The alley was a wound in the city’s flesh. Anja moved through it with a predator’s economy, her steps silent on the cracked concrete. Sineus followed, the pre-erasure map a brittle, useless thing in his hand. The paper showed a city of curves and alleys named for forgotten saints. The reality was a grid of rust and soot, a place that had forgotten its own name. He was trying to overlay one on the other, a task like trying to fit a round gear into a square housing. It was impossible. The city was tearing itself apart.
Anja stopped. She did not turn. Her body went rigid, her hand dropping to the hilt of the knife at her belt. Sineus looked past her. The alley narrowed ahead, choked with debris. And figures. They emerged from the smog and the shadows of the foundry wall. They wore the grey, shapeless clothes of factory workers. But each wore a strip of red fabric. A scarf. A band around an arm. The color was a shock against the monochrome decay. It was the color of fresh blood.
There were five of them. They blocked the path forward, their faces hard and smeared with grime. They were the Unremembered, the revolutionary cell that haunted the Palimpsest. Zealots who believed the only cure for a sick history was to burn it all down. A woman stepped forward from their ranks. She was no older than Sineus, her face sharp with a fierce intelligence that bordered on madness. This was their leader, Katarina Volkova.
— Another aristocrat, — she said. Her voice was not loud, but it cut through the industrial drone. It was full of jagged edges. — Come to pick at our bones? To trade our misery for your profit?
Anja did not answer with words. She moved. It was not a charge. It was an explosion of focused violence. She closed the ten meters between them in a heartbeat, her knife a flicker of dull steel in the gloom. One of the men with a red scarf raised a heavy iron pipe. Anja was already inside his guard, the knife driving low into his gut. She twisted, pulled, and was moving again before he had time to scream. He just folded, a puppet with its strings cut.
Sineus backed against the cold brick of the warehouse wall. This was not his world. This was a world of physical debt, paid in blood and pain. He was an observer. A liability. The remaining four revolutionaries spread out, their movements practiced. They were not a mob. They were a hunting pack. Two came at Anja, their own knives out. The other two, including Katarina Volkova, advanced on him. The alley was a dead end behind him. A wall of sweating, dark brick. They were trapped.
Anja was a whirlwind of grey wool and grim purpose. She parried a clumsy thrust, her knife scraping along her opponent’s blade. She used his momentum to spin him into his partner, creating a half-second of chaos. It was all she needed. Her blade darted out, opening a red line across the second man’s throat. He gargled, his hands flying to his neck, and stumbled back. Two down. But the other two were still on her, their attacks more cautious now, more coordinated. They were forcing her back, step by step, towards Sineus. Towards the dead end.
Katarina Volkova stopped five meters from him. She held a heavy, obsolete revolver, its metal pitted with rust. It was aimed at his chest.
— You see? — she said, her eyes burning with conviction. — The past is a disease. Your class, your wealth, your history. It all must be erased. We will make the world clean again. A perfect, final erasure.
Her words struck him harder than the gun. She was a dark mirror of his own former philosophy. The same desire for a sterile world, a clean slate. But his was born of a desire for order. Hers was born of a desire for righteous destruction. He saw the horror of his own logic twisted into a weapon.
And then he saw something else.
It was a shimmer against the solid brick wall behind him. A flaw in the fabric of the present. His sight, his curse, cut through the physical world. He saw the ghost of an archway, made of heavy, moss-covered stone, where only flat, grimy brick existed. It was a memory. A doorway bricked over a century ago, but the memory of it, the path it represented, was still there. A scar in reality.
The background noise of the district changed. The low, overlapping whispers sharpened into a single, piercing sound. The dry, frantic clicking of a watch made of ice. The Ticker’s Rattle. It was the sound of reality under stress, of two histories fighting for the same space.
He had a choice. Trust the solid wall in front of him and die. Or trust the ghost in his head and run at it. The price was simple and absolute. If he was wrong, he would smash himself and Anja into a ton of brick at full speed. A messy, stupid death. He looked at Anja, her face a mask of concentration as she held off two men. He looked at Katarina, her finger tightening on the trigger.
He chose the ghost.
— This way! — he yelled. The words were torn from his throat.
He grabbed Anja’s arm, pulling her out of the fight. She stumbled, her eyes wide with shock and anger.
— Are you mad? — she snarled, trying to wrench her arm free. — It’s a wall!
He did not answer. He did not have time. He held her arm in a grip of iron and ran, dragging her with him, straight at the dead end. He saw Katarina’s eyes widen in disbelief. He saw her raise the revolver. He saw the flash of the muzzle. He did not hear the shot.
They hit the wall.
For a single, heart-stopping instant, there was nothing but cold. A deep, profound cold that had nothing to do with temperature. It was the cold of non-existence, of a space between moments. The air was thick with the smell of dust a hundred years old and the faint, mineral scent of forgotten rain on stone. Then they were through, tumbling onto a floor of cracked flagstones, landing in a heap of tangled limbs.
He pushed himself up, his head pounding. A warm trickle of blood ran from his nose, dripping onto the dusty stone. The effort of forcing his perception onto the world, of dragging another person through a memory, had taken its toll. He tasted copper in the back of his throat.
They were in a small, enclosed courtyard. It was silent. The walls were the same ancient, moss-covered stone as the archway. A single, skeletal tree grew in the center, its branches black against the bruised grey sky. It was a place that had been swallowed by the city, a forgotten space that existed only because the world had not yet finished erasing it. By using its memory, he had reinforced it. He had saved it. A small, unconscious act of remembrance.
Anja was on her feet, her knife still in her hand. She stared at the wall they had just passed through. From this side, it was a solid archway, filled in with newer, darker brick. There was no seam, no crack. It was impossible. She touched the brick, her fingers tracing the mortar lines. Then she looked at him. At the blood on his face. The mockery was gone from her eyes. The professional curiosity was gone. It was replaced by something else. Something he had never seen in her before. Awe.
— What… — she started, her voice a hoarse whisper. — What was that?
— A memory, — he said, wiping the blood from his lip with the back of his hand.
The frantic, high-pitched clicking of the Ticker’s Rattle was gone. The silence it left behind was heavy, profound. In its place, only the low, steady hum of the district remained, a constant, mournful note. The sound of a machine slowly grinding itself to dust.
The dust from their fall settled in a weak beam of light filtering down from the rooftops. Far in the distance, a factory steam hammer pounded out its slow, rhythmic beat.
From the far side of the courtyard, through a narrow gap between two buildings, they could see the fog-choked canals.
