Mara had learned to count by things that would not disappear. While the sky above the ruined city held its endless grey and ash fell like slow rain, she measured days by the knots on a thread-wrapped tin, by the exact number of spoons still unscarred in the kitchen drawer, by the way Tess would fold her thumb around the little leather tag Mara kept looped on a cord. It was a small ritual—simple objects that tethered memory when the Fade unstitched names and places in the sleeping hours. Without those anchors, people woke to versions of themselves that felt like strangers; lives were slowly eaten at the edges until only gestures remained.
Tess sat by the window with a cup of tea gone cold beside her and did not know Mara. That detail should have been the shape of Mara’s morning—should have been the thing the tin, the spoons, the leather tag were for—but this morning carried a different weight, a lonelier precision. Tess looked at Mara the way someone might examine a familiar painting they were trying to place a year later: recognition scanning, landing, slipping. Her gaze held questions that Mara could answer, and also a blank where shared history should have been.
"Do you remember the blue scarf?" Mara asked, because small things could sometimes prod the memory and make the other person stretch toward it. Tess frowned, and the frown was a tug in Mara’s chest.
"I know I had a scarf," Tess said. "Blue? Maybe. I can't—" Her voice thinned with frustration. She pressed a palm to her temple as if supporting a faulty shelf.
Mara set the tin between them and opened it like a ceremony. Inside lay a handful of small, ordinary things: a pressed leaf, an old ticket stub that said nothing, a copper key with ragged teeth. Beneath them, folded and sealed in wax, was a small module the size of a coin. It had a cracked face of glass and an engraved line of letters nearly worn smooth by time: V-A-U-L-T, the rest gone under corrosion. Mara's hands didn't tremble when she touched it; she had trained them to steady. Her thumb brushed a seam and the module clicked. A low, fallen sound spilled from it, like something waking.
She carried the coin to the battered receiver on the windowsill—a wind-up thing with a glass cone and a coil of copper that the community's scavengers called a mender's radio. The receiver whined, coughed, took in the city's thin air and spat back whispers. Static leaned into something else beneath it: syllables, voices half-swallowed by hiss. For a long moment there was nothing but broken breath. Then, through the interference, a voice threaded through like a hand finding a rail. It was a woman’s voice: ragged, tired, and painfully familiar.
Mara could have said it was Tess—she did not yet dare. The recording drifted, crackled, and then fell away into the rasping noise like a candle guttering. In the silent space it left behind Mara heard something else, a single syllable dragged out like the end of a name—but gone before she could nail it down. She turned the dial and the hiss intensified, as if the city itself were refusing to let the sound be heard. Outside, a neighbour's child kicked a tin lid and laughed; inside, Mara listened to the emptiness the voice had left.