The library smelled of dust and old binding glue.
It was the kind of place people only visited when they wanted to remember something they didn't know how to say.
Akari moved between the stacks like a person walking along seams in a building — careful not to step on cracks that might fall away.
Shinra watched her from the doorway.
He had no real reason to be there beyond curiosity. The map on Mizuki's screen had pulsed toward this district, then dimmed, then flared again. The root had touched the eastern library with a thread that felt like a finger testing a spine.
He stepped inside.
Shelves rose, patient and tall. A single clerk nodded without surprise. The patrons bent over fragile pages as if they could keep the world small by reading it.
Akari was at a table near the back, a napkin of notes spread around her: scrap paper, worn photographs, a small hand-drawn map with places circled. The pendant at her throat caught the light once and went dull.
When she noticed him she didn't startle. She only folded her hands together like someone holding a thin animal that could skitter.
"You came," she said.
"I came because the grid pointed here," he answered. "And because you were here."
She smiled, small. "People who keep things don't like their places empty."
Hana and Riku lurked near the reference desk. Yuna stood just inside the stacks, eyes scanning, her posture ready.
Mizuki monitored from the comm, voice a soft thread in their ears. "Sensors show a faint lattice under the eastern stacks. It's resonant with the shard's edge. Probability of anchor residue: low but nonzero."
Shinra walked to the table and sat opposite Akari. He watched her fingers toy with the pendant.
"Did it react when you came in?" he asked.
She paused. "Slightly. Like a throat clearing."
He understood that image. Arios translated in the space just behind his thoughts: It observed a familiar pattern. Not a direct match. A cousin signature.
They threaded through the library together.
A child's cough echoed. A woman rearranged volumes. Outside, a truck rattled over a manhole.
The world was ordinary. The net had learned to hide its teeth in afternoons.
A blip lit on Mizuki's feed.
"Micro-resonance spiking near the archives," she said. "Lower basement. Someone's been here recently."
"Someone as in root agents?" Yuna asked.
"Unknown," Mizuki replied. "But the trace profile—old-era metal, thin filaments, like the shard but degraded and threaded into paper fibers. Whoever put this here knows how to fold things into the city fabric."
Akari rose, smoothing her sleeve. "Show me," she said.
They went down.
Basement air tasted cooler and older. Shelves here were thicker with cataloging codes you had to have learned as a child to read. A lamp had been left burning in one corner. Papers lay spread like maps.
On a table, a book lay open face down. Someone had marked a page with a scrap of ribbon.
The ribbon had a pin of tarnished metal — an insignia like a spiral with a missing tooth.
Akari's fingers twitched.
She crossed the room in a few steps, light-footed. Shinra followed.
She lifted the ribbon, palette-boy careful, and the pendant at her throat warmed like a small animal waking.
A hairs-on-the-back-of-the-neck moment crawled through Shinra.
A memory overlay hit him sideways.
Not the jagged throne this time. A classroom. A woman teaching children to write their names on clay tokens. A small hand — callused — pressing an imprint of a spiral into wet clay.
He blinked.
Akari's mouth moved without sound. Her eyes were slightly unfocused, as if she were reading not the paper but the ghost of what had been written there before.
"This is old," she whispered.
Mizuki's scanner chimed. "Composite read: anchor lattice present but dormant. Someone attempted to seed a marker into archival materials and then retreated. The anchor is incomplete but recognizable."
Hana's voice was taut. "Incomplete anchors are bad. They're like splinters. Painful and unpredictable."
"Who would do this?" Riku asked.
"Someone who wants the root to sniff certain archives," Mizuki said. "They want the root to think those volumes are important. They want to make old knowledge into a lure."
Shinra listened to the plan like a surgeon watches a scan. Someone was building a map not of streets but of memory.
Akari's fingers rested on the ribbon.
Her pendant vibrated, a faint tick that only Shinra and the tech gear would notice.
[Peripheral anomaly: synchronized microreactivity with personal relic,] Arios observed.
[Probability of heritage link: moderate.]
"You have family ties to these symbols?" Shinra asked.
She nodded once. "My grandmother said the spiral was a way to keep names from evaporating. She kept the ribbon in a box with prayers." She swallowed. "We thought it was superstition. Maybe it was instruction."
Mizuki's eyes were already scanning the ribbon. "If someone seeds anchors into archival pages that mention persons or events the root recognizes, the root could retro-fit significance. It upgrades the map with human stories."
"Human stories," Shinra repeated. He felt an ache — not only the overlay but an old memory about names and duties. "It wants to know who we remember."
"Maybe it's not the root alone," Akari said quietly. "Maybe someone else is using the root like a hand."
Silence slid under that idea.
Mizuki's fingers moved faster now. "We need to catalog every anchor in this facility. Keep public traffic low. And—" She hesitated. Then, with a scientist's bluntness, "keep Akari under observation. She's connected, and that connection may be useful or dangerous."
Yuna's jaw flicked. "Useful how?"
Mizuki looked up, not unkind. "If she can sense resonant artifacts, she can guide us to seeds before the root finds them. That gives us time to contain or—if we choose—extract data. But she's not a sensor. She's human. We don't run people like instruments."
Akari's eyes met Shinra's.
"I don't want to be a tool," she said.
He saw truth in her words. He also saw the honest, stubborn backbone of someone who'd learned to keep things because no one else would.
"We won't make you one," he said. "We'll ask."
She nodded.
Then Mizuki's feed spiked again.
"Active ping," she said. "Basement north corridor—movement."
A shadow moved between stacks, deliberate and lithe.
Riku whispered, "We have a visual?"
"No," Mizuki said. "But there's a heat signature. Low energy, like a person who carries little but knowledge."
Shinra felt a cold thread of memory wind its way through him—men in cloaks moving between stacks, the scrape of sandals on flagstone.
He tightened his fingers into his palm.
"Prepare," he said.
They did.
Hana lit stabilizers at the entrances. Riku and Daren took flanking positions. Yuna moved to block exits. Mizuki fed their feeds into overlays that pulsed like a heartbeat.
The shadow came closer.
It carried no weapon Shinra could see. It carried a satchel and a soft footfall and a deliberate, unhurried pace.
When the stranger turned a corner and stepped into the lamp's circle, Shinra saw a face that made the breath leave him.
Not because it was unfamiliar.
Because it matched a face in one of his overlay flashes — a thin man with eyes like hammered steel, a scar at the jaw, an air of someone who'd been taught how to make silence a profession.
"Stop," Shinra said.
The man froze.
Akari's hand closed on the pendant until the cord creaked.
"Who are you?" Yuna demanded.
The man looked at his hands, as if remembering where he'd put gloves, then at each of them in turn. His voice was low. "I am someone who forgot his name."
The line in the room tightened.
Mizuki's tablet blinked. "His thermal signature matches no common template. Composition of clothing reads as patched with nonstandard fibers. He's not an Ascendant by our registry."
"Not a Mundane either," Hana said. "Something else."
The man's eyes flicked to Akari. "She keeps things," he said. Not a question. A recognition.
Akari's fingers trembled.
"You shouldn't be here," Shinra said. "Who sent you?"
The man's mouth twisted. "I came because someone lit a name in the stacks. Names travel. They call."
Mizuki's voice was flat with alarm. "He's baiting the bait. He moved the seed. This is an operative move."
Shinra's pulse slowed with a decision like ice: they could detain him. They could ask him questions. They could wait for Authority. Or they could act.
He chose action.
"Why light the anchor?" he asked.
The man's eyes found his in a slow, intentional way. "Not to light it," he said. "To read the echo."
Akari stepped forward, the pendant at her throat brightening like a pulse.
"You read echoes?" she asked.
"I read what the past leaves behind," he replied. "Some of us are archivists who learned to use different tools."
"Tools like the root?" Mizuki cut in. "You weaponize memory?"
"No," he said. "I study what remembers and how it remembers. Sometimes memory is a map. Sometimes it is a trap. I want to know which."
His eyes narrowed a fraction. "You—" he said, addressing Shinra, "—are remembered. That's why I came."
Arias spoke in the space behind Shinra's thoughts: He claims not to be root-linked. He moves like a scavenger of memory. His intent—ambiguous.
Shinra felt a strange clarity. The man's face was a cruelty of habit. He had survived on edges and scraps. He had learned to seek names because names guided him to places others missed.
"Why this library?" Shinra asked.
"Because books keep what people throw away," the man said. "They hide fragments. They are soft nodes the root can't see well — yet. Some of us read where the root is blind."
Mizuki's jaw clenched. "You're playing with dangerous things."
"I know," he said. "But someone has to understand the map before the root redraws it."
Shinra's instincts did not trust him, but he also felt something sharp and simple: the guy was honest enough to be dangerous.
"Leave," Shinra said finally. "And forget this place."
The man's mouth quirked. "You don't get people to forget easily, Shinra." He pronounced the name like an old coin.
Akari's fingers tightened on her pendant until the cord whispered.
She stepped forward. "If you knew how to read, you'd not let the root lead you," she said. "You'd learn from the paper and not the echo."
The man's eyes flicked to her. "You think you know how to preserve names?" he asked. "Keep them then. Hide them better."
He turned away.
At the threshold he paused and looked back with a soft and terrible honesty.
"Remember this," he said. "When bones are old, songs are easier to steal than you think."
Then he left.
The lamp's circle felt colder when he was gone.
Mizuki scrubbed the feed. "We logged him. We'll track movement out of the city."
Yuna shook her head once. "We can't be everywhere."
Shinra felt the overlay hum again — not a memory but a warning. Names are a currency. Someone else collects them. Someone else knows how to use the root as a blade.
Akari's pendant warmed and then cooled.
She looked at him with a sort of tired resolve. "You're a name in the noise now," she said. "That's dangerous. But names are also how you find people. They're how you call."
He met her eyes, and for the first time since waking in this era, he did not feel like a relic.
He felt like a point on a map.
And the map was being redrawn.
Outside, the library sighed. The city kept breathing.
Inside, Akari folded the ribbon into her palm and closed her fingers around the memory like someone closing a book.