She went back to the bookshop the next morning because it was the only place she knew.

She told herself this was the practical reason, which it was, and the only reason, which it was not. She had spent her second night in Bellgrave cataloguing the practical reasons not to spend more time in Cassian Vey's company than was strictly necessary. He was withholding information. He had anticipated her movements before she made them. He had told her to avoid the railway station and given her a reason that was technically true and operationally evasive. These were all things she had noticed, all things she had written down, all things that should have produced caution.

Instead she put on the clothes she had been wearing for two days and went downstairs at eight in the morning.

He was at the worktable again, examining the same instrument as before, or one very similar to it. He did not look up when she came in.

"There is tea," he said.

There was. She found it on the small table near the front of the shop, in a pot this time rather than a cup, and she poured herself a cup and stood by the window and watched the street wake up while he worked at the table and neither of them spoke for several minutes, which felt less uncomfortable than it probably should have.

"I want to understand what I can do," she said, when the street had finished waking up and she had drunk most of the tea.

He set down his instrument.

"Your ability," he said. It was not a question, but it had the shape of confirmation, like he was noting a correct answer.

"I have seen things when I touch people," she said. "Fragments. Images. Emotions sometimes, rather than pictures. One of the landladies I passed yesterday on the street: I brushed her hand picking up something she dropped, and I saw a very clear image of a harbor at sunset and someone standing at the end of a dock." She paused. "The man who sold me the pastry: I touched his hand taking the change, and I had three seconds of something that felt like a very good afternoon, warm light, bread rising, something being finished."

Cassian had turned fully toward her by this point.

"Afterglow," he said.

"Tell me what that means."

He was quiet for a moment in the particular way that she was learning meant he was deciding how much to tell her, which was different from the quiet that meant he was deciding how to tell it. This was the longer pause, the one where she could almost hear the internal calibration happening.

"Every person carries one or more possible futures," he said. "These appear as images, emotional residue, sensory memory. What you are seeing when you touch people is their Afterglow: a fragment of something that may happen to them. It is not prophecy," he added, and the addition had the quality of something he emphasized specifically. "It shows possibility, not certainty. The future can be changed."

"And I can see it through touch."

"Yes. It is called Future Sight. It is rare."

She looked at her hands, and then at him, and she thought about the previous morning, about reaching for the book on the high shelf and catching herself, and the specific clarity of the impulse that had made her reach for it: the title on the spine, a collection of navigational charts for a coast she did not recognize, and when she had touched the spine she had felt something faint and layered, like an echo of many hands, all of the people who had held this book before, all of them reaching forward into their own futures, none of which she could identify fully.

She had not mentioned that to him yet. She was not sure why.

"What about you?" she said.

He held very still for a moment. The instrument on the table caught the morning light and distributed it across his hands.

"I have no Afterglow," he said. "There is nothing to read."

"That is what I thought," she said. "But when I touched you the other night, it was not nothing. It was dark. Not empty dark, the way a blank page is empty. Dark the way a room is dark when there is something in it and the light is off."

He looked at her for a long moment.

The shop was quiet around them in the way that Agnes's shop had been quiet: full rather than empty, a quiet with texture and content. Outside on the street she could hear footsteps passing, two women in conversation, the words indistinct. A bird somewhere near. Inside, just the two of them and the quality of a morning with something unresolved in it.

"I will need to examine some books," she said. "May I touch the stock?"

A pause. "With care," he said. "Some volumes are sensitive to contact."

She set down her teacup and moved to the nearest shelf, the one labeled Consequence, and ran her fingers lightly along the spines. Faint things, most of them: impressions of other readers, other hands, emotions too diluted by time and distance to be anything more than tone. Anticipation on this one. Satisfaction on that one. Grief on this narrow volume in faded green cloth, grief so old it had gone still, which was the worst kind.

She pulled her hand back from the grief book and moved down the shelf.

At the end of the Consequence section, tucked between two larger volumes, was a small book bound in red leather. When she touched it the Afterglow that came through was not faint and impressionistic but sharp and recent: a woman standing at a window in a house she did not recognize, watching something that was not visible in the fragment, and the feeling that accompanied the image was a very specific combination of hope and terror that Mina recognized from her own experience of submitting manuscripts.

She pulled her hand away.

"Someone is waiting on news," she said. "Something important. Recent."

He was watching her from the worktable. "The book came in yesterday," he said. "From a woman named Adela. She is waiting on the result of a medical examination."

Mina looked at the red book and then at him. "Do you always know their situations?"

"I do research when I acquire," he said. "The provenance of an object includes the life around it."

She absorbed this. He catalogued the emotional context of his inventory. This was either very thoughtful or very strange or, as was possible with this particular person, both simultaneously.

She moved toward the worktable. He did not move away, which she had half-expected him to do, but he did straighten slightly, the posture of someone who was deciding in real time whether to maintain their position.

She was three feet away when she said: "May I?"

He looked at her hands. He understood what she was asking.

A pause that was longer than any of the others. Then he held out his hand, palm up, a deliberate gesture, considered. Not tentative, not reluctant. Deliberate.

She touched his hand.

The darkness came immediately, the same darkness she had felt in the alley when she had touched him by accident, but this time she stayed with it because she had asked and he had allowed it and she owed him the full attempt. She stayed in it and turned it over in her mind, the way she turned over a sentence that was not quite right, looking for what it was actually saying.

It was not emptiness. She had touched enough objects to know what the absence of resonance felt like, and this was not that. This was presence without image: something there, something that had texture and weight and even, faintly, direction, the way a darkened stage had direction even when the lights were off. You knew where the wings were. You knew where the center was. There was a shape to it even without illumination.

She stayed for a long moment.

Then something shifted, somewhere in the dark interior of the reading, and she caught the edge of an image, very faint, more impression than picture: a person standing in what might have been a ruined city, the light wrong, the air wrong, and in their arms, another person. The person they were holding was very still in a way that had nothing to do with sleep.

She pulled away.

Her heart was going faster than it should have been, which she noted with the clinical part of her mind that was always noting things, and she looked at him and he was looking at her with an expression that was not blank and not composed but something she had not seen on him before: attentive in a way that had nothing to do with analysis.

"Well," she said, and her voice was slightly steadier than her heart. "There is something there."

"Yes," he said. He lowered his hand. "I know."

"The darkness is not absence," she said. "It is more like a space that was cleared. Like something was taken out of it."

He said nothing. But he did not look away.

"I am not going to ask you what I saw," she said. "Not right now."

He said, quietly: "Thank you."

That was not a response she had expected. She had expected deflection, or a controlled non-answer, or the particular precision of a person who had practiced answering questions they were not going to fully answer. Thank you was something else. Thank you was someone who had braced for a door opening and found it did not.

She went back to the tea table and poured herself another cup, because she needed something to do with her hands, and because her heart was still going faster than warranted and she did not want him to see her accounting for that.

"I can be useful," she said, from across the shop. "Future Sight. If you are looking for something, I can tell you things about objects, about people, that you cannot determine any other way."

He was quiet for a moment. She had her back to him and she heard him pick up the instrument on the worktable and set it down again.

"I am aware," he said.

"And you need the help."

Another pause. Shorter this time. "Yes," he said. "I need the help."

She turned around. He was looking at her with an expression she could not entirely read but was beginning to have hypotheses about, the kind of expression that occurred on a face that was usually careful when it had, for a moment, forgotten to be.

"Then we should talk," she said, "about what you are actually looking for."

He looked at her for a long moment, and she looked back, and the morning light from the shop windows was warm on the books around them and the street outside was going about its business and the instrument on the worktable caught the light and threw thin lines of it across the walls, and she thought: this is where it starts. Whatever this is. This is where it starts.

"Sit down," he said.

She sat.

He told her, in the careful measured way that he told everything, what he was looking for. Not all of it. The shape of it, enough to understand the task, the way you told someone the genre of a book without telling them the ending. His Afterglow had been erased from the magical record. He needed to find out how it had happened and whether it could be reversed. He believed her Future Sight might allow her to read objects and people connected to the case in ways he could not access on his own.

"And if I help you," she said, "you will help me find a way back."

"Yes."

"That is a fair trade."

He nodded once, the nod of a man confirming an agreement.

She held out her hand, and he took it, and they shook on it in the formal old-fashioned way, and she felt the darkness again as their palms met, that specific full-dark presence, and underneath it, very faint, the edge of something that moved.

She did not mention this. Not yet. But she held it in the place she kept things she did not yet understand, beside his name tightening in his grip, beside the room that had been specifically available, beside the image of still hands in a ruined city.

Outside, a bird sang four notes in a pattern she would hear again later and not understand until much later.

Inside, two people who did not fully trust each other shook hands on an agreement that neither of them was going to keep as simply as they had stated it.

She went back to the shelves and touched the next book, and the next, and behind her she heard the scratch of pencil on paper as Cassian began to write something down, and the morning settled around them into the particular shape of two people working in the same room.

She found, to her own surprise, that she did not want to be anywhere else.

She was going to think about that later, she decided. Later was good. Later was a container for a great number of things.

She worked through the afternoon.

The section labeled Distance yielded mostly impressions of travel, of long journeys and arrivals, the Afterglow of people who had gone somewhere significant and returned changed or not returned at all. She found one book that was saturated with the Afterglow of someone who was about to leave Bellgrave for a very long time, the specific bittersweet quality of a planned departure, and she held it for a moment longer than the others because she recognized the feeling from the inside.

She put it back carefully and moved to the next shelf.

Cassian worked at the far end of the shop, cataloguing arrivals, and she was aware of him in the way she was beginning to be consistently aware of him: not constantly, not obsessively, but as a presence she could locate without looking, the way you learned the geography of a room and knew where the furniture was in the dark. She would not have said this was comfortable, exactly. It was more specific than comfort: it was a calibration, the ongoing process of learning where someone was.

She found a book in a red cover that gave her, when she touched it, a flash so vivid she made a small sound.

Cassian was beside her in less time than she could account for.

"What did you see?" he said. His voice was low, not alarmed, but close.

She breathed. "Something very good," she said. "A wedding, I think. The feeling of it. Not the ceremony, the feeling: someone understanding, precisely, that this is the person." She paused. "It was very clear."

He looked at the red book. "The Gable family," he said. "Their son is engaged. They brought the book in last week, the grandmother's favorite. She is not well enough to travel to the celebration."

She looked at the book.

She thought about a grandmother who sent her favorite book ahead of her to a celebration she could not attend, carrying her presence in the object she had loved most. She thought about Agnes and the blank leather-bound book and the inscription that said for when you are ready to go back.

"People put a great deal into the things they love," she said.

"Yes," he said, and his voice had the quality of someone saying something that was both obvious and true in a way they were not accustomed to saying aloud.

She put the red book back and turned toward him and he was closer than she had realized, the lamp between them and beyond it the shelves and beyond that the street with its evening sounds beginning, and he was looking at her with an expression that she was adding new data to every day.

"Can I ask you something," she said, "that is not about the Afterglow case."

He looked slightly wary. "Yes," he said.

"Do you like books?" she said. "Not as objects, not as artifacts. Do you like reading them?"

He blinked. Whatever he had expected, it was not this.

"Yes," he said. "I did. I do, when I have time." He paused. "My family's work made reading feel like cataloguing for a long time. It is difficult to read for pleasure when you spend twelve hours a day reading for information."

"What do you read when you have time?"

He looked at the shelves. A long pause, the considering kind.

"History," he said, "primarily. The kind that is interested in why things happened rather than what things happened." Another pause. "And occasionally poetry, when I want to understand something I cannot get to through prose."

She thought about this. A man who read history for causation and poetry for understanding: this was the most illuminating thing he had told her about himself, and he had told her without noticing he was doing it.

"I read endings first," she said. "Of novels I am thinking about reading. To decide whether the story is worth the investment."

He looked at her. "You read the ending first."

"Yes."

"Does that not remove the purpose of reading?"

"The purpose of reading," she said, "is not to be surprised. It is to understand how things get from beginning to end. Reading the ending first is research."

He was quiet for a moment. Then: "That explains a great deal about your approach to situations."

She looked at him. He was looking at the shelves, but the corner of his mouth had done the thing she had catalogued twice before, the almost-movement.

"You made a joke," she said.

"I made an observation," he said.

"They are sometimes the same thing," she said.

He looked at her then, and whatever the expression was, it was warmer than the one she had come in with that morning, and it was hers, she thought, specifically, generated by this conversation and not available to anyone who had not had it.

She filed it next to the almost-movement and the tightened hand and the warmth through the ring and the very careful thank you and the deliberate pace of his pauses.

She was building a picture. She was not done building it.

But the shape of it, so far, was interesting.

She went back to the shelves and he went back to the worktable and the evening came in through the front windows and neither of them mentioned any of what had just happened, which she was learning was their particular dialect: things said by not being said, understood by the shape of the space around them.

She thought: this is the strangest and most complete conversation I have had in a very long time.

She thought: I am not going to write that down.

She thought: I am absolutely going to write that down.