The Remitted Hour

The city kept its clockwork breathing like a thing that must not be startled. On Remittance Day the machinery of public calm moved with particular ceremony: streets cleared into measured canals of people, walls printed with the same calm exhortations, broadcast screens sending the same muted instrumental under every announcement as if sound could seal a feeling. Above it all, a low, persistent hum threaded the air — the Engine's presence, never seen by most and understood by fewer still. People spoke of it in formal terms, as if it were a law rather than a machine: the Consensus Engine, the stabilizing heart of civic peace. Citizens came, gave what they were asked to give, and left lighter or hollower depending on the angle of their private grief.

Lina Arlow had learned to move inside that ritual like a practiced seamstress moves her hands: with economy and a guarded tenderness. She cut fabric for a living — curtains, sleeves, the small soft things that made people forget the hardness of cement — and she cut herself a place in the crowd that kept her steady. At twenty-eight, with hands familiar with thread and needle, she also carried a memory she refused to hand over. It was not grand or mythic when she thought it straight-on; it was an evening, a laugh, a mark on a wall and then the sudden blank where a person had been. Most months she could blur it, fold it into something else. Today, on the day the city asked for one more piece of what made her, she would keep it.

The Remittance Hall itself was a modest temple of bureaucracy: frosted glass, cool lighting, booths arranged like pews. Volunteers in pale uniforms guided citizens into small pods where receivers cradled the temples of the head and listened for the attuned signature of memory. In the past the process had been described as cleansing, a way to lift burdens and smooth social friction: a tiny surrender for the greater good. Posters on the hall's outer walls displayed the slogan with gentle insistence — a slogan that matched the music on the screens. Governor Hal Varn's face appeared occasionally in recorded addresses, earnest and convinced, promising that peace required small renunciations. The speech itself felt like a chime that made nerves softer.

Lina registered at a counter with hands that would not betray her. She followed procedure down to the practiced pause before entering the booth. Inside the pod, the receiver hummed and a pale light skated across the glass. She breathed as she had taught herself to breathe and tried to think nothing of weight and loss. The extraction had rhythms she had felt before: a cool pinch in the temple, an odd pressure behind the eyes, like a finger tracing the shape of a long-hidden seam. People left pods different, sometimes quieter, sometimes oddly buoyant, and the attendants recorded the change like gardeners noting bloom.