Night in the city had its own seams. Under the sodium glare and the neon wash, the masonry and metal met and rubbed at one another in ways that left openings just thin enough for small things to hide: a hairline gap where water pooled; a fissure in the flagstones shaped by a thousand bootheels; the cool split around an iron grate. Cass Arlen's hands learned those edges the way other people learned faces. She could press a trowel into mortar and feel the ghost of a laugh; she could run a seam-knife along a joint and come away with the residue of a conversation. It was not romantic magic, not the sort of thing that made headlines. It was craft: a practice passed down in damp basements and municipal yards, a language of wedges and wedges of light. She mended the city so it would walk without snagging on itself.
The crew called themselves seamwrights, though the office upstairs in the municipal yard preferred a simpler label: Maintenance. Under the street lamps the crew wore the maintenance gray that made them part of a crowd and part of a machine. Etta Quinn handed Cass a replaceable head for a pneumatic filler and watched her work with the small, careful patience of someone who had been measuring seams for longer than Cass had been alive. "Mind the crown," Etta said, and Cass adjusted her pressure. "You don't want the patch to sit proud. Pride gets loose when the first frost comes."
In the central span of the Alder Bridge the mortar had shifted along an old repair. The river that moved beneath it had a memory of its own—soft erasures of things that used to be tethered to its banks—and mortar soaked in that water sometimes birthed unwanted life. Cass felt the tremor beneath her gloves: a series of fine ticks, like fingernails tapping a table. She set her chisel and cleared the crack, exposing a bright congregation of minute, glasslike grains between the stones. They pulsed faintly, not with light that radiated but with the sense of pressure, like tiny breaths held in sleep.
Etta's mouth went thin. "Report it."
Cass closed her hand over the bauble and felt a quick shiver pass through her wrist, as if a small animal had shaken awake and complained. The city's policies were clear: anything that manifested from structural seams was cataloged and transferred to the Department of Urban Equilibrium for processing. Memories, if they were what these were, were not property of the individual who found them. They belonged to the public body that kept the lines of the city running predictable. Cass knew the rules. She had signed them into overtime forms and watched men in flat visors take away sacks of shimmer and light. But knowing and obeying were different things.
She slid the brightest shard into the lining of her glove and let the others fall back into the crack. The jar of her chest tightened in a place that long acquaintance with absence had hollowed out: the missing name on a city roster where her mother's record ought to have been; the one picture at home that had been kneaded smooth as fabric in a wash—an impression rather than a face. She told herself she had not done it for sentiment. She told herself she had done it because she respected the material and wanted to study it properly, in the quiet of her own workbench. She told herself many things.
Later, after the crew had tamped new mortar back into the stone and the inspectors' flashlights had gone down the bridge, Cass would find that the shard had warmed to the pulse in her palm. For now she wrapped the handful in a scrap of tarred cloth and tucked it into the inner pocket of her work jacket, under the label she had stitched there to cover the hole from a long-ago spill. The city night kept going about its business: buses murmured, a solitary bike bell clattered, a radio on the bridge muttered complaints about deadlines. But in the hollow between the stones, something small and bright had been moved and secreted and, for the first time since she was a child, Cass felt the wild, hungry tilt of hope.