She walked him to the tram.He let her, because his legs were worse than he was admitting and because the alternative was standing on a seawall at five in the morning arguing about reincarnation with someone who had just told him she had done it before.The tram was empty except for a man asleep across four seats with his boots on the upholstery.Serena sat facing him. She folded her hands."Ask me properly," she said."Who are you?""Wrong question. That's the one I've been answering for four years and it never gets anywhere." She looked at her hands. "Ask me what I know."Evan leaned his head against the window. Outside, Halcyon went past in the grey — the depot, the laundry, the alley behind the laundry where eleven floors of storage went down into the dark."Fine," he said. "What do you know?""I know the Tower opens." Her voice was level. "I know it opens in nineteen days. I've known the number for four years and it has never once changed, and there is nothing in this city that k

The Man in the doorway was not Cassian Voss He was older and heavier and he had the look of a registrar who had spent his whole career on the fourth floor and had stopped expecting anything from it, and he stood there for four seconds doing arithmetic.Then he said: "Box down."Yuna closed the box."Sir.""Intake is not open until eight." He came in and looked at Evan with the particular disinterest of a man filing a form. "You're Vale. The F with the object-link.""Yes, sir.""Your intake was two months ago. Why are you on my floor at seven-forty.""I asked him to help carry," Yuna said.The registrar looked at the crate she was not carrying."Box down," he said again, to her, and it was not the same sentence as before. "And you — Vale — come with me."* * *He took Evan to a stairwell and stopped him halfway down, where the stairs turned and the light came in through a dirty window, and there was nobody to hear."You saw the ink," he said."Yes.""How many.""Three."The registrar

They met in the Archive's reading room because it was the only place in Halcyon where neither of them had to explain themselves.Serena had a table in the far corner by the tall window, and she had been there since opening, and there were eleven books open in front of her in a pattern that Evan had come to recognise as method rather than mess.She looked up when he sat down."You're pale," she said."I met the chief registrar.""Ah." She turned a page. "Did he threaten you with something specific, or was it the general ambience?""He told me he was lying to me."Serena's hand stopped.Then she did something he had never seen her do, which was that she laughed — a short, surprised, entirely genuine sound, gone almost before it arrived."That," she said, "is the most reassuring thing I've heard in four years.""Why.""Because men who intend to kill you don't tell you they're lying." She closed one book and opened another. "They tell you the truth. The truth is heavier."He watched her r

Evan did not go home.He walked the harbourside until two in the morning with Halloran's voice going round in his head, and then he went and stood outside the Archive's east doors and looked at the north face of the Registry Tower across the water.The crack was wider than it had been. He was sure of it now. He had stopped being able to pretend.The lamp on the twenty-second floor was still on.* * *At three he did the arithmetic out loud, alone, because saying it made it real."A witness," he said to the fog.Somebody who saw it the first time. Somebody who can stand at that wall and mean it — not know it, not believe it. Witness it.The man in the chair had been writing for eleven years. Four hundred and eleven pages. Two thousand four hundred and six slips with a second letter, and out of all of them, twenty-seven carried an E, and Halloran's letter was an R, and nobody knew what any of it stood for.Except that Evan did know one thing, now, and it was the thing he had been avoidi

He didn't tell her until two in the morning.He sat in the kitchen with his back to the blue radio playing low, and he told her everything — the seawall, the knot, the slips, Halloran, the eleven paces and the four seconds, the witness, the price. All of it. He did not soften any of it and he did not stop to check her face.When he finished, his mother got up and made tea. Which was, he understood later, the only thing she had ever known how to do with bad news."So," she said. "Somebody thinks you're going to give up your memories.""Somebody anticipates it.""And they wrote me a letter about it." She stirred. "How kind of them."Evan almost laughed."Are you all right," he said."No." She set the cup down. "I'm sixty-one and I found out tonight that a stranger has been reading my life well enough to know I'd open an envelope addressed to me at nine o'clock on a Thursday." She looked at him. "You're going to that wall. Aren't you.""I don't know yet.""Evan.""I don't know," he said.