Morning came in wet gray, the fog pressing against the wall at the town's edge like a held breath. By the square, the cobbles glistened, and the smell of rain hung in the air. Idit, the guard on the east post, stood with her arms crossed, watching Matan crouch at the boundary, a length of knotted rope in his hands. He had measured the fog before, always with the same careful method—tossing a stone, counting the seconds until the splash—but today he had brought a measuring stick, and he was sighting along it into the white. Idit walked over, her boots loud on the wet stone. She said, 'The Council wants the boundary respected, Matan.' He looked up, sheepish, and held the stick behind his back. She held out her palm. He fished two copper coins from his pocket and placed them there, then walked away without a word. Idit slipped the coins into her own pocket and returned to her post.

At the fountain, the argument started over nothing—Kinneret the younger had brushed against Nava's basket, or perhaps had not, and Nava said the bread inside was crushed. Kinneret laughed; Nava did not. Within a minute they were on the ground, scratching and pulling hair, while a small crowd gathered in a loose ring. No one moved to stop them until Idit, tired of the noise, walked over and pulled them apart by their collars. 'Fight over bread, and the fog watches,' she said, and the two girls stood panting, their cheeks red, neither looking at the other. They separated without another word, and the crowd drifted away as if nothing had happened.

The hall was quiet that afternoon when Uriel the herbalist, age seventy-five, was found in his cot, his hands folded on his chest, his face peaceful. He had died in his sleep sometime before the noon bell. The women who found him, who had come for a tincture for their children's coughs, stood in the doorway and did not enter. They told the others, and soon the hall was full of quiet voices. Uriel had been a fixture, a man who knew every plant and root and what it could do; his death left a gap in the town's memory, and the women whispered about who would take his place.

By mid-afternoon, the guards on all paths were busy. On the west path, Noa came back with wet boots, her face set in stubborn lines. The guard, a young man named Dan, said, 'The Council prefers people to mind their trade,' and she nodded, but did not apologize. She walked past him with her boots squelching, and she did not look at the fog. The same scene played out on the north path, where Hannah the younger and then Tobiah the younger were turned back within the hour. Each came home with wet boots, each received the same reminder, and each returned to the square with a private look, as if they had seen something in the white that they had not intended to share.

Amos the younger, the miller, had fallen ill with the valley fever and lay in his own bed for three days, shaking and sweating. His wife stayed by him, wringing cloths, and his mill sat silent, the wheel turning in the stream with no grain to grind. He told her he dreamed of the fog, and in the dream it parted, and he saw the road beyond, but he could not walk it. When he woke, he was weak, but he said, 'It is only the fever,' and she believed him.

That night, in the small house of Joel and Miriam, a new sound rose above the fog's silence: the thin, urgent cry of a newborn. Joel the younger was born, and the midwife wiped his face and placed him in his mother's arms. As the baby opened his eyes—dark, blinking, looking around as if to understand the room—he seemed to settle. Miriam, exhausted, said he had cried once, then gone still, and in the quiet she thought she heard him whisper, though he could not speak. She told Joel later, in the dark, that the baby's dream had been a sentence, clear as her own voice: 'The fog is just fog.' Joel said nothing, but he looked out the window at the wall of white, and for a moment, the fog seemed thinner, a little less solid, as if it had heard. The lamp burned lower, the square fell empty, and the town slept under the same gray lid, each house a small, separate light, and the fog kept its silence.