The city remembered like a patient with too many scars: not by names carved into stone but by the things people touched, the soft habit of a hand on a banister, the way a corner store always smelled faintly of citrus and repair glue. Neon glass and old brick held their own memory, a low hum beneath car horns and the rail that ran like a silver vein through the neighborhood. Kara Voss could hear it in the bureaucratic rhythms she practiced—thin, formal rituals that made the remembering safe enough to live beside. Her office was on the third floor of a municipal clawback bureau, a narrow room with a window that looked out at the transit line and the rooftops where satellite dishes clustered like restless birds. On the walls hung laminated forms and seals, neat grids of permissions and covenants. She kept a small kettle on the counter and a stack of paper bands for sealing agreements by hand, the old way. When she undid a memory that had become a hazard—a grief that infected a block, a promise that had calcified into grievance—she did it by filling out boxes and speaking lines that made the city listen.
It was not the sort of work that earned applause. Most residents thought of municipal shrines and the technicians who kept them as municipal functionaries: polite, necessary, forgettable. But Kara believed deeply in the pattern of mutual weight. The city, she had always told herself, needed its history, even the sharp parts. Loss made rooms, and rooms kept people near each other; when too much vanished, neighborhoods began to float apart. She had seen it once before—years back—when a private firm offered local wards a new kind of relief. They sold people an uncomplicated life: the removal of small, persistent agonies in tidy packaged sessions. It had been legal then, and people had queued for it like they queued for a new phone. The firm had promised to take only what a client agreed to and to replace it with something softer. Kara had watched the lines and filed the complaints. She had watched a friend step into a showroom and step out quieter, more efficient, and less himself. That memory sat in her like gravel under skin: a fixed sting that made her steady.