We leave before dawn with the kind of tired that feels like a second language. Corin's salvage crew moves quiet and efficient—three people who know how to make a living out of other people's mistakes. I follow because that's what I do now: show up where things are breaking and try not to let the city bleed more than it already has.
The site is a narrow alley the city forgot to name. It smells like wet cardboard and old cigarettes. Plaster flakes from the walls like dandruff. Light is scarce; Echo Sight draws paths for me like highway lines on a map—where someone stepped, where a crate gave way, where a thing decided it didn't want to be found. The echoes are helpful and rude. They do not care about my pride.
Corin assigns me to clear a fallen metal shelf that leans toward an electrical box. "Watch the edges," he says. "Old wards like to hide in dust." He is practical and blunt, which is why people survive around him. I nod and try not to think about how the ledger's partial name keeps threading through the parts of me I don't want poked.
Halfway through the job the ground gives with a sigh and the alley opens into a shallow pocket of darkness that doesn't belong inside the city. Echo Sight shows that the pocket cycles—brief bright, brief black—like a slow heartbeat. It hums with residue: a ward fragment's flavor, dated and metallic, and the word stabilizer in an old hand. The ledger's ink pricks at me like a splinter.
A sound like paper dragging across concrete announces someone else's interest. Shadows peel out of the pocket like bad dreams stretching for the street. This lot is small but fast: scavenger predators that like working hands and moving feet. Corin swears under his breath and barks orders.
We move like a compact machine. Corin hooks a harness to a beam, the kid—Jeong—lays down a plank to brace a collapsed shelf, I wedge my shoulder under the rusted shelf and pull. The echoes show where the weight will shift; together we make a stupid, human thing work. It's honest labor—sweat pays bills and the world forgets to punish you for it if you keep your head down.
But scavenger predators have patience. One slips under the plank and lashes at Jeong's calf with something like a talon. The kid screams—young, high and raw—and the alley explodes into motion. I see the echo of the predator's lunge before it happens and shove the shelf the exact way Echo Sight tells me to. The predator clips the planks and slides off balance. Corin's boot lands on its back and it yelps like it has tasted the city and hated it.
We pull Jeong free. He's shaking so hard he can't speak. Corin claps him on the shoulder like a man passing off a scar as an achievement. "You good?" he asks. Jeong nods and then vomits into a bucket because some things are more than a bruise.
We find, under the shelf's ruined belly, a metal case that's been welded shut and glazed with grime. It's small and heavy. When I pry the lid, inside is a fragment of a device: curved metal with a lattice of tiny, brittle wiring and a smear of some old numbering etched into it—half of a stabilizer inscription and a string that matches the ledger's notation. My hands go cold in spite of the alley warmth.
"We got lucky," Jeong whispers, like luck is a contact sport.
Corin's face folds. "Or unlucky to have it surface." He looks at me as if the ledger's name and this piece are the same coin. People trade in those; people die over them sometimes.
Before we can argue morality the broker from the market appears like a stain. He moves like he has been refitted with a compass for other people's misfortunes. His smile is too certain. "That there is valuable," he says, nails tapping the metal case like a man checking for hollow spots. "We can offer—"
"Not for sale." Corin's voice is blunt enough to be a blade. He holds the case like a weird relic and looks at me. "You saw ledger lines. We keep this. We don't sell it."
The broker's smile thins. "You could trade its history. Some clients pay well for pieces with provenance."
I remember the temptation like an itch. I remember the device that promised names back for coin. Saving a name for a price feels like robbery even if you keep the receipts. I tuck the device under my jacket. Not because I want to hide, but because some things are not safe in the open. Secrets are not ornaments.
We transport the case back to Corin's yard under an unhelpful sky. There, in the dim light, Corin sets the fragment on the table and uses a magnifier that has seen too much honesty. The etching matches the ledger: a partial stabilizer code, an obsolete font, a date pushed into the margin. An address line partially intact.
"River ward scrap number seven," he says. "Looks like a component for an old stabilizer. Could this be the stabilizer someone tried to use?" He tastes the question like it might be dangerous.
The ledger's partial name nags. The name fragment is still the shape of a person I can no longer fully remember. The hole in my memory has a weight to it like an unpaid debt. I think about the broker's offer and the cheap glow of a device that returns what was lost. I also think about Corin's face when he refuses to sell.
That night, Corin forces me to help him open the case properly. It's a task that requires patience and the ability to be gentle with brittle things. We work by the light of a single lamp. The fragment sings faintly when we touch it—like a tuning fork where the note is memory. Corin hums under his breath to keep the motion regular.
"Whoever made this didn't want it found," he murmurs. "If stabilizers are cropping up in random alleys, someone's hacking the network or someone's hiding a cache. Both mean trouble."
The System interrupts then—its voice like a child tapping at the window. System: Research suggestion — analyze fragment at public archive. Reward: 100 XP. The System is helpful in the way a squirrel is helpful if you want your birdseed redistributed. I make a face at it and Corin chuckles without humor.
We find a small stamped number on the fragment. It corresponds to a ward maintenance registry that was supposed to be decommissioned ten years ago. The registry file is half corrupted but contains a notation: stabilizer prototypes were tested in low‑income wards and results flagged with caution. There's a name in the corrupted header—half of it matches the ledger's fragment. My chest constricts like a trapped breath.
"You want to take this to someone official?" Corin asks.
I don't. Officials are for people who like paperwork and institutions. I like salvage yards and Corin's stubbornness. But I also know that secrets like this grow teeth and bite.
"First to Mom," I say stupidly—then stop because I can't even say the name. The syllable slides like oil under my tongue and I cough. Corin's face softens in a way that says he understands more than I tell.
"You'll find her," he says, simple as a promise and complicated like a bank account.
I sleep poorly that night, ledger and fragment side by side like two hearts that cannot quite synchronize. Echo Sight hums in the background of everything, translating movement into diagrams and offering me tiny, cruel choices: leverage knowledge for coin, or hold knowledge for safety that never comes with guarantees.
In the morning we plan a run to the public archive to cross‑check the registry. The plan feels like a map with too many red Xs. We will need a clean face and maybe some luck. Corin jokes that luck is a cheap credit line you live on until the bills come due.
I look at the ledger one last time before we leave and trace the partial letters with my thumb. The name is still a missing tooth in my mouth. I want to find it. I want to know if my willingness to save people will cost me the scaffolding of myself. Perhaps the cost will be necessary. Perhaps it will be too much.
We move out of the yard into the city, carrying a piece the world thought it had buried, and I wonder how many people will be glad it rose again.
The archive sits under a municipal building that pretends to be boring and succeeds. It smells like old glue and bureaucracy; the air is tempered to keep paper from getting dramatic. We wear faces that look like people with legitimate questions and hand the clerk a forged request that smells faintly of desperation and coffee. Corin's steady hands and my nervous charm are an awful combination for anyone who prizes procedure.
Inside, the registry room is a maze of metal shelves and the thin, precise light of preservation. Echo Sight gives me nothing helpful here—too much organized motion, too many recorded footsteps. The records are honest in the way paper can be; they keep things people want to forget and things people want to remember.
We find the decommissioned register tucked into a stack labeled "Ward Maintenance — Obsolete." The file is brittle and guarded by a stamp that says DO NOT RESURRECT like a bad joke. I turn pages and trace typed notations—stabilizer prototypes, test sites, and an entry with a date and a partial name that matches the ledger. There's an annotation in red ink: SUBJECT WITHDRAWN — MEMORY LIAISON ACTIVATED.
Corin leans over my shoulder and reads the line like an accusation. "Memory liaison," he says. "That sounds like the kind of title bureaucrats invent when they want to avoid the truth."
"And 'withdrawn'?" I whisper. The room feels colder, as if the files are holding their breath.
We trace the address to a long‑abandoned clinic at the edge of the city. The map in the registry is simple: a location, a name fragment, a note about stabilizer testing. Whoever ran these tests had stopped—either by choice or because someone stopped them.
The clinic is a ruin with polite graffiti. The door is stuck but not barred; it's the kind of place that expects no visitors because it has nothing worth stealing. Inside the dust is a quiet that makes your ears ache. Echo Sight hums faintly with old movements—nurses' rounds, a child coughing in the night—ghosts arranged in tidy rows.
We find a back room with a metal cabinet that still locks. The key is gone, but Corin has a set of tools and a patience that's more violent than it looks. He gets the door open and inside is a small box of personal items—a folded photograph, a name badge with half the letters worn away, and a needlepoint patch with a symbol I don't recognize. The photograph is of a woman with a laugh in her eyes and a child in her arms. Both faces are familiar in ways that make my chest flatten; the photograph is a place where memory should live, and something in me roars.
A slip of paper is tucked under the photograph with a single, clear line: STABILIZER PROTOTYPE — HANDLE WITH CAUTION. Below it, in a different hand, a warning: DO NOT LET MEMORY BE SOLD.
My hands shake. The ledger is a map and this is a waypoint. Whoever left this wanted someone to know: stabilizers were tested and someone tried to protect the memory of it. Someone cared enough to put instructions in a box and hide it.
We take the photograph and the note back to the yard. Corin's jaw is a line of worry I've learned to read like weather. "There's a network here," he says. "A system set up to test stabilizers. Someone tried to bury it."
"Why?" I ask because it's the correct question and the one I am afraid of hearing answered. The idea of systems that tamper with memory and then tell you what's useful tastes like rust.
Corin shrugs. "Maybe it wasn't safe. Maybe the people in charge realized stabilizers could be weaponized. Or maybe they wanted to control what people remember about what they did."
The System chirps like an excited child. System: New research thread available — Stabilizer prototypes. Reward: 200 XP. I mute it politely in my head because government conspiracies are less helpful when they come with jingles.
That night, I study the photograph under better light. The woman's smile hints at familiarity and something fierce. The corner of the image is smudged, almost as if someone tried to erase the name. My fingers hover over the smudge and for a breath I can see a fragment of a syllable—a shape that wants to be a name and fails. The ledger is impatient; it wants me to be a detective. I am not trained for detective work. My training is in surviving and in watching echoes of motion.
The more I dig, the more a pattern emerges: stabilizers were meant to shore up failing wards. They were prototypes with ethical strings attached. Someone tried to protect the memory of their testing because memory—our ability to keep names and promises—was both the tool and the target.
If someone is now circulating fragments of stabilizers in alleys, someone else wants them found. Or hidden. Or sold.
We sleep poorly. Corin dreams in short, angry fragments. Jeong stays up to polish tools as if cleanliness can outrun the ache. I fold the photograph into the ledger between the stabilizer notes like a talisman. The face in the photograph becomes another kind of map—this one emotional, not mechanical.
Two nights later there's a knock at the yard that is not the city's usual polite saunter. It's a hard, deliberate sound. Corin moves before I can think. He opens the door to find a woman in a coat that smells faintly of hospital antiseptic and a handbag that has seen better lawsuits. Her hair is pulled into a practical bun, and her eyes are sharp in the way people's eyes get when they have chosen to hurt themselves to save something else.
"You Corin?" she asks. Her voice is plain and not a question.
He nods. "Depends who's asking."
She looks at me like she is checking the balance of a ledger. "You were involved with stabilizer trials," she says. Not a question.
My mouth goes dry. Corin's face changes in a quick, private way—hope, fear, recognition all in the same dollar bill fold. "We found a fragment," I say. "We're keeping it."
She glances at the photograph tucked in the ledger and something inside her relents, like a locked drawer opening. "That's—" She stops, breathes, and says the name in a voice that is bare as bone. The word slips into the room like sunlight: Hae‑In.
I know Hae‑In. She is the woman in the photograph, a name I knew once and then watched become a smear. The missing syllables in the ledger congeal and form meaning; it is like finding a bridge you didn't know was missing and then realizing the road you used to walk was incomplete.
She sits without ceremony and tells us a story in pieces—stabilizer prototypes, field tests, ethical boards that argued late into the night, an attempt to keep a community whole that went messy and expensive. She speaks of the ward collapses that led to trials and of people who sold memories in a panic. Her voice is even and steady until she mentions the word "liaison," and then a crack opens.
"They tried to make memory commodity," she says. "They tried to measure regret like it was salvage. I tried to stop it. I failed a few times. It got worse." Her eyes find mine. "You have the ledger."
I do. My thumb grazes the page where I wrote Find stabilizer. Find sibling. My promise hangs like a light in a dark room.
Hae‑In doesn't offer easy answers. She offers context and a map of the forces that once tried to harness human recall. She warns us—softly, like a friend telling you where the cliff is hidden—that there are people who will kill for a fragment if they think it will return a memory that empowers them. She asks Corin and me to help protect what we found.
"We protect what's left of the trials," she says. "We keep memories where they belong: with the people they're about, not in the pockets of the greedy."
The System, predictably, pipes up: System: Alliance suggestion — Cooperative with Hae‑In. Reward: 500 XP. I ignore it like a school teacher offering extra credit for a dangerous assignment.
We agree. Not because we know all the answers, but because keeping things safe is the only plan that makes moral sense in a world that pays for forgetting. Corin clasps the ledger like a talisman and the fragment sits on the table between us humming faintly, like it remembers being alive.
That night, I write less directive notes in the ledger and more questions: Who else knows? Who profits? Where did the memory brokers get their tech? The pages fill with ink like small flags.
Before I sleep, Hae‑In pulls me aside and presses something into my hand—an old patch with the same symbol from the clinic cabinet. "If you find more," she says, "come to me. If you don't, at least don't sell them." Her palm is warm and real. "And Sung—don't lose your name looking for someone else's."
I roll the patch into my pocket and feel like that makes me armoured in a peculiar, private way. Corin lights a cigarette and the yard smells like rebellion. The System offers tasks and rewards and little checkmarks for morality, but tonight the ledger and the photograph and Hae‑In's voice feel like the only reliable things.
We go to bed with a plan that is more firewall than map: protect fragments, find stabilizers, and look for the person who can fill the missing name in my head. It is not an elegant plan. It is the kind of plan that can be kept in a pocket and fed to a man who's learning to pay attention.
I sleep with echoes in my head and a photograph in the ledger and for the first time in a long while, a sliver of the name I lost feels less like a hole and more like a place I can reach.