They called themselves wardens in the polite way governments give cruel things softer names. Their badges were brass and flat, stamped with the jagged circle; their coats were the official gray of a place that preferred uniform grief to spontaneous grief. They moved like a tide through the streets—orderly, deliberate, smoothing edges as they passed.
Nox saw them long before they reached Tailor's Alley. The alley's traders quieted, folding their bargains like secrets into palms. Even the tailor with porcupine fingers slipped the names he'd been handling back into hiding. Lian's hand tightened on the ribbon at her wrist, a small, human hinge closing.
"Stay low," she murmured, more to herself than to him. "They keep receipts."
The wardens stopped at the alley's mouth. A tall woman with a voice like gravel unrolled a slate and read aloud, not loudly but in the way proclamations are read—slow enough that every ear could stitch the words to its own fear.
By municipal decree: unauthorized preservation and distribution of unregistered recollections is a breach of civic integrity. Present all suspicious materials to the registry. Citizens cooperating will be rewarded. Those obstructing registrars will be detained pending archival review.
The tailors exchanged glances; someone spit into the gutter; a child who had been counting the coins in his palm darted away. The warden's eyes passed over faces until they rested for the length of a heartbeat on Lian. Her gaze was not accusatory as much as assessing—measuring the weight of memory by the lines around a person's mouth.
"You trade in ephemeral goods," the warden said. "You endanger order."
"We trade in what people lost," Lian said. "We help them keep what matters."
"You keep things out of the registry," the warden said. "You interfere."
Nox watched the exchange like a man watching a clock. For all the quiet of the city, the machinery of official handling hummed loudly when called. The warden's shadow slid across the table where names were weighed on little spoons. She did not like improvisation.
"Who's that with you?" she asked then, turning to Nox. Her gaze sharpened. There was no aggression in it yet; only the precision of someone checking a list to see if a name fit a slot.
Lian's jaw tightened. "A friend," she said. "He saw a fragment. We are leaving."
The warden smiled, and it was a small, professional thing. "You will all come with us for a brief inventory," she said. "We will ensure the ledger remains whole."
Some among the traders moved to tuck their wares out of sight. A man with a band on his wrist—one of those brass bands Nox had seen—hid a folded slip under his sleeve. The tailors did not resist; the city had taught many to keep their hands empty when order requested it.
They followed the wardens to the registry not because they trusted the registry but because the registry was a stage where things were named and the named could not vanish without witnesses. The registry building sat on a small square and smelled faintly of iron and older paper, the way places that process grieving smell of tools.
Inside, the registry room was a low, narrow chamber lit by panes of glass that flattened faces. Rows of drawers with small label-slits lined the walls. Wardens moved with trays and clamps, drawing out slips and matching them to entries. One of them—a man with a thin smile and fingers like a watchman—handled a strip of paper that hummed faintly like a trapped insect.
"State your reasons for retaining unregistered recollections," the tall woman said, peering at each face as if she expected to find the same ledger-like indentation behind their eyes.
"We listen," Lian said. "People misplace things. We keep places where people can look if the registry refuses."
The warden's lips thinned. "You complicate civic repair. Unregistered recollections fracture the ledger. Fractures become contagions."
A clerk brought out a small instrument—a clip with polished teeth that looked like a miniature comb—and tapped it against a slip. It clicked and measured a vibration only the registry purported to understand. People treated the clip with a mix of reverence and dread. The wardens used tools like priests used relics: not always understanding, but certain they held power.
When the tall warden reached Nox she paused and studied him as an archivist would examine a note that did not match the hand that wrote it. Her eyes moved over his coat, the bulk at his pocket, the faint dust on his cuffs.
"You appear unlisted," she said. "We keep records of residents. State your identification."
Nox's throat went dry. The habit of saying his name had at times become a ritual to test whether the city kept him. He tried the syllable—once, twice. It felt like something you pry from the lid of a jar.
"Nox," he said at last, and the sound felt small in the registry's hush.
The warden's thin smile flickered. She made a mark on her slate and nodded to a clerk who unlocked a drawer. He pulled out a ledger as if furnishing a room. The pages smelled of dust and the paper's edge glittered with the faint abrasion of many hands. He leafed through, fingers whispering across entries.
"No entry for that name," he said. "Either unregistered or misfiled."
"Misfiled names are common in these parts," Lian said quietly. "It does not mean the person is false."
The warden considered this, then leaned closer so only Nox could hear. "We are precise here," she said. "We correct mistakes before they infect others."
Her words were not a threat so much as a warning wrapped in civic virtue. Nox felt inspected, like a page in a book some clerk suspected had been altered.
When the clerk flicked the ledger shut a small sound seeped through Nox—like a thread being plucked in a very distant room. It was a thin, clean note that tasted of memory. Nox did not move. He had learned that small things announced bigger ones.
He felt, then, the shape of a thread more clearly than any word had described: a pale filament hanging between two sentences of a life, shimmering faintly. It floated in the air near Lian's sleeve where she had been sitting. To everyone else it was nothing; to him it was a visible error, a line drawn through an otherwise finished sentence.
He reached, almost without thinking. The motion was so small it was barely a gesture. His fingers brushed the filament and it thrummed like a plucked wire. For a second, a sound swelled—a child's laugh, bright and immediate—so quick and full that Nox felt as if the space between his ribs had filled with sunlight.
And then the sunlight was gone.
He clutched at the space where the laugh had been and felt a hollow. Something had unthreaded inside him. He opened his mouth to ask Lian what the laugh had been—what name or place had belonged to it—but the syllable dissolved at the edge of his tongue. The question itself had been plucked away.
Panic did not rise in him immediately; it was a cool, careful thing that edged in, a new kind of loss that felt like a misfiled feeling. He looked at the ribbon Lian had given him, then at the shoe in his coat. He tried to picture the child's face—its hair, the freckle on the jaw the boy had shown him earlier—but the face slid sideways, like a photograph held to a flame. He could not hold it.
The warden noticed the change. Her eyes narrowed, and where before her concern had been civic, it folded into the clinical curiosity of someone seeing an unmodeled error. "What did you touch?" she asked.
Nox could not answer because the thing he'd touched had already been taxed for itself. He saw Lian watching him with a look that had something sharp in it now—less sympathy, more calculation. She had not told him the whole price of pulling a thread.
"You will be detained for a brief archival inquiry," the warden said, making the words sound like a mercy. "Anomalies need inventory."
Lian stepped forward, her voice steady. "He did not mean harm. He only touched a fray."
"That is not for you to decide," the warden said. She signaled two men at the door.
Hands moved. Someone murmured about procedures. Nox felt the tail of the city's breath tighten, a hand closing on the ledger around him.
Before the wardens could reach for him, Lian snatched his sleeve. Her fingers were urgent. "Listen to me," she hissed. "You must not let them take you in there. If they keep your body and file no name, you can be a ledger with no owner. You must leave."
"Leave?" Nox repeated, the word clumsy in his mouth. He could not feel the thing he had lost fully enough to know its value, but the hollowness at his chest tasted like something he would regret.
The warden's patience thinned. "Step forward," she commanded.
Lian's eyes flicked toward a side lane, the kind of place that folded into other strangers' routes. She did not break the hold on his sleeve to the degree the wardens might notice; she only leaned close enough for a whisper.
"If they put you into the registry as an anomaly, they will keep you unread—" she said. "You will be a page without a book. You can still exist, but no one will be able to affirm you."
Nox understood the image without needing the words to be precise. The city had many legal fictions, and one of them was that if a thing were processed without a proper index, it might as well never have been.
He made a choice that surprised him for its swiftness. He turned and bolted. The alley swallowed him like a mouth. The wardens shouted and people scattered, but Lian—moving with a slink that defied her delicate look—slid after him.
They ran until their breath came hard and the city's rhythm reasserted itself. When they stopped, leaning against a stacked wall of crates, the sound of the wardens' boots diminished to something like a tide withdrawing.
"You could have been detained," Lian said, blunt as a blade. Her fingers trembled slightly where they refused to unclench around the ribbon.
"I touched a thread," Nox said. The words felt like paper between his teeth. "I heard something. Then it…unraveled."
Lian studied his face for a long moment. "You pulled it?"
"I—" Nox's memory of the laugh was already growing thin. "I think so."
"You did," she said. "You don't do that for curiosity. You do it when something wants to be heard."
He thought of the child's shoe in his coat and the boy's freckle that had asked about his sister. The knot of things in his pocket felt heavier now with the weight of things he could not name. He had taken a fragment from the fray and, in doing so, had paid.
"What did I lose?" he asked.
Lian curled her fingers around the ribbon in a motion that looked like both comfort and calculation. "I can't tell yet," she said. "Sometimes it's small. A face. A flavor. Sometimes it's a month. You'll know in time."
They sat in the twilight listening to the city settle its small calculations. Far off, a bell rang out with a tone half-remembered and half-contrived by the hands that wound it.
"I saw someone at the registry," Lian said suddenly, changing the subject like someone who used news to keep feelings at bay. "A man with eyes like a ledger. He moved differently. I felt he was looking for something—someone who didn't exist on the page."
Nox pictured the man with thin smile and watchman hands. He pictured the warden who had checked him with a grave politeness. Between them, the registry's presence felt like a net strung beneath the city.
"What about Ilmar?" Nox asked. The name came out as if he had tested it on his tongue previously. He had heard it whispered in Tailor's Alley like the name of a doctrine or author.
Lian's face shadowed. "You'll meet that thought in time," she said. "For now—keep your hands from threads you do not understand. And keep your pockets full of witnesses."
Nox touched the shoe inside his coat as if he could compress the hollowness into leather and so regain what had been plucked. The shoe felt like a mute promise.
Above them, somewhere in the city, a clerk closed a ledger with the soft finality of a lid. The registry had marked another day. The wardens had gone back to their list-making. The city settled into the gentle tyranny of its recorded hours.
Nox thought he had learned a new law: seeing a thing that others could not did not make you chosen; it made you a hazard. And hazards were dealt with in gentle, bureaucratic ways that left little room for appeals.
He slept that night with his hand over his chest and the ribbon pressed against his skin, feeling for the place where the laugh had lodged and been taken. He could not find the laugh, but he could feel the cut it left—an absence that wanted to be filled.
Outside, the ledger watched and closed another small page.