The note came at twilight, long and low, as if the city had drawn a single breath and refused to let it go.
Asha felt it in the soft triangle between thumb and forefinger, where the quill had nicked her; she felt it behind her knees; she felt it gather at the base of her throat like a vow that had waited years to be spoken.
Kairon appeared at her door without a knock. He looked as if he'd been listening from the moment the light began to fade—coat unbuttoned, hair pushed back with the imprecision of a man who had used his hands for other things than power. The bell lived in his eyes too, a dark widening as if pupils tried to drink the sound.
"You hear it," she said.
"It's not a sound," he answered, stepping in until the room's lamplight climbed the angle of his jaw. "It's a… splice."
The forgetting clock on her bench moved once—only once—yet every gear in it seemed to agree. The pendulum's first, impossible sway knocked at the air. Asha reached for the housing; Kairon caught her wrist before she touched heat.
"Careful."
"I made it," she whispered. "It will know me."
His fingers loosened but didn't leave her. The pressure of his thumb fit the narrow bone along the inside of her wrist with unnerving precision, as if a memory had taught his hand where to rest and the present had simply obeyed.
The bell deepened.
The workshop changed its temperature by a degree only her work could measure. Oil sent up its lemon-metallic breath, and in it came something else: the scent of rain soaked into wool a lifetime ago, bitter orange peel, a hint of cedar smoke. It was nothing in the room—and it was the room, suddenly layered with another night.
"Don't move," Kairon said, though he himself took a slow step closer. "It's… overlaying."
"Overlaying what?"
"Us."
Asha drew in air too quickly. The world answered. The lamplight doubled—the present flame and an older one shivering just out of phase. On the cabinet glass, two reflections stood where there should have been one: herself in gray linen; herself in a dark dress she did not own. Kairon in the waistcoat he wore tonight; Kairon younger by the tilt of his mouth and the unscarred ease of his shoulders.
"Close your eyes," he said softly. "Listen."
She did. The bell's long note spread the way ink spreads in water—patient and entire. Beneath it, her clock's pendulum began to count a rhythm that wasn't time so much as intention. The sound led her toward something her bones already knew.
When she opened her eyes, the second workshop fully occupied the first. The walls were the same. The lamp was not. Asha's tools lay almost where she kept them now, just slightly wrong—her father's arrangement, not hers. On the hook, a key she had not yet filed—sharp at the bite, rough along the spine. And near the window, a pair: herself and Kairon, closer than the present allowed.
He was ungloved. That alone made the air feel bare.
"Is that—" Kairon's present voice wavered. He seldom let it.
"It's a memory," Asha said. Her mouth had already learned the shape of the truth. "Spliced into now."
In the other light, she watched her other self lift on tiptoe to reach the cabinet's top drawer. Kairon—no scar, sleeves rolled as if he had helped sand a length of wood he would never admit to touching—steadied her by the waist. The gesture belonged to familiarity tempered by caution: fingers flat, thumbs away from the ribs, a respectful hold that nonetheless said mine to the part of a woman that hears such claims.
Her present lungs forgot their craft and stuttered.
"I know this," Kairon said, barely audible. "I don't know how, but I know the temperature of this lamp. I know the weight of you when you lean."
"Don't say you remember me," she breathed, eyes on the other them. "Let the room do it so you won't have to pay the price."
The bell swelled, then thinned to a silver thread. The past Asha found the small brass plate. ASHA—not yet etched; her other hand guided his. In the soft candor of that overlayed night, he held the burin and she covered his knuckles, teaching him the pressure. His breath went uneven—not with desire alone, but with the humility of learning under her touch.
"Press," she whispered to the then-him. The now-him closed his eyes, and his throat worked, and the same word sounded in his body.
Metal gave the smallest grind of surrender. The letters took their first shallow bite. The present clock ticked once in approval.
A draft lifted the edge of Asha's sleeve. The present Kairon stepped instinctively closer to shield her from a cold that belonged to no season. When his chest grazed her shoulder blade, something pure and ruinous launched through her, as if the bell had rung inside a cathedral made only of nerve.
"You taught me," he said. "That night. You guided my hand."
"Don't force it," she said. "Let it find you."
In the layered room, the younger Kairon looked at her younger mouth—then away—then back—then away again. The restraint in it was so physical it read as ache. He etched the last curve of the A and laughed once, quietly, like a man genuinely pleased to have made something uselessly beautiful.
"You were happy," Asha said, unable, for one breath, to armor the statement.
"I was safe," he corrected, and it sounded like the most intimate admission he had ever made.
The overlay brightened. Two scenes began to flicker—not one night, but several. A garden path where moonlight made her hair a darker map. A balcony rule spoken, then unspoken. A held breath in a doorway that never became a kiss because someone had promised not to ask for what he could not keep. The tide of images pressed up against the present until Asha's ring felt too tight, until Kairon's hand at her wrist was the only fixed thing.
He let go first, as if he feared what truth a longer touch would ransom from him. He took a breath that was almost a step. "This is the price of the clock," he said, voice rough with edges. "It doesn't only excise; it insists."
"It wants us to finish the engraving," Asha said, surprising herself with certainty. "Not the plate. The thing it stands for."
"What does it stand for?"
She thought of the scar across his palm—earned badly, mended worse—and of the way he had held her father's safety like a signed weight in his pocket. "A promise you started and then cut out."
Silence took the room, the soft silence that comes just before someone is honest.
"I asked you to run," he said finally, eyes on the line of her jaw rather than her mouth. "In another version of this city. Before I was Regent. Before I requisitioned my own forgetting. I asked you to run, and when you said you wouldn't leave your father, I… made a mechanism of the thing I couldn't kill. I cut myself out so the city would live with you still in it."
Asha stood straighter not to survive the thought but to meet it. "It lived. I'm here."
"And I am not," he said, a dry, unguarded truth.
The bell gentled. The double light peeled away like an eyelid opening. The other workshop faded, but the scent it left behind—bitter orange, cedar smoke, the night they almost chose—stayed a long, stubborn heartbeat.
Asha reached for the burin in the now. She set the plate on the bench and, standing where the then-version had stood, took his wrist and placed his hand over hers—skin to glove, warmth through habit. His breathing changed. She guided the pressure and carved the shallowest line beneath the A, not to add a letter but to underline it, to make the name less a label and more a sentence.
Kairon's forehead eased the way a knot eases when it believes it will not be pulled again. "If the council tears the east wing apart," he said, watching the line brighten under the lamp, "promise me you'll keep the key to this. To me."
"I already do," she said, and she did not mean metal.
He looked up too fast, as if the bell's last lingering overtone had said his name where she had not.
Outside, the first rain of night freckled the window. The forgetting clock settled into a quiet, steady hum—the sound a heart makes when it remembers it is not alone.
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