When he left the Archive, he didn't step into the corridor.
He stepped into the street.
It shouldn't have been possible—the Archive was never connected to anything but itself—but here it was: cobblestones underfoot, storefronts leaning into the road, windows showing reflections that didn't match what passed by them. The air smelled like rain, but the sky was dry.
A tram slid past without sound, its windows full of still figures. He stared, waiting for one to turn its head. None did.
He started walking. Every corner looked almost familiar, the way dreams borrow pieces of places you've lived. He saw the swing—yes, the swing—at the far end of the street, but it hung inside a shop window, a display piece among mannequins in clothes he didn't recognize.
He kept going.
The crowd was wrong. They moved with the rhythm of people who had somewhere to be, but their faces were out of focus until he looked at them, and then they were too sharp, like overexposed photographs. He realized with a kind of cold clarity that they were all walking in loops—same stride, same turn of the head, same reach for a pocket—until something broke the pattern and they snapped back to the start.
He almost laughed. It was like looking in a mirror.
The girl was waiting at a corner.
She didn't say hello, didn't ask where he'd been. She just fell into step beside him, as if she'd been there all along and he was the one catching up.
"I saw something," he said. "In the Archive. A page."
Her eyes flicked toward him, then forward again. "You weren't supposed to."
"I think I remember it. But not the rest."
"That's how it works."
"Why?" His voice cracked more than he wanted. "Why let me see any of it if I can't keep it?"
"Because you have to want the rest before you can survive it," she said. "Otherwise it breaks you too soon."
He stopped walking. "I think it's already breaking."
She stopped too. "Not yet."
The words landed heavier than they should have, as if she'd stolen them from someone else.
He realized then that the sky above them was tilting—not moving, but tilting, like a photograph hung crooked on a wall. The buildings seemed to lean with it, the horizon creeping upward on one side. The crowd didn't react.
"This isn't supposed to happen," she said quietly.
"What isn't?"
Her gaze didn't leave the sky. "The world forgetting faster than you do."
And just like that, the tilt was gone.
The tram passed again, same speed, same faces. The swing in the shop window swayed once.
He looked at her. "If it all goes, what happens to us?"
"We'll still be here," she said. "Just not in the same place."