Chapter 28 · Back to the Night of Death

The dead came out of the Thirteenth Archive without making a sound.

They stepped through the broken doorway in a slow, uneven procession, shoes whispering over the black glass floor. Some wore uniforms that had gone out of fashion decades ago. Some carried umbrellas collapsed against their shoulders, though no rain fell beneath the city. Others had no faces at all—only pale impressions where eyes and mouths should have been, as if the white erasure had scrubbed away everything but the shape of a person.

Behind them, the released minutes poured upward.

Thirteen minutes from every midnight for twenty-one years, ripped loose from the machinery of Nacre City, rose like a silver flood. It climbed through the vaulted chamber in ribbons of frozen lightning. Every strand contained fragments: a falling teacup, a kiss interrupted by an alarm, a child turning toward a voice that had never reached him. The air smelled of hot brass, wet stone, and old lightning.

Eve Calder stood at the center of it with blood drying beneath her nose.

The hourglass hung between her and Kieran, suspended in the air by threads of pale light. Its sand was no longer falling.