Mara had learned to read the city in afterlight long before she learned to cook any meal that wasn't meant to be reheated. The residue had its own grammar: thin, trembling halos that clung to coat buttons after a last embrace; dented glows pressed into the backs of emptied chairs after a long conversation; the soft, buoyant gleam that rose off a child's skinned knee. When she opened her sight the world rearranged itself into a faint map of events, a map made of feeling instead of streets.
She worked at night, because afterlight stiffened in the cold and loosened in the dark. Her tools were practical, made for the small trades of retention — a curved glass like the neck of a bottle, a wire that hummed at a particular pitch, a pouch lined with salvaging cloth that had once belonged to an old custodian. She could coax a siphon around a banister and draw long, pale filaments into a vial; she could listen to a bench and hear its pattern: a laugh, three notes of a song, the soft reverberation of a promise. There were rules, mostly unspoken: not every salvage should be sold, not every bloom should be bound, and no one had the right to claim the residue of someone else without a name.
The work paid poorly and paid in ways that were never on a bank statement. People came to her with small losses — a father who wanted the scent of his daughter’s swing back, an elderly woman who wanted a last clear smile from a husband whose memory had begun to fray. Mara fixed what she could and let the rest go. She kept little pieces of those repairs in a drawer no one knew about, a handful of warm glints that she told herself were professional curiosities but which were, in truth, small mercies she kept because loneliness had taught her to hoard warmth.
She had been a hoarder of warmth long before Eli went away. He had been a loud and small man, a street photographer with a bag full of strange little notes and a habit of humming out of tune when he thought nobody listened. In life his afterlight had been a scatter of citrus-bright sparks undercut by a slow, honest laugh. It smelled of cheap roasted coffee and wet pavement; it carried the particular edge of a joke he repeated in the same cadence until it became an anchor. For Mara, the joke was the shape she could find.
She slept badly but knew where every fragment lay. On good nights she could walk the map, touch a rail and read the evening that had once touched it. On worse nights the city's commercial lights blurred the afterlight until she had to shield her eyes and remember the way things once glowed naturally. Lately, a new color had been appearing over the skyline: a pale, industrial white that smelled of polished metal and policy documents. Machines had come to town with tidy schedules and smiling names and glossy promises about giving people safer grief.
Mara ignored promises. She kept to the small jobs and paid the rent with an economy that preferred hours over honesty. But the new machines hummed in the distance. They left a thin, nervous residue in alleys, the sensation that someone else had rearranged the city’s listening. The week after the machines arrived she found a sealed container tucked into the gutter beneath an old camera shop, wrapped in industrial film stamped with a tiny emblem she didn't recognize. Inside it there was a pulse that made her head tilt the same way Eli’s laugh used to make it.