Outside the narrow window a shadow moved at the alley's lip — A hooded figure pacing the dark like a cat who had learned to wear human patience. Mara's chest pinched. She knew that silhouette the way you know the step before a rainstorm: deliberate, watching.
The figure paused and, without stepping into the pool of light, spoke in a voice that was too
amused to be casual. "You always pick the interesting things, don't you?"
Mara's hand clamped on the keepsong. Its warmth spread into her ribs like a secret. Sene
followed her eyes. "Who's there?" she asked, not quite ready to be frightened.
The hooded man's laugh was soft, without threat. "No one you'd like." He tipped something small in his pocket — a stamped brass token that flashed before he retreated into the alley. "Call me Curious."
They decided to ignore it for now. The city did not lack its fair share of crazy people.
By the time Mara sank back onto the mattress, her pulse was loud enough that the room seemed to answer. She had kept the keepsong because she had a private intuitive ache she couldn't explain — not greed, not heroism. Something like hunger for a thing that remembered.
She did not know yet that keeping it would cost her more than a night's safety. She did not know what it contained beyond warmth and the residue of another person's care. She did not know whose words had been written beneath it. She did not know whether the voice she heard meant danger or invitation. She knew only the economics of small decisions.
Mara slept with one hand on the tin. The scar beneath the other felt like proof that she was alive and present.
Somewhere below, a public board blinked: ANOMALOUS NODE LOGGED.
It was supposed to be an ordinary night. The kind that passed without asking to be
remembered, the kind you let slip by so the city wouldn't bother learning your name.
Mara lay still, counting the breaths between the building's systems cycling. She had learned the rhythm over years, learned where the pauses lived. When the hum stayed even, the night stayed quiet. Quiet meant unremarkable. Unremarkable meant safe.
Then the sound slipped in.
Not sharp. Not loud. Not even sudden. It arrived the way a thought sometimes did — already halfway formed, already occupying space. As if it had always been there and she was the one who had failed to notice.
The lullaby threaded through the walls, low and practiced, the sort of melody people recognized before they realized they were listening to it. It settled into the air with the confidence of something that expected compliance.
Mara frowned into her pillow.
"Lullabies?" she muttered. "At this time?"
She turned her head slightly, careful not to shift the mattress.
"Sene? You hearing this?"
No response. Not even a change in breathing. Mara exhaled through her nose. Typical.
Sene could sleep through anything — not because she was calm, but because she trusted the world far more than it deserved. Sirens, arguments in the corridor, a cart crashing down the steps once — none of it ever pulled her fully awake. If the city decided to end in the middle of the night, Sene would probably miss the announcement and complain about it in the morning.
"Unbelievable," Mara whispered. "We don't even get a quiet night anymore, do we?"
The lullaby deepened.
That was the wrong part. It didn't announce an emergency. It didn't demand attention. It
didn't even sound new. It behaved like a habit. Like a memory the city had agreed to share
and never question.
Cold air slid through the room, thin and deliberate. Mara's instincts tightened. She reached beneath the mattress without looking, fingers finding the keepsong by feel alone. The moment she lifted it, the cold eased — not gone, just redirected.
She slipped the chain over her head and let the crescent rest against her collarbone.
It felt like an answer she hadn't asked for.
Mara pulled the pillow tighter over one ear and glanced down at the keepsong, the metal catching a narrow blade of streetlight and reflecting it back at her — dull, watchful. Her fingers brushed the scar on her forearm without thinking, a small, practiced motion, like checking the edge of a blade to remind herself it was still there.
"Strange timing," she murmured. Not questioning it. Just noting it. Questions were loud.
Outside, something hiccupped.
A vending column in the plaza coughed once, as if choking on an old command, then corrected itself. The public board across the street flickered, smoothed its display, and
continued as though nothing had happened. From somewhere below, a child's toy chimed a wrong note — high, off-key — and then cut itself short.
Mara sat up slowly.
The city had a way of listening that didn't feel like listening. Walls carried more than sound.
Floors remembered weight. Even stillness could be logged if you let it linger too long.
She closed her fingers around the keepsong, careful not to let it scrape or catch the light. She had learned how to move without announcing herself — how to make actions look like accidents, how to give the city nothing worth marking if anyone bothered to look back later.
For a moment — just a moment — she felt it. Not eyes.
Not presence. Attention.
The sensation pressed close, intimate and impersonal at once. Not watching her, exactly —
measuring her. Like a shape being penciled into a ledger, not yet inked, but close. Her pulse thudded once, hard enough to make her wince.
A flicker of doubt surfaced, sharp and unwelcome.
stayquiet
The words didn't arrive as sound. They settled instead, thin and certain, in the space behind
her thoughts — already there before she realized she hadn't been thinking them herself.
Mara froze.
Her breath caught halfway in, then eased out again, slow and deliberate. She didn't turn her head. She didn't search the corners of the room. Looking made things worse. Looking turned instinct into evidence.
She pressed the keepsong against her chest and let the city finish whatever calculation it was running.
She scanned the doorway only with her peripheral vision, the stairwell beyond reduced to shadow and suggestion. Nothing moved. Nothing revealed itself. Nothing she could prove.
"I wonder…" she started, the thought forming too close to something dangerous, too close to
a name.
She didn't finish it.
The knock came down hard against the door.
Once — heavy enough to make the plant shudder in its pot. Twice — measured, patient, like someone testing a surface. The third time wasn't a knock at all.
It was a demand.
Sene didn't stir.
Mara closed her fingers around the keepsong and waited. Her heartbeat roared in her ears, loud enough she was sure it would give her away. Below her, Sene's breathing remained slow and oblivious — a soft, infuriating sound. For a wild second, Mara imagined shaking her awake, clamping a hand over her mouth — anything to make the room quieter.
She didn't move.
Impulse was how people ended up remembered. Silence flooded the space.
Not relief.
Not absence.
Pressure.
Mara held her breath longer than felt safe. And then the certainty returned — sharp and intimate — that this wasn't the first time she'd been here like this. The recognition came without memory, like a scar she didn't remember earning.
The quiet stretched on.
Not the kind that meant someone had gone — the kind that meant nothing had been decided yet.
She stayed motionless long after the moment should have passed. Her grip loosened only when her fingers began to ache. Somewhere in the building, a door opened and closed.
Footsteps crossed a floor. The city exhaled and resumed its regulated hum as if it had never paused at all.
What's that… noise?" Sene mumbled from the lower bunk, turning onto her side.
Mara swallowed. Her throat burned. "Nothing," she said, and made it sound true. "Go back to sleep."
Sene did. Immediately.
Mara didn't move.
When she finally dared to breathe normally again, the keepsong was warm in her palm — warmer than it should have been. It hummed faintly, not quite sound, not quite vibration, a frequency that settled into her bones instead of her ears.
The lullaby had ended.
The city had returned to silence. Mara had not.
Sleep hovered, then retreated. Too many questions circled just out of reach, too many gaps her mind refused to fill. Trusting the instincts that had kept her alive this long, she curled her fingers tighter around the keepsong and kept it close, as if letting go might invite the night to finish what it had started.