The wall rushed at them. A cliff of dark, weeping granite. Anja held the tiller. Her knuckles were white. She did not flinch. She had made her choice. The price was simple. Annihilation, if he was wrong. The searchlights of the Ordo Umbrarum gunboats converged, pinning their small skiff in a glare so bright it bleached the world to black and white. The roar of their own small engine was a desperate scream against the inevitable.
Sineus held the memory. He held it tight, a fragile thread of light in his mind against the storm of the city’s past. The memory of a canal that was no longer there. The spectral wake of a thousand forgotten journeys. It was a ghost-path, a lie told to reality. He focused all his will upon it, forcing the lie to become true for just a few seconds. The pounding in his head intensified, a blacksmith’s hammer on a cold anvil. The dry, frantic clicking of the Ticker’s Rattle filled his hearing, the sound of the world’s gears grinding against an impossible command.
— Now, — he breathed, the word lost in the engine’s shriek.
Anja did not need to hear it. She was already committed. She held their course true. Straight at the wall.
They hit it.
There was no impact. No splintering of wood or shattering of bone. There was only cold. A deep, profound cold that had nothing to do with the November air. It was the cold of a place that did not exist. The roar of the engine vanished, replaced by a thick, pressurized silence. The brilliant white of the searchlights was gone, plunged into absolute darkness. The skiff glided forward through nothing.
Sineus felt the shift in reality like a physical blow. The air grew thick, heavy with the smell of dust a hundred years old and the faint, mineral scent of forgotten rain on stone. The darkness was not empty. It was filled with faint, shimmering outlines. The ghostly bricks of the forgotten channel walls, slick with a spectral dampness. The water beneath them was no longer water. It was a river of pure memory, cold and slow, pulling at the hull of the boat.
He fought to hold the path open. The memory flickered. For a terrifying instant, the granite of the real world bled through, a solid shadow in the spectral tunnel. He pushed back with his will, his vision swimming. The nosebleed from the courtyard started again, a warm trickle over his lip. He tasted copper. The Ticker’s Rattle was a deafening, frantic clatter now, the sound of a watch made of ice shattering on a stone floor. It was the sound of reality tearing.
Anja stood frozen at the tiller, her face a pale mask in the gloom. Her eyes were wide, staring at the impossible space around them. She was a creature of solid matter, of iron and brick and violence, trapped in a ghost story. But her hands did not leave the tiller. Her grip was absolute. She was steering a boat through a dream, and she did not falter. Her trust was a physical weight, another burden he had to carry.
A deep, resonant thud vibrated through the memory-water. It was not a sound they heard with their ears, but a concussion felt in the bones. Muffled. Distant. Sineus knew what it was. A torpedo. Fired at the spot where they had been only seconds ago. The Ordo Umbrarum did not accept failure. They erased it.
The tunnel of memory began to collapse. The shimmering walls flickered violently. The darkness pressed in.
— Almost there, — Sineus forced the words out, his voice a raw rasp.
Light appeared ahead. Not the harsh glare of a searchlight, but the soft, grey light of the fog-bound canal. They burst out of the memory and back into the real world. The sound returned in a rush. The chugging of their engine. The slap of water against the hull. They were moving at speed across the open canal.
A white line of churning water raced past their stern, fifty meters away. The torpedo. It continued on its path, a blind shark, and slammed into the far bank with a muffled crump of detonating explosive, sending a plume of mud and water into the air. They had escaped. They were through.
Sineus looked back. The solid granite quay stood unbroken, as if nothing had happened. The gunboats were distant lights, their searchlights sweeping an empty stretch of water a kilometer behind them. The blockade was broken. They were clear of the primary threat.
Anja cut the engine.
The sudden silence was deafening. The skiff drifted, its momentum slowly dying. The only sound was the gentle lapping of water against the hull and the distant, mournful clang of a buoy bell. The frantic clicking in Sineus’s head was gone. The Ticker’s Rattle had ceased. In its place was only the low, steady thrum of his own blood in his ears. The silence felt clean. Earned.
She finally let go of the tiller, her hands flexing as if to restore feeling. She did not look at him. She stared at her own hands, then back at the solid wall of the quay, now distant and shrouded in mist.
— What was that? — Her voice was low, steady. Not the question of a terrified passenger, but of a mechanic inspecting a machine that should not work.
— A memory, — Sineus said. He wiped the blood from his mouth with the back of his sleeve. The fabric came away dark. He felt a profound exhaustion settle deep in his bones. He had paid a price for that passage.
Anja finally turned to look at him. Her pale eyes seemed to see more than they had before. The mockery was gone. The professional disdain was gone. Even the awe he had seen in the courtyard was gone. It was replaced by a look of grim, absolute certainty. She had seen the world beneath the world. She had steered a boat through it. It was real. And so was he.
— You owe me a new boat, — she said. It was not a joke. It was a statement of fact. A return to the transactional world she understood. But the foundation had shifted. The debt was different now.
He gave a short, sharp nod. A debt was a debt.
The skiff drifted in the quiet water, a tiny island of stillness in the vast, wounded city. The fog began to thin, revealing the skeletal shapes of dormant cranes and the dark masses of warehouses lining a secluded, dilapidated dock.
A single figure stepped out from the shadows of a loading bay
