The apartment lurched.

Nessa caught the table before it slid into the wall.

Outside, metal shrieked across metal as the slipped emergency mooring dragged several feet through its receiving bracket. Lantern Row tilted farther toward the cloud sea.

The altered crystal rolled across the tabletop.

Nessa snatched it up, returned it to her fastened inner pocket, and checked the rest by touch.

Six crystals. Mirelle's silver debt-stay card.

The archive card remained clenched in her other hand.

Rhydian was already at the window.

"The third chain is slipping."

"Can you stop it?"

"Not without reaching the housing, and if the bracket is tearing free, stopping time would only give me a better view of something I cannot repair."

Nessa hated answers that were both sensible and useless.

Another tremor passed through the tower.

Across the street, one of her glowing blue evacuation arrows skewed sideways with the building beneath it. The illusion itself remained intact, obediently pointing toward the upper bridge even while the world tried to turn the bridge into a wall.

"Then we leave," Rhydian said.

Nessa looked at Tavi's empty bed.

"He could come back."

"If he does, this district may not be here to receive him."

That was worse because it was true.

She seized Tavi's note from the table and stuffed it into her pocket with the crystals. The old archive card she kept in her hand.

They ran downstairs.

Lantern Row had become a slow-moving evacuation rather than a panic. Municipal wardens had reached the surviving bridge and were funneling residents toward the stable upper district. Behind them, enormous counterweight engines groaned as emergency crews tried to transfer some of Lantern Row's load from the failing moorings to temporary suspension cables.

Nessa's blue arrows floated above the crowd.

A warden spotted them and shouted, "Keep those up!"

"Finally," Nessa muttered, "official recognition of my criminal talents."

Rhydian glanced at her.

"Directional signage is not normally prosecuted."

"You lack imagination."

Her wrist remained cold.

She was relieved by that, then irritated that relief itself had become something she needed to evaluate.

They crossed the bridge with the last large group of residents.

Only after both of Nessa's feet touched the stable stone of Crescent Ward did a municipal engineer cut access behind them. Lantern Row remained hanging crookedly between the upper transfer arch and the support spine while crews installed additional cables.

It had not been saved.

It had merely been prevented from dying immediately.

Nessa turned back toward home.

Rhydian said nothing.

That was almost kind.

She unfolded the archive card.

The graphite rubbing curved along one edge, reversing part of the ancient eye-and-clock-hand symbol.

"If this came from a real carving," she said, "we need to find the carving."

"Agreed."

"You knew Ilya Sorn."

"Knew of him. We exchanged correspondence."

"Where would a disgraced historian hide?"

"Somewhere historians consider obvious and everyone else considers condemned."

Nessa stared.

"That was nearly a joke."

"I am recovering from severe temporal expenditure. My judgment may be compromised."

She almost smiled.

The contract mark stayed cold.

Rhydian looked away first.

"There is an old municipal chronology annex beneath Bellglass Square," he said. "It was closed after the eastern foundation cracked thirty years ago. Sorn requested records from that annex repeatedly before his expulsion."

"Repeatedly enough that you remember?"

Rhydian's expression changed very slightly.

"Yes."

Nessa noticed the hesitation.

"What?"

"Nothing certain."

"Rhydian."

He looked toward Lantern Row, then back at her.

"I remember receiving Sorn's petitions. I remember his arguments. I remember the seal he used."

"And?"

"I cannot remember the face of the clerk who delivered them."

Nessa waited.

"Did you know the clerk?"

"I don't know."

A colder answer than no.

The rescue had cost him something after all.

Maybe.

Or perhaps the clerk had never mattered enough to remember.

There was no clean way to distinguish ordinary forgetting from magical theft.

Nessa folded the archive card again.

"Bellglass Square."

The journey took twenty minutes through streets clogged with evacuees, suspended carts, and emergency crews. Public moonlifts around the damaged districts remained locked, so they crossed two pedestrian bridges and descended a narrow maintenance stair built along the exterior of a municipal tower.

Bellglass Square lay below the commercial wards, a circular plaza centered on a cracked glass clock whose hands had stopped at some forgotten hour.

The abandoned chronology annex occupied the square's eastern side.

Its official entrance had been sealed with iron plates.

Nessa held up the card.

"Historian hiding place: disappointingly obvious."

Rhydian walked past the sealed entrance.

"Historians rarely use official doors once governments become interested in them."

Around the side of the building, a narrow alley ended at a collapsed stairwell.

A faded inscription ran along the stone foundation.

Most of it had been chiseled away.

But near ground level, protected beneath a drainage ledge, Nessa saw a raised curve.

An eye.

A clock hand crossed its center.

She crouched.

The graphite rubbing on the archive card matched the lower curve exactly.

"Someone pressed this here."

"Yes."

This time Rhydian did not dilute the conclusion.

Nessa ran her fingers over the carving.

Nothing happened.

She tried pressing the card against it.

Still nothing.

"Maybe there is a door."

"There usually is, when someone goes to the trouble of marking one."

They searched the foundation.

Nessa found the seam because the illusion hiding it was bad.

Not weak.

Bad.

The false stone repeated the same hairline crack every six inches.

"Someone forged this wall," she said.

She touched two fingers to the surface and sent a thread of blue illusion magic through it.

Her magic did not physically remove anything. It only disrupted the false image layered over the real structure.

The stone shimmered.

A narrow metal door appeared beneath it.

A voice behind them said, "That took you longer than I hoped."

Nessa spun.

A thin man stood at the alley entrance carrying three paper folders beneath one arm and a crossbow beneath the other.

His hair was more silver than brown, his coat had been repaired so many times that the original cloth was difficult to identify, and his expression suggested disappointment had become a professional discipline.

Rhydian said, "Ilya Sorn."

"Keeper Noct."

Ilya shifted the crossbow toward Nessa.

"And unless the city has become considerably stranger since breakfast, that would make you Nessa Quill."

Nessa's stomach tightened.

"Where is my brother?"

"Alive."

"That was not the question."

"It is usually the first useful answer."

Nessa stepped toward him.

Rhydian did not touch her, but his voice came quietly beside her.

"Let him answer."

Ilya studied Rhydian.

"Interesting."

"What?" Nessa demanded.

"Nothing relevant to your brother."

"Then develop better instincts about when to speak."

For the first time, Ilya almost smiled.

He lowered the crossbow.

"Tavi is downstairs. He went to move the Lantern Row records when the Anchor failed. He should have returned by now."

Nessa's anger changed shape.

"Returned from where?"

Ilya opened the concealed door.

Beyond it, stairs descended into darkness.

"From a place the Council says does not exist."

Nessa and Rhydian followed him underground.

The annex beneath Bellglass Square was larger than the building above it. Shelves stretched through old stone chambers packed with paper ledgers, metal printing plates, clay tablets and sealed boxes.

Physical records.

Things memory magic could not conveniently rewrite inside someone's skull.

"You kept all this?" Nessa asked.

"I kept what survived being burned."

Ilya placed his folders on a table.

Maps covered the surface.

One showed Lantern Row.

Red circles marked seventeen residences.

Another sheet listed names, dates and missing spans of memory.

Six months.

Three years.

Eleven years.

Twenty years.

Nessa recognized one entry from Tavi's note.

Orin Vale — 20 years — familial recognition compromised.

"Tavi found him," she said.

"Tavi found seven of them. I found the others."

"Why would anyone steal memories from Lantern Row?"

Ilya pulled another ledger forward.

At the top was the crest of Vaunt Holdings.

Nessa went still.

"Where did you get that?"

"From a clerk who decided conscience was preferable to promotion."

The ledger recorded purchased debts.

Beside several names was a small twelve-pointed star.

Nessa found Tavi.

TAVI QUILL — APPRENTICESHIP CHRONOLOGY — ACQUIRED.

Beside his name: the star.

And beneath it, a notation.

COLLECTION PRIORITY: LUNAR COMPATIBILITY REVIEW.

Nessa read it twice.

"What does that mean?"

"I was hoping you knew," Ilya said.

Rhydian leaned over the page.

His face hardened.

"This is not standard debt notation."

"No," Ilya said. "It also appears beside four residents whose memories were taken without consent."

Nessa thought of Lot Seven.

Her recalled debt.

The manipulated auction.

Her mother's pendant in an ancient memory.

"They weren't interested in Tavi's debt," she said.

Ilya shook his head.

"I don't think they were interested in Tavi."

Before Nessa could answer, something struck the metal door at the far end of the chamber.

Once.

Twice.

Then three times rapidly.

Ilya seized his crossbow.

"That is Tavi's signal."

Nessa ran.

Ilya reached the door first and unlocked three mechanical bolts.

The door opened inward.

Tavi stumbled through.

His coat was torn. His brass chronometer hung from one hand.

There was blood on his temple.

Nessa grabbed him.

"You absolute idiot."

"Good to see you too."

She held him harder for one second, then pushed him back enough to inspect his face.

"Who did this?"

"Later."

"Incorrect answer."

Tavi looked past her and saw Rhydian.

His expression sharpened.

"Why is he here?"

"Long story. Heart theft. Moon failure. Mild property damage."

"Heart what?"

"Later."

Tavi looked as though he objected to the symmetry.

Then he remembered whatever had brought him running.

He held up the brass chronometer.

"I needed somewhere to hide this on the way back."

With his thumbnail, he released the battered rear casing. Then he worked loose the inner mechanism, which had been partially lifted from its mounting and held aside by a bent retaining clip.

Beneath the displaced gears, fitted into the shallow space behind them, lay a thin disk of black stone engraved with a twelve-pointed star.

Nessa stared.

"That did not come with the chronometer."

"No. I found it beneath the old Anchor maintenance station," Tavi said. "I pried the mechanism up and hid the disk behind it before I came back."

He glanced at the crooked gears.

"The chronometer probably hates me now."

Ilya had gone pale.

"You went below the station?"

"I found the marked door. The real one. Not this annex."

Nessa's hand closed around the archive card.

"The eye symbol?"

Tavi nodded.

"And someone else had already opened it."

Rhydian stepped closer.

"What was beyond it?"

Tavi looked at him.

For the first time since entering, the defiance left his face.

"A staircase."

Nessa remembered the preserved ancient hour.

Stairs descending beneath the silver sea.

Tavi swallowed.

"It goes down farther than Vespera is supposed to exist."