The week carved itself into small deadlines. The registry's polite line—one week for provisional collateral—hung over Nox like a measure. It narrowed each day, becoming less a threat of paper and more a rhythm of approaching footsteps. Observers, the silent instruments of that rhythm, began to appear in the periphery: a hat worn too straight, a shadow that lingered at the edge of Tailor's Alley, boots that seemed practiced at counting the same cracks in the pavement.
The first observer arrived not in uniform but in the careful anonymity of a courier's coat. He watched Nox from across a stall where glass jars held orange-scented mornings. He did not speak; he only catalogued gestures—how Nox folded his hands, how his eyes passed over tokens—and wrote them in a small book with a spine like a finger. When Nox met his gaze the man bowed the tiniest amount and turned away. That small bow carried the registry's permission to watch.
Lian noticed the watcher the way someone notices a thread pulled too tight in a garment. "They'll place marks on you now," she said. "Little things: a clerk in a market, a polite question from a neighbor, a note on a ledger. These are their stitches."
Nox had never been good at counting stitches. He was better at following frays.
They went to Marek because Marek was a man who kept the half-remembered whole long enough for people to bargain. His stall smelled of lemon and old glue, and he moved like a person who had stitched his life into other people's seams.
"You have a week," Marek said when he saw the registry's stamped paper. He pinched the edge of a witness token as if testing its temperature. "A coin greases a clerk's hand less than a memory, but it speaks the same language. The registry will accept a token if it is sealed by someone they trust—or if it is obviously the registry's own. They like authorship."
"How much?" Nox asked.
Marek looked at his hands as if numbers were insects. "Money buys tokens," he said. "And memories buy exemption. Tokens from me are authentic enough for the streets but thin for the counters. They will delay a filing; they do not prevent scrutiny. If you want a seal that sings when the registry checks, you go to the fence."
"Fence?" Lian repeated.
"There's a man who deals in heavier things," Marek said, leaning in. "Gus. He traffics in seals and counterfeit witnesses and in one or two registry-made tokens that slipped when someone in a drawer dozed. He asks favors. Favors are paid later and loudly."
Nox felt the ledger of choices tilt under his feet. Collateral, token, favor—each word was a gate.
"You said collateral could be an object tied to memory," he said slowly. "Would the shoe do it? The horse?"
Marek smiled without warmth. "Objects speak, but not always with your voice. The registry will watch where those objects go and whom they touch. A shoe that belongs to a child is fine; but if that child does not appear in a registry query, the file will flag. They like matches. A token beats a shoe at interviews."
Lian's jaw tightened. She had offered sponsorship; now the cost of keeping that promise rose like tide. "What would Gus want?" she asked.
Marek spat into a corner as if the idea were bitter. "He wants stories or work. He will ask you to break a thing—sometimes to lift a page, sometimes to take a nameplate. He will make you owe him. He calls it balance."
Balance, in that place, was an accounting language for theft.
They considered other routes. They could try to make the registry accept Marek's token and risk having the provisional tag scrutinized. They could petition Kerran for more time, but Kerran's week had been generous and the registry's patience was the sort of thing measured in closed ledgers. They could ask other allies—someone at the Half-Index, an apostle of memory with a pocket of days to spare—but favors run thin where certainties are currency.
While they debated, the city did what it always did: it made arguments out of small gestures. Flyers quoting Ilmar began to appear on lamp posts, not only in pamphlets but in the tidy handwriting of municipal clerks. "Order is mercy — pare the chaos of truth," read one: Ilmar's sentences had become the registry's wallpaper. The ideas that had once been essays in quiet rooms now sat in the mouths of wardens and the margins of official decrees. That someone had woven Ilmar into policy made the registry's offer of compassion feel inevitable.
One evening, an observer with a face like worn paper approached them in Tailor's Alley with curt, polite steps. His name was Thane; his presence smelled faintly of ledger glue. He regarded Lian the way a month regards a debt.
"You are under provisional sponsorship," he said matter-of-factly, as if reciting a line from a script no one had granted him. "You two must declare all witnesses you hold. Presence will be audited. Do not attempt to obscure provenance."
Lian's hand closed reflexively on the ribbon. "We have nothing to hide," she said, but the words trembled.
Thane's eyes flicked to Nox and then to the small bundle in his coat. "Objects without provenance may be evaluated," he said. "If the registry deems an object suspicious, it will be seized for verification."
Seized. The word landed like a cold stamp. It meant that an object might be examined in a room where forgetting was technical and final.
"We will comply," Lian said. "We will bring what we can."
Thane inclined his head and left, his steps neat as a closing drawer.
That night the three small items—shoe, horse, ribbon—felt like contraband in a world where paperwork could make a person invisible. Lian stood in the doorway of the compound and looked at Nox with a calculation that seemed older than youth.
"If I give a memory," she said finally, "it will be something I keep folded in my heart. It is not rash."
"You will lose it," Nox said. "You said so once."
She smiled with a thin, sad humor. "People survive losing what holds them. We make room for new things. But I won't trade what I cannot spare."
Marek's offer and Gus's favor shaped the night into an immediate geometry: a cheap token that buys delay, a counterfeit that buys danger, a memory that buys certainty. Lian's sponsorship complicated things further: if she attached a memory as collateral, she would place herself under registry audit. That could unravel her own seams—her ability to remember the erased might be questioned, catalogued, or taken.
They walked toward the market at dawn, decisions like lead in their pockets. The black fence's stall was a crooked thing under a bridge; its table held things that smelled of other people's lives—sealed envelopes, a child's crayon, a rusted key. Gus was thin and quick-eyed, and he liked words that meant consequences.
"You want a seal," Gus said without preamble. "I can get one. It will cost you a job or a memory. Jobs are cleaner. Memories are messy. I prefer jobs."
"What job?" Lian asked.
Gus smiled wide enough to show teeth. "There is a plaque in the northern square. A nameplate that came from an old monument. It is sealed—part of a mayoral recessive archive. Bring it to me. Do that, and I give you a stamped token that sings at registry checks. Fail, and I keep what you have already." He tapped his pockets for emphasis.
Nox could have refused. He could have let the registry file him unowned and walked the city as a polite omission. He thought of the boy with the freckle, of the laugh he had borrowed and lost, and of the smallness of the shoe in his palm. He imagined a life where his name flickered like a candle in a closed room.
Lian looked at him. There was no dramatic flourish—only the quiet alignment of gears. "We will do it," she said.
They had consented to a theft in exchange for a seal, and the week's countdown ticked thinner. The registry's watchers would soon note their absence from markets or their movement toward the northern square. Favors and audits moved in parallel, each footfall measured. The ledger would be watching, and what they did to keep a name might very well cost them the right to claim any other.
Outside, the city folded itself into evening and the flyers with Ilmar's neat sentences caught in the corners like dried leaves. Somewhere, the registry's pages turned.