The last ten minutes before dawn were the only ones Doyun Rennar had never learned to bear.

He had tried. Over the long years he had tried everything: counting, reciting, walking the length of the hall until the stone wore thin under his shoes. He had tried leaving the station before the light came and found that the sun reached him wherever he stood. He had tried sleeping through the end, and found that the forgetting did not need him awake. In the end he had settled on the only method that left him any dignity, which was to sit still and look directly at the person he was about to lose.

Nahee Vael stood on the second step with her fists clenched and her chin up, and she was looking back at him as though he were a problem she meant to solve before sunrise.

He did not think he had ever seen anyone so determined to remember.

*Do not,* he told himself. It was the same instruction he gave himself every dawn, in the same flat inner voice, and it had worn so smooth with use that it no longer sounded like advice. *Do not hope. You know how this ends.*

"I'll remember the knot," she was saying, "and the pact and the clock. I'll remember your voice."

He knew better. He had heard this sentence eight times, in eight different voices, and every one of them had been sincere. The first Tracker had been a plump, kind woman who wept at the end. The fourth had sworn on his mother's grave. The sixth had written the word on her hand in ink. And every one of them had walked out of the station into the sunrise and looked at the mark on her skin, or the knot in her thread, and wondered what on earth she was doing here.

She was not any different. He knew that. The only difference was in how it felt, and that, he told himself, was his own fault.

Because of the name.

*Doyun Rennar. That is your name. I will not lose it.*

She had shouted it into the grey air like a flag planted on a hill. Nobody had ever said it like that. Not as a greeting, not as a question, not as the first word of an accusation. As a thing to be kept. He had flinched. He had been unable to help it. Something that had been sealed in him for longer than he cared to count had shifted an inch on its hinge, and a draft had come through.

That was what frightened him. Not that she would forget. That a part of him had, for one unguarded second, believed that she might not.

The light climbed behind the river. He could feel it on the back of his neck like a hand. His edges had begun to go, the soft blurring he had learned to ignore, the street lamp showing faintly through the sleeve of his coat. Soon the hall would empty and the lanterns would be only paper and the doors would be only chained wood.

He made himself smile. He had perfected this smile over centuries. It was gentle, unburdened, entirely without reproach, and it was meant to spare the other person the burden of guilt. He put it on now, and for the first time in his life it would not sit properly. It cracked at the corners. He felt it go.

"Thank you," he said, and meant it with an intensity that startled him.

She took a step toward him. The thread on her wrist brightened, gold and then white, and he saw her eyes go wide with the sudden knowledge that something was happening to her and she could not stop it. He saw the look she gave him. It was the look of someone standing on a shore who has only now understood that the tide goes out.

Then the bell rang, and the sun came over the roofs, and the light took her.

It was always the same. He had watched it more times than there were stars in the sky over the old quarter, and it never became easier. The thing in her eyes that had been his, the recognition, the wary heat, the stubborn spark of a woman who refused to lose an argument, simply went out. It did not fade. It left the way a bird leaves a branch, in a single quick motion, and the branch swayed once and was still. Her face rearranged itself into the polite, slightly puzzled calm of a stranger.

She looked at him. She looked straight at where he stood, softening in the sunlight, and her gaze slid over him as though over an empty doorway.

But her lips moved.

It was the smallest thing. Her mouth shaped half a syllable, a voiceless *Doy*, before the rest broke off. For one half of a second her face held the ghost of the name, and her hand lifted a fraction toward her wrist, toward the thread.

He nearly broke apart.

He had been forgotten ten thousand times. No one, in all the centuries, had ever left half a syllable behind.

*Hope is a thing you do not do,* he told himself, with something close to panic. *You will go home and you will write it down and you will not look at it again.*

But his hand was already in his coat.

The book was where he always kept it, in the deep inner pocket against his ribs, a battered notebook with a cover of faded blue cloth. He drew it out, and with the last of the substance that the dawn had left him, he stepped down onto the stair below hers and slid it into the pocket of her trench coat. His fingers brushed the lining. She did not feel it. She was staring across the square at a baker's boy wheeling a cart of bread, with her hand around her wrist and her brow creased in an expression of terrible concentration.

He had written in the first page that morning, before she came, in the old habit. He did not remember deciding to. He had only found himself sitting on the bench with the pencil in his hand, writing a sentence that would be useless to anyone but him, and then he had folded the page over and kept going. It said: *Ninth, read this before you forget why you were angry.* He had put it in the pocket with a feeling he did not examine.

He stepped back.

The sun cleared the roofs. Warm gold flooded the square. Doyun watched his hands go transparent against the light, and then his arms, and then there was nothing, only a lantern swaying on a hook above the empty step and a woman in a trench coat standing in the sunshine with her head tilted, listening to a name she could not hear.

"Do not hope," he said aloud, to no one, and the sunlight swallowed it.

Nahee got home a little after seven and sat at her kitchen table for an hour without turning on the light.

Her flat was on the third floor of a narrow building above a stationery shop. It was clean, spare, and orderly in the way of rooms that had been arranged by someone who did not expect visitors. A narrow bed. A single bookcase of Tracker manuals. A shelf of small stoppered jars, each one holding the thread of a sending she had completed, labeled with a name and a date in her small square hand. Seventy-three of them. Seventy-four, if you counted the old man on the roof.

She sat with her coat still on, her elbows on the table, her hands wrapped around a cold cup, and looked at her left wrist.

The mark was still there. It had not faded in the walk home. A thin pale-red line circled the skin like the memory of a bracelet, slightly raised, faintly warm under her thumb. She had examined it in the light from the window. She had pressed it. She had rubbed it with water. It was not a bruise, not a rash, not a scar. It had the faint fine weave of thread.

She had tied it herself. She knew that much. Some part of her was entirely certain of it, in the way you can be certain that you have put your keys in a drawer without remembering opening the drawer. She had tied a knot. A thing had happened. She had been in a great echoing room, and someone had been there.

Beyond that there was nothing.

Nahee was a woman who did not like nothing. She liked edges, and lists, and the satisfying click of a case closing. She had built her life on the discipline of noticing, and she had never in her adult life failed to account for a night. She took a breath and went through the facts, aloud, in a low controlled voice, as she had done on bad mornings since she was a girl.

"I received a contract. I signed it. I went to the station at midnight. I threw a thread and it came back." She paused. "I walked in. There was a clock. It said one minute past twelve."

She stopped, and a cold finger touched the back of her neck.

The clock had said one minute past twelve. She remembered that. She remembered the dead gathered on the benches and the bride with her veil blowing in a wind that was not there. She remembered walking toward the far end of the hall. She remembered a gap in her gift, a hollow in the middle of all that warm singing.

She did not remember what had been in the hollow.

She tried to walk her mind up to it, the way she would walk up to a door in the dark, and every time she reached for the handle her thoughts slid sideways like water off a polished table. It was not that the memory was blurred. It was that there was no memory to be blurred. She knew the shape of the gap and she knew it ought to be filled. There had been a conversation. There had been a bargain. She had said some words and received some others.

There was a name.

*Doy.*

She said it aloud. It sounded absurd in her empty kitchen, a small childish syllable with no meaning attached. She said it again. Nothing came. She took the portrait out of her coat, flattened it on the table, and stared at the grateful eyes. The name on the contract was written in clear black ink above the drawing. *Rennar, Doyun.* She read it. It meant nothing to her. It was only a collection of letters, and the part of her that should have lit up at the sight of it stayed dark.

She had never been afraid of the dead. She had never been afraid of the dark, or of heights, or of the cold weight of a thread that was fighting her hand. But she had been afraid, her whole life, of this: the gap. The door that opens on nothing. The night she could not account for. She had built the entire structure of herself around never being left with one.

She pressed her palm flat on the table to stop it from shaking, and sat very still, and waited for her heart to slow.

By noon she could stand the flat no longer, so she walked.

The daylight city was loud and ordinary, and she moved through it like a woman wading. She bought a bun she did not eat. She passed the tea shops of the old quarter and the shuttered fish stalls and the stair that led down to the river, and at some point she found herself on the bench in the small square above the station, looking down at its dark green roof.

She took out a thread, and said the name aloud. It felt like reciting a word in a language she did not speak.

"Doyun Rennar."

The thread flew from her fingers into the daylight, which was a foolish thing to do. Daytime was not her hour. Threads cast in the sun were weak and lazy things that drifted and dissolved. This one went straight and true for a distance of twenty meters and then fell, flat and dead, onto the cobbles. It did not even bend. There was nothing at the other end to bend toward.

She retrieved it. She coiled it. She found that her hand was trembling slightly and put it in her pocket.

Granny Okja was in the garden when she got there, kneeling in the dirt beside the persimmon tree with a trowel in her hand and her old straw hat tied under her chin. She looked up as the gate scraped and her face lit with a delighted, completely clear smile.

"Nahee! You've come early. Look, the last ones are almost ripe."

Nahee crouched beside her. The persimmons hung orange and heavy among the bare branches, the last of the season, and the old woman was weeding around the roots with a care that belonged to another decade. For a moment the garden was exactly what it had always been, and the knot in Nahee's chest loosened.

Then Granny's eyes dropped to her wrist, where the cuff of the trench coat had ridden up.

The trowel went still.

"Oh," the old woman said softly. "Oh, my dear. Who did you tie yourself to?"

Nahee pulled the cuff down quickly. "It's nothing. A work thing."

"That is not nothing." Granny's voice was calm and perfectly lucid, with the particular clarity that came on some days like a window cleaned. She put down the trowel, took Nahee's wrist in both her dry brown hands, and turned it toward the light. "That is a promise-knot. I haven't seen one in forty years. They are very rare. They can only be tied by someone who truly means it."

"I didn't mean it. I don't even remember it."

"Mm." Granny ran her thumb along the pale band with a curious tenderness. "A knot like this does not care what you remember. It is tied from the part of you that is deeper than remembering. It holds when you let go. That is what makes it dangerous." She looked up. Her eyes were very bright and very sad. "The one who ties it is not the one who wants to be freed, you know. The one who ties it does not want to let go."

"Granny," Nahee said, uneasily, "what are you talking about?"

"Hm?"

The lucidity went out of the old woman's face the way a candle goes out in a draft. She blinked. She looked at the wrist in her hands, and at the persimmon tree, and at the girl in front of her, and her mouth trembled.

"Minah," she said. "Are you cold? You should have a scarf."

"I'm fine," Nahee said. She had to say it twice. She stayed until the light slanted, weeding beside her in silence while the old woman hummed to herself, and when she finally rose to go, she kissed Granny's hat and told her she would be back tomorrow.

She did not say what she was thinking. *I'm not sure I'll be myself when I get there.*

By the time she reached her flat again, the afternoon had gone amber and she had made up her mind.

She would go tonight. She would walk into the station at midnight, find whatever was in the hollow, and finish the job fast. No conversations, no knots, no hesitating. She would send this man out of the world and put the whole confusing business behind her, and she would not think any more about gaps. It was the correct decision. It was a Tracker's decision. It was the decision of a woman who had built her whole life around never being the one left in the dark.

She took off her trench coat to hang it on the hook by the door, and something knocked against her hip.

She stopped.

The weight in the pocket was small and square. She had not put it there. She was completely sure of that, in the cold clear way she was sure of her own name. She slid her hand into the lining and drew it out.

It was a notebook. The cover was faded blue cloth, worn pale at the corners, softened with years of handling. The spine had been mended at least twice with thread of different colors. It was warm, as though it had been held against someone's body until a moment ago.

She turned it over. There was no title, no name. She stood in the amber light by the door with the book in her hands and felt a sensation she had no word for, the feeling of a stranger's handwriting lying in wait.

She opened the cover.

The first page was blank except for a single line, written in pencil in a neat, slightly slanted hand.

*Ninth, read this before you forget why you were angry.*

Nahee stood completely still.

Then, slowly, as though the book might bite, she carried it to the table and sat down.