Abel did not sleep.
He lay still long enough for the room to lose its edges, then longer, until the dark thinned and the wall opposite the bed began to suggest itself again. He watched the faint outline where plaster met beam and tried to remember when he had last slept through the night without waking to listen for something. The memory did not come. He waited for it longer than was reasonable, then accepted that it would not.
When he stood, his legs felt as though they had already been used. Not sore. Just heavy, like tools left out in the rain. He waited for the sensation to pass. It did not. He decided that moving would be better than standing still and moved.
The first bell rang on time.
It sounded normal.
The sound reached him cleanly, without echo or distortion, and that normality pressed against his chest harder than any alarm would have. He remained where he was and listened until the bell finished ringing, until the silence returned and failed to reassure him.
He dressed without care and noticed the absence of it halfway through. His hands worked correctly, but without attention. He buttoned his shirt once and left the final button undone. The seam on his shoulder caught and he ignored it. The fabric pulled slightly with each movement, a persistent irritation that kept him aware of his body when he would have preferred not to be.
He tightened the strap of his pouch. It creaked. He did not loosen it.
Outside, the street was already awake, but not hurried. People moved with purpose, not urgency, as if the day had been explained to them in advance. Abel passed faces he recognized and failed to attach names to them. The failure irritated him, then worried him, then slid away when he realized he had no energy left to pursue it.
At the registry, Matthieu was waiting.
He stood near Abel's desk with his hands folded behind his back. His posture was formal in a way that felt practiced rather than natural. The folded notice was visible in his pocket. His expression was composed, but thin, as if the night had taken something from him and left the shape behind. "You're early," Matthieu said.
"Yes." "Good." The word lingered longer than it should have. "There's a discrepancy," Matthieu said. Abel waited.
"A minor one," Matthieu added. "It won't affect operations." "What kind of discrepancy," Abel asked.
Matthieu removed the notice from his pocket and unfolded it carefully, smoothing the crease with his thumb. The paper was clean. Too clean. No smudges, no hesitation marks, nothing to suggest it had been handled by anyone uncertain.
"There's a route listed that doesn't align with the revised manifests," he said. "It needs to be corrected."
Abel felt the word corrected settle somewhere behind his ribs. "Corrected how." "Removed," Matthieu said. "Reassigned. The documentation needs to match the current structure."
Abel stared at the notice. The route name sat there in his own handwriting. The ink had bled slightly at the curve of a letter, exactly where he remembered pressing too hard.
"That route carried people," Abel said. Matthieu nodded once. "It did." "Where are they," Abel asked.
"They were transferred." "To where." "That information isn't included," Matthieu said. "It doesn't need to be." Abel felt pressure begin behind his eyes. Not pain yet. Just the sense of something being held back. "If I don't change it," Abel said.
"Then it will be changed anyway," Matthieu replied. "Without your name attached."
"And if I do." Matthieu's shoulders relaxed. "Then the record remains consistent." Abel's voice was steady. "Consistent with what." "With what has already happened," Matthieu said. His voice wavered, barely. "This isn't a decision. It's documentation." Abel sat.
The chair creaked beneath him. The sound felt intrusive. He placed the notice on the desk and flattened it with his palm. The surface felt uneven. He pressed harder, then lifted his hand and found nothing wrong. "How many," Abel asked.
Matthieu shook his head. "That isn't listed." Abel closed his eyes.
For a moment, he imagined standing up and leaving. The image came fully formed. The weight of the door handle. The sound it would make. The street outside. The image dissolved as soon as he tried to hold it.
"If I write it," Abel said, "they disappear from the record." "They already have," Matthieu said softly. "You'd only be reflecting it."
Something inside Abel loosened. Not relief. Something worse. The sense that the problem had finally resolved into a shape that could be endured. He reached for the pen.
His hand shook. Only slightly. He noticed it and waited. The shaking stopped. He placed the pen to the page and paused, aware of how deliberate the moment felt, aware that this awareness itself was becoming a kind of indulgence.
He wrote. The letters formed exactly as they should. His handwriting looked calm. Controlled. He finished the entry and lifted the pen. For a moment, nothing happened.
Abel held his breath without realizing he had. He waited for the familiar relief that came when a task was finished and the world returned to its ordinary shape. He waited for the ledger to remain a ledger instead of becoming a verdict.
The pen's tip hovered above the page. Ink gathered there, heavy with its own patience, threatening to fall.
Matthieu stood on the other side of the desk, hands folded. He was not smiling. He was not cruel. He looked like a man who had chosen his posture carefully and now refused to change it, because changing it would admit feeling.
Abel looked at what he had written. The letters were clean. That was the obscene part. The entry looked like truth. It looked like the kind of truth that could be filed, stamped, and used to accuse someone else later.
A thought rose in Abel's mind, quiet and relentless. Truth is morally obligatory.
He had believed that sentence for years without being forced to test it. He had carried it like a charm, polished by repetition. Now the sentence felt less like a charm and more like a knife held to his throat.
He turned his head slightly, just enough to see the notice board across the room. The board was blanker than it had been yesterday. Pinholes remained. The absence of notices felt louder than any proclamation.
He could stand now, Abel realized, and refuse. He could push the ledger away, walk to the door, and let his refusal become a scene. He could do that and feel briefly clean. And then what.
Then Matthieu would walk out and return with men in better coats. Then the refusal would be recorded, and Abel would be filed under another heading, another kind of discrepancy.
Abel's mind tried to find a third path, a compromise that did not corrupt him and did not kill him. The registry did not reward third paths. The registry rewarded compliance and punished imagination.
He had written. The act was done. Now he wanted to pretend the act could be undone by regret.
Matthieu's voice came softly. "You did what you had to," he said. Abel stared at him. "No," Abel said, and surprised himself with the steadiness of the word. "I did what was easiest." Matthieu's eyes flicked downward, then back up. "Easiest is sometimes the same as necessary," he replied.
Abel wanted to strike him. Not out of hatred. Out of desperation, as if violence could break the system's spell. Abel's hands were still on the desk. His fingers pressed so hard the wood creaked.
Matthieu added, almost gently, "Do you think the men who built this place built it to be kind."
Abel swallowed. He tasted iron. Whether it was blood or bile he could not tell.
He tried to stand, and his chair scraped the floor too loudly. Several clerks flinched and then pretended they had not. Their faces stayed down. Their pens moved faster.
Abel took one step back from the desk. The air shifted.
Not like a gust. Like a measure.
Abel felt his stomach clench. The space between his chest and the desk felt wrong, as if the desk were farther away than it should be, and then, in the next blink, closer. He blinked again. The distance changed again, rearranging itself with a casualness that made him nauseous.
He swallowed hard and forced his eyes to focus on a fixed point, the corner of the desk where an old ink stain had soaked into the grain. The stain had a familiar shape. Abel had traced it absentmindedly once. That memory did not help him now.
Matthieu's face sharpened in attention. "Abel," he said. Abel did not answer. He was listening to something else. The bell.
It had not rung. Not yet. But Abel felt the pre-bell movement in the room, the way shoulders adjusted, the way paper edges lifted, the way the whole registry inhaled as if time were about to speak. He had always thought the bell made people move. Now he suspected people moved and the bell only made it official.
The room felt too bright. Or perhaps Abel's eyes had decided to admit more light than they should.
His hearing sharpened and dulled in alternating pulses. The scratch of quills became loud as rain. Then it vanished. Abel heard his own heartbeat in his throat, and then his heartbeat sounded far away, as if it belonged to someone in the next room.
He pressed a hand to the desk to steady himself. His palm landed an inch short of where he expected. His fingers closed on air.
Panic flashed through him, hot and stupid. He reached again, slower, and found the desk. Wood under his hand. Real. But the first miss stayed in his body like a warning.
He had always trusted distance. Distance had always been honest. It was one of the few honest things. Now distance was behaving like bureaucracy, like a rule that could be altered without explanation.
Abel pushed away from the desk.
The floor did not meet his foot where he thought it would. His boot slid on nothing, then caught suddenly on the edge of the plank. Pain shot up his ankle. His knee buckled. Abel grabbed the desk hard enough to jolt the ink pot. The ink pot wobbled, did not fall, then wobbled again as if deciding whether gravity still applied. Abel's vision tunnelled.
He heard Matthieu speaking, but the words were muffled, as if spoken through wet cloth. Abel saw Matthieu's mouth move. Abel saw the clerks look up briefly, eyes wide, then look down again, desperate to remain uninvolved.
A thought rose in Abel's mind with the clarity of a cruel joke. Everything can be wrong right down to the core.
Abel's breath came shallow. He tried to force air into his lungs and felt his ribs resist, not because they could not expand, but because the space inside his chest felt miscounted, as if his body had been measured incorrectly.
He was not dying. That would have been simpler. Something inside him was being corrected, line by line. The bell rang. The sound was ordinary.
That was what made it unbearable.
The bell did not distort. It did not crack. It rang the way it always rang, and the room moved on it the way it always moved, and yet Abel's world slipped sideways as if the bell had been rung in the wrong place in reality.
The desk lengthened away from him, then snapped close enough that his knuckles struck wood. Pain flared. Abel gasped and tasted blood. He did not remember biting his tongue, but his mouth was suddenly warm.
He tried to step back and found himself stepping forward.
He tried to lift his hand and felt it lift, but the sensation arrived late, as if his nerves were reporting by courier and the courier had taken the long road.
Abel's mind scrabbled for explanation, and found none. The registry had no form for this. The church had no hymn. The bell had no schedule entry for a man losing his measurements.
Matthieu's voice cut through, closer now. "Abel," he said again, sharper. "Sit. Sit down."
Abel wanted to obey because obedience was a habit carved into him by years of bells and ledgers. He also wanted to refuse because obedience had brought him here. He tried to sit.
The chair was not where he expected. His thighs hit wood too soon. He lurched, half seated, half falling. The floor rose to meet him and then dropped away. Abel clutched the desk again, tearing a strip of skin under his glove.
Pain anchored him for a heartbeat. Then the pain drifted too, delayed, as if even pain could be made procedural. His eyes found the ledger again. The entry he had written sat there quietly. The ink had already begun to dry. If he had not written it, Abel thought, would this be happening.
He did not know, and not knowing felt like betrayal. He had wanted truth to be morally obligatory. Now he wanted truth to be simple.
Abel's vision darkened at the edges. The ceiling seemed impossibly far away, a distant white plane that might never be reached again.
Someone moved fast at the edge of his sight.
A hand closed around his shoulder, firm, anchoring. Not Matthieu's. The grip was steadier than fear, practiced in a way the registry's hands were not. Abel turned his head slightly. Silas was there.
He had not been there a moment ago. Or Abel had not been able to see him. Abel could not tell which.
Silas's eyes met his. They were steady in a way the rest of the world was not, and in that steadiness Abel felt something like permission to collapse.
"I can stay," Silas said, low enough that only Abel would hear. "If you want."
Abel tried to speak. His tongue felt too heavy. His mouth would not form the words he needed.
Silas's grip tightened slightly, not painful, simply real. Abel's vision narrowed further.
He heard the bell again, or perhaps he only heard the echo of the bell inside his skull. The sound folded into the sound of water against pilings, the sound of a river deciding whether to fog. Then everything went black. Then the room tilted.
Not violently. Just enough to make him brace against the desk. He looked down at the ink drying on the page and felt a sudden certainty that the letters were settling into place somewhere beyond the paper as well.
A wave of dizziness passed through him. The space around him compressed, then expanded, like a lung drawing breath. The desk felt closer. The wall farther away. He blinked and the distances rearranged themselves again. He stood.
The floor slanted beneath his feet, then corrected itself. Abel took a step and felt his foot land sooner than expected, the ground rising to meet him. He stopped, heart beating faster now, and tried to place his foot carefully. It landed wrong again.
The archive doorway seemed farther away than it should have been. Then nearer. He reached it too quickly and struck his shoulder against the frame. Pain flared, sharp and grounding, and for a moment the world steadied.
Inside the archive, the shelves stood where they always had, but the space between them felt wrong. Too narrow. Too wide. He stepped forward and nearly collided with a table that should have been farther away. He pressed his hand against it and felt the wood vibrate faintly, as if responding. The map was gone. Not missing. Not removed. Gone.
The volume that should have held it was still there. Abel pulled it free and opened it. Blank pages.
No torn edges. No sign of removal. Nothing to suggest anything had ever been there at all.
His breathing quickened. He backed away and felt his heel strike nothing. He staggered and caught himself against the wall.
The wall was closer than it should have been.
He pressed his palm against it and felt resistance that was neither solid nor soft. The space between his hand and the wall compressed, then released.
"This isn't right," he said, and the words sounded inadequate. He returned to the registry.
The ledger lay open on his desk. The entry he had written sat among the others, unremarkable. He searched for the route name and did not find it. He turned pages. Nothing.
The pressure behind his eyes sharpened into pain. His vision blurred at the edges. Corners refused to meet. His body lagged behind his intentions, movements arriving too early or too late. He dropped to his knees.
The world lurched, distances collapsing and expanding in nauseating waves. His muscles clenched without instruction. He felt as if he were falling sideways through the room while remaining perfectly still. Then it stopped.
The room snapped back into place with brutal suddenness. Abel lay on the floor, gasping, sweat soaking his clothes. He felt emptied out, as if something essential had passed through him and left only the shape behind. Footsteps approached. He lifted his head. Silas stood there. Not alarmed. Not surprised. Just a present.
"You felt it," Silas said quietly. Abel tried to speak. His mouth opened. No sound came out. Silas crouched, his face level with Abel's. His eyes were steady in a way the rest of the world was not. "I can stay," Silas said. "If you want."
Abel's vision darkened at the edges. The ceiling seemed impossibly far away.
Silas's hand closed around his shoulder, firm, anchoring. Then everything went black.