Tarn’s quarters were suspended along the Spine, bolted directly into the fox’s vertebrae like an afterthought.

  They were issued to clerks after five years of service—close enough to the Crown to feel important, far enough from the Heartcage to avoid temptation. The walls were bare stone, smoothed by generations of occupation. The air always smelled faintly of dust and metal, and beneath it all, the constant low vibration of the fox’s movement hummed through the floor like a second pulse.

  Tarn locked the door behind him.

  The sound echoed too loudly.

  He stood there for a long moment, hand still on the latch, as if expecting a knock that would never come. A summons. A correction. Someone to tell him this was not his responsibility.

  No one came.

  He slid down the door and sat on the floor, knees drawn up, breathing shallowly. His chest felt tight—not pain, exactly, but pressure. As if something were pushing outward from inside him, testing the limits of bone and skin.

  “Routine,” he murmured, the way they were taught. “Structure prevents collapse.”

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  It didn’t help.

  He pulled off his gloves and stared at his hands. Ink stained the creases of his fingers, the lines of his palms. Official ink—chemical, permanent, designed to last longer than skin.

  Every clerk had it. It was considered a mark of diligence.

  Tarn had once been proud of it.

  He crossed the room and poured water into the basin, scrubbing his hands until the skin reddened. The ink lightened, but did not disappear. It never did. The names had soaked too deep.

  On the shelf above his cot sat his ledgers—approved ones, stamped and numbered, each entry validated by three layers of authority. Lives reduced to columns. Deviations corrected. Errors resolved.

  Beneath them, hidden behind a loose stone, was the book he was not allowed to keep.

  He took it out carefully, as if it might object.

  The gray cloth cover was worn soft at the corners. Inside, the pages were uneven, scavenged from rejected forms, bound together with thread from a dismantled ward.

  Names filled the pages. Not records—remnants. People whose files had been closed too quickly. Whose disappearances had not made sense. Whose stories had snagged in his mind and refused to smooth out.

  He opened to the last page.

  Velru, Aera.

  Yren's mother.

  He had written her name years ago, late at night, hands steady, heart quiet. Back then, it had felt like a kindness—this private acknowledgment. A way of saying you were here even as the system erased her.

  Now the name seemed to pulse faintly on the page.

  “I didn’t look away,” Tarn said again, louder this time. “I watched. I signed. I archived.”

  The fox groaned outside the wall, a long, low sound that vibrated the basin and made the water ripple.

  Tarn picked up his pen.

  For the first time, he did not write a name.

  He wrote a sentence.