The memory of the raindrop was still perfect.
Kaelen could feel its phantom chill tracing a path down his temple, just as it had on a Tuesday three years, four months, and sixteen days ago. He could smell the wet cobblestones of the Aethelgard canals, hear the specific, hollow plink as the drop fell from a rusted gutter and struck the water below. He could feel the knot of disappointment in his stomach because a girl had said she would meet him, and she hadn't.
He never told her he remembered that. He never told anyone he remembered everything.
"Kaelen? Are you fading on me again?"
Lyssa's voice, sharp with a familiar, performative annoyance, cut through the cascade of sensory ghosts. Kaelen blinked, forcing the past back into its neat, internal shelves. The present reasserted itself: the warm, dusty air of "The Dusty Tome," the antique shop he called both workplace and sanctuary. The scent of old paper, lemon polish, and the faint, metallic tang of the city's ever-present Siphon-fumes.
"Sorry," he murmured, not looking up from the pocket watch in his hands. "Just… concentrating."
He wasn't. The watch was a simple fix—a worn mainspring. His hands, skilled and steady, had already completed the repair ten minutes ago. Now, he was just holding it, feeling the faint, lingering echo of its history.
Most people saw a beautiful, if tarnished, old timepiece. Kaelen saw more. When his fingers brushed the cold silver case, he felt a fleeting warmth—the pride of the craftsman who forged it. He caught a whiff of pipe tobacco that wasn't in the room, heard the faint, joyful chime of a wedding bell that wasn't ringing. This watch had been a gift, given with love, worn for decades with care. Its memories were gentle, worn smooth by time like the grooves in its winding stem.
These were the memories he could bear. It was the sharp, jagged ones the city produced in abundance that threatened to overwhelm him.
"You need to get to the Siphon, Kai," Lyssa said, leaning against the counter. She was his age, with hair dyed the approved, forgettable grey-brown, but her eyes were always alight with a rebellion she couldn't quite act upon. "Your eyes are doing that… thing. The too-seeing thing."
She was right. His Cognitive Load was spiking. A day in Aethelgard was a sensory assault. Every face on the street carried a flicker of a recently surrendered memory—a fragment of a laugh, a flash of an argument, the hollow ache of a mandated forgetfulness. It all piled up behind his eyes, a pressure building like a storm.
"I went last week," he lied smoothly. His last official Siphoning was twenty-three days ago. He'd faked the headache, the slight disorientation everyone displayed after a purge. The Mnemonic Guard attendant had nodded, bored, and logged him as compliant.
"You're playing a dangerous game," Lyssa whispered, her voice dropping. "My uncle… you know what happened to him."
Kaelen did know. He remembered the exact date, the time, the look of vacant terror in the man's eyes before the Guards took him away for "re-calibration." He'd been hoarding memories of his dead wife. The city had declared it a cognitive crime.
"It's under control," Kaelen said, finally placing the repaired watch on a velvet cloth. The gentle echoes of its past faded, leaving only the cold, silent object. A small, private loss. "I'll go this evening. Promise."
The shop bell jingled, and the atmosphere shifted. Two figures in the stark, grey-and-chrome uniforms of the Mnemonic Guard entered. Their boots were silent on the floorboards, but their presence was deafening. Kaelen's heart hammered against his ribs, a frantic, traitorous rhythm. Calm. Be normal. Be empty.
The lead Guard, a woman with a face as sharp and impassive as a stamped coin, scanned the shop. Her eyes, the flat grey of a Siphon conduit, landed on him.
"Kaelen, resident of the Old Quarter?" Her voice was devoid of inflection, a perfect instrument of the state.
"Yes, ma'am," he said, his own voice thankfully steady. He could feel Lyssa holding her breath beside him.
"Your public Siphon log shows compliance. Your private cognitive scans, however, indicate elevated, sustained neural activity. Anomalous spikes during mandated rest periods."
The scans. He'd been so careful with the public rituals, he'd forgotten about the passive scanners in the living quarters. They monitored brainwaves, flagging anyone who dreamed too vividly, who remembered too well in their sleep.
"It's… it's the shop," Kaelen stammered, gesturing to the shelves of antiques. "The old objects. They have strong… residues. It affects my sleep." It wasn't entirely a lie.
The Guard's expression didn't change. "Residue is ambient data. It does not cause sustained cognitive load. You will come with us for a voluntary assessment."
It was not a request. The word "voluntary" was the city's favorite lie.
As the Guard stepped forward, her gloved hand brushed against a small, porcelain music box on the counter—a piece Kaelen had been restoring for an old woman. It was a cheap, mass-produced thing, but it had been her mother's.
The moment the Guard touched it, a memory, sharp as a shard of glass, lanced into Kaelen's mind.
It wasn't the Guard's memory. It was the music box's. A little girl, tears on her cheeks, winding the key. A lullaby, tinny and thin, playing in a dark room. The crushing loneliness of a child feeling forgotten. The desperate, fervent wish for someone, anyone, to remember she was there.
The memory was so potent, so raw with a child's pain, that it stole his breath. It was a memory the Siphons would have classified as "low-yield dissonance" and purged without a second thought.
And in that moment, under the weight of that forgotten child's sorrow, Kaelen's control shattered.
He looked at the Guard, his vision sharpening, the world falling away until only she remained. "She just wanted her father to come home," he whispered, the words torn from him. "She played the song every night, hoping he'd hear it. He never did."
Silence.
The kind of silence that was heavier than any sound. The Guard's hand recoiled from the music box as if it had turned to white-hot iron. The flat grey of her eyes churned, fractured by a emotion Kaelen had never seen on a Guard's face before: pure, undiluted terror. Not of him, but of the memory he had just spoken aloud. A memory that, by the sacred law of Aethelgard, should not exist.
Lyssa had her hand over her mouth, her eyes wide with horror.
The male Guard's hand went to the neural-dampener on his belt, its single red eye glowing to life.
The female Guard found her voice, but it was no longer the cool, impersonal instrument of the state. It was a shaken, horrified whisper that hung in the dusty air of the shop, a verdict and a death sentence all in one.
"An Anchor," she breathed. "By the Council's grace… you're an Anchor."
And in that single, damning word, Kaelen's life of secret remembrance ended, and something far more dangerous began.