Amara did not notice the hour until the archive lights shifted to their evening setting.
The change was subtle, a soft dimming meant to reduce glare on aging paper, but she felt it right away, just as she noticed most things related to time. She glanced at the clock above the reference desk and frowned—past seven. The building would close in an hour, but no one had told her to leave.
No one ever did.
She sat alone at her workstation, shoulders hunched slightly forward, fingers moving in short, efficient bursts across the keyboard. The database filled the screen, rows of indexed certainty stretching back centuries: names, dates, causes of death. The language of history was orderly, impersonal. It promised answers, even when it withheld meaning.
She had been searching for nearly three hours.
It had started as verification. That was the story she told herself, anyway—a professional courtesy to her own sanity. After the notebook, after the watch, after the way her body had reacted to a name she did not remember knowing, she needed something solid. Something official.
Records didn't lie. They could be incomplete, biased, cruel—but they did not hallucinate.
She entered the name again.
Julián de la Cruz.
Colonial Mexico. Late eighteenth century.
The search wheel spun. Once. Twice.
A list populated the screen.
Amara exhaled slowly through her nose and began sorting through the results, narrowing parameters with practiced ease. She filtered by region, then by occupation. Civilian records fell away first, then trade guilds, land registries, tax rolls. What remained were military files: sparse, functional, preserved because empires loved to count their soldiers even when they discarded them.
One entry sat at the top of the list.
Her fingers stilled.
She clicked.
The record opened in a new pane, stark and undecorated, the digital equivalent of a death mask.
Name: Julián de la Cruz
Rank: Capitán
Affiliation: Royalist Colonial Militia
Posting: Nueva España
Date of Birth: Unknown
Date of Death: 14 May 1793
Cause of Death: Execution by order of the Crown
That was it.
No portrait. No commendations. No footnote explaining the crime, the accusation, or the circumstances that led a captain in service of the Crown to be executed by it. History, in its bureaucratic mercy, had reduced him to a single line of consequence.
Amara stared at the date.
Fourteenth of May.
Her vision blurred, not dramatically and not enough to draw attention, but enough that she had to blink several times before the numbers came back into focus. A strange pressure bloomed beneath her ribs, sharp and insistent, as if her body had recognized the information before her mind had caught up.
She pressed her palm flat against the desk.
"That's not possible," she murmured, though she wasn't sure what she meant by it.
The record did not change.
She scrolled.
Additional fields expanded beneath the initial entry, revealing a summary pulled from multiple sources. Public execution. Central plaza. The bell announced the sentence. Witnessed by civilian and ecclesiastical authorities. Final disposition of remains: unrecorded.
The word bell snagged in her mind like a burr.
Amara swallowed.
She leaned back in her chair, forcing herself to breathe evenly. The reaction was inappropriate. Unprofessional. She had read hundreds of execution records over the years, some far more graphic than this one. Names blurred together after a while, tragedies stacking atop one another until they lost their individual weight.
This one had not.
Her gaze returned to the name, tracing the letters as if they might rearrange themselves into something else.
Julián.
She did not know why it mattered.
She only knew that it did.
Her fingers hovered over the trackpad again, then moved with sudden urgency. She toggled on the annotation layer, an option most users ignored and reserved for internal notes left by archivists and researchers over decades. The margins of the digital document populated instantly. Her breath caught.
Her mother's handwriting filled the screen.
Not a little. Not a note here or there. The margins were crowded with commentary, arrows, underlines, and emphatic marks that betrayed a level of engagement bordering on fixation. Amara leaned closer, her heart beginning to race.
Execution date confirmed across three sources; there is a discrepancy in the timing of the witnesses.
Why preserve personal effects if the sentence is carried out thoroughly?
This death anchors something.
She recognized the cadence of the notes immediately. The way her mother posed questions, she already suspected the answers to—the way she underlined selectively, not for emphasis but for memory.
Near the center of the page, written larger than the rest, was a single phrase:
Fixed point.
Amara's mouth went dry.
She scrolled further down, following the annotations as they traced the record line by line. Her mother had dissected this entry with surgical precision, noting gaps, inconsistencies, and silences that most historians would have dismissed as the inevitable erosion of time.
At the bottom of the page, the notes stopped.
Abruptly.
No concluding thought. No summary. No cross-reference directs her to another file—just an empty margin, untouched by ink.
Amara stared at the blank space, a cold realization settling over her.
This was where it had ended.
She checked the metadata automatically, fingers moving on instinct. Date of last access. User ID.
Her mother's name appeared.
The timestamp sat beside it, unassuming and final.
This had been the last record she worked on before abandoning the project entirely.
Before her health declined, before she withdrew into herself, into silence, Amara had mistaken for exhaustion or age.
A sharp ache bloomed behind Amara's eyes.
"She knew," she whispered.
Not just of him. Of something else. Something tied to this death, to this date, to this man who existed in the archive as a fact but in Amara's body as a disturbance.
Her chest tightened, breath coming shallow now. She closed the record abruptly, the screen reverting to the neutral blue of the database home page. The motion felt defensive, instinctive, as though she had looked too long at something that could look back.
The archive around her was quiet, but it no longer felt inert. The shelves seemed closer somehow, the weight of centuries pressing in. Objects waited in their boxes, patient and untroubled by the living's attention.
Amara logged out and shut down her computer, her hands trembling despite her effort to still them.
She gathered her bag and left without properly signing out.
That night, sleep did not come easily.
When it did, it brought bells.
Not the bells of any church she recognized, not the orderly tolling of a clock marking hours. These were louder, harsher, like iron voices clanging against stone and echoing through narrow streets. The sound vibrated through her chest, through her bones, as if calling her to witness something she could not yet see.e dawn, heart pounding, the echo of the bells still ringing in her ears.
Amara lay there in the dark, staring at the ceiling, one certainty settling into place with quiet inevitability.
The record said Julián de la Cruz was dead.
But nothing about him felt finished.
And somewhere, deep in the machinery of time, his name was still being called.