The flats stretched out like an unrolled map that had forgotten its markings.Silas left Rustwater before the sun had strength enough to throw a shadow. The world around him hummed the way old wires hum after the current's gone—memory without motion.
He walked south. The salt dust rose with each step and settled again, same as thought.A man could believe he was choosing his trail, he reflected, when maybe the ground had been choosing him all along.
The deck of cards tapped his ribs with every stride. He found the rhythm steadying, like boots on a boardwalk that no longer existed. Somewhere ahead, the horizon flickered—metal catching light. He followed it. Following was easier than deciding.
The relay hut waited half-buried in a dune, its antenna bent toward the east like a prayer that never learned to stand up straight. Inside, blue motes of light drifted where dust should have been. Rows of memory squares glowed on the shelves, their faint pulses giving the room a slow heartbeat.
A woman sat cross-legged on a crate, soldering something small enough to vanish between her fingers. Her hair was the color of the sand outside, her eyes the color of the sky before it rains but doesn't.
"You're late," she said without looking up.
"I wasn't expected."
She smiled. "Everyone who remembers something they shouldn't is expected sooner or later."
He hesitated by the doorframe. "You the trader?"
"I'm what's left of her." She set down the tool and gestured to the shelves. "People bring me what happened. I give them a story they can stand to live with. Same memory, different frame."
Silas stepped closer. "You sell lies."
"No," she said, "I sell context. Without it, truth just hurts too loud."
He picked up a square at random. Inside, a figure moved—slow, blurred, buried in snowlight. He couldn't tell if it was digging or hiding.
"Same image shows up twice," the woman said, reaching for another square. "Watch."
In the first, the man knelt over a pit, shoveling in haste—criminal eyes, hunted breath.In the second, the same motion, same hands—but now a child's toy rests on the dirt beside him, and grief changes the angle of his shoulders.
"Behavior's nothing but a mirror for the frame," she said. "Change the frame, change the world."
Silas turned the square over. The back was blank metal, yet it felt heavier now."You saying nothing's real?"
"I'm saying everything is—just not all at once."
He sat on the crate opposite her. "What about when a man forgets his frame altogether?"
"Then the old ones still steer him," she said. "Hidden, but decisive. They choose what he sees and what he don't. What he can do and what he calls impossible."
Silas thought of the Broker's ledger, the name written ahead of its own time."Feels like witchcraft," he muttered.
She laughed softly. "Feels like breathing once you notice it." She leaned forward. "Look—everybody lives inside a story stitched together from what kept them safe once. The trick is seeing the stitching before it tightens around your throat."
He rubbed his thumb along the tin edge of his own square. "And once you see it?"
"Then you've got a choice. First time in your life, maybe. Who you are apart from the frame."
Her words settled into him slow, like sand finding cracks in stone.
She reached behind her and brought out a small brazier. A thin flame licked the air—blue, cold."You can burn it," she said. "End the loop. Start clean."
Silas stared at the fire. It gave no heat."If it's gone," he asked, "how will I know who I was?"
"Maybe you'll stop telling yourself who you weren't."
He looked down at the square, the faint pulse inside it echoing his heartbeat. The voice from Rustwater seemed to breathe beneath the metal: Dad.
He closed his hand around it."I'm not ready to change the frame."
"Most aren't," she said. "Freedom don't always feel like freedom when it first shows up."
He rose. "What do I owe you?"
"Nothing yet," she said. "But every question costs, eventually."
He nodded. At the door, he paused. "What do you do with the ones you burn?"
"They're still there," she said. "Just not running the show."
Outside, the wind had shifted. The horizon looked different—same line, new color. He wasn't sure if the world had changed or only the eyes he was seeing it through.
He turned once, catching her silhouette in the doorway, framed by that cool blue fire."Context," she called after him, "is just the weather of the soul. You can't stop it blowing, but you can walk in it awake."
The road met him with the same indifference as before, but his steps felt chosen this time.Each crunch of salt underfoot belonged to him. The sun climbed higher, burning the frames off the landscape until nothing was left but what was.
He adjusted his coat and smiled, not because anything was fixed, but because he could finally see the shape of the wind that had been steering him all along.