The scrap of photograph trembled in my palm like an accusation. The corner where a face had once been cut away left a pale crescent of paper, and the handwriting on the back—my handwriting—was a proof that I had once promised something and then misplaced the courage to keep it.
Find me. Finish me.
Outside the theater the city buzzed as if nothing had happened, a living thing that could both forget and pretend to remember on the same breath. Lamps flared as if relieved; street-voices returned to their usual round of complaints and commerce. But pockets of stillness lingered where the reminder's echo had grazed: a baker lingering over a name on a bill, a tram conductor who mouthed a syllable before swallowing it back down. The air tasted like the moment before a storm—charged, impatient.
The woman with brass eyes had already vanished into the alleys that know how to cheat the maps. She left behind a ticket stub, folded and blunt, and the smell of metal and boiled coffee. I folded it into my coat and felt the weight of an agreement I had not signed.
I should have gone home, hidden the photograph in the drawer where I kept unsent letters and things that felt like small crimes. Instead I went where debts are easiest to read: the Registry.
The Registry was a library thin as a razor and twice as cold. It stood between a pawnshop that sold secondhand destinies and a laundromat that ironed out memories for the wealthy. Inside, clerks with long, indifferent hands cataloged disappearances like they were predictable weather. They would tell you what the city had lost if you had permission to ask; otherwise they sold you paper straps labeled with the words "Possibly Remembered" and "Unverified."
I had no permission.
At the entry, the night-arch of the Registry blinked at me like a sleepy thing. A doorwoman—her name badge read "Reception" though she answered to nothing—checked my coat as if I smelled of rumors. "Names without tracing," she said. "Do you have Advocate status?"
"No," I lied. My chest felt full of the theater's light, like I had swallowed a lens.
She studied me with a boredom that was almost ritual. "Temporary access costs memory," she said. "Either you pay or you return to the market with your pockets lighter."
I fished for coin but the theater had taken the night's easy currency. I had traded sleep and a photograph. The woman in the third row had maybe taken a little of my future as well. "I have something else," I said. "Evidence."
She nodded, interested now. Evidence could be bartered. Evidence could be translated into a position on a waiting list. She led me through stacks that smelled of dust and apology. Shelves rose like city blocks. Each tome inside them was a rumor sewn into leather.
"Find me. Finish me," I repeated, and the words felt like an invocation.
"You sound like a debtor," Reception said, and did not smile. "Who is Lena?"
"I don't know much," I admitted. "Only the photograph, and... pieces. She was erased. Somewhere between the Registry and the river she was unmade. Someone finished her wrong."
Reception's fingers paused over a ledger. "Anyone who is 'finished wrong' tends to stay finished," she said. "Why do you think you can do better than the city?"
"Because I can be louder than polite forgetting," I said.
She closed the ledger and handed me a slip stamped with a constellation of dots. "You have three marks of access," she said. "One for the Street-Archives, one for the Merchant-Records, one conditional. Use them poorly and the city will mark you as a disturbance."
"Three?" I echoed.
"Three," she said. "Names cost more than coin. They cost trespass."
I left the Registry with the slip burning in my pocket. The city had a way of measuring urgency by the way it rearranged its shadows; mine had been rearranged into a neat, public suspicion.
The first stop was the Street-Archives, a ruin of signage and memory where children sold collected phrases like shells. There, fragments were cheap: half-sentences, names used in arguments, the laughter of a shopkeeper when he thought no one was watching. I traded for a scrap that smelled faintly of lemon and an old lullaby. It said, in a child's uneven hand, "—Lena used to hum before the rain."
Small things. Tiny keys. Keys that could be fitted together until a lock finally yielded.
The Merchant-Records were less forgiving. They kept receipts for favors and the names of men who made deals with fingers crossed. The clerk there recognized the photograph fragment and looked at me with the kind of slow pity men reserve for fools they once were. "The woman belonged to a ledger," he said. "Not a person. She was a line item: 'Lena — discontinued.'"
"Discontinued by whom?"
He tapped the column. "By a client higher than the butcher and lower than the mayor. We do not see such clients often. They prefer discretion."
Discretion was a polite word for a blade.
By dusk my coat pockets were full of nothing that felt like certainty. I had collected smells and half-memories and the kind of ledger numbers that could be traced to doors that lead to basements. I had also collected attention; someone had watched me trade and whispered the shape of my face into a line of waiters. There were always witnesses when you rubbed a seam raw.
That night I returned to the theater. The stage still smelled of the reminder's absence—like a wound that had not yet closed. The scrap of photograph had not been enough to make Lena whole; the edge where her face had been cut away felt like a promise I could not keep alone.
The brass-eyed woman sat in the back row as if she had never left. She did not applaud. When I reached her, she did not turn.
"You've been busy," she said.
"I have a list," I answered. "A trail."
"Trails are easy," she said. "Completing is hard." She turned then, and I caught the full shape of her face: small scars mapped in constellation, a faint white line that began at her cheek and ended at her jaw like an old sea-route. "Why Lena?" she asked. "There are a thousand people to remember."
"Because I'm already in debt," I said. "Because I found a photograph with my handwriting on the back. Because she asked me. Because the city doesn't deserve the last word."
She smiled—an animal's smile, respectful of hunger. "Finish her," she said. "But know this: the city will fight with the tools it knows. It will take back what you've given it, and when it does, you will be asked to prove you were the author of the return."
"Then I'll write louder," I said.
She tapped my palm, where the scrap lay folded. "The city recognizes authorship in odd ways. Blood may work. Memory often does not. Find what was taken from her—not only the name, but why it mattered. Bring the ledger's missing page."
"Where do I begin?" I asked.
"Wherever they sell endings cheap enough for you to afford," she said. "Begin with the people who remember less than they should. You will find that unfinished things keep their own light."
She rose and left like a statement dismissed. The theater sighed as if relieved; the chandeliers whispered back to life.
Outside, the moon still failed at its own name. But for the first time since the reminder cracked, I felt the city answer me with a small, dangerous promise: a thread had been pulled. The rest of the fabric trembled.