The Memory Birds

The first thing Marisol Kade remembered about Grayhaven was the way rain changed the city’s smells. It bent diesel and wet paper into something like an old photograph, a flattened, familiar thing that made the back of her throat ache. She made a private habit of cataloguing small weathered details—how a wet wooden slat tasted of tannin and lemon peel, how a broken neon sign hummed a low metallic ozone between its breaths. The habit had made her useful. It had also made her dangerous, in that sense of being the only person who could remember someone precisely enough to tell the police where a moment had gone.

Her office was a narrow slice of a fourth-floor building that leaned over a laundromat; the window always steamed in winter. Felix Alvarez—thin, quick-mouthed, twenty-three—called it 'a detective's pantry' and insisted on bringing stale pastries until the pastries stopped being stale. He kept a drone folded into a padded case behind the radiator and a little tin of cigarette-lighter oil that smelled like tar and childhood. He was the kind of apprentice Marisol had not expected to want, but she had kept him anyway because he could coax a seized camera into speaking and because he laughed in places she needed laughter.

She lived alone most of the time, with a notebook of smells and a drawer of wooden birds Elias Mort had given her as a joke one winter. Elias had been a restorer of clocks and small things; he'd taught Marisol how to listen for the failure in a gear the way other people listened for a song. He was also the man who'd once brewed a pot of tea that smelled exactly like a summer fair—caramel, horsehair, and rain—and had forced her to breathe it in until something inside her stopped aching. He was her mentor in the small, quiet ways of listening.

The phone in the office was an old thing with a chipped mouthpiece. When the line lit, the air seemed to lift. June Kellar's voice was a short piece of command.

"Marisol. There's been a disappearance. Elias Mort. His workshop. You need to come."

The kettle on the other side of the wall hissed. Marisol's hand found the coat hook before she had a thought about whether she would go. She had not worked with the police in three years. She had not wanted to; the memory of a case that had gone bad lived in her ribs like a small, hot coal. But listening felt like obligation when someone she'd loved was missing. Felix watched her with that bored, protective look he used when he wanted to be helpful and afraid at the same time.

They caught the last of the rain in muddy sheets as they ran toward Elias's street. Grayhaven's alleys smelled of frying oil, wet cardboard, and something metallic—like copper pennies left in water. The workshop's door was ajar. A thin cord of smoke trailed out, and inside, clocks stopped, dozens of faces frozen in mid-argument with time.