"Now," he said, his breath a cold brush against her ear, "we see what you'll give me next."
Lina stared up at him from the chair, fingers still welded to the armrests. The room's dim lamplight threw long bars across his face, cutting shadow and bone into a mask she could not read.
"I've already given you everything," she said. The words felt thin, papery. "I gave you—him."
The Sculptor's gaze didn't waver. "You gave me a wound you could not bear. It is not the same as giving me you."
Her mouth was dry. "What else is there?"
A small pause, a measured breath. Then he stepped past her, and the shelves answered as he moved—vials pulsing faintly to his presence, their trapped lights recoiling and then settling. He lifted one in his palm, considering the way it glowed, then set it down again as if it had failed a test only he could see.
"There must be an anchor," he said. "A counterweight after a carving. If I remove a keystone memory, others shift. Emptiness is hungry. It will begin to eat whatever is nearest. You will think you are choosing. You will not be."
Lina straightened. "You didn't say—"
"I did." His eyes flicked back to her, quiet and cruel in their calm. "You heard what you wanted. Pain is loud. Warnings are not."
She forced her fingers to unclench. Blood returned to them in pins and needles. "So what—what do you want?"
He stopped in front of her again, close enough that she could see the delicate silver threading along his fingers, like veins sunk beneath glass. "There are prices. Choose one."
Her chest tightened. "Choose?"
"A truth never spoken aloud," he said, counting on those glass-veined fingers as if reading from a list only he knew. "A name that belongs to you and only you. A promise kept without witness. A day you cannot afford to lose. A memory that shines."
She swallowed. "Those aren't… equal."
"No," he agreed, and the corner of his mouth threatened a smile. "That is the point of choosing."
She wanted to stand, to put a wall between herself and the smell of cold glass, but her legs wouldn't trust her. "A truth," she said, because it seemed the least dangerous. "Fine. I'll tell you a truth."
He shook his head once. "Spoken truths are air. I collect substance." He lifted his hand, the silver filaments along his knuckles catching a stray flicker of light. "If you give me a truth, I take its root. The memory where that truth grew. The moment that gave it life."
Her pulse stumbled. "You can't just—pluck at random. It could be anything."
"I will take what you offer," he said. "But choose with care. We are still carving you, Lina Veyra. You will live inside whatever shape you make."
Her name on his tongue again. She hated the way it made her feel found.
She closed her eyes. There were truths she had never spoken, yes—quiet things, and one loud one she kept locked in an old, private room of her mind. She pushed past it quickly, afraid even to look at its door. She could not give that. Anything but that.
"A name," she said, buying time. "What does that mean?"
"Not the name you show the world. The one that opens you." His voice gentled without softening. "The one your mother used when she wanted only you to answer. The one no stranger could call without trespassing."
Her breath caught. For a heartbeat the emptiness inside her rang like struck metal, not with grief but with something almost like memory—warmth pulled thin by time. A kitchen wound with steam. The scent of cardamom. A woman's tired hands smoothing her hair, voice low with a word that belonged to no one else.
"That name," she said, and her voice faltered.
He watched the falter.
"No," she said too quickly. "Not that."
"Then a promise," he said. "Promises keep their own ledgers. They bind without rope."
"What kind of promise?"
"That when I call," he said simply, "you will come."
A quiet beat. She heard her own breathing, quick and uneven. The market outside the door was a far-off ocean, dim and meaningless.
"That's not a promise," she said. "That's a leash."
"It is a line," he corrected. "Lines can pull you from drowning." He angled his head. "Or hold you under."
"Then no."
He didn't seem disappointed. If anything, the refusal pleased him, as if it were a contour he had been expecting in the clay. "A day, then."
"A day?"
"One single day that you will never live again. You will rise, walk, speak—but the day will be missing. No memory of it. No imprint. As if the sun skipped you."
Lina's tongue felt heavy. She tried to imagine it—the blank space within a day-shaped outline. "What if something important happens?"
He waited long enough to make the answer obvious.
She shook her head. "No."
"Then," he said softly, "a bright memory."
The room seemed to lean. "You just took the one that mattered most."
"I took the one that hurt most." A slow blink, that not-smile again. "The brightest may be smaller. A moment. The sound of a song. The taste of a fruit. The touch of a hand without ache inside it."
Her mind skittered over the surface of her life. Laughter under a cheap umbrella. The first room she had paid for with her own money, keys heavy in her palm. The chalky sweetness of the boiled candy the baker's wife used to slip her when she was little. Her mother's voice, dusk-soft, singing—
She stopped herself again, too sharp, too fast. The emptiness stirred.
"The song," he said, and she flinched though he shouldn't have known. He hadn't touched her. He hadn't needed to.
"No," she said.
"Not all of it," he answered. "A note. A thread. The part that begins you. It will do more than pay your price. It will anchor the hole you asked me to carve. Absence will have a border. Emptiness obeys edges."
"Edges," she repeated, tasting the word. Something inside her reached for it. Edges meant she would not fall through herself. Edges meant there would be a floor.
"It is a fair exchange," he said.
"You have a strange idea of fair."
"I deal with people who cannot bear their own lives," he said, mild as a prayer. "Fairness is a luxury. Edges are mercy."
She looked at his hands—the silver seams, the careful stillness of them. "You don't touch unless I say."
"I never touch without consent," he said. "Consent is another kind of edge."
It should not have steadied her. It did.
"Fine," she said. The word scraped. "A thread of the song."
He dipped his head, not in victory but acknowledgement. "Give me the name of it."
"It didn't have a name." She swallowed. "It was just… ours."
"Then speak the first sound."
Her lips parted. Nothing came. The emptiness was not cruel, only wide; it had made everything quiet. Panic rose to the surface like air trapped under ice.
"I can't."
He lifted his hand, hovering again just shy of her temple. "I will not take. You will give."
"How?"
"Follow my voice."
It should have been ridiculous—following a voice into the place where memory lived—but ridiculous things were often the ones that worked. She fixed her eyes on his and breathed when he breathed.
"Close your eyes," he said. "Not to hide. To enter."
She closed them.
"Find the kitchen," he said. "Not the room. The heat. The steam."
Steam. The sound of pots whispering to themselves. The window open to let out the evening, the city beyond it singing in its own tongue. Her mother's hands, brown and clever, pressing dough into circles that puffed when they met oil. The smell of cardamom again, and cumin, and the wet metal scent of rain, always rain.
"Now the chair," he said. "The one that rocked."
Lina's fingers tightened on the armrests without meaning to. The old chair creaked. Her feet didn't reach the ground; her heels beat a slow, patient rhythm against wood.
"And the word," he said. "Not the meaning. The warmth."
Her mother's mouth at her ear, voice barely sound. The syllables not letters so much as breath. What mattered wasn't the word itself. It was the way it gathered the world and held it still.
The emptiness inside her breathed in.
Her lips moved. Not the song. Not yet. The start of the song—three quiet notes that weren't really notes at all, just a lift, a fall, the lift again, a path into the rest.
She gave him that much.
He didn't touch her. The air touched her. Something in it drew thin, fine as a hair, and the thread left her with a pain so small it was almost sweetness. She felt the absence occur. A tiny, perfect circle opening in the fabric of the memory. Not the whole song. Not even a bar. Just the door to it.
When she opened her eyes, his were already waiting.
"That will hold," he said, voice softer than before.
"What did you take exactly?" She hated the need in the question.
"The key." He lifted two fingers, showing nothing between them and everything. "Enough that the emptiness will respect a perimeter. Not enough to unmake the room."
She tried to hum the start of the lullaby. Her mouth shaped it. No sound came. She knew there had been music. She could still feel where it warmed her cheeks. But the first step into it had been brushed away, and her mind, cautious now, would not move without it.
Anger, brief and sharp, flared and went out. In its wake came something more dangerous: relief. The hole where her lover had been no longer yawned open like a pit. A rim had formed, narrow but real. She could stand at its edge without falling.
"You could have taken more," she said.
"I could have taken less," he answered.
She let out a breath she hadn't realized she was holding. "And now I owe you nothing?"
He didn't answer at once. The shelf lights pulsed once, twice, as if reminding him of time. "Debts are not so tidy," he said at last. "But for tonight, yes. You have paid."
"For tonight." She pushed herself up from the chair. Her legs obeyed. Her skin felt wrong on her bones, but her bones held.
At the door she paused, hand on the iron latch. "What happens if I never come back?"
He seemed to consider the question as if it were a curiosity, not a defiance. "Then the emptiness will build its own edges," he said. "They will not be kind."
"And if I do?"
His eyes, dark and bright together, did not leave her face. "Then I will teach you where to cut."
Lina's palm tightened on the latch until metal bit. "I don't want to be your sculpture."
He inclined his head, the smallest bow. "You have always been someone's."
She didn't ask what he meant. She didn't want to know whether he was right. She opened the door and stepped into the hall of red lantern light. The market sounds gathered her up—voices, footsteps, a laugh spun too sharp—but they seemed farther away than before, as if she had left something of her hearing on the chair.
When the cold air touched her, she felt the new absence stir—small, clean-edged, not grief. The space where the song began. She tried not to prod it. It did not ache. It simply was.
She walked.
Halfway down the alley she stopped and looked back.
Through the doorway she could see him, a dark cut-out against the slow glow of bottled lives. He had turned from her, but only enough to place a vial among its kin with an odd, careful tenderness. The light inside it—hers, his, both—flickered and settled.
"Lina," he said without raising his voice.
She shouldn't have heard him from that distance. She did. It slid through the lantern light like a thread and tugged. She felt the new perimeter hold, and something in her held with it.
She did not answer. Not out loud.
What will you give me next, his voice had asked.
She had thought the question was about payment. Now, stepping back into the market's throat, she suspected it was also about permission.
And beneath the quiet, in a place she didn't want to inspect too closely, she knew this: the line was drawn. She had not chosen the leash. But she had given him a name-shaped door, and a thread of a song.
Edges, he'd called them.
Mercy, he'd said.
She wasn't sure which scared her more