Chapter 27 · The Clerk’s Double-Faced Clock

The future execution order split down the middle before Eve could tear her name from it.

A black seam raced through the paper, swallowing ink, signature, and the line where Kieran’s target designation should have been. Shelves groaned around them. Thousands of dead records shivered loose from their chains and lifted into the air, pages beating like trapped white birds.

Kieran drove his shoulder into Eve and took them both behind a stone lectern as a brass index rod speared through the place where her throat had been.

She hit the floor hard enough to bite her tongue. Copper flooded her mouth.

"Get off."

"When the ceiling stops trying to execute you."

"That order had my signature."

"I noticed."

Another shelf folded inward. Kieran curved over her as glass cylinders burst against his back, each one releasing a scream in someone else’s voice. For one nauseating instant, Eve heard herself begging him to remember her.

Then the sound was sucked into the widening cracks.

At the forbidden door, Sora Bell clung to the entry mechanism with both hands. Blue-white current crawled from the lock into her wrists, illuminating the bones beneath her skin.