disturbing the white pebble beneath her knee.

The runner waited at the gate.

A month ago Sori would have made the runner wait out of rank. Today the runner waited because Sori had agreed to the chore board and the courtyard still needed sweeping. The distinction was less flattering and more useful.

Sori finished the last strip, returned the broom, and only then accepted the packet.

FORMAL FORK STATEMENT REQUIRED.

Seven days had become six because the court counted from yesterday’s entry.

The form itself looked older than the building that copied it. One vertical line ran down the center, with a place to mark the claimed split and two branches for the names that followed. It had probably been designed for inheritance disputes involving dead merchants, divided houses, and duplicated shrine vessels. The court had adapted it for a stolen crown prince because law apparently preferred old paper to new metaphysics.

Sori carried the form into Room Seven and set it on the floor beneath the shelf. The calibration board leaned against the wall. Demba’s offer remained unwritten. Jalo’s statement did not. The copied ledger pages did not.

Sori opened the evidence packet.

Three weeks before transfer:

PRIMARY ANCHOR RETENTION ACCEPTABLE.

Demba’s fork theory sat in another packet. One person before transfer. One primary self plus a dependent preservation structure. Severance, then two.

Sori read it again, not because he doubted his own answer but because Saran had trained him to respect the strongest version of the argument he wanted to defeat.

Demba’s theory was not stupid, which was why Sori had to answer the strongest version of it. He took the chalk.

The form asked for relevant stages. He wrote carefully.

AGE ELEVEN: SORI MARET. CONTINUITY TRAINING BEGINS. NO CLAIM OF SECOND PERSON.

He paused over eleven. Poisoned anchor ink. Demba saving him. Maret authorizing the continuity program. Care had become something else slowly enough that no one could point to the day medicine became preparation for theft.

He wrote the next line.

Jalo’s hostile memory. My hand is there. Demba closing the routes afterward.

TRANSFER NIGHT: SORI MARET EXPERIENCES LOSS OF CONTROL OF LIVING BODY AND LATER STABILIZES IN CLAY.

The sentence was too clean. Between loss of control and stabilizes in clay lived panic, mud, reed, iron, terror, Demba walking away in Sori’s face, and the first crude body dragging itself upright because there was nowhere else for Sori to go. The form had no field for any of that. He let the sentence remain.

The next line required current identity.

NOW: SORI.

The clerk could add Claimant if the registry required it. Sori would not volunteer the word.

Then came the central question.

POINT AT WHICH ONE IDENTITY BECAME TWO:

Below it, the old vertical line waited for a mark.

Sori held the chalk above the blank and thought of Demba saying Not like this. Contained. Dependent. No independent claimant.

He thought of Jalo refusing to meet him, Mara refusing court business on her clock, Alieu objecting to a bad protection plan without waiting for Sori’s permission, his father coming to Room Seven because Sori refused the north garden, and Koumba leaving the household line blank because Sori rejected a second name.

No had become crowded with other people. Mara, Alieu, his father, Koumba, Jalo somewhere refusing to meet him. Refusal no longer meant being alone.

Sori lowered the chalk and wrote one word.

NONE.

He underlined it once. Not twice. No need.

Below, in the explanation space, he wrote:

CLAIMANT’S POSITION IS NOT THAT TWO PERSONS FORKED. CLAIMANT’S POSITION IS THAT ONE PERSON WAS WRONGFULLY DISPLACED, CONTINUED THROUGH A BODY CHANGE, AND HAS CONTINUED CHANGING SINCE.

He read it. No throne. No father. No claim that Demba was evil. None of those things answered the question on the form.

Then he added the sentence Demba had made necessary.

CONTINUATION AFTER CHANGE IS NOT A FORK BY ITSELF.

Demba’s filing would answer that. Let it. Sori signed:

SORI.

The clerk could append the registry qualifier if required.

He carried the form into the courtyard. The runner still waited at the gate. Alieu waited across the lane. Room Five was hanging laundry badly. The child from Room Nine sat on the gallery eating something sticky and watching everyone.

The city continued around him while Sori handed over the fork statement.

The runner unfolded it enough to check the required field. His eyes stopped at NONE, then lifted to Sori.

Sori did not explain. The runner folded the page again and left.

Alieu watched him go, then looked at Sori with a question. Sori signed, No fork.

Alieu nodded.

Sori looked toward Mara’s district.

Work.

He went.