Her first instinct was to cut it.

Trackers carried shears for exactly that purpose, small silver blades that lived in a sheath beside the thread roll, honed every month by a man in the lower market who asked no questions. Nahee had them in her hand before she had finished thinking. She slid the blade under the loop of red-gold thread that joined her wrist to his and closed her fist.

The shears met nothing.

The blades passed through the thread as if it were a reflection in water. She tried again, harder, sawing at it, then angling the edge against the weave. The thread did not fray. It did not even tremble. It lay across her pulse with that infuriating lightness, and as she worked, the loop drew itself in a half turn tighter, as though the pact took her effort for a kind of embrace.

"That won't work," Doyun said gently.

"Stop talking."

"I'm only saying that the Tracker's shears are made for threads that belong to the dead. This one doesn't belong to anyone." He lifted his own wrist and studied the loop with the expression of a man reading a letter he already knew by heart. "It belongs to us. I'm sorry. I did try to tell you."

"You said not that kind of knot." She wrenched her wrist away from his. The thread stretched, hummed, and pulled her back an inch, and she nearly dropped the shears. "You said it like a warning. You didn't say it like an explanation."

"I said it the only way I could." He rubbed his thumb across the pale band on his skin. "If I had told you what the knot would do, you would have thought I was trying to trick you into tying it. Every Tracker who has come here has tried a binding anchor sooner or later. It is the instinct of the trade. But none of them ever used a thread like yours."

"Like mine."

"Spun from something that wants to be found."

She didn't know what to say to that, so she said nothing. She sheathed the shears with a snap and tried to think like a professional. A problem existed. Problems had causes. This one had been caused by her own hand and therefore could be undone by it, in time, with research and a very large cup of tea. All she needed to do was gather her facts.

"Explain the pact," she said. "Quickly. Plainly. Don't make it sound like poetry."

"Very well." He folded his hands. "Two people joined by a promise-knot cannot move more than a hundred paces apart while the hour is open. That is the first rule. The thread will draw you together, gently at first, then less so. The second rule is the one you will like less. Anyone who touches me forgets me by the end of the night. Everyone does, without exception. A Tracker, a ghost, the baker who has sold me bread for forty years. I am forgotten at first light, all of me, my face and my voice and my name. It is how I came to be this way." He said it without drama. "With a promise-knot, however, the forgetting comes more slowly. You will lose me the way the sea loses a shoreline. By inches instead of all at once. I am told it is the only kindness the pact has."

"Told by whom?"

"The last person who tied one."

"And where is she?"

"He," Doyun said, "and I do not know. I have not been able to remember him for a long time."

The words dropped into the quiet like stones into a pond, and neither of them reached for them again.

Nahee did not believe any of it. She was perfectly clear in her own mind that she did not believe it, and so she walked toward the doors.

The station's great timber doors stood forty paces from the bench. She went at an unhurried stride with her hands in her pockets, as if she had remembered an errand. At thirty paces, the loop on her wrist went tight and warm. At fifty, it began to pull, a polite tug, like a hand on her sleeve. At seventy, her boots scraped on the stone and the thread dragged her one full step backward, and she dug her heels in on principle and kept going.

Behind her she heard the creak of the bench.

"Ninth," Doyun said, mildly. "I'm afraid I'm coming with you."

"You are not."

"I assure you I am not doing it on purpose."

She looked over her shoulder. He was standing, one arm stretched out in front of him as if towed by an invisible leash, and he wore the look of a man trying very hard to keep his dignity while being hauled across a room. His long coat flapped. The dead in the hall watched with the polite interest of an audience at a play. The little boy with the old man's coat laughed, and then looked startled at himself.

She wrenched at the door handle, hauled it open, and strode into the lane. The night air hit her face, cold and wet and smelling of river. She walked fast, past the shuttered tea shop, past the dark mouth of the alley where the pebble boys had been playing, until the loop on her wrist went suddenly, humiliatingly taut, and yanked her back like a hooked fish. She stumbled. She caught the nearest lamppost, and turned, and found Doyun Rennar six steps behind her with his hands raised in a gesture of apology.

"That," he said, "is a hundred."

She closed her eyes.

She was a Tracker of nine years' standing, the best in the city by anyone's count, and she was clinging to a lamppost at one in the morning while an immortal with scarred hands tried not to smile at her. The unfairness of it burned in her throat. She breathed out through her nose and counted to five, which was a thing Barun had taught her for moments of dignity lost.

"Fine," she said. "Fine. It holds. I believe you."

"Thank you."

"I do not like you."

"That is perfectly reasonable."

She let go of the lamppost, and with great dignity she walked back toward the station, and he fell into step beside her at precisely the right distance. Neither of them spoke until they reached the steps.

It was Nahee who sat first, on the second stair, with her elbows on her knees. After a moment Doyun lowered himself onto the step beside her, a careful body's length away. Above them the paper lanterns hung motionless, and across the river a few sleepless windows burned like dropped coins.

"What does the pact do to the contract?" she asked.

He was quiet for a long moment. "Nothing," he said. "I wish I could tell you otherwise. The contract stays in force. A sending requires a Tracker close enough to the subject to work the thread, and a pact makes that easier, not harder. If Hall wished to be efficient, they would be pleased."

The words landed in her stomach like swallowed ice.

So that was the situation. She had signed a paper that bound her to send this man out of the world by the longest night of the year. She had spent the first hour of the task trying to hold him still. And with a single wrong knot, tied out of pride, she had made the very thing she had been hired to do easier. She had, in the plainest possible terms, helped Ledger Hall.

She felt sick.

"I could refuse to complete it," she said, mostly to herself.

"You could."

"I would lose the house."

He didn't ask which house. He only said, "I know," in a voice so quiet that she nearly missed it, and he did not look at her.

She stared out at the empty lane. There was an argument in her head, a very good one, a long ladder of reasons she had built over nine years to explain why the world was divided into those who searched and those who were searched for. At the bottom of the ladder was the number seventy-three. At the top was a bench in a cold hall and a girl of seven, and a morning that she had never allowed herself to think about for longer than a breath.

She did not climb it. She had learned not to.

"Tell me about the forgetting," she said instead.

He turned his head. The lamplight caught his profile, and she saw that he was surprised. "You want to know?"

"I'm a Tracker. I want to know how a thing works before I decide how to break it."

"That is a very honest reason."

"It's my only one."

He almost smiled. "It begins at the first grey," he said. "The hour opens around me at midnight and does not close until dawn, as I told you. When the light comes, whatever was said, done, and remembered by anyone who touched my life in the night is taken. All of it, like a tide going out. The ghosts forget. The Trackers forget. I do not." His voice stayed light, which made it worse. "I remember everyone. Every one of them, down to the color of their sleeves. It seems to be part of the arrangement."

"That's monstrous."

"It has been a long time since I have called it anything."

She said nothing for a moment. Then, very practically, because practicality was the only armor she had left, she said, "If I'm going to forget less than the others, there must be a way to hold on. A trick. A weight. Something in the thread."

"There is one thing." He turned his hands palm-up on his knees. "You may choose a single memory to keep. One anchor, carried across the dawn. It must be chosen by you, deliberately, in the last minutes before the sky turns. Almost no one manages it. I have never learned why some people can and others cannot."

"I can."

"Ninth."

"I can," she said. "I don't forget things. I've never forgotten anything that mattered. Ask anyone. Ask Barun. I could tell you the license number of every Tracker who ever walked into the guildhall." She was talking too fast again. She could feel her pulse in the thread. "It's the one thing I'm certain of about myself."

He studied her with those level dark eyes, and in them she saw a thing she could not name, a mixture of tenderness and terrible, practiced sorrow, the face of a man who had been told this exact sentence eight times before.

"Then I hope you are right," he said.

They sat.

The night moved on in small, quiet ways. A ghost drifted up the steps and sat a few feet from them, an old woman with her hair in a net, and Doyun said good evening and asked after her sister, and she answered in a thin, pleased voice and forgot the question halfway through her reply. A second ghost came, then a third, and Nahee watched the way he spoke to each of them, without hurry, without condescension, in the particular voice a man uses to a person he truly expects to remember. And each time, the exchange ended the same way. A blank face. A polite smile. A drifting away.

She thought of Mr. Pyo and his loose tile. She thought of Granny Okja holding her cup of tea with both hands. She thought, with a pain she had not expected, that forgetting was the one thing the dead and the living seemed to share.

"How do you stand it?" she asked, and was startled to hear herself ask.

"Stand what?"

"Being the only one who remembers."

He was quiet for a time. "I write things down," he said at last. "I keep a book. It is not the same, but it is not nothing." He looked at the thread on his wrist, gold and red. "I think I had stopped expecting anyone to ask."

A gray thread of light touched the rooftops far across the river.

She saw it first as a change in the air. The deep blue above the old quarter thinned, almost imperceptibly, from ink to slate. The shadows in the lane lost their edges. And along the line of his shoulder, where the lamplight met the dark of his coat, Doyun began to blur.

It was not dramatic. He did not flicker or fade. His outline simply grew a little softer, as a drawing does when someone has touched it with a damp thumb, and the lamplight began to pass through the edges of his sleeve.

Nahee stood up.

She hadn't decided to. Her body did it, and she found herself on the second step with her fists clenched and her heart going hard against her ribs.

"Choose something," Doyun said, still seated, still calm, though his voice had gone thin. "Now, while there is time. One thing. Make it plain and make it yours."

"I know what I'm doing."

"I know you do."

"I'll remember all of it." She heard how fierce she sounded and did not care. "I'll remember the knot and the pact and the clock and your voice. I'll remember your name."

"Ninth."

"Doyun Rennar," she said, and it came out almost as a shout, flung into the grey air like a challenge. "Doyun Rennar. That is your name. I will not lose it. I'm saying it aloud so that I will not lose it. Doyun Rennar."

He flinched.

It was the smallest movement, a tightening around the eyes, a catch in his breath, and she would have missed it if she had not been staring straight at him. His face did something she had no word for. The composure that he wore like a second coat split along an invisible seam, and for the length of a single heartbeat she saw what lay beneath it, raw and astonished and so young that it frightened her.

"Nobody has said it like that," he said quietly. "In all this time. Not as a question. Not as an accusation. As something to hold."

Then the smile came back, but it did not fit anymore. It cracked at the corners, held for a moment, and went out like a lamp in a draft.

"Thank you," he said.

The bell rang.

It was the ordinary bell of the thirteenth hour at last, the long clear note that closed every night's work, and it rolled over the roofs and down to the river and out across the water. All around her the dead dissolved, one by one, like breath on glass. The bride. The soldier. The old woman in the hairnet. And Doyun was fading with them, a soft pale shape on the step with the grey light shining through his shoulder, though his eyes stayed fixed on her with an expression she would never be able to explain.

She took a step toward him. The loop on her wrist went warm and brightened, and then, with the sunrise, the world turned over.

She was standing alone on the steps of the old station in a flood of ordinary morning.

The lanterns were just lanterns. The doors behind her were locked and chained, rusty with disuse. Across the square a baker was pulling up his shutters and a woman in a yellow raincoat was walking a small damp dog. Somewhere in the distance a radio was playing, and its cheerful babble sounded absurd after the night. The sky was a soft, clean, indifferent blue.

Nahee stood very still.

She was holding her left wrist with her right hand. A faint mark circled the skin there, a thin pale-red line, like the shadow of a ribbon. She had no memory of acquiring it. She remembered the contract, and the portrait, and the long walk down the hill. She remembered the station, vaguely, a sense of a great echoing room. She remembered that something had gone wrong with a knot.

Beyond that, the night was a smooth, bright surface with nothing written on it.

She frowned and checked her pockets. She had her thread roll. She had her shears. She had the portrait of a man with grateful eyes, folded in quarters against her ribs, and she took it out and looked at it for a long time, trying to recall where she had seen that face.

There was something on her tongue. It had been sitting there since the bell, small and round and smooth, like a pebble tucked under the tip. A word. Two syllables, or perhaps three. She turned it over and over, trying to bring it into the light.

Doy.

It sounded like the start of something. It slid away from her the moment she touched it.

She stood on the steps of the old station for a very long time with her hand around her wrist, in the thin cold sunshine, feeling like a woman who had walked out of a house and could not remember what she had left burning on the stove.