Chapter 15 · The Nameless Invitation

The archive fire had not gone out.

It crawled beneath the floor in thin veins of orange light, illuminating the forbidden vault from below. Every few seconds, the shelves shuddered. Red-thread files trembled in their iron drawers. Somewhere beyond the walls, the city groaned as if its foundations had begun to remember something painful.

Noa pressed one burned palm against the nearest pillar and tried not to fall.

The skin along her wrist had split open again. Heat pulsed beneath it, not like blood, but like a second heartbeat searching for a way out. Since touching the red file, memories had been arriving in pieces—Evelyn's childhood voice, the smell of rain on slate, a boy laughing beneath a market awning, Silas Morn's silver rings clicking against a wooden table.

None of them belonged to her.

That was the part she kept repeating.

None of them belonged to her.

Evelyn crouched beside her, one hand braced against the floor and the other gripping the short blade she had stolen from a dead registrar. Her coat was stiff with blood at the shoulder.