Mara Vale arrived at the Records building before the elevator had finished its slow, bureaucratic climb. The municipal block that housed the Civic Records Office had the kind of morning light that flattened everything into practical shapes: the combed steel of the sign, the windows serried against the street, the narrow stone steps already marked with other people’s footsteps. Inside, the air smelled of old paper and coffee gone flat and the faint chemical tang of the preservation room where reels and folders were kept away from the humidity. She liked the office when it was like this—quiet enough for audit work, not yet bristling with the small dramas that cracked the day into worse grievances and municipal errands.
Mara moved through routines like a person who trusted the scaffolding that habit provided. She checked the outermost rows of incoming mail against the day book, scanned a stack of recent conveyances for clerical errors, and ran a hand across the glassed index cases that still held long-since catalogued cards. Records work was mostly patience and pattern recognition: the same motions over and over until something in the repetition broke and revealed an anomaly. That’s how you learned to hear the muffled alarm in a ledger’s silence. She had been at that bench for nearly seven years; it had taught her where the dust accumulated and where the careless pencil marks always hid. It had also taught her to keep her own life small enough that it fit into the margins of forms and not too many public statements.
The office had its small hierarchies. Rowan Hale, the Director of Civic Records, kept an immaculately constrained presence—ties that never showed a wine stain, a temper that arrived on schedule, and a private office that smelled faintly of cedar and legal pads. Rowan’s staff respected the order he enforced; they resented only the parts that touched their leave requests. Mara respected Rowan’s competence and friendlier edges of his habit of insisting that every page bear the correct stamp. But she did not rely on anyone else to see what she could see. That was safer.
On the desk beside her screen, an old bound volume waited. It had been scheduled for an annual audit: handwritten enrollments from the late 1970s transferred into the municipal database decades later. The leather on the spine had softened with a history of being opened and closed. Mara settled a magnifying glass over a column of dense cursive and began the slow work of cross-checking names against the scanned copies. It was precise, soporific work at first, an exercise in finding what fits. Then a line snagged her eye: a date of 1979, and beside it a rectangular ribbon of white where a name should be. The field had been excised as if someone had taken a razor to the page.