The first thing Sable Crowe noticed was that the rain had no patience.
It didn't fall like weather. It fell like judgment—straight, hard, uniform, as if poured from a bucket held above the world by a hand that never trembled. The drops struck the pavement and didn't splash so much as flatten, collapsing into thin, obedient sheets that sluiced toward the gutters with a sound like paper being smoothed.
Above, the sky was absent in the old, intimate way an eye might be absent—no scar tissue, no empty socket. Just the wrongness of a place that should have depth and instead had a ceiling.
The paper ceiling watched the city.
It stretched from horizon to horizon: pale, fibrous, veined with lines that shifted as Sable walked, ink threads moving slowly like nervous veins under thin skin. Every so often, a line would kink, curve, and continue—as if something up there had corrected itself mid-sentence.
Sable pulled his scarf higher. Not for warmth. The air was warm enough to rot. He pulled it up because the rain carried a taste. Not water. Not metal. Pulp. A faint papery bitterness that stuck behind the teeth like regret.
He'd been in this city before.
That thought came from nowhere, clean and sharp, and then it was gone—dissolving the moment it formed, like a word written on skin and wiped away with spit. Sable's stomach tightened. His fingers slid under his coat, brushing the inside seam where the lining had been ripped out and resewn into pockets.
Blank Pages rustled softly.
The sound made his throat close. It always did. The Pages were so light they seemed less like paper and more like absence given shape. He'd learned that blankness could have weight. Learned it the way you learn what a knife does by catching it wrong.
He stopped under the awning of a closed storefront. The sign above the door had been scraped and repainted so many times it looked like a bruise. Its letters now read:
BUREAU OF CONTENTMENT
EMOTION AUDIT—MONDAY & THURSDAY
GRIEF IS A CONTAGION. REPORT SYMPTOMS.
A poster beside the door showed a smiling family holding hands beneath a bright, painted blue sky that did not exist. The image had the glossy perfection of a lie practiced for years.
Sable watched a woman hurry by, clutching a bundle close to her chest beneath her coat. The bundle was long and narrow and wrapped too carefully. She kept her head down. Every few steps she glanced at the Bureau door, as if expecting it to open and swallow her.
A man followed her—same pace, same direction, careful not to seem like he was following. His hair was slicked down by rain; his face had that gentle, vacant expression people wore in this city, like a mask that had been glued on in childhood. His left sleeve had a patch: a thin silver tag stitched near the wrist, numbers stamped into it.
Index property.
Sable's hand slid down into his pocket and closed around a cold circle of metal—an antique key, teeth worn and sharp. His heart did not race. It never did when it should. That was the worst part: the body's betrayals. The silence where fear should have screamed.
He let them pass.
He couldn't afford to be brave for strangers every time. He'd done that before. He didn't remember it, but his skin did.
In the shadow under the awning, he pulled his sleeve up just enough to see the inner forearm. Letters cut into the skin, healed crooked and pale. Not tattoo ink. Not pen. Old cuts that had scarred into words.
DON'T LET THEM CALL IT HEALING.
He stared until the meaning of the sentence became a physical thing in his chest. He waited for the familiar sensation—like someone pulling the plug on a sink—to take it away.
It didn't. Not yet.
Sable exhaled, a slow hiss through clenched teeth, and stepped back into the rain.
The city's streets were narrow in a way that felt deliberate. Buildings leaned close together like eavesdroppers. Every other corner had a speaker mounted high, its casing painted cheerful yellow. A calm voice issued from them at intervals, measured and warm:
"Citizens are reminded: unauthorized gatherings are prohibited. Tears are a symptom. If you experience sorrow, report it. If you witness sorrow, report it. If you remember sorrow, report it."
Sable walked past a public kiosk where a line of people stood beneath umbrellas, waiting to press their thumbs onto a glass screen. An Emotion Audit station. The screen displayed a list of faces with categories next to them: Compliant. Compliant. Under Observation. Referred.
A boy of maybe ten stepped up. He placed his thumb down. The screen brightened. A pleasant chime sounded.
"Thank you," the kiosk said. "How do you feel today?"
The boy's lips moved. Sable couldn't hear his answer over the rain, but he saw the boy's eyes flick up toward his mother. She watched him with a smile too wide and too hard, hands clenched on the umbrella handle as if it were the only solid thing in her life.
The kiosk chimed again.
"Wonderful," it said. "Contentment is health."
Sable kept walking.
The back streets smelled worse. Garbage, urine, damp brick. Beneath it all, something else—something faint and sour, like old flowers in a closed room.
Death, unspoken.
In other cities, there were signs for cemeteries. Here there were signs for disposal.
He saw it near the river: a low concrete building with no windows, its doors painted white. In front, a small crowd stood in the rain. Not gathered—queued. As if grief could be processed one body at a time.
A truck backed up to the entrance. Men in clean coats unloaded a stretcher. The crowd watched with faces carefully empty. No sobbing. No wailing. No prayers.
An older woman in the line began to shake. Her hands fluttered at her collar like she couldn't get air. For a moment, her expression cracked—mouth pulling down, eyes filling, the beginnings of a sound rising—
Two attendants in yellow raincoats stepped from the doorway. They moved fast, practiced. One placed a hand on the woman's shoulder. The other held a small white spray bottle.
"Ma'am," the attendant said gently. "Breathe with me. Contentment is health."
The woman's throat worked. A tear slid down, bright and traitorous.
The spray bottle hissed.
Mist coated the woman's face. She blinked. Her shoulders slackened. The tear stopped halfway down her cheek as if it had hit a wall. Her eyes went flat. Her mouth smoothed.
She nodded obediently.
The attendants guided her back into line.
The crowd did not react. Their emptiness wasn't apathy. It was armor. And armor, Sable had learned, was heavy enough to drown you.
He turned away.
A narrow alley ran beside the river, squeezed between the disposal building and a wall of old warehouses. The rain pooled there, unable to drain, turning the ground into a slick mirror. Sable stepped carefully. Every footfall sounded too loud, like confession.
Halfway down, he stopped.
There was a door in the brick wall—old wood, iron hinges, no sign. It didn't belong. He knew that the way you know a toothache is coming before it starts.
His fingers found the cold key. He held it up, and the moment the metal neared the lock, the lock changed. Its shape softened, flowed, as if recognizing him. The key slid in with an obscene ease.
Sable swallowed. "Don't," he whispered, not to the door, but to himself.
He turned the key.
The click was quiet. The sound behind it was not.
A faint, papery sigh came from within—like a book opening in a silent room, like a thousand pages exhaling dust. The air in the alley shifted. The rain seemed to hesitate near the threshold, as if unwilling to cross.
Sable pulled the door open.
Inside was darkness, and then, as his eyes adjusted, not darkness—depth. A corridor stretched away, lined with shelves that disappeared into shadow. The smell hit him immediately: paper and ink and something sweet and rotten beneath, like fruit left too long in a drawer.
The Library had always smelled like truth that had gone stale.
He stepped over the threshold.
The door shut behind him on its own, cutting off the rain. The silence that followed was oppressive, thick. In the hush, he could hear small noises: a faint creaking as if shelves were shifting under weight; a whisper of pages moving where there was no wind; something distant that might have been dripping.
Sable stood still. He didn't like rushing in the Library. Rushing made it notice you.
He reached under his coat and pulled out a blank Page.
It was a rectangle of pale fiber, edges clean, surface too smooth. When he held it up, it seemed to drink the dimness. Under the Library's low light, the blankness wasn't empty; it was hungry.
He'd carried these for weeks. Months. He couldn't trust his memory for longer than a handful of days, but he knew their weight. He knew the way they shifted against his ribs when he ran.
"Where," he murmured, voice barely more than breath.
The Library did not answer with words. It never did. It answered with attention.
The shelves nearest him shuddered softly. Dust fell like gray snow. A faint draft brushed his cheek—not cold, not warm. Searching.
Sable's skin prickled. He hated the feeling of being catalogued. He hated that it felt like recognition.
He began to walk.
The corridor narrowed and widened in places, a throat swallowing him. The shelves on either side were packed with books of every size, their spines marked with strange symbols, dates that didn't exist, titles in handwriting that made his eyes hurt if he stared too long. Some books were bound in leather. Some in cloth. Some in something that was not leather, not cloth, and he refused to think too hard about it.
He passed a shelf where the books hummed quietly, like insects. Another where the spines were wet, ink seeping as if the words inside were trying to escape.
The Library was sick.
He knew that too, the way you know an animal is dying by the way it moves too slowly.
A bend in the corridor revealed a small alcove: a desk, crooked, with a lantern that burned without flame. Someone had been here. Someone had left signs—chalk marks on the floor, thin lines like surgical notes.
And there, on the desk, was a book with no cover.
Just pages bound together by red thread.
Sable stopped. His mouth went dry. He did not reach for it. He did not need to. The sight of red thread was enough to make his scars itch.
Binder work.
Ysra Hemlock.
He didn't remember her face. He didn't remember her voice. But the name rose in him like a bruise being pressed. It hurt, which meant it was real.
Sable's fingers trembled slightly as he set his blank Page on the desk beside the thread-bound book. The blankness looked obscene there, like a clean sheet laid beside a corpse.
He leaned closer.
The air above the Page wavered. A faint smell drifted up, not from the paper, but from somewhere else—the sour sweetness he'd smelled in the city alley, only stronger here. Like dead flowers. Like a room where someone had cried and no one had noticed.
Sable's breath caught.
Meaning was near.
Not the kind you could buy or spray over a face to stop tears. The real kind. The kind that left aftermath.
His blank Page did not stain. Not yet. But his skin reacted anyway: the scar-letters on his forearm prickled, as if the words under his skin were trying to wake.
He should leave. He should walk out and pretend he hadn't felt it. That was what most people did, in the city above. They pretended hard enough that the world began to cooperate.
But Sable's promise—carved into him with pain—didn't allow pretending.
He picked up the blank Page, held it to his chest, and closed his eyes.
He listened.
At first, only the Library: creaks, whispers, distant drip.
Then another sound: a muffled sob.
Not from the city. Not from the corridor. From somewhere deeper, behind the shelves, as if the building itself had a throat and something was trying to cry through it.
Sable opened his eyes.
The sob came again, wet and raw and wrong—not a human sob. Something imitating the shape of grief without understanding it. A predator wearing the skin of a feeling.
A Sootborn.
His pulse finally quickened. It was late, but it came. His body remembering fear even if his mind couldn't keep it.
He turned slowly.
At the far end of the corridor, where the shadows pooled thickest, a figure stood half-hidden between shelves.
It was tall—too tall. Its limbs were thin, jointed at angles that suggested the idea of a person more than the reality. Its skin looked like paper soaked and dried and soaked again—wrinkled, pale, with ink stains blooming beneath like bruises. Where its face should have been was a smooth sheet, except for a single wet tear-track running down the center.
The tear glistened in lantern light.
Then the smooth face split—not like flesh, but like paper tearing. A mouth opened, jagged and damp, and inside was not teeth but letters, black and small, squirming as if written by a hand that hated you.
The thing leaned forward.
It spoke, and its voice was a woman's voice, shaking, gentle, familiar in a way that made Sable's stomach drop.
"Please," it said, and the word carried such human need that for an instant Sable almost believed it. "Please… don't—don't make me—"
Then its voice changed mid-syllable, becoming a child's thin wail. Then a man's broken whisper. Then a chorus of those. A whole room of grief compressed into one throat.
Sable's fingers tightened around his blank Page until it bent.
He could run. He could leave the Library and let the city above handle it the way it handled everything—by numbing, by denying, by spraying lies until the tear dried in place.
But the Sootborn's tear wasn't drying.
It was growing. Spreading, wetness seeping into its paper-skin, loosening it, making it sag. Like a page left out in rain. Like truth refusing to be kept tidy.
Sable swallowed hard. The taste of pulp thickened on his tongue.
He reached into his coat and pulled out a second Page—not blank. A stained Page, edges darkened, letters faint. He didn't remember how he'd earned it. He rarely did. But the title at the top was clear, written in a hand that felt like his own.
THE PAGE OF NAMING.
His thumb brushed the title.
Pain lanced up his arm—sharp, immediate, as if the letters were a blade. His gums began to ache with that familiar pressure, like his teeth wanted to loosen. Breath-Reading always did that. The Page asked for flesh even when it wasn't pressed to skin.
He lifted the Page toward his mouth.
The Sootborn took a step forward, and the shelves around it shivered, books rattling softly as if frightened.
"Don't," the chorus-voice pleaded. "Don't say it. Don't say—"
Sable's lungs burned. He could already feel the cost. Every time he used a Page, something in him went quiet afterward. A memory. A feeling. A piece.
He didn't know what he would lose this time.
He didn't know if he could afford it.
But the city above had a line of people waiting to dispose of their dead under the watch of a calm voice telling them grief was sickness. The woman with the bundled shape under her coat. The Index patch on the man's sleeve.
He couldn't afford not to.
Sable brought the Page to his lips and began to read.
The words tasted like ash and old flowers.
They scraped his throat as if they didn't want to leave the paper. His teeth throbbed, pain blooming like a bruise behind the gums. The letters rose from the Page in faint black vapor, drifting toward the air between him and the Sootborn.
He didn't shout. He didn't chant. He spoke the words with the vicious gentleness of someone pressing a wound closed.
"Name," he whispered, and the Library listened.
The air tightened.
Somewhere above, beyond the paper ceiling, a line of ink kinked and corrected itself.
The Sootborn's mouth opened wider. The letters inside it wriggled, trying to crawl out, trying to become language before they could be pinned.
Sable forced the next word through his bleeding gums.
"Her."
The tear on the Sootborn's face trembled.
Sable's voice shook now, not with fear but with effort, like lifting something too heavy to save a stranger.
"Say her name," he commanded the empty air. "Say it out loud. Let the city hear it. Let the world admit she existed."
For a heartbeat, there was only silence.
Then, from somewhere beyond the shelves—deep, deep in the Library's gut—a human voice answered.
Not the Sootborn's. Not the chorus.
A man's voice, rough with smoke and ash and exhausted humor.
"You finally showed up," it said. "Thought you were gonna let me rot down here, Crowe."
Sable's head snapped toward the sound.
From the darkness between shelves stepped a figure with ash on his sleeves and rain still clinging to his hair like confession.
Oren Silt smiled like a dull knife.