Chapter 9 · The District Without Doors

The rain tasted like rust and forgotten things. Noa Vey stumbled up the last of the stone steps, her boots squelching in a puddle that glinted with faint, inky black residue—the leftover echo of a memory erased.

The parchment crumpled in her fist was warm, even through the rain: a tattered childhood contract, edges singed, its two signatures half-obscured by smudges. She knew one was hers—NOA, scrawled in wobbly kid’s ink, the rest of the name eaten away by something she couldn’t name.

The other started with E, sharp and looping, and when she ran her thumb over it, a jolt of something like safety shot up her arm, dulling the shard-like pain behind her eyes. She couldn’t remember the name of the woman beside her.

She knew the woman was tall, with sharp cheekbones and a scar slicing through her left eyebrow, that her coat smelled like old leather and iron-gall ink, that when Noa had swayed three steps back, the woman had caught her elbow without looking, like she’d done it a hundred times before. But when Noa opened her mouth to call out to her, no sound came.