The stairwell at the back of the block smelled of wet plaster and boiled coffee, an honest city smell Iris had come to like on night shifts. She moved without hurry, palms loose at her sides, listening for the small discordances that the eye did not name. To anyone else the building was a tired eyeless thing: peeling wallpaper, a recurring leak at the landing, a bent bannister ground shiny by decades of hands. To a seamkeeper the same stairwell declared its bones — faint threads of light beneath chipped paint and mortar, a woven insistence that ran like a map under the skin of the city. Iris saw those seams the way some people saw color; they lay across doorframes and between floorboards, roped glimmers that hummed when continuity was asked to hold.
She checked the list clipped to her jacket: standard round, third landing, routine reweave on a fray by the light box. Routine meant the kind of problem the guild called “wear”: little losses that accumulated until someone noticed a festival blurred at the edges, a recipe remembered wrong, a boy’s name mispronounced for a year. The work was small and surgical, a hand ritual and the careful application of resin and stitch. Iris liked the rhythm. Repair calmed the city and, if she let it, it calmed her. It was good to put a practiced hand to a place that complained like an old animal, to mend and watch the glow reassert itself until the building sighed and stopped hurting.
She sat at the step and opened her kit. There is a vocabulary to the tools of seamwork that guildmates traded like jokes: a bone needle, a lamp that did not throw shadows, a vial of lumen-resin that smelled of citrus and rain. Iris uncorked the resin and let a sliver warm between thumb and forefinger. She breathed in, felt the seamlines shiver under her skin, and began — the pinch, the slow pull, the small bright knot. By the time she had the second stitch placed the stairwell had folded back to something close to quiet. The light along the baseboard leaned together again, an old bruise smoothing.
Something in the third step did not settle. The hum she’d come to expect refused to congeal. Iris paused, hands still on the needle, feeling rather than seeing that the weave there was wrong. Where seams should braid, there was a gap like a cut cloth. It was not the ragged emptiness of wear. This was clean, surgical, as if someone had taken a razor and slipped between stitches and lifted an exact, measured strip out of the pattern. The edges were sharp; the light bled at the rent and then receded, leaving a hollow that felt colder than the rest of the stairwell.
Iris frowned and swept the lamp closer. The cut had a residue — tiny granules along the edge that did not belong to her work. She examined them with the tip of her needle. They were microbeads of lumen-resin, but not the kind guilds used for mending: harder, clearer, uniform in size. She had seen something like them once in a city records lab, locked away in the glass case of a planner who liked to collect samples of modern materials. They glinted with a manufactured calm that made Iris’s stomach tighten.
A sound above the hiss of the radiator: a neighbor moving late in the night, a door opening and closing. Old buildings made small talk, and the people within them answered. Iris pocketed the bead cluster and stood. Repairing seemed suddenly inadequate. She wrapped the fragile residue in the cloth packed beneath her tools and took the stair up to the third landing where a row of tin mailboxes leaned like a chorus line.
Mrs. Calderby, who kept her geraniums in the sink and her years on loop, answered a tentative knock in a dressing gown the color of dried tea. Iris had known Mrs. Calderby since she was an apprentice with hands that trembled. The old woman blinked at the sight of the quilted linen and then at Iris’s face, one eye narrower than the other as if remembering a detail.
“There was a thing last month — a little fair by the fountain,” Mrs. Calderby said, fussing a stray curl of hair. “We put up bunting. Did you notice?” Her voice held the bland certainty of someone layering the world with facts.
Iris swallowed. The square fountain at the end of Harper's Row had never had bunting in her memory, and festivals in that district were not the sort that came and went without notice. "When was it?" Iris asked, keeping the question casual. Mrs. Calderby named a date with all the mannered specificity of a record. Curiosity pulled at Iris; she asked another neighbor on the landing, the young father who made furniture in his spare hours. He cocked his head.
"No, I don't remember a fair," he admitted, and then said, after a beat, "but there was a street performer — a woman with a drummer — she had a coloured scarf, I think." His eyes slid away, blank with the effort of fitting the statement into an unsteady pattern.
Two neighbors, two different memories for the same night. That was ordinary and alarming in equal measure. Sometimes details slipped like beads from a hem. People forgot a name, then recovered it. But collective forked accounts were a different thing. They suggested a fissure in shared continuity. They suggested someone had been tampering, not with long past history, but with a present so freshly woven that its fray still smelled of glue.