The tea was the correct temperature again.

Mina noticed this while sitting across from Cassian at the table in the back of the shop, which she had understood by now was the table they would use for conversations that required two people sitting down rather than one person standing and one person moving around the room. The table was small and old and had rings from decades of cups on its surface, and the chair she was sitting in had a leg that was slightly uneven, and the chair he was sitting in was the better one, which she felt was a statement about whose space this was even if he had not intended it.

He had made two cups of tea and placed hers in front of her before she had asked for it.

She wrapped her hands around it and looked at him across the table.

"You have no Afterglow," she said. "Tell me what that means, specifically."

He looked at the table for a moment. His hands were on the surface, not clasped but resting, the same careful stillness she had noticed before.

"Every person born in Avelune is registered in the Afterglow system when they are children," he said. "The system catalogues their Afterglow, which may change as they grow, as their future shifts with their choices. A trained reader can access the record and see what possibilities exist for a given person." He paused. "My record was removed."

"By who?"

"By me."

She looked at him. He was looking at the table.

"You removed your own Afterglow from the record," she said.

"Yes."

"How."

"There is a method. It is not common and it is not simple and most people do not know it exists." He picked up his tea and held it without drinking. "I knew it because of my family's work. My family are archivists. Have been for several generations."

She thought about this. A family that kept the records of futures. A man who had, five years ago by his own count, removed himself from the record entirely. She thought about the darkness she had felt when she touched him, the particular quality of it, presence without image. Something removed rather than never there.

"You said you saw something in your Afterglow," she said. "Something you could not survive."

"Yes."

"And you removed the Afterglow to prevent it."

He looked up from the table then and met her eyes, and his expression was the careful composed one but with something underneath it that she was getting better at reading. Something that had been carrying its own weight for a long time.

"I believed," he said, "that if the Afterglow no longer existed in the record, the event within it could not occur."

"Did it work?"

"I do not know yet," he said. "The event has not occurred. The time when it was meant to occur has not yet arrived."

She looked at him for a moment. "You have been operating without a future for five years," she said, "waiting to see if removing it stopped what was in it."

"Yes."

"That is a very long time to live in a provisional state."

Something moved across his face. "Yes," he said, again, but the word was slightly different this time, slightly less controlled, as though the simple agreement had gotten out before the review process could catch it.

She thought about the vision she had seen when she touched him, the image at the edge of the darkness: still hands, ruined city, someone being held. She had not told him about it. She was not going to tell him about it today. There were things she needed to understand before she handed them over, particularly to the person they concerned.

"And you believe my Future Sight can help you find out what happened," she said.

"I believe it may help me trace the connection between my erased Afterglow and certain objects and people that were connected to it," he said. "Whether this will tell us anything useful, I cannot say. But it is a possibility that did not exist before you arrived."

"Before I fell through the door," she said.

"Yes."

She looked at him steadily. "You are going to tell me eventually how you knew I was coming. Or at least that you did know."

He met her eyes and did not look away. "Yes," he said. "I am going to tell you that."

She accepted this because it was more than she had expected him to offer.

"I will help you," she said. "For the reasons I stated this morning. You help me find a way home; I help you with whatever you need my ability for. But I want you to be clear about something." She leaned forward slightly, not aggressively but with the specific emphasis of someone who had decided to say a thing directly rather than around the edges. "I am not a tool. I am a person who has a useful skill. You can ask me to use that skill and I may agree or I may not, depending on the situation. What you cannot do is manage information in ways that affect my ability to make informed decisions. I have already noticed you doing this. I would prefer you stopped."

He was very still.

She waited.

"I understand," he said. There was something in his voice that she had not heard before, something that might have been, in a different register, something close to respect.

"Good," she said. She picked up her tea. "Now. What do we do first?"

Before he could answer, the sound came from behind them: a high, thin, very clear scream, somewhere between a human voice and a sound no human throat could produce, and it was coming from the shelves.

Mina was on her feet before she had decided to stand.

Cassian was already moving, crossing the shop with the directed speed of someone who had dealt with this category of emergency before, navigating between tables and shelves without touching anything, reaching the section she had been examining earlier in the morning, Consequence, and the screaming was louder here, a vibration in the air that she felt in her back teeth.

The book that was screaming was not the red one, not the grief book. It was a volume she had not touched, a thick book in black cloth binding with no title on the spine, and it was shaking slightly on the shelf, vibrating in time with the sound.

Cassian put his hand on the spine.

The sound stopped.

Complete silence, the particular silence that follows a very loud noise.

He kept his hand on the book for a moment, then carefully, with both hands, took it off the shelf and held it the way you held a frightened animal: firm enough to contain, gentle enough not to increase the distress.

"This has happened before?" Mina asked.

"Not this one," he said. "Others."

"What does it mean?"

"It means someone has attempted to access the record connected to this book remotely," he said. "A forced read, from a distance." He turned the book in his hands, examining it. "Someone who knew it was here."

"Is that common?"

"No."

She looked at the book and then at him. "Is it connected to what you are looking for?"

He was quiet for a moment. "I do not know yet," he said.

She did not believe him, entirely. But she also thought that this particular uncertainty might be genuine, that he was telling her the version of the truth that was available to him at this moment, and she gave him the benefit of that.

"What do you want to do with it?" she said.

"Keep it here," he said. "Secure it. Examine it more carefully when I have the equipment."

He carried the book to the worktable and set it down with the same deliberate care he used for everything, and she watched his hands on it and thought about the kind of person who moved through a world of fragile and significant things all their life and how that shaped the way they handled everything else.

"You should stay," he said, without looking up from the book. He was examining its edges, running his fingertips along the binding. "The room upstairs. Indefinitely, while we work on this." He paused. "If that is acceptable."

She looked at his hands on the book. At the back of his head.

"It is acceptable," she said.

He nodded once, in the direction of the book, not at her.

She went back to her chair at the small table and picked up her tea, which had cooled somewhat. She drank it anyway and thought about the screaming book and the forced read and the someone who had known it was there. She thought about the letter she would receive several chapters from now that would make this day look like a preamble.

She thought, briefly and specifically, about the email she had not answered, about Monday, about the agency that had asked for her full manuscript.

She thought: I am living in a story I did not write, and I do not know the ending.

Then: For once, that does not feel like a problem.

She looked up and found Cassian looking at her from across the shop, just for a moment, before he looked back down at the book. Not analyzing. Just looking.

She filed it in the usual place.

The afternoon passed in a kind of industry, both of them engaged, neither of them talking much, which was becoming its own kind of grammar between them. She finished her examination of the Consequence shelf and moved to the one labeled Maps of Places That Moved, which was as strange as it sounded: books that mapped geography that was not fixed, coastlines that moved with the seasons, forests that migrated slowly northward, a city that had relocated itself three times in two centuries. She touched each spine lightly and found them deeply strange and strangely ordinary at once, in the way that all the most interesting things were.

Near the end of the afternoon, she found a book in a pale green cover that gave her, when she touched it, an image so brief and clear that she laughed out loud before she could stop herself.

Cassian looked up.

"Someone," she said, "is going to have a very good birthday party."

He looked at her for a moment. Then the corner of his mouth moved, just slightly, the same almost-movement she had catalogued in the alley the previous night.

"The Mercer family," he said. "The daughter turns seven on Saturday."

"She is going to love the cake," Mina said.

"I believe so," he said.

She put the book back on the shelf. When she turned, he had already looked back down at the account he was writing, the almost-movement gone, his face composed.

She thought: there is a person in there who laughs. He is simply very careful about when he lets it out.

She thought: I want to see it. The real one.

She thought: that is information I should probably keep to myself for a while.

"What time does the shop close?" she asked.

"Seven," he said.

"I will make dinner," she said, "if you have food. I am not a bad cook."

He looked up. A pause. "There is a kitchen," he said. "Behind the back room."

"I know," she said. She had found it that morning.

He looked at her with the expression of someone recalibrating their understanding of the situation they were in.

"Thank you," he said, and this time it had a different quality from the thank you in the morning: less relief, more something that took longer to name.

She went to find the kitchen, and behind her she heard him set his pen down, and in the silence that followed she thought she heard, very faintly, the quiet sound of a person exhaling for the first time in a long time.

She did not mention it at dinner. Some things were better filed than named.

She made pasta.

It was the most practical option given the contents of the kitchen, which had pasta and cheese and something that resembled basil in sufficient quantities, and she made it the way Agnes had taught her, which was to say quickly and without measuring anything, and she put it on the table in the kitchen with two plates and sat down and waited.

Cassian appeared in the kitchen doorway.

He looked at the pasta and then at her and his expression went through several things before settling on something that might have been, in a different register, something close to moved.

"You did not have to," he said.

"I was hungry," she said. "And you were still working. Sit down."

He sat down.

They ate without much conversation, which she had learned was not uncomfortable. He ate the way he did most things: with attention, without ceremony, giving the thing his full focus. She found this interesting in the way she found most things about him interesting: it was consistent, the same quality in everything he did, the full attention that came from a person who had decided long ago not to do things partway.

"Tell me about your family," she said, when the pasta was mostly gone. "The archivists."

He looked at the table. "My father was the senior archivist for the Bellgrave district," he said. "His mother before him. It is the family work, the way some families are farmers or merchants. We keep the records."

"Did you want to?" she said. "Be an archivist?"

He was quiet for a moment. "I wanted to understand how the records worked," he said. "Whether I wanted to be responsible for keeping them was a different question." He paused. "I was good at it. The distinction between being good at something and wanting it is one I did not sort out for several years."

She thought about fourteen months of trying to finish a novel she was good at writing and not sure she wanted to finish. "Yes," she said. "I know that distinction."

He looked at her. "You had it with your writing?"

"I have it with my writing," she said. "I am good at the middle. Not always certain I want the ending."

He was quiet for a moment. "Why not?"

She thought about this seriously, the way it deserved. "Because once something is finished," she said, "you have to let it be what it is. There is no more adjusting, no more understanding as you go. It becomes fixed." She looked at the wall. "The middle is where you can still change your mind."

He looked at her with the expression she was building a vocabulary for.

"You are afraid of endings," he said.

"I am cautious about them," she said. "There is a difference."

"Is there?"

"Yes," she said. "Fear is anticipatory. Caution is informed." She looked at him. "Though I grant you the line is sometimes difficult to locate."

He looked at his plate and then out the small kitchen window at the night.

"I removed an Afterglow because I was afraid of an ending," he said, very quietly. Not to her, not quite. To the table, or to himself, or to the five years of choosing.

She did not say anything. She let the statement be what it was.

After a while she collected the plates and washed them in the kitchen sink with the small square of soap and the water that was slightly too cold, and he sat at the kitchen table and watched her do this with the expression of someone who was not accustomed to being sat with, being witnessed in ordinary moments, and did not know what to do about finding it tolerable.

She dried her hands.

"Good night," she said.

"Good night," he said. And then, when she was at the door: "Thank you. For dinner."

She turned. "You are going to keep thanking me," she said. "For normal things."

"Probably," he said.

"You are welcome," she said, and went upstairs.

She lay on the bed and thought about the shape of the evening, the pasta and the conversation about endings and the thing he had said to the table, and she thought: this man has been alone with this for five years.

She thought: someone should have been here.

She thought: I am here now.

She fell asleep on that thought, which was either very simple or very complicated, and she was too tired to sort out which.

She woke the next morning thinking about courage.

She had been thinking about it since he had said it, the first morning, when she had stood in the dark of the shop and felt the screaming book vibrating in his hands, and he had said this is how it happens with a precision that came from experience. She had filed it and moved on, the way she filed most things, into the place where they waited to be understood.

She understood it now.

Courage was not the absence of alternatives. It was the presence of them and the choosing anyway.

She had been in Bellgrave four days. In four days she had fallen through a door into a world she did not know, made an agreement with a person she did not trust, read objects that she had no framework for reading, discovered that her grandmother had been living a double life that had, deliberately and with great care, included her. She had done all of these things without the kind of crisis she might have expected because there had been no time for crisis: each thing had been followed immediately by the next thing, and the next thing had required her attention, and attention was, it turned out, the enemy of paralysis.

She was going to need to write about this.

She was going to need to write about a great deal of what was happening, because she was a writer and writers processed through language, and she had been processing in real time and the processing had been accumulating, and she needed to find somewhere to put it.

She got up and got the leather-bound book and sat at the small desk and wrote for twenty minutes without stopping, not about the case or the archive or the Afterglow, but about the interior texture of being in an unfamiliar world, the specific relationship between attention and survival, the way that paying attention to the next immediate thing was its own kind of grace.

When she came downstairs, Cassian was at the front of the shop rearranging a display in the window, and he turned when she came in, and she saw his eyes go briefly to the book in her hand with the particular quality of recognition: he knew what the book was, and he knew what she did with it, and the recognition had a warmth to it that she noted and filed.

"You write every morning," he said. Not a question.

"When I can," she said. "It helps me think."

"What do you write?" he said.

She looked at him. "Right now? The interior texture of being somewhere you have never been." She paused. "What it is like to pay attention to things you do not understand and keep paying attention until you do."

He looked at the book.

"You are writing about this," he said.

"I am always writing about what is in front of me," she said. "It is not always immediately recognizable."

He turned back to the window display and adjusted a small volume an inch to the left.

"Does it help?" he said.

"Yes," she said. "It gives the experience somewhere to live outside my head."

He was quiet for a moment, not the working quiet but the considering kind.

"I have never," he said, carefully, "been able to write about things. The archive trained me to record, which is not the same as write."

"No," she said. "Recording is factual. Writing is about what the facts mean."

He turned and looked at her.

"And what do the facts mean?" he said.

She looked at him across the shop, at the window with its careful display and the morning light behind it, at the man who had just asked a question he was not asking about her writing.

"I am working that out," she said.

He nodded once and went back to the window, and she went to the table and set down the book and picked up her tea, and she thought about what the facts meant and about courage and about the specific grace of attention, and she thought: I am going to figure this out.

Both things. The book and this.

Both of them.