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The dead thing beneath the tugboat knocked again.
Eve felt the impact through the soles of her boots, through the iron deck, through the hand Kieran had locked around hers. The sound traveled up the bones of her arm and settled behind her teeth.
Three knocks.
Then silence.
The cabin lights flickered. For one breath, the black water beyond the portholes turned silver, as if something vast had rolled beneath them and shown the pale armor of its back.
Kieran’s fingers tightened around hers.
Not fear, she realized.
Recognition.
“What is it?” Eve whispered.
His face had gone colorless beneath the blood streaking his temple. His other hand pressed against the torn seam in his coat, where the contract assassin’s blade had opened him from ribs to hip. The thorned hourglass burned on his palm, its black lines pulsing in time with hers.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“You do.”
His eyes lifted to hers. Whatever he had seen in the impossible memory—the rain, her corpse, the knife in his hand—still lived behind them.
“I know it was waiting for us.”
A brass needle on the engine panel jerked backward.
Somewhere above, a bell rang once. Not the harbor bell. This note was thinner, colder, and it made the shadows lean toward the sound.
Kieran turned toward the narrow hatch. “We have less than a minute.”
“Until what?”
“Until the Assembly opens the lower locks.”
“And then?”
“They’ll come through the water.”
Eve looked at the porthole again. A pale shape passed beneath it, too large to belong to any creature that had ever breathed air. Rows of blue lights opened along its side like eyes.
Her stomach clenched.
“Where are we going?”
“The Meridian Assembly has a memory vault under the old courthouse.”
“Convenient.”
“It’s sealed against clock-magic.”
“And you can get us inside?”
Kieran gave her a humorless smile. “I used to arrest people who tried.”
Another impact struck the hull. The tugboat groaned. A hairline crack spread across the porthole glass.
Eve pulled her hand free. The instant their palms separated, pain flashed through both of them. Kieran staggered. She caught herself against the engine housing, biting down on a cry as his agony flooded through the pact—hot metal, torn flesh, the dull throb of a body running out of blood.
He looked at her, startled.
“You felt that?”
“I felt you.”
For a moment, neither moved.
The thing below knocked a fourth time.
Eve grabbed his coat. “Then keep up.”
They climbed through the hatch into the rain.
Nacre City glittered around them, all wet rooftops and leaning towers, its streets wrapped in fog from the tide channels. The tug had drifted beneath the old courthouse bridge, where rusted girders crossed the harbor like the ribs of a dead animal. Beyond the bridge, three black Assembly skiffs cut through the water. Their lanterns were covered with red glass, and each carried a clock-masked enforcer standing perfectly still at the bow.
Kieran pulled Eve into the shadow beneath the bridge.
The city clock began to chime midnight.
One.
The first chime shivered through the rain.
Two.
Eve felt the pact mark tighten around her palm.
Three.
A red lens on one of the skiffs turned toward them.
Four.
Kieran drew the narrow knife from his boot. The blade was still wet with blood—hers, or his, or both. Eve’s gaze caught on it, and the memory he had seen seemed to open between them like a wound.
Rain in a narrow alley.
Her body in his arms.
His voice breaking as he said, I had to kill you twice.
She jerked her attention away.
Five.
“Don’t look at the knife,” Kieran murmured.
“I’m trying not to look at the man who used it.”
His jaw flexed. “I haven’t used it on you.”
“Not that you remember.”
Six.
The seventh chime never came.
The city lost its thirteen minutes.
All sound vanished.
Rain froze in the air. The harbor stopped mid-surge. The red lanterns on the skiffs held their light without flickering. A droplet hung beside Eve’s cheek, bright as a tiny glass bead.
Inside the stolen time, the pact became the only thing that moved.
Its mark crawled across her skin. Thorned lines wound from her palm to her wrist, each black thorn dragging a pulse of Kieran’s heartbeat with it.
He seized her hand. “Run.”
They crossed the street while Nacre City remained trapped in its missing minutes. Eve vaulted a fallen barricade, ducked beneath a frozen horse’s bridle, and followed Kieran through an alley that should have ended at the river. He kicked open a service door hidden behind a curtain of ivy.
A stairwell dropped beneath the courthouse.
The moment they crossed the threshold, the stolen time snapped shut.
Rain crashed down. The harbor roared. Somewhere behind them, an enforcer shouted.
Kieran slammed the door and drove a rusted bar through its brackets. “The vault is three levels below.”
“And the clerk who can open it?”
“Sora Bell.”
“Why would she help us?”
“She won’t.”
“That’s reassuring.”
They descended into darkness.
The courthouse foundation was older than the city above it. Its walls were made from pale blocks veined with metallic threads. Every few feet, a clock face had been set into the stone. None of the hands moved, but all of them pointed toward the same number: thirteen.
Eve’s breath came shallowly. “How many people know this place exists?”
“Fewer than should.”
“And how many know about my death record?”
Kieran stopped on the landing below.
The pact carried the question into him before she finished speaking. His shoulder twitched. His pain changed shape, becoming something quieter and more dangerous.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“You saw me dead.”
“I saw a memory.”
“You said it was me.”
“It was your face. Your blood. My knife.”
“Then tell me what happened.”
His eyes hardened. “I can’t tell you what I don’t remember.”
“You remember enough to cry.”
The words struck him harder than any blade. Eve felt it through the pact: shame, grief, and beneath both, a terror so old it had become part of his bones.
Footsteps echoed above them.
Kieran reached for her again. This time, she let him take her hand.
“Save the interrogation,” he whispered. “Survive the vault.”
At the bottom of the stairs, a narrow corridor ended in a circular door. A girl sat beside it on a folding stool, reading a ledger beneath a green glass lamp.
She looked no older than twenty, with copper-brown skin, cropped black hair, and a coat several sizes too large for her narrow shoulders. Brass spectacles rested at the end of her nose. A silver chain ran from one ear to the collar of her uniform, carrying a tiny key.
Sora Bell did not look up.
“You’re late,” she said.
Kieran raised his knife.
Sora turned a page. “If you intend to threaten me, do it quietly. The listening hands are awake.”
Eve glanced at the ceiling.
At first she saw only pipes. Then one pipe flexed. A dozen small brass fingers emerged from a crack, each tipped with a black glass nail. They crawled along the stone, feeling the air.
Assembly surveillance.
Sora finally looked at them. Her gaze dropped to their joined hands, to the glowing thorns beneath their skin.
“You made the true-name pact,” she said.
“Kieran Ash Voss,” he replied. “Open the vault.”
Sora’s expression tightened. “You used his full name in front of the listening hands.”
“They already know it.”
“No. They know what the Assembly wrote. That isn’t the same thing.”
She closed the ledger and stood. Beneath the oversized coat, clockwork plates shifted at her wrists. Not armor. A clerk’s tools—thin picks, calibration pins, and a ring of stamped keys.
Eve stepped between Sora and Kieran’s knife. “We need to see a record.”
“Everyone who comes here needs to see a record.”
“My death record.”
For the first time, Sora’s composure cracked. A pulse jumped in her throat.
The listening hands scraped across the ceiling.
Sora lowered her voice. “Who told you?”
“I received a letter bearing my death date.”
“From whom?”
Eve hesitated. “I don’t know.”
Sora looked at Kieran. “And he was named as the killer?”
The question fell into the corridor like a dropped glass.
Kieran’s knife lowered by half an inch.
Eve felt the memory inside him stir. Rain. Blood. His arms around her.
“Yes,” Eve said. “He was.”
Sora’s face went pale. She took the tiny key from her ear and pressed it into the lock.
“Then you’re already dead,” she whispered.
The circular door opened with a sound like a long breath.
Inside, shelves rose into darkness. Thousands of glass cylinders filled the vault, each containing a slow spiral of silver light. Memories. Sealed, labeled, and stacked by date. The air smelled of dust, cold iron, and something sweetly rotten.
Eve stepped inside.
The door began to close behind them.
Sora caught it with one shoulder. “We have four minutes before the surveillance network notices the breach.”
“Can you stop it?” Kieran asked.
“I can lie to it.”
“Is that what you do for the Assembly?”
Her eyes flashed. “I do what keeps my little brother breathing.”
The door sealed.
Sora moved quickly between the shelves, trailing her fingers over labels. “The vault indexes memories by event, not person. If the Assembly erased yours, the residue will be filed under the night of the first theft.”
“The first theft of what?” Eve asked.
“Thirteen minutes.”
A pressure built behind Eve’s eyes. “You know what happens during them.”
“I know what the records say.”
“And?”
Sora stopped at a shelf marked OCTOBER 31, 1927.
Every cylinder on it was empty.
Her mouth tightened. “And someone has been removing the evidence.”
Kieran reached past her and lifted a thin black folder wedged behind the empty cylinders. Its cover bore a stamped symbol: a broken hourglass surrounded by thirteen thorns.
Eve’s heart lurched.
“That mark,” she said. “It was on the letter.”
Sora snatched the folder from him. “This shouldn’t be here.”
“Open it.”
“No.”
Kieran stepped closer. “Sora.”
The girl flinched at the sound of her name. The listening hands scraped again, louder this time.
Eve felt Kieran’s anger rise through the pact, hot and immediate. Beneath it, his wound pulsed. She caught his wrist.
“Don’t frighten her.”
“I’m not the one hiding records.”
Sora stared at their joined hands. “You don’t understand what the vault does to people who read the wrong page.”
“Then read it with us.”
The words came from Eve, though they surprised her too.
Sora’s eyes lifted.
Eve swallowed. “If my life is already written down, I’m done letting other people decide what it means.”
For several seconds, the only sound was the soft churning of silver light inside the cylinders.
Then Sora opened the folder.
The first page contained no words, only a moving image pressed into the paper. A rainy alley. A woman with Eve’s face collapsing against a brick wall.
Eve’s knees weakened.
Kieran caught her before she fell.
“No,” he breathed.
The image shifted. Kieran stood over her body, one hand gripping a blood-dark knife. His face was younger, unscarred, and devastated.
I had to kill you twice.
The memory ended.
Eve tore herself from Kieran’s grip and seized the page. The ink beneath her fingers warmed.
A line appeared.
EVE CALDER.
DATE OF DEATH: OCTOBER 31, 1927.
She stared at it until the letters blurred.
“That’s tonight,” she said.
Sora made a small, broken sound.
Kieran’s hand found the back of Eve’s neck. Through the pact she felt his disbelief collide with recognition. He had known the date. Somewhere buried beneath the stolen minutes, he had known.
“You said you didn’t remember,” Eve whispered.
“I don’t.”
“Then why do you look like you do?”
His mouth opened. Nothing came out.
The vault lights went dark.
Every cylinder on every shelf flared at once.
Silver memories spilled across the walls—thousands of fragments, thousands of people caught in the same missing thirteen minutes. A child screaming beside a stopped clock. A woman kneeling over a body. Kieran, older and bloodied, carrying Eve through the rain. Eve herself, standing in a room filled with hourglasses.
The images repeated.
Again.
Again.
Every memory pointed to the same night.
October 31, 1927.
Sora turned the final page with shaking fingers.
The handwriting was Eve’s.
Not similar. Not forged. Every slant, every sharp crossbar, every impatient stroke belonged to her.
At the bottom of the page, beneath a list of erased names, one sentence waited in black ink.
EVE CALDER HAS DIED TWICE.
A knock sounded from the other side of the sealed vault door.
Once.
Twice.
Then Kieran’s voice came through the metal, though he was standing beside Eve.
“Open the door,” it said. “Before I kill her again.”