Time stopped.

Nessa did not feel Rhydian's magic strike the world. She understood it only because the world ceased behaving like one.

Lantern Row had been falling beneath the stranded moonlift.

Now it hung motionless over the luminous cloud sea.

A market awning floated half torn from its frame. Shards of glass remained suspended around a shattered window. A woman below was frozen with one hand stretched toward a child. Even Nessa's hair, whipped across her mouth by the fall, refused to move.

Nessa could not breathe.

Could not blink.

Could not turn her head.

Only her thoughts remained free.

Rhydian moved beside her.

He alone crossed the arrested world.

Silver light crawled around his clenched fist as he stepped from the moonlift roof and dropped through the open emergency hatch.

The lift had jammed roughly twenty feet above Lantern Row before the district's supports failed. Lantern Row was now falling away beneath it, while the lift itself remained locked to the auction tower's guide system.

If nothing changed, Nessa would soon be hundreds of feet above the district.

Rhydian reached the lift's emergency brake housing.

He did not touch the release.

He only placed himself beside it.

Then his fist opened.

Time crashed back.

Noise struck Nessa from every direction.

Lantern Row plunged.

The moonlift remained suspended.

Below, Rhydian ripped open the brake housing while the machinery could move. He seized the manual release and hauled it down.

Metal snapped.

The locked clamp sprang free.

The moonlift dropped.

Nessa's stomach tried to remain behind.

"Rhydian!"

He climbed back through the hatch as the cage began racing down its guide rail beside the falling district.

"The lock is released!"

"I gathered that!"

Lantern Row fell slightly faster than the lift, its streets tilting as broken structural arms twisted beneath it.

Rhydian leaned over the roof edge.

Along the district's outer rim, three emergency mooring housings were coming into view.

Beyond Lantern Row stood the structures they had been designed to reach: immense municipal support spines rising independently from the city's central suspension frame. Unlike Lantern Row, those vertical silver-black towers were not falling.

Nessa recognized the system.

Emergency moorings were meant to hold a district steady while an Anchor connection underwent maintenance.

They were not meant to stop an entire neighborhood after free fall had begun.

"Those chains aren't built for this!"

"No," Rhydian said.

Silver gathered around his hand again.

"But they may slow it."

He closed his fist.

Silence returned.

Nessa froze with the moonlift.

The district froze beneath them.

The support spines, chains, shattered roofs and drifting debris all became immovable.

Rhydian used the stolen stillness only to travel.

He jumped from the moonlift onto a frozen market canopy, crossed an arrested spray of broken planks and descended a maintenance ladder until he reached the first mooring housing on Lantern Row's outer edge.

Beside it, perhaps thirty feet away across open air, rose one of the fixed municipal support spines.

A reinforced receiving bracket projected from that stationary spine.

Rhydian braced himself beside the mooring release.

Then he opened his fist.

Lantern Row dropped again.

Rhydian dropped with it, one arm locked around the housing frame.

He spun the release wheel.

The first turn resisted.

The second screamed.

The third broke the safety seal.

The housing burst open.

A massive emergency chain fired outward.

Its hooked end shot toward the receiving bracket on the fixed municipal spine.

It struck too low.

Metal sparked.

The hook glanced away.

"Missed!" Nessa shouted.

Rhydian looked toward the next mooring station farther along Lantern Row's rim.

He did not try to grab the moving chain.

Instead he closed his fist again.

Everything stopped before the failed hook could swing back into the district.

Rhydian crossed the frozen outer framework to the second housing and positioned himself beside its manual release.

Time resumed.

The district continued falling.

Rhydian hauled the lever.

The second chain launched.

This one shot toward another structure beyond Lantern Row: a surviving upper-district transfer arch connected directly to Vespera's central suspension frame, not to Lantern Row itself.

The hook struck the arch's reinforced crossbeam.

It slid several feet.

Then caught.

The chain snapped taut.

Lantern Row jerked sideways.

Buildings groaned.

The district kept falling, but more slowly.

"One isn't enough!" Nessa shouted.

Rhydian was already moving toward the third housing.

He stopped time once more, crossed the frozen framework, and placed himself at its release mechanism.

When time resumed, he wrenched the lever down.

The third chain fired toward the original municipal support spine.

Its hook slammed into the receiving bracket the first chain had missed.

This time it seated.

The chain tightened.

Lantern Row stopped falling.

Not gently.

The district swung between the two fixed structures like a broken pendulum.

The moonlift, still descending independently beside it, suddenly shuddered as its emergency governor caught the guide rail.

Nessa was thrown flat across the roof.

The altered memory crystal she had been holding slid from her hand.

Pale-blue quartz skittered toward the edge.

"No."

She lunged.

Her fingers closed over it inches before it disappeared into the clouds below.

She shoved it back into her fastened inner pocket and checked by touch.

Six crystals.

All present.

Mirelle's silver debt-stay card was still beside them.

Lantern Row swung beneath the surviving suspension structures.

The two emergency chains screamed under the weight.

Rhydian climbed back onto the moonlift from a tilted market roof that had swung close beneath it.

When he reached Nessa, his face was colorless.

"How long?" she asked.

He rested one hand against the railing.

"Not continuously."

"I know. How long altogether?"

He thought.

"Under forty seconds."

"You said the dangerous point was approximately a minute."

"Approximately. Under strain, less."

Nessa looked at him.

Her contract mark remained cold.

The fear was hers.

"Did the Vault take anything?"

Rhydian hesitated.

"I don't know."

"How can you not know?"

He looked toward Lantern Row.

"Because forgetting something does not leave a label where it used to be."

One of the mooring chains groaned.

The district dropped half a foot before the line caught again.

Nessa looked toward the narrow Quill apartment tower.

It still stood, though at an angle that architecture usually considered a confession.

"Tavi."

The moonlift now hung only several yards above a slanted market roof because it had descended with Lantern Row before its governor engaged.

Nessa kicked down the exterior emergency ladder.

Rhydian did not try to stop her.

"Those moorings are temporary."

"Then we will be temporary faster."

She climbed down.

Rhydian followed.

Lantern Row had become a geography of bad decisions. Market stalls lay piled against railings. Windows faced the sky. Moonlamps hung sideways. Citizens stumbled toward bridges leading to districts still attached to the central frame.

Nessa lifted both hands.

Three huge blue arrows appeared above the street, pointing toward the nearest intact evacuation crossing.

"Upper bridge! Follow the arrows!"

The illusions cast no force and moved nothing physical, but they were visible over the darkened district. People turned toward them.

Rhydian glanced upward.

"Effective."

"That sounded almost complimentary."

"It was meant to be."

Her contract mark stayed cold.

Nessa noticed anyway and immediately became annoyed with herself for noticing.

They reached the Quill apartment tower.

The front door had twisted in its frame.

Nessa shoved against it with her shoulder.

It moved an inch.

She shoved again, harder.

The warped latch tore free.

She ran upstairs.

"Tavi!"

No answer.

Their apartment door stood open.

Nessa stopped.

She had locked it before leaving for the Midnight Auction.

Inside, chairs had shifted during the fall, but nothing suggested a fight.

Tavi's coat was gone.

So were his work boots and the cheap brass chronometer he always kept beside his bed.

A folded note sat beneath their mother's chipped tea cup.

Nessa opened it.

The handwriting was Tavi's.

Ness—

If Vaunt calls in the debt, don't give them anything. I found out why they bought it. I should have told you earlier.

Someone has been taking memories from people in Lantern Row.

Not buying them. Taking them.

I found a man who remembers losing twenty years but cannot remember his own daughter's name.

I'm going to meet someone who has records.

If I'm right, the Council knows.

Do not follow me.

Nessa stared at the last sentence.

"He wrote 'do not follow me.'"

Rhydian remained by the doorway.

"A tactical error."

She looked at him.

"You are learning."

Beneath the note lay a rectangle of old archive stock.

An open eye crossed by a clock hand had been stamped in one corner.

Rhydian's expression changed.

"You know that symbol."

"I've seen it before."

"Where?"

"Hour Vault correspondence."

Nessa waited.

Rhydian sighed softly.

"A historian named Ilya Sorn used it on requests sent to the Vault after the Astral Archives revoked his access. He accused the Council of altering sealed historical records. His formal petitions stopped carrying his name after his expulsion. They carried that mark instead."

"And you remember this because?"

"Because sealed-history requests addressed directly to the Keeper came to me."

That, at least, was an answer earned by his job rather than prophecy.

Nessa turned the card over.

Graphite darkened one edge.

Before she could examine it more closely, something warmed inside her pocket.

One altered crystal began to glow.

She removed it and placed it on the table.

Pale-blue light unfolded above the quartz.

The ancient silver shore returned.

The same enormous moon.

The same black-stone Anchor.

The same single preserved hour.

Twelve-pointed-star soldiers marched prisoners toward a stone structure near the water.

One prisoner resisted.

A soldier pressed a shining instrument against his forehead.

Light poured from the man's skull into a glass vessel.

When the instrument was removed, the prisoner stared around with empty terror.

Nessa's throat tightened.

"Memory extraction."

"Yes," Rhydian said.

The preserved viewpoint shifted as the ancient recorder moved along the shore.

Ahead stood a doorway descending beneath a stone arch.

Carved over it was an open eye crossed by a clock hand.

Nessa picked up the present-day archive card and held it beside the projection.

The symbols matched.

"Ilya didn't invent it."

"No."

The ancient scene continued only a few seconds longer.

The prisoners disappeared through the marked doorway.

Then the fragment ended.

The crystal went dark.

Nessa examined the physical card separately.

The graphite smudge along its edge was not random.

It formed a reversed partial curve of the same eye symbol, as though the card had recently been pressed against a raised carving and rubbed with graphite.

"Someone used this against a real surface," she said.

"Probably," Rhydian replied.

"A surviving one."

"Possibly."

Nessa frowned at him.

"You are very committed to ruining dramatic conclusions."

"It is one of my better qualities."

He pointed to the rubbing.

"We don't know who made it. Tavi could have. Ilya could have handed it to him already marked. Someone else could have supplied it to either of them."

Nessa looked at Tavi's note again.

He had gone to meet someone with records.

The card connected that trail to Ilya Sorn.

And Ilya's symbol was not merely the eccentric signature of a disgraced historian.

It had existed centuries ago, carved above a doorway used during the conquest that official history claimed had never happened.

Outside, a tremendous metallic boom shook the apartment.

One of Lantern Row's temporary moorings slipped.

Dust fell from the ceiling.

Nessa closed her hand around the archive card.

Somewhere in modern Vespera, someone had apparently found a surface bearing the mark of the erased city.

She could not yet prove Tavi had seen it himself.

But he had found a trail leading toward whoever had.

And that trail began with stolen memories.