The third-floor hallway stretched long and dim, the flickering light overhead casting restless shadows against the weathered brick walls. The air carried the scent of old wood, dust, and the faintest trace of rain drifting in through an open window at the end of the corridor. It smelled lived-in. Settled.
But there was no history here.
Ezra's boots barely made a sound against the floorboards as he followed Mara up the stairs, but something gnawed at him—the unsettling hollowness pressing in from all sides. Buildings always carried echoes of their past—a landlord's tired sighs, the hurried footfalls of tenants late for work, the whisper of a door closing three floors up. Even the quietest places hummed with remnants of the lives lived within them.
Here, there was nothing.
Mara hesitated at her door, fingers clenching around the key so tightly her knuckles whitened. The tremor in her grip betrayed her, though she said nothing. Then, with a sharp inhale, she turned the lock and pushed the door open.
Ezra stepped inside—and his entire body went cold.
The apartment was wrong.
Not just empty. Not just missing Daniel.
It felt like it had never belonged to two people at all.
The air was still. Too still. There was no warmth, no lingering presence of a shared life. The walls—pale and unremarkable—held no whispers of laughter, no echoes of hushed conversations in the late hours of the night. It wasn't just absence. It was wrong, as if no one had ever lived within its walls.
Mara took a slow step forward, arms wrapping around herself as though shielding against the loss pressing in around her.
"It's like he was never here," she whispered.
Ezra's sharp gaze swept over the room. The signs of life were subtle, but they were incomplete. A jacket draped over the back of a chair—but only one. A single coffee mug abandoned in the sink, its rim smudged from recent use. The bed was slightly unmade, but only on one side.
The apartment had reshaped itself around a life that had never known Daniel Finch.
Ezra exhaled, slow and steady, then knelt beside a worn leather armchair near the window. The material was soft, creased from years of use—the kind of chair that should have held a thousand moments. Nights spent reading. Mornings with coffee in hand. The weight of someone sinking into it after a long day.
It should have been full of memory.
Ezra pressed his palm to the armrest.
Nothing.
No hum of the past. No flickers of old conversations.
Just empty static.
A sharp prickle ran up his arm, like touching a place that should be warm but was suddenly, impossibly cold. His breath came a fraction too fast. This wasn't natural fading. Fading was slow, uneven—memories buried under time like layers of dust.
This was surgical. Precise. A clean cut through history.
Ezra pulled back, flexing his fingers as if to shake off the void clinging to them.
"This chair," he said, voice careful. "It belonged to him?"
Mara swallowed hard and nodded. "His favorite," she murmured. "He sat there every evening."
Ezra touched it again, pressing deeper, reaching beyond the silence.
Still nothing.
A slow, creeping dread settled in his gut. Whatever had done this hadn't just erased Daniel. They had rewritten the space around him.
He pushed to his feet, gaze scanning the apartment with sharper intent. If memory traces had been stripped from this place, there had to be something left. A fragment. A mistake.
Then, he saw it.
A book.
It sat on the shelf like the others, its spine lined up neatly, but it was off. Barely—a fraction of an inch pulled forward, as though it had been taken out and hastily returned.
Ezra strode toward it, fingers brushing the cover.
A flicker.
A whisper of something so faint, it barely registered.
His pulse quickened. Whoever had erased Daniel Finch had missed this. A single crack in the void.
He turned back to Mara.
"I might be able to pull something from this," he said. "Something they didn't erase."
Mara's eyes widened, hope flickering through the grief. "Do it."
Ezra took a breath, steadied himself, and reached out with his mind—diving into the past before it, too, could be stolen.