They left at an hour that didn't exist in a place without sky.
Noah and Abel moved like shadows through the quieter ribs of the settlement—past shuttered doorways and scent-lanterns that guttered with pale, honey light, past rope-strung charms of bone and seed that clicked softly when the air shifted. The false sun was a steady pressure on the back of Noah's neck even here, diluted by stone and angle, like a hand that never stopped resting there.
"Training," Abel murmured if anyone looked too long. He carried a wrapped spear and an old pack filled with nothing useful—just enough to pass as routine. Noah had the deck tucked close to his ribs and a blade at his ankle. He kept his mouth shut and his eyes open.
The Womb's arteries narrowed. Gold thinned to amber, then to old butter, then to a color that wasn't color so much as absence. The air cooled by degrees. The farther they walked, the more the world began to sound like itself—drips, distant stone-sighs, a slow pulse that might have been water or the earth or the Womb dreaming.
Noah's skin pebbled.
They reached the old vein by way of a collapsed stair and a crawl beneath a shelf of calcified ribs. Abel went first, silent and sure-footed; Noah followed, palms scraping damp stone, breath fogging in the cooler pocket of air. On the other side, the passage widened into a low corridor ribbed with fossilized cartilage, the floor pitted by puddles that reflected a ceiling spiked with mineral teeth.
"Here," Abel said, soft, and pointed with his chin. The tunnel ahead turned sharply—an elbow of rock—and beyond it the light died completely.
A thin buzzing threaded the quiet.
Not a sound so much as a sensation—like standing too close to a live wire, like an insect wings' tremble against eardrums. Noah tasted metal on his tongue.
"Feel that?" he whispered.
Abel nodded once. His eyes were pale in the near-dark. "Stay behind me."
Of course he said that. Of course Noah ignored it by half a step.
They rounded the bend and the world changed.
No lanterns reached here. No perfumed smoke. The stone was a darker kind of bone, matte and thirsty, and the air had that hollow quality caves kept for themselves when they weren't interested in human lungs. Abel lifted a hand to halt Noah and crouched, pressing his palm to the ground.
"What are you—"
"Listening." Abel's voice was so quiet the rock could have eaten it. After a breath he stood, jaw set. "No people. No patrols."
"Just the giant electric wasp," Noah muttered. The buzz had grown thicker, braided with something deeper—
A hum, he realized, and felt his stomach drop. Not sound. Not really. A pressure. A resonance. The same frequency as the false sun.
Abel took a step forward.
"Wait," Noah said, hand snapping out to catch his wrist. He felt the heat of Abel's pulse under his fingers and the steady unmoving weight of him, like a wall that had chosen to walk. "We mark this." He fished a charcoal nub from his pocket and scored a quick line on the wall at shoulder height, the mark damp and black. "If we… lose something, we'll know we were here."
"You think we'll forget?"
"I don't know what I think."
They eased forward together—Noah a half pace behind, Abel's shoulder a dark shape at the edge of his vision. The hum thickened. The air went thin, as if some patient giant had drawn in a breath and forgotten to let it go. Noah's eyes watered; the skin between his shoulder blades prickled hard enough to ache.
Another step.
The buzzing knotted into a single bright thread of sensation.
Noah reached for a Fate Line on instinct—just a palm's worth of shimmering thread in his mind—and it shivered, stuttered, as if trying to catch on glass. The Deck warmed against his ribs in a way that wasn't pain so much as warning.
"Abel," he said, voice low and steady because if he let it shake he might not stop, "if anything feels—"
The world folded.
Noah blinked and the corridor was gone. Heat slapped the side of his face; the air smelled of ash and rootbrew and cooked meat. He stood in the market square under steady gold, a bowl seller's awning bleeding pale color into his peripheral vision. The Kindled Choir strode past in two-by-two ranks, eyes forward, blades dulled for parade. Abel stood beside him, breathing even, hand relaxed on the spear-shaft.
Noah's heart was a trapped bird.
"Abel," he said, too sharply.
Abel's head turned. His eyes were calm. "What?"
"Where are we?" Noah demanded.
Abel looked around like a man checking bearings after a short nap. "Market. You said you wanted to eat."
Noah stared. His mouth was dry. He turned slowly, scanning for… anything. A crack in the air. A seam in the moment. His fingernails were dark; he lifted one hand. Charcoal smudged his thumb and the ridge of his palm where he'd gripped the nub too hard.
He looked to the nearest wall—smooth bone-plate fitted between two load-ribs—and fought down the impulse to laugh. He wasn't at the mark. He wasn't anywhere near the mark.
He swallowed. "Do you remember the tunnel?"
Abel didn't frown. He simply watched Noah with that soldier's quiet that made you wish for anger, any visible thing to push against. "We went out to train," he said. "You stopped to argue about whether the Chef's stew smells like boiled regret."
"I would never," Noah said automatically, and hated the way his voice wanted to tip toward hysterical. His gaze skated off the Choir—children with perfect posture, adults bending their bodies around their formation like reeds around a current—and landed on a stray strand of thread caught on a nail-head. Pale, ordinary. Relief flooded him like nausea. He reached into his pocket and closed his fingers around the soft grit of charcoal. "Walk with me."
Abel fell in without question.
Noah led him back through a lattice of alleys until the square's sound dulled to a patient murmur and a stretch of blank wall offered itself. He pressed the charcoal to bone and drew a quick line, then another below it. A meaningless mark among a thousand settling cracks.
Abel watched him do it, quiet as snowfall. "Explain."
Noah licked his lips. They tasted like ash. "We went to the outer vein. We felt it—like the sun inside stone. There was a bend in the tunnel, and a… a pressure. I marked the wall. We took three more steps." He could see it when he shut his eyes: the elbow of rock, the hum, the way the Line in his mind had skittered. He opened them again. "Then we were here."
Abel's jaw worked once. He turned his head, slow, scanning the alley as if the right angle would show him the missing seconds. "I don't remember," he said, finally, and did not force more than that.
"It took it," Noah said, more to the marks than to Abel. "The Saint. The sun. Both. The memory. It took it from you." He touched the smudge on his thumb and then the fresh line he'd drawn, proof of nothing that still felt like everything. "It didn't take it from me."
Abel's attention returned to Noah, to his face, and traveled once down to the charcoal-stained hand. "Why you?"
Noah laughed softly. It didn't feel like humor. "Because my patron deity is Petty Vengeance and Inconvenient Truth? I don't know." He shook his head. "The priestess said she blacks out at the edge and wakes back inside. This is… cleaner. Crueler. You keep the walk. You lose the line."
Abel considered that, the way he considered routes and kill-zones and whether a door could be trusted. "Then we can't take anyone out past that line until we cut whatever power holds it."
"And we can't plan an exit if half the plan will just…" Noah's fingers splayed, searching for a word, closing on the only one that fit. "Disappear."
They stood there for a few breaths that meant nothing and everything.
The market's hum rolled back in, ordinary as prayer. A woman haggled in a soft, ritual cadence. The scent of stewing root-meat thickened and turned sweet. Somewhere, the Choir's chant tucked itself into silence all at once, like a wick pinched between fingers.
Abel's hand came to rest briefly at the small of Noah's back—just a touch, an anchor. "We go home," he said. "We write down what you remember. We don't trust what I don't."
Noah nodded, chest tight. "And we don't talk about the edge where anyone can hear."
Abel's mouth tilted. "We don't talk about the edge at all."
They left the alley at an unremarkable pace, two men who looked like any other pair deciding dinner. Noah wiped his hand clean on the inside hem of his robe and kept the charcoal in his fist anyway, as if the dirty proof of what he knew could tether him to it.
They turned a corner and nearly ran into Cassian.
He looked exactly as he had in ten other hallways on ten other not-days—hair pushed back by an impatient hand, jacket half-fastened, a smudge of something dark at one wrist that he hadn't yet noticed. He lit a grin like a lantern.
"There you are," he said, delight plain as breath. "I've been hunting you." His gaze flicked to Abel's spear and back. "Training? I'm hurt you didn't invite me."
Noah's heart dropped neatly through the floor and kept going, but he forced a smile. "Everything alright? You're… acting like your usual annoying self. Guess I should be glad." His voice carried a lightness that only half-covered the knot in his stomach. "Careful," he added, "you'll bruise easy."
"Not me," Cassian said, mock-affronted. "I'm indestructible. Ask anyone." He stepped in close enough to bump shoulders with Noah, casual as breathing. "You look like you've seen a ghost."
"Maybe I have," Noah said, watching him more closely now. He searched Cassian's face for anything—recognition, a glint, a private joke left over from river-water and a kiss. Nothing. Cassian's eyes were easy and bright, open as a dog's. Behind them: blank.
"You remember the cave?" Noah asked, trying for casual and failing.
Cassian only grinned. "Cave? No idea what you're talking about."
"You went to see the Saint?" Noah asked, very carefully, trying not to completely combust after getting the answer he feared.
Cassian's grin crooked. "Private audience. Important people things." He nudged Noah's arm with his own, teasing. "Jealous?"
Noah's laugh came out too thin. "Always." He took a step back that looked casual and felt like saving his own life. "We were just going to eat." He glanced at Abel and then back. "Catch us later?"
"Try and stop me," Cassian said, and saluted them with two fingers before letting the crowd carry him away.
Abel didn't speak until the sound of him was gone. "He didn't remember," he said, not a question.
"No," Noah said. The word scratched. "He didn't."
Abel's hand found his shoulder and squeezed once, a small, grounding pain. "Home," he said again.
"Home," Noah echoed, and let himself be steered back toward the little room with its two beds and its narrow windows and the feeling of plans crowded into air. He did not look back at the alley, or the mark, or the place where the Choir had been. He carried the forgetting like a hot coin in his mouth and did not spit it out.