False Exposure

Maya Ivers felt the city in her knees before she felt it in her ears. The courier bike thumped over cobbles that had been polished by a thousand hurried boots; the frame vibrated up into her thighs and the weight of the crate on the rear rack made her fingers white on the handlebars. Grayhaven was a city of salt and diesel where the harbor fog rolled through alleyways like a soft mistake. She had learned to read those little weather-breaths—when the fog stuck to glass and lights smeared, people stayed inside and packages waited. She liked the city when it was awake and messy and honest; it matched the way she braided her hair in the mornings, quick and permanent enough to hold while she moved.

The crate smelled faintly of metal and varnish. Printed on its side was a small logo: a stylized swallow and the words 'Public Memory' in a serif so thin it looked like a hairline. Somebody had packed three of the little bronze birds she'd seen nested on lamp posts for months. The street-artist who called himself Marn welded them into corners and signal boxes, and everyone seemed to pretend they were accidental. Maya had learned the pattern—little pieces of bronze where people needed to feel like the city remembered them.

She rode past the pier, where gulls argued in short, hoarse sentences, and a ferry's horn sounded like a reluctant apology. Jonah waved from the mechanics shop. He had a grease-smudged apron and an impossible calm; he was her map when streets braided and shortcuts were logic puzzles. 'Big one?' he called when she parked and leaned the crate against the curb.

'Public Memory drop for the pier gallery,' Maya said. She liked saying the names out loud, it made the job feel less small. The gallery had glass windows like teeth. People fed on sunlight and small ceremonial things there. Ruth, who ran the café two doors down, was inside folding napkins with a surgeon's patience. The plaster of the gallery's façade had a bruise where someone had once blasted a protest slogan and then repainted it at two in the morning; the city had a way of covering its wounds.

They took the crate in. It was heavier than it looked, and when they pried it open the bronze birds lay threaded in straw, small and very quiet. The gallery director—a slim woman with ink on her fingers—touched one with the problem-solving reverence of someone who negotiated grants. 'We keep them rotating,' she said. 'They protect the corners.'

On her way out, Maya paused by a rear alley where the lamps sputtered. Someone had left a small stack of flyers pinned to a telephone post. They featured the swallow and a xeroxed portrait of a man with hair like a spill. A note scrawled across the bottom read: 'They take what remembers. Find Marn.' She folded the flyer into her jacket. The city had pockets of secrecy, and little slips of paper were like breadcrumbs.