*From the site-book:*
> The lanes are the Gallery's public face: a sequence of turns inducing a gentle, polite delay. A merchant should lose twenty minutes and blame the weather. A messenger should lose an hour and blame himself. Nothing here may feel hostile; hostility is inefficiency. The lane's whole art is that the delay reads as distance.
*Marginalia, later hand:* the first disappearances were from these lanes. Small groups, solitary merchants, the occasional messenger — they would enter the polite delay and fail to emerge. The courier Elian passed the first checkpoint at 05:15. He should have reached the secondary gate by 05:45. The log after that is the Watcher's Station's to tell.
---
**Town restoration note.** The rebuilt lane delays nobody: it is one page long and this is the end of it. The old lane's craft — a delay that reads as distance — is the thing the Code of Open Doors exists to forbid.