The next morning the city felt narrower, as if paper edges had been folded inward overnight. The lanes seemed to lean closer together; conversations were clipped to avoid the loose syllables that might tumble out and be eaten. The shoe in Nox's coat felt heavier. So did the wooden horse and the ribbon, a clustering of evidence he kept like contraband.
He went first to the boy who had asked about his sister because the knot in his chest had a name-shaped ache. The boy's hair was wind-rough and his shoes too big; he sat on a step with knees pulled up, counting pebbles into a neat tower. When Nox called the boy looked up with the quick, bright stare of someone cataloguing the present.
"Did you find her?" Nox asked before he could stop himself.
The boy blinked and frowned. "Which sister?" he said. He chewed the inside of his cheek as if fishing for a memory that slid away like a fish. "I have a sister?" His voice was small, surprised by its own question.
Nox's throat closed. He crouched and put the shoe on the step beside the boy's feet as if its presence might anchor the missing thing. The boy touched it with an index that trembled.
"She had a freckle," Nox said, testing. "On the jaw, like a tiny sun."
The boy studied his own jaw as if expecting a missing dot to appear. "No," he said, and looked away. The pebbles rolled helplessly from his tower. "I don't remember."
The arc of loss in Nox's chest folded in on itself. He had the shoe; he had the memory that had been there for a breath; now even the breath seemed borrowed. If the boy could not keep the name of his sister with the shoe at his feet then whatever thread connected things here was thinner than a rumor.
He left the boy and the step and walked like someone tracing a margin. The registry's presence pressed at him. Lian had told him he might not immediately feel the full price for pulling the thread. Sometimes the cost arrived like a tax bill weeks later; sometimes it ate an afternoon. Whatever shape it took, it carved.
Nox found Lian at the edge of Tailor's Alley where a vendor mended a pocket of sky—blue paper where a painting had been sanded away. She leaned against the wall, hands clasping the ribbon. Her face was a ledger of slight tension.
"You shouldn't go to the boy again," she said without preamble.
"He asked," Nox said. "I thought—maybe—"
"You thought the shoe could do the remembering for him." Her voice didn't scold so much as catalog. "Objects are witnesses, not witnesses that can speak for people forever."
He told her slowly about the laugh he had plucked and how the echo had been snatched from him. He told her about the boy who could not name his sister despite the shoe. Lian listened with the practiced stillness of someone who had watched pages curl before.
"That's the kind that eats a name," she said. "Small, bright, and sticky. It clings to a person until something else decides it wants it. When you pulled, it dislodged, and whatever kept it tethered had no anchor. It fell."
Nox looked at the ribbon and felt the absence like a draft. "What happens now?"
"You watch what slips," Lian said. "You make lists. You write names on things that still remember. You leave witnesses."
They walked until they reached a narrow stair that descended beneath the market into a place Lian called the Half-Index. It was not on any map because it had been kept between pages. Stalls were smaller there; the light came from jars and the talk was softer. The Half-Index was where people left things that were too thin to make a ledger but too loud to toss aside: the scent of a winter, a single verse of a lullaby, a photograph whose edges had already begun to cede ink.
"People come here when the registry will not hear them," Lian said. "The Half-Index holds fragments. It's safer than a formal register, but it's not safe in a way that keeps you from being noticed. The wardens still count the stalls in the day."
They found a man behind a low table who kept his eyes like two fast, deliberate coins. He introduced himself as Marek without a flourish, and Marek was the sort who made a living by putting pins into loose things and asking whether they hurt.
"You touched a filament," Marek said, as if reading the paragraph at the top of a page. "That will show as an anomaly if they scan you long enough."
"How?" Nox asked. He tried to make the question practical. That steadied him.
"Anomalies leave residues on the flesh like smudges on paper," Marek said. He tapped his temple lightly, then the pad of his palm. "The registry can read for differences. They prefer to place a marker rather than chase every fray. Markers make neat rows."
"Can they—undo it?" Nox asked.
Marek's expression tightened with an old kind of regret. "Undo suggests an original to return to. Sometimes memories are not so much taken as relocated. We can place a tag, a witness, a provisional note. It buys time. It also places you under observation."
"You mean they'll watch me?" Nox said.
"We all watch one another," Marek replied. "But yes. The registry will prefer to file you neatly. Files are comfortable. They keep the city from coughing up surprises."
Lian's fingers found Nox's hand and squeezed. "If they file you as an anomaly," she said, "they can lock a name to you that belongs to no one. You become a placeholder. You exist on a page with brackets where a life should be. People will pass you and not see your years."
Nox imagined being a bracket. He imagined no one ever arguing his cause because a clerk had written "ANOMALY: UNOWNED" across his line and closed the drawer.
Marek showed them a small metal token the size of a coin. Its face was stamped with a jagged circle and a tiny notch. "This is a witness token," he said. "If you attach it to a thing that remembers you—your horse, your shoe, a scrap—then the registry has a mark to follow. It tells them someone has laid claim; it complicates their bureaucratic unhappiness."
"How much?" Lian asked.
"Memories have prices," Marek said. "You can trade a shape of days, the color of one's laughter, a month. Or you can hand over something irreplaceable." His eyes flitted up to Nox.
"What do you mean by irreplaceable?" Nox asked.
Marek was careful. "A memory that has been your anchor. For some it is a name. For others it is a voice. It is not my place to list what it could be. I merely remind you that tokens require collateral."
Nox felt the blank where the laugh had been. He did not yet know what it had cost him beyond a hole. The thought of handing over something he understood as the last of himself made him sick.
Lian looked at him the way people look at accounts when they must decide what to pay and what to keep. "We can spare things," she said. "But sparing is itself a ledger. What we spare for ourselves we deny to others."
They thanked Marek without agreeing to anything. Outside, noise pressed the market into a steady hum. Nox walked with his hands in his pockets, with the shoe and horse and ribbon a rough conscience.
That night he tried to write down what he could still call by name. He made a list on scrap paper: the shoe, the horse, the ribbon, Tailor's Alley, Marek, Lian's gray eyes, the wardens' brass. He wrote his name on the top and watched the letters keep their shape as long as he looked at them.
When he slept the world put its hand over the page and half-closed the lids of the city.
At dawn there was an envelope slipped under his door like a pressed leaf. The paper was heavy and official. The crest at the top was the registry's stamp. Inside a single line, typed and precise, read:
Provisional Review: A representative of the Archive will call for an inventory at first light tomorrow. Presence requested. Assistance will be offered to reconcile anomalies.
No signature. No warmth. A polite mechanism of attention.
Nox held the paper with fingers that suddenly felt foreign. The edges of his handwriting blurred a little when he blinked. He read the line again and felt the old ledger close a little more tightly around him.
He kept the token of the registry's notice close and thought about Marek's words: markers, witnesses, collateral. He thought about the boy who could not remember his sister and about the laugh he had borrowed and lost. He thought about being catalogued, bracketed, reduced to a neat row.
And then he folded the paper carefully and slid it into the pocket with the shoe and the horse and the ribbon. He pressed the objects to his palm like a small, stubborn prayer.
Outside, the city waited as if for an answer it already knew.