June Marlow kept her lamp low and her hands quieter. She worked with things that hummed under the skin of the city—small luminous residues that gathered in corners where a life had been half-lived or abruptly rearranged. People called them remnants, afterimages, oddities of a modern memory economy, but June learned to call them by what they were: sliverlight, a thin, almost audible glow that shivered when you asked it a question. It settled in curtains, behind books, along the seams of mattress springs. A bad fight could leave a bristle of it on a doorknob; a sudden loss could condense entire conversations into a single silver flake that clung to a stair tread.
Her client tonight was an old woman with arthritis and a small appetite for truth. She wanted the recipe she'd mislaid decades ago, a single congealed moment that June could tease back into shape. June folded her fingers over the woman's wrist and tilted her head until the sliverlight aligned like a constellation in the girl's palm. It took minutes—sometimes hours—for the fragments to remember how to become sentences again. June listened until the oven's clatter became an ingredient list, until the woman could taste the smell of baking and name a pinch of rosemary.
The work was domestic, intimate. It paid, and it paid better if you were discreet. June had been doing this for nearly ten years in the corridors between the municipal services and the private purifiers, where memory was still treated like a human need instead of a commodity. The ward she worked in hummed—apartment lights, the low bass of a bar that never quite slept, the distant spires that housed the municipal regulators. People moved through it collecting or losing minutes, and June moved through it righting small errors.
She finished the recipe reading and sat back, listening to the city breathe with the same sort of gentle hesitation she felt when a breath after a long swim finally steadied. The old woman was smiling, tasting something before it existed again. June wiped her hands on a towel and pressed her thumb to the inside of the woman's wrist, answering the polite question the client always asked last: did it change anything? June's job wasn't only to restore the sense of the moment; sometimes it meant choosing what to keep. She answered the woman honestly: only what was mine to keep.