They walked upside-down boulevards where the pavement was the sky and the real sky was a black road full of motionless yellow traffic lights.
Every footstep made a sound like tearing paper.
After seven blocks (or maybe seven seconds; time had started to hiccup), they found the first locals.
A crowd of several hundred stood perfectly still in the middle of an intersection that no longer intersected anything.
They wore office clothes, school uniforms, hospital gowns (whatever they'd been wearing when the city forgot its own name).
Their faces were blank, not smooth, just… unfinished. Like someone had pressed delete halfway through loading the texture.
They were all staring straight up (which was down) at a single floating bus stop sign that still displayed a route number: **00**.
Elias raised a hand. The team stopped.
Riley whispered, "Are they dead?"
"No," Elias said. "Worse. They're placeholders. The city keeps the bodies because it can't remember why it needed people in the first place."
The priest stepped forward, clutching his bone rosary.
"Poor souls," he murmured, and began the rite of extreme unction in Latin.
The moment the first Latin phrase left his mouth, every single placeholder turned its head toward him with a wet clicking sound, like a thousand cameras focusing at once.
Their mouths opened.
Inside each mouth was not a tongue but a tiny upside-down street (complete with streetlamps and miniature placeholders staring upward in infinite regression).
From every throat came the same voice, soft and polite and utterly empty:
"Name, please."
The priest froze.
Elias's hand clamped on his shoulder hard enough to bruise.
"Don't give it one," he hissed. "That's how it finishes you."
The placeholders began walking toward them in perfect synchronization, shoes making no sound on the sky-pavement.
Each step erased a memory from Riley's head. She felt it happen: the smell of her mother's kitchen, the title of her favorite song, the reason she'd run away from the third cult. Gone, like chalk in rain.
She dropped to one knee.
Elias snapped his fingers. Blue fire traced a circle around the entire team in a single heartbeat.
The placeholders stopped exactly one inch outside the chalk line.
Their unfinished faces pressed against an invisible wall, mouths still moving.
"Name, please."
"Name, please."
"Name, please."
The woman with clockwork eyes (her name was Mara, Riley remembered suddenly) took out her Polaroid and shot a picture of the crowd.
The photo developed showing nothing but empty street.
Mara turned the photo over. Someone had already written on the back in neat red ink:
**We were never here. Thank you for reminding us.**
She dropped it like it burned.
Elias crouched, touched the chalk line, and spoke directly to the placeholders.
"I have a counter-offer," he said. "Take mine instead."
He pulled out his own envelope (the one every specialist carried) and slid his Polaroid halfway out.
It was a picture of Elias standing in front of the original Site-19 sign, the day he was recruited. In the photo he was smiling the way people do when they still believe rules can save them.
He held it up so the placeholders could see.
A ripple went through the crowd. Their mouths closed with soft, wet clicks.
The nearest one (a woman in a torn business suit) reached out with fingers that ended in tiny upside-down skyscrapers and gently, almost tenderly, took the photograph from Elias's hand.
The moment skin touched paper, every placeholder exhaled at once.
A wind made of forgotten names swept through the intersection, strong enough to stagger the team inside the circle.
When it cleared, the crowd was gone.
Only the single Polaroid remained, lying face-down on the sky-pavement.
Elias picked it up.
The image had changed.
Now it showed the entire team (all seven of them) standing in that same intersection, but the placeholders were gone and the city was right-side up.
Underneath, new text had appeared in Elias's own handwriting:
**Payment accepted.
Debt transferred.
You are now one name lighter.**
Elias stared at it for a long second, then tucked it away.
Riley grabbed his sleeve. "What did you just give them?"
"Nothing important," he lied. "Just the name of the person I used to be before I started breaking mirrors."
He stepped over the fading chalk line and kept walking.
The others followed, quieter now.
Far above (or below), the floating bus stop sign flickered once and changed its route number to **01**.
Somewhere in the distance, a train that had never arrived finally pulled into a station that no longer existed and opened its doors to no one.
The hunt continued.