Before The Memories Fade - By ALIYA DINA BINTI MOHD SOPHIE JAILANI

Written By: ALIYA DINA BINTI MOHD SOPHIE JAILANI

Category: Fantasy

Competition: Global Poetry and Creative Writing Competition 2026

ALIYA DINA BINTI MOHD SOPHIE JAILANI presents "Before The Memories Fade," a mesmerizing fantasy narrative that invites readers into a world where memories and reality intertwine. This piece is part of the Global Poetry and Creative Writing Competition 2026, showcasing a profound exploration of lost memories and the longing for lives unlived. With a haunting narrative that delves into the intricacies of memory and belonging, this story is sure to captivate those who dare to wander through its pages.

About the Work

"Before The Memories Fade" takes readers on an evocative journey through a city that remembers differently, exploring themes of memory, identity, and belonging. The narrative is imbued with a dreamy and surreal quality, inviting readers into a world where the past and present blur. With rich imagery and a melancholic undertone, the piece captures the essence of longing and the elusive nature of memories, leaving readers to ponder the beauty and fragility of recollection.

Before The Memories Fade

Original Submission by ALIYA DINA BINTI MOHD SOPHIE JAILANI

Before The Memories Fade: Somewhere, someone remembers a life you never lived.

A novel written by Adi Mierza.

Copyright © 2026 Adi Mierza

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, distributed, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without the prior written permission of the author, except for brief quotations used in reviews, criticism, or other uses permitted by applicable copyright law.

This is a work of fiction.

All characters, names, places, organisations, events, and incidents portrayed in this book are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or places is purely coincidental.

Any references to real locations or cultural elements are used within a fictional narrative and do not imply the participation or endorsement of any real individual or organisation.

First edition, 2026

Written by Adi Mierza

For rights and permissions enquiries, please contact the author through their official contact details.

For the ones who have ever missed a place they've never been, and longed for a life they've never lived.

Author’s Notes..

Dear reader,

I don't quite know how to explain where this story came from.

Perhaps it began with a feeling. The kind that is difficult to put into words, when something feels familiar without a reason, or when you find yourself longing for something you cannot name. Maybe it came from wondering how much of who we are is made up of the things we remember, and how much is shaped by the things we don't.

I've always found something bittersweet about the idea that we can carry pieces of people, places, and moments long after they've passed. Sometimes, we remember the smallest things. A voice. A particular afternoon. The way someone made an ordinary day feel a little less ordinary. And sometimes, we forget things we once thought we'd remember forever.

I think that's what stayed with me while writing this story.

Before the Memories Fade is about a girl searching for something she has lost, a boy trying to understand who he is, and a city that remembers things a little differently than it should. But somewhere along the way, it became a story about more than that. It became a story about belonging, about the lives we might have lived, and about the quiet hope that even the things we lose can leave something beautiful behind.

I don't expect every reader to understand this story in the same way. Perhaps you'll find something in Amara that feels familiar. Perhaps you'll understand Kai in ways she cannot. Or perhaps you'll simply enjoy wandering through a city that was never meant to exist.

Whatever you find here, I hope something stays with you.

Thank you for picking up this book. Thank you for giving a little of your time to a world that began somewhere in my imagination and now gets to exist somewhere beyond it. There is something extraordinary about that, and I don't think I'll ever take it for granted.

I suppose that's all a writer can really ask for: to make something that, even for a little while, becomes part of someone else's world.

So, before you turn the page, I hope you make yourself comfortable. There is a city waiting for you.

And it has been expecting you for a very long time.

With love, Adi.

PROLOGUE

The First Invitation

The city had a peculiar habit of forgetting people.

It forgot them quietly, at first. A name slipped from a shopkeeper's memory. A face disappeared from a family portrait. A chair remained empty at a dinner table, though nobody could recall who had once occupied it. Eventually, even the empty chair was taken away.

By then, there was no one left to notice.

The residents of Bellweather called this an unfortunate quality of the city, much like its unpredictable weather or its fondness for thirteen chimes at midnight. They had learned not to ask questions. Questions, after all, had a way of making themselves unwelcome.

There were three rules every child learned before they were old enough to read. Never follow a stranger who calls you by a name you have forgotten.

Never look at the clocktower when it strikes thirteen.

And never, under any circumstances, accept an invitation without a sender. The trouble was that nobody remembered why.

On the night the city began to remember, the rain fell upwards.

It rose from the cobblestones in delicate silver threads, gathering beneath the violet sky. Puddles emptied themselves into the air. Water slipped from the gutters and climbed the walls of the buildings, leaving the windows dry and the rooftops shining. A paper boat drifted past a lamppost, ascending slowly until the darkness swallowed it whole.

Nobody stopped to stare. In Bellweather, the impossible was rarely considered an emergency.

At the end of Bellweather Lane stood a narrow shop with crooked windows and a brass sign that had not been polished in decades.

SECOND CHANCES

Bought, sold, and sometimes returned.

The shop belonged to an elderly woman who had never disclosed her name. Inside, she retailing things other shops would not accept: letters that had never been sent, keys to houses that no longer existed, memories with their sharpest edges carefully removed. On the highest shelf sat a collection of clocks, none of which agreed on the time.

Behind the counter, a young woman named Elodie Vale was counting them.

She had been working in the shop for six years, though she could not remember applying for the position. The old woman had simply opened the door one morning, handed her an apron, and told her she was expected.

Elodie had stayed because the shop felt familiar.

Everything in Bellweather felt familiar, eventually. That was the danger of it. She reached the eleventh clock when the bell above the door rang.

A man stepped inside, bringing with him the smell of wet stone and distant smoke. He wore a dark coat buttoned to the throat, and his hair was damp despite the fact that the rain had been travelling towards the sky for the better part of an hour.

His name was not offered. In Bellweather, names were expensive things to give away. "You are late," Elodie said.

The stranger glanced at the clocks.

"According to which one?"

"The one that matters."

"Then I suppose I am."

He spoke as though lateness were a minor inconvenience rather than a catastrophe. Elodie disliked him immediately.

The stranger removed a photograph from his coat and laid it on the counter.

It depicted Bellweather's railway station, though the platform appeared older than it did now. An iron bench stood beneath the station clock. A train waited beyond the yellow line, its windows glowing like candlelit rooms.

In the foreground stood a girl in a pale coat.

Elodie leaned closer.

She knew that coat. She knew the silver clasp at its collar and the crooked stitching along its left sleeve. She remembered sitting beside a window while someone mended the torn fabric, humming a song whose final verse she had never been able to recall.

But the photograph was dated eleven years into the future.

"Where did you get this?" Elodie asked.

The stranger looked at her for a moment before answering.

"That depends. Do you remember the girl?"

Elodie straightened.

"No."

The lie came too quickly.

The girl in the photograph had turned slightly towards the camera. Her face was blurred, but there was something unmistakable about the shape of her smile. Elodie had seen it in shop windows, in darkened mirrors, in dreams that vanished the moment she woke.

She turned the photograph over.

Four words had been written on the back.

You were happier here.

The handwriting was hers.

Not similar to hers. Not a convincing imitation. Hers, down to the peculiar way the final letter curled beneath the line.

Elodie had written those words before. She was certain of it.

She simply could not remember when.

"Who is she?" Elodie asked.

The stranger's expression softened, and for one fleeting moment, he looked less like a man and more like someone who had spent a very long time waiting for bad news.

"That," he said, "is the question everyone keeps getting wrong."

The first bell rang from the clocktower.

Elodie looked towards the window.

The second bell followed.

Then the third.

The stranger moved away from the counter, his gaze fixed on the photograph. With every chime, the image grew clearer. The iron bench appeared first, then the station clock, then the pale sleeve of the girl's coat.

At the eighth chime, the girl turned her head.

At the ninth, Elodie saw her face.

At the tenth, she recognised herself.

She stumbled backwards, knocking a porcelain bird from the shelf. It struck the floor without breaking. Instead, it let out a tiny, furious squawk before unfolding its wings and flying into the rafters.

The eleventh bell rang.

"No," Elodie whispered.

The stranger reached for the photograph.

"Don't touch it."

The twelfth bell rang.

The shop lights went out.

And then came the thirteenth.

Every clock in Bellweather stopped.

For a moment, the city became perfectly still. The upward rain hung suspended above the streets. Curtains ceased their movement. Somewhere in the distance, a dog froze with one paw lifted, and a woman halfway through closing her window forgot what she had been doing.

In the darkness, Elodie heard the sound of a train whistle.

When the lights returned, the stranger was gone.

The photograph had vanished with him.

In its place lay a cream-coloured postcard.

Elodie picked it up with trembling fingers. The front displayed a view of Bellweather beneath its violet sky, all spires and winding streets and golden windows. It was beautiful in the way certain dreams were beautiful: too perfect to be trusted.

There was no stamp. No return address.

Only a message.

She is coming.

Elodie read it once, then again.

A second line appeared beneath the first, the ink blooming slowly across the paper. This time, do not let her leave.

For the first time in six years, Elodie remembered something from before she had come to the shop.

She remembered a girl laughing beside a railway track.

She remembered a boy with a camera who refused to stand in front of it. She remembered a promise made beneath a sky the colour of violets.

And she remembered that one of them had broken it.

The memory disappeared before she could grasp its edges.

Elodie dropped the postcard.

Outside, the clocks began ticking again. The rain resumed its journey towards the clouds, and the city returned to its ordinary business of pretending nothing had happened.

At the end of Bellweather Lane, a florist opened her doors for the first time in seventeen years.

Miss Evangeline was an old woman with silver hair, sharp eyes, and a peculiar talent for remembering people who no longer existed. She stepped onto the pavement carrying a single white rose and placed it in the window.

Then she turned her sign from CLOSED to OPEN.

"About time," she murmured.

Three streets away, Kaiser Wilde woke from a dream he could not remember.

He sat upright in bed, one hand pressed against his chest, the other searching blindly for the camera on his bedside table. His room was dark except for the faint purple light filtering through the curtains.

Something lay beside the camera.

A photograph.

Kai stared at it.

A girl stood beneath a streetlamp, her face turned towards the lens. She had dark eyes, an expression caught between curiosity and amusement, and the sort of smile that made a person feel they had arrived halfway through a conversation.

Kai knew her.

The certainty was immediate, absolute, and utterly impossible.

He had never seen her before.

He would have remembered.

Wouldn't he?

He turned the photograph over.

Four words had been written on the back in his own handwriting.

Please remember me, Amara.

Kai read the name aloud.

"Amara."

It sounded like something he had lost.

Outside his window, the clocktower struck once.

The clock on his bedside table struck twice.

And somewhere beyond the city's gates, on a railway line that did not appear on any map, a train began its journey towards Bellweather.

Its destination board was blank.

Its passenger list contained one name.

AMARA BAKER.

The city had not invited her.

It had merely made certain that, sooner or later, she would come.

CHAPTER ONE

The Postcard

The last time Amara Baker saw her sister, Lydia was wearing a yellow raincoat and stealing cherries from the refrigerator.

Amara remembered this because Lydia had insisted, quite seriously, that cherries tasted better when stolen. She had eaten six of them before their mother caught her, then blamed the entire incident on Amara, who had been sitting on the kitchen counter with a book in her lap and absolutely no intention of getting involved.

It was the sort of memory that should have meant nothing.

Seven years later, Amara would have given almost anything to remember what happened after it.

Lydia had disappeared on a Thursday.

There had been rain that evening, a power outage that lasted eleven minutes, and a phone call their mother never explained. By morning, Lydia's bedroom was empty. Her shoes remained beneath her bed. Her favourite mug sat beside the sink, a faint crescent of lipstick on its rim. The yellow raincoat was missing.

So was Lydia.

The police searched. Their mother made calls. Relatives arrived with food nobody ate and sympathy nobody knew what to do with. For months, every unfamiliar number sent Amara running towards the telephone.

Eventually, the calls stopped.

The police had no answers. Their mother stopped keeping the porch light on. Lydia's name became something that was mentioned less frequently each year, until even mentioning it felt like disturbing a room whose door had been closed for a very long time.

Amara never stopped looking.

She searched old photographs, checked unfamiliar faces in crowded places, and occasionally typed Lydia's name into search engines at two in the morning, as though the internet might suddenly remember something the rest of the world had forgotten.

She kept Lydia's bedroom untouched, too.

Not because she believed her sister would return to find it exactly as she'd left it. Amara was not that naïve.

She kept it because she was frightened that one day she might walk past the closed door and struggle to remember why it mattered.

Already, there were things she could no longer recall.

The exact sound of Lydia's laugh, for instance. The way she pronounced Amara's name when she was annoyed. Whether the small scar above her eyebrow had been there since childhood or appeared later.

The details had begun to blur around the edges.

Amara had taken to writing them down.

Lydia hates papaya.

Lydia sleeps with one foot outside the blanket.

Lydia says the moon looks lonely.

The last one had been written in the margin of an old notebook, beside a sketch of a city Amara did not recognise.

She had drawn it when she was eleven.

A row of narrow buildings. A bridge. A clocktower missing a number.

Above them, a sky coloured violet.

Amara had spent years wondering where she had seen it before.

She had spent even longer wondering why Lydia had drawn the same city in the notebook's opposite margin.

Neither sister had ever spoken about it.

At least, Amara did not think they had.

Memory was becoming an unreliable witness.

And then, on a Tuesday morning in October, the postcard arrived.

It was tucked beneath the front door, resting against the welcome mat as though someone had slipped it there moments earlier. There was no envelope, no stamp, and no return address. Only a cream-coloured card, yellowed at the edges, with Amara's name written across the back in dark blue ink.

She recognised the handwriting before she picked it up.

For several seconds, she forgot how to move.

The letters leaned slightly to the right. The capital A had an unusually long crossbar. The final stroke of her surname curled beneath the rest of the word, almost touching the edge of the card.

Lydia wrote like that.

Amara had hundreds of reasons to know.

She had spent years looking at birthday cards, school notes, shopping lists, and the occasional apology Lydia had slipped beneath her bedroom door after an argument. She knew every peculiar habit of that handwriting, every unnecessary flourish and every letter that leaned too far into the next.

She would have recognised it anywhere.

Even after seven years.

Even if the rest of the world had forgotten.

Her fingers tightened around the postcard.

"No," she whispered.

She turned it over.

The front displayed a city beneath a violet sky.

Amara stared at it.

The buildings were tall and narrow, their rooftops crowded with chimneys and weather vanes. Golden streetlamps illuminated winding cobblestone roads. An iron bridge crossed a dark river, and beyond it rose a clocktower whose face appeared to be missing a number.

At the edge of the photograph stood a florist's shop.

White roses filled the window.

Amara knew this city.

Not from photographs or books. Not from a holiday she had forgotten taking. She knew it from the dreams that had followed her since childhood.

She knew the bridge, the crooked rooftops, the streetlamps that glowed before sunset. She knew the feeling of walking through its streets with the certainty that someone was waiting for her around the next corner.

Most of all, she knew the clocktower.

Every night she dreamed of that clocktower, it stood a little closer.

And every morning, she woke with the name of her sister caught somewhere behind her teeth.

Amara rushed upstairs.

Lydia's bedroom was at the end of the corridor, behind a white door with a brass handle. The room had not changed much since the day she disappeared. The curtains were faded, the bookshelf was crowded with old novels, and a collection of dried flowers remained pressed between the pages of a dictionary.

Amara had dusted the room only three days earlier.

She crossed to the bookshelf and pulled out the old notebook.

The violet city stared back at her from the page.

She placed the postcard beside the drawing.

The resemblance was exact.

Not similar. Not coincidental.

Exact.

Even the small crack in the pavement beneath the clocktower appeared in both images. Amara turned the postcard over.

Four words were written beneath the address.

You were happier here.

She read them once.

Then again.

The sentence made no sense. Lydia had never visited this city. Neither of them had. Their childhood had been spent in familiar neighbourhoods, ordinary houses, and places that appeared on perfectly ordinary maps.

And yet, the handwriting was Lydia's.

Beneath the message was a date.

October 14.

Tomorrow.

Amara checked her phone.

October 13.

She checked the calendar on Lydia's desk, though she knew perfectly well what it would say.

Still October 13.

"Very funny," she muttered, although nobody was there to hear her.

She photographed the postcard and searched for the city online. She tried different combinations of words, searched for historical railway stations, and even looked through photographs of European towns with similar architecture.

Nothing.

The city did not exist.

At noon, she called the police officer who had handled Lydia's disappearance. His number had remained in her contacts for seven years, although she had not called him in months.

He answered on the fourth ring.

"Amara? Is everything all right?"

She explained about the postcard, the handwriting, and the city in the photograph. She told him about Lydia's notebook and the drawing that matched it.

He listened without interrupting.

When she finished, he sighed.

"Have you considered that someone might be playing a cruel joke?"

"Yes."

"Someone who knew your sister?"

"Yes."

"Then perhaps you should bring the postcard to the station. We'll see whether there's anything we can do."

Amara looked down at the photograph.

"What if it isn't a joke?"

There was a pause.

"Amara, it's been seven years."

She hated those words.

Not because they were untrue, but because people used them as though time were a reasonable substitute for an answer.

"I know how long it's been," she said.

"I didn't mean—"

"I have to go."

She ended the call before he could finish.

For a while, she sat on the floor of Lydia's bedroom, surrounded by the quiet things her sister had left behind.

She wondered what Lydia would have done.

Probably laughed. Probably told her she was being ridiculous. Probably stolen the postcard, declared it a terrible attempt at forgery, and then spent the next three hours investigating it herself.

Amara could almost hear her voice.

Well? What are we waiting for?

The memory was so vivid that Amara turned towards the doorway. Nobody stood there.

Of course nobody stood there.

She pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes until the room stopped blurring. When her phone rang, she nearly dropped it.

The number was unknown.

She answered.

"Hello?"

For several seconds, there was only static.

Then a woman's voice came through the speaker.

"Amara?"

"Who is this?"

"Have you received it?"

Amara sat up straight.

"Received what?"

"The postcard."

Her heart began to beat faster.

"How do you know about that?"

A shaky breath came through the line.

"Listen to me carefully. You mustn't go to the station."

Amara looked at the photograph on the floor.

"What station?"

"The one that appears in your dreams."

Silence settled between them.

The woman's voice softened.

"You remember it, don't you?"

Amara swallowed.

"Who are you?"

"I can't tell you that."

"Then tell me how you know my sister."

The line went quiet.

It was only a second, perhaps two, but Amara noticed.

"You knew Lydia," she said.

"Oh, Amara."

The woman's voice broke on her name.

"Please. Whatever happens tonight, whatever you hear, whatever you think you remember, do not board the train."

"Why?"

"Because the city doesn't give people back the way it found them."

Amara stood.

"Where is my sister?"

The woman began to cry.

It was a small, helpless sound, as though she had been trying very hard not to make it. "I thought we had more time," she whispered.

"Where is Lydia?"

But the call ended.

Amara remained standing in the middle of the room, the phone pressed against her ear long after the line had gone dead.

Then she looked at the postcard.

The date had changed.

October 13 was no longer printed beneath the message.

In its place were four words.

TONIGHT. 11:11 P.M.

Below them, in smaller handwriting, appeared a final instruction.

Come alone, Amara.

She dropped the card.

It landed face up on the floor.

The photograph had changed.

The girl standing beneath the streetlamp was no longer a distant silhouette in a pale coat.

She had turned towards the camera.

Amara could not see her face clearly, but she recognised the way the girl's head tilted, the familiar line of her shoulders, the small silver pendant resting against her collarbone.

Lydia had worn that pendant every day of her life.

Amara had given it to her for her sixteenth birthday.

She crawled towards the postcard and picked it up with trembling hands. The image blurred, then sharpened.

For one impossible moment, Amara saw her sister smiling at her.

Not the distant, faded smile of someone captured by a camera.

A real smile. A familiar one.

The kind Lydia gave her whenever she had done something reckless and wanted Amara to join her.

Then the photograph changed again.

Lydia was gone.

In her place stood a young man holding a camera, his face turned away from the lens. On the back of the postcard, a sentence appeared beneath the appointment time. He has been waiting for you.

Amara sat very still.

She had spent seven years searching for Lydia.

She had followed false leads, answered unknown calls, and learned to recognise the particular silence that settled over a room whenever someone decided the conversation was over. She had searched because she could not accept that a person could disappear without leaving behind an answer.

Now, for the first time, someone had given her a place to look.

It might be a trap.

It might be a cruel joke.

It might be nothing more than an elaborate way of making her suffer all over again.

But the postcard bore Lydia's handwriting. The photograph showed the city from Amara's dreams. And somewhere in that impossible place, a stranger appeared to know something about her sister's disappearance.

For seven years, Amara had asked the world to give Lydia back.

The world had answered with silence.

She was not going to ignore the first thing that had answered differently. At 10:47 p.m., Amara changed into a dark coat.

At 10:53, she packed her phone, wallet, and Lydia's old notebook into her bag.

At 11:02, she stood before the mirror in her bedroom and tried to imagine what she would say if she found her sister.

Would she ask where Lydia had been?

Would she demand to know why she had never come home?

Would she simply run towards her and pretend, for one impossible moment, that seven years had never happened?

She had rehearsed these questions a thousand times.

None of them seemed sufficient now.

At 11:07, Amara opened the drawer where she had hidden the postcard. It was gone.

In its place lay a railway ticket.

The paper was thick and ivory-coloured, edged in gold. Her name was printed across the centre.

AMARA BAKER.

Beneath it was a departure time.

11:11 P.M.

The destination field was blank.

She turned the ticket over.

You have already been here.

Amara stared at the words.

Then she picked up her keys and left the house.

She told herself she was going to the station to prove that none of this was real. She told herself she would not board any train.

She told herself a great many things on the way there.

But beneath every sensible argument, beneath every warning and every flicker of fear, one thought remained.

What if Lydia is waiting for me?

The station stood beneath a sky heavy with clouds. There were no other passengers, no announcements, and no trains listed on the departure board. A single lamp flickered above the empty platform.

Amara checked the clock.

11:10.

She held the ticket so tightly that its edges pressed into her palm.

Then, somewhere beyond the darkness, a whistle sounded.

The clock changed.

11:11.

A train emerged from the mist.

Its windows glowed gold. Its dark metal sides reflected a sky that had turned the colour of violets. It slowed without making a sound and came to a stop directly in front of her.

The doors opened.

Amara looked through the nearest window.

For a moment, she thought she saw a girl standing in the carriage.

Yellow raincoat.

Dark hair.

A familiar tilt of the head.

"Lydia?"

The figure disappeared.

The train waited.

Amara thought of the empty bedroom, the unanswered questions, the memories she had been writing down for fear they might disappear next.

Then she stepped towards the open doors.

She had spent seven years afraid of forgetting her sister.

Tonight, she was going to find out why the world had forgotten her first. And if the city had answers, Amara intended to bring every last one home.

CHAPTER TWO

The Train That Had No Destination

The first thing Amara noticed was that the train had no driver.

The second was that every passenger was looking at her.

Not openly. No one turned in their seat or whispered behind a hand. They simply watched from the corners of their eyes, their reflections lingering in the dark windows long after they had looked away.

Amara stood in the aisle with one hand gripping the brass rail, her sister’s notebook pressed against her chest.

“Is there a conductor?” she asked.

A man seated nearby lowered his newspaper.

It was an old newspaper, the sort printed on thin, yellowing paper that stained the fingertips. The headline was impossible to read. Every time Amara tried to focus on the words, they seemed to rearrange themselves into something else.

“Of course,” he said.

“Where?”

He smiled sympathetically, as though she had asked a question children were supposed to outgrow.

“Wherever you need him to be.”

Amara decided not to ask anything else.

The train doors slid shut behind her.

There was no announcement. No whistle. No indication that they had begun moving, except that the station lights started slipping away through the windows, stretching into long golden ribbons against the darkness.

Amara found an empty seat beside the window.

The upholstery was dark green velvet, worn smooth at the edges. A small brass plaque was fixed to the wall above it.

“PLEASE KEEP ALL BELONGINGS WITH YOU.”

Someone had scratched a second sentence beneath the official lettering. “ESPECIALLY THE ONES YOU HAVE FORGOTTEN.”

She stared at it for a moment before sitting down.

Outside, the ordinary world had disappeared.

There were no houses, no roads, no familiar silhouettes of trees. Only an endless stretch of black water beneath a sky without stars. The train crossed it on a narrow bridge, its wheels making a soft, rhythmic sound that seemed almost like someone tapping on glass.

Amara opened Lydia’s notebook.

She had brought it because she couldn't think of anything else to bring. It was an old thing, its corners rounded from years of being carried around, its pages filled with school notes, terrible drawings, shopping lists, and the occasional sentence Lydia had written when she thought no one was looking.

Near the back, Amara found the sketch of the city again.

The clocktower. The crooked bridge. The narrow buildings pressed together beneath a violet sky.

She ran her thumb over the drawing.

“You knew,” she whispered.

The words sounded ridiculous in the empty carriage.

Lydia had drawn the city years before she disappeared. Amara remembered finding the sketch in a notebook Lydia had left on the kitchen table. When she'd asked where the place was, Lydia had shrugged and said she must have seen it in a dream.

At the time, Amara had laughed.

Lydia had always dreamed strange things. Once, she had woken up convinced that their house had an extra staircase. Another time, she'd spent an entire breakfast insisting that a woman with a face like a porcelain doll had visited her in the night.

Amara had teased her about it for weeks.

Now she wished she had asked more questions.

She turned the page.

A sentence had been written in the margin, so faint that it might have been mistaken for the impression left by another page.

If we ever find it, don't let me go alone.

Amara's fingers tightened around the paper.

She knew Lydia's handwriting better than her own. The tall letters, the impatient slant, the way she always forgot to cross her lowercase t's until the very end of a sentence.

There was no mistaking it.

But Amara had never seen those words before.

A sudden movement outside the window made her look up.

Someone was standing on the water.

A little girl in a red dress stood ankle-deep in the blackness, watching the train pass. Her hair moved in a wind that Amara couldn't feel. In her hands, she held a paper boat.

For one impossible second, the girl looked exactly like Lydia at eight years old. Amara lurched toward the glass.

“Lydia?”

The girl lifted her head.

Her mouth moved.

Amara couldn't hear her through the window, but she knew what she was saying. Not yet.

Then the train passed a column of darkness, and the girl was gone.

Amara remained pressed against the glass long after the water had vanished.

Her heart was beating too quickly. She tried to tell herself that the light had played tricks on her, that exhaustion had made her see something that wasn't there.

She had spent seven years explaining away things she couldn't bear to believe. She was tired of it.

“First journey?”

The voice came from across the aisle.

A young man sat in the seat opposite hers. Amara hadn't noticed him before, although she was certain the seat had been empty when she boarded.

He wore a charcoal coat over a white shirt, the collar slightly rumpled, and held a small black camera in one hand. His dark hair fell across his forehead as though he'd run his fingers through it too many times. There was something familiar about his face, but Amara couldn't decide whether she had seen him in a photograph or in a dream.

He was looking at her as if he had been waiting for her to notice him.

“Is it that obvious?” Amara asked.

“Only because you're still looking for the station.”

She glanced at the window.

The water was gone. In its place, a countryside stretched beneath a pale, unfamiliar moon. Trees leaned away from the tracks, their branches tangled with tiny lights. Far in the distance, a row of houses stood with every window illuminated, although there were no roads leading to them.

“Where are we?” she asked.

“Not there yet.”

“That's not an answer.”

“It's the only one I have.”

“You seem remarkably comfortable for someone who doesn't know where he's going.” The young man smiled faintly.

“I know where I'm going.”

“And where's that?”

He looked at her.

For a moment, his expression changed. Something in it slipped—not quite sadness, not quite relief, but something that had been held in place for so long that even the smallest movement hurt.

“That's a difficult question.”

Amara leaned back.

“Is everyone on this train determined to be mysterious?”

“Probably.”

“Wonderful.”

That earned a real smile from him, brief but unexpectedly warm.

He lifted his camera and checked something on its small display. Amara noticed that the strap had been repaired with black thread. There was a silver ring attached to one side, engraved with a tiny crescent moon.

“Are you taking pictures of me?” she asked.

He lowered the camera immediately.

“No.”

“You pointed it at me.”

“I was taking a picture of the window.”

“The window is behind me.”

“Yes,” he said. “I noticed.”

Amara narrowed her eyes.

“What's your name?”

He hesitated.

It was only a fraction of a second, but she caught it.

“Kaiser Wilde,” he said at last. “Kai, if you prefer.”

“Amara Baker.”

“I know.”

The words landed between them with a quiet finality.

Amara went still.

Kai seemed to realize his mistake at the same moment she did. His hand tightened around the camera, and he looked away.

“You know my name?”

“Your ticket has it printed on it.”

She glanced down.

Her ticket lay on the seat beside her. The paper was cream-coloured, its edges decorated with a thin border of silver ink. She had barely looked at it before boarding.

Her name was printed across the centre.

AMARA BAKER.

Beneath it was a line of smaller text.

ONE PASSENGER. ONE ARRIVAL. NO GUARANTEE OF RETURN. She picked it up.

“Does yours say that?”

Kai didn't answer.

“Let me see.”

He turned his ticket over in his hand.

His name was printed on the front, but beneath it, where Amara's warning should have been, there was only a date.

October 14.

The day after Lydia's disappearance, seven years ago.

Amara stared at it.

“That isn't possible.”

“No,” Kai said quietly. “It isn't.”

“Why does your ticket have that date?”

“I was hoping you could tell me.”

She looked up sharply.

“You're the one who bought it.”

“Not this time.”

The train gave a small shudder.

Somewhere farther down the carriage, a bell rang once.

Every passenger stopped what they were doing.

The man with the newspaper folded it carefully. A woman in a blue hat closed her eyes. Two children who had been playing with a wooden horse placed it between them and sat with their hands folded in their laps.

Even the little brass lamps above the seats seemed to dim.

Kai's expression lost every trace of humour.

“Whatever happens,” he said, “don't answer if someone calls your name.” Amara looked at him.

“Why?”

“Because it might not be someone you want to answer.”

“That sounds like something a person says right before something terrible happens.” “Then consider yourself warned.”

The bell rang a second time.

From the far end of the carriage came the sound of footsteps.

Slow. Measured. Getting closer.

Amara couldn't see who was walking toward them. The aisle was empty, yet the velvet seats dipped one by one as though someone invisible were passing.

A cold draft moved through the carriage.

Then a voice spoke.

“Amara Baker.”

It sounded like her mother.

Amara's breath caught.

She hadn't heard her mother's voice sound that young in years. This was the voice from old home videos, from birthday mornings and bedtime stories, from before grief had settled into their house and made every conversation feel like something they had to survive.

“Amara, darling.”

Her hand began to lift before she could stop it.

Kai caught her wrist.

“Don't.”

“But—”

“It's not her.”

The voice came closer.

“Amara, I've been looking everywhere for you.”

Amara's throat tightened.

The voice was perfect. The slight breathlessness. The gentle rise at the end of her name. Even the way it pronounced darling, as though the word belonged only to her.

“Please,” the voice said. “Come here.”

Kai's fingers tightened around her wrist.

“Look at me.”

Amara couldn't.

She could hear her mother crying now.

“Please don't leave me alone again.”

Something inside Amara twisted.

She had spent years feeling guilty for growing older without Lydia. Guilty for laughing at things her sister would never see, for forgetting the exact sound of her footsteps, for sometimes waking up and reaching for her phone before remembering there was no one left to call.

She couldn't bear the thought of her mother feeling that kind of loneliness. The footsteps stopped beside her seat.

A shadow fell across the notebook in her lap.

“Amara?”

She turned.

There was no one there.

Only a small white envelope resting on the seat beside her.

Her name was written across it in her mother's handwriting.

Kai released her wrist.

“Don't open it.”

Amara stared at him.

“Why does everyone keep telling me what not to do?”

“Because this place is very good at finding the things you want most.”

“And what if I want to find my sister?”

His face changed.

There it was again—that fleeting expression of pain, the one he kept trying to hide. “Then,” he said, “you should be careful what answers you accept.”

Amara picked up the envelope.

It was warm.

Not warm from the carriage or from someone's hand. Warm as if it had been tucked beneath a pillow, waiting for her.

She slipped a finger beneath the flap.

Kai stood so quickly that his knee struck the table.

“Amara, don't.”

She tore it open.

Inside was a photograph.

Two girls stood on a narrow bridge beneath a violet sky. The older one wore a yellow raincoat. The younger one had her arms wrapped around the older girl's waist, laughing at something beyond the frame.

Lydia.

Amara knew the pendant at her throat, the little silver crescent she had given her for her sixteenth birthday. She knew the way Lydia tilted her head when she laughed, as if she couldn't quite believe the world had given her something worth being happy about.

And she knew the younger girl.

It was her.

Amara's hands began to shake.

She had never been to this city.

She had never stood on that bridge.

So why did the photograph feel like a memory?

On the back, in handwriting she recognised as her sister's, were five words. You promised you'd remember me.

The bell rang a third time.

The lights went out.

For a few seconds, the carriage was swallowed by complete darkness. Amara heard the scrape of a chair, the rustle of paper, and Kai saying something she couldn't understand.

Then the lights flickered back on.

The envelope had vanished.

The photograph remained in Amara's hands.

Across the aisle, Kai stood perfectly still, staring at it.

“You've seen this before,” she said.

He didn't deny it.

“Who took it?”

His gaze moved from the photograph to her face.

“I did.”

Amara rose so abruptly that her notebook slid to the floor.

“You were there?”

“Yes.”

“With Lydia?”

“Yes.”

“Then tell me where she is.”

Kai looked as though she had asked him to do something impossible.

“I don't know.”

“You expect me to believe that?”

“No.” His voice was quiet. “I expect you to hate me for it.”

Amara wanted to demand an explanation. She wanted to grab his camera, search every photograph, force him to tell her what he knew.

But before she could speak, the darkness beyond the windows began to change.

The pale moon disappeared behind a veil of violet clouds. A distant glow appeared on the horizon, spreading slowly across the sky. Towers rose from the darkness, their rooftops sharp as folded paper. Bridges arched between buildings that seemed to have been built too close together. Lights drifted through the streets like fireflies, gathering around a river that shone silver beneath the moon.

And at the centre of it all stood a clocktower.

Amara leaned toward the window.

The tower had twelve clock faces.

On the thirteenth, there were no hands.

The train began to slow.

For the first time since boarding, the passengers moved. The woman in the blue hat put on her gloves. The man with the newspaper folded it into a neat square. The children picked up their wooden horse.

No one looked surprised.

No one looked afraid.

They were simply preparing to arrive.

Kai stood beside Amara, his camera hanging forgotten at his side.

“Welcome to the city,” he said.

She watched the rooftops draw closer.

“What city?”

He looked at her, and the answer came with the weary certainty of someone repeating a sentence he had once prayed he would never have to say again.

“The one that remembers you.”

The train passed beneath an iron arch.

For an instant, words appeared across its surface, shining like fresh ink. WELCOME HOME, AMARA BAKER.

Then the doors opened.

And somewhere beyond the platform, a girl in a yellow raincoat began to run.

CHAPTER THREE

The Street of Second Chances

The girl in the yellow raincoat disappeared before Amara could reach her.

One moment, she was running between the iron pillars at the end of the platform, her coat bright against the violet haze. The next, there was only a narrow passageway and a scattering of pale petals drifting across the stones.

Amara stepped off the train.

“Lydia!”

Her voice travelled farther than it should have.

It passed beneath the iron arch, slipped between the buildings, and seemed to return from somewhere above her.

Lydia.

Lydia.

Lydia.

She turned in a circle, searching the platform.

The other passengers had already dispersed. The woman in the blue hat had vanished into a carriage with no windows. The man with the newspaper walked through a door painted on the side of a brick wall. The two children followed a procession of floating lanterns down a flight of stairs that led nowhere Amara could see.

Nobody appeared to notice that any of this was unusual.

“Where did she go?”

Kai stepped off the train behind her.

“Who?”

“My sister. The girl in the yellow coat.”

He glanced toward the passageway.

For a moment, Amara thought he might tell her something useful. Instead, he looked away.

“You shouldn't chase her.”

“Why not?”

“Because you don't know if she's really your sister.”

Amara stared at him.

“I know what my sister looks like.”

“Do you?”

The question was so quiet that she almost missed it.

She took a step toward him.

“Listen to me very carefully, Kaiser Wilde. I have spent seven years being told that my sister is gone. Seven years listening to people explain why I should stop looking, and all those years, I had to watch everyone else move on while I keep finding new reasons to believe that she might still be out there… somewhere.”

Her voice shook, but she refused to lower it.

“So if you know something, tell me. If you don't, get out of my way.”

Kai didn't move.

Something flickered across his face, and for the first time, he looked less like a man with secrets and more like someone who had been standing in the same place for far too long.

“I wish I could.”

Amara hated him a little for saying it.

She turned and marched toward the passageway.

Behind her, Kai sighed.

“It's called Bellweather Lane,” he said. “And if you get lost, don't ask the clocktower for directions.”

She didn't turn around.

“Why?”

“Because it might answer.”

That was the last thing he said before she disappeared between the buildings.

Bellweather Lane smelled of rain, cinnamon, and something faintly metallic, like the air just before a thunderstorm.

The street curved in ways that made no architectural sense. Buildings leaned toward one another, their upper floors almost touching, while narrow balconies stretched across the gaps like bridges. Lanterns hung from wrought-iron hooks, each containing a small, slow moving cloud instead of a flame.

There were shops everywhere.

A tailor displayed coats whose sleeves moved when nobody was looking. A bookseller had arranged hundreds of books along a wall that appeared to continue into the sky. A little café

offered cups of tea to empty chairs, and every so often, one of the chairs would scrape backward as though an invisible customer had arrived.

Amara passed a bakery whose window was filled with tiny cakes shaped like moons. A handwritten sign beside the door read:

TODAY'S SPECIAL: A TASTE OF YOUR CHILDHOOD.

Beneath it, someone had added:

NO REFUNDS FOR UNHAPPY MEMORIES.

She kept walking.

The city was beautiful, she supposed, in the way a locked room might be beautiful if it had been built by someone who knew exactly what you were afraid of.

Every corner seemed almost familiar.

She recognised the pattern of the cobblestones from her dreams. She knew, without knowing how, that the narrow bridge ahead would lead to a square with a dry fountain. She knew there would be three steps before the street sloped downward.

And she knew the smell of the flowers drifting from a shop on the opposite side of the road.

White roses.

Her sister's favourite.

Amara crossed toward them, but before she reached the florist, a sound from the next street stopped her.

A bell.

Not the deep, distant toll of the clocktower. This was a small, cheerful sound, like a shopkeeper welcoming a customer.

Above a narrow doorway, a wooden sign swung gently in the wind.

SECOND CHANCES

Bought, sold, and sometimes returned.

Amara stood beneath it.

The words stirred something in her memory.

She had seen this shop before.

Not in the city. Not in her dreams.

In Lydia's notebook.

On the corner of one of the old sketches, beneath a drawing of a bridge, Lydia had written the name in tiny letters. Amara had assumed it was a place she had invented for a story.

Now she stood outside its door, staring at the familiar sign.

The shop window was crowded with strange objects: a cracked porcelain teacup, a pair of children's shoes, a key with no teeth, and dozens of envelopes tied together with faded ribbon.

At the very centre sat a glass jar containing what looked like a tiny storm. A small label beneath it read:

THURSDAY AFTERNOON, LOST IN 1998.

Amara reached for the door.

A bell rang overhead.

Inside, the shop was much larger than it appeared from the street. Tall shelves rose into the shadows, crowded with objects that seemed too ordinary to be magical until she looked at them for more than a second.

A row of watches ticked backward.

A music box played a melody she recognised but couldn't place.

On a velvet cushion lay a single blue button, and beside it was a handwritten note: From the coat you wore when you first learned to lie.

Amara moved farther inside.

Behind the counter sat a young woman with dark hair tied loosely at the nape of her neck. She wore a white blouse beneath a brown waistcoat, and there was a thin silver ring on her right thumb. A book lay open in front of her, its pages entirely blank.

She was writing something in the margin.

Amara cleared her throat.

The woman looked up.

For a moment, neither of them spoke.

Then the woman's pen slipped from her fingers.

“Oh,” she whispered.

Amara frowned.

“Sorry?”

The woman stood so abruptly that her chair scraped against the floor.

“No. No, you're not supposed to be here yet.”

Amara glanced behind her.

“I'm sorry, am I interrupting something?”

The woman didn't smile.

“What is your name?”

“Amara Baker.”

The colour drained from the woman's face.

She looked toward the shop window, then at the staircase in the far corner, then back at Amara.

“How did you get here?”

“Train.”

“Which train?”

“The one that arrived at eleven eleven.”

The woman closed her eyes.

For a few seconds, she looked as though she were silently counting to ten.

When she opened them again, her expression had changed. She was no longer frightened, exactly. She was trying very hard not to be.

“I'm Elodie,” she said. “Elodie Vale.”

“Nice to meet you, Elodie.”

“No, it isn't.”

Amara blinked.

Elodie seemed to realise what she'd said.

“I mean—” She pressed a hand to her forehead. “I'm sorry. I've been expecting someone for a long time, and you're not quite who I thought would come.”

“Who did you think would come?”

Elodie looked at the blank book on the counter.

“That's the problem. I can't remember.”

Amara stared at her.

“Is everyone in this city like this?”

“Like what?”

“Infuriating.”

To her surprise, Elodie gave a short laugh.

It sounded rusty, as though she hadn't used it in a while.

“Not everyone. Some are worse.”

Amara took the opportunity to look around the shop again.

On the wall behind Elodie hung dozens of photographs. Some showed people standing in front of buildings Amara recognised from the street. Others showed people she had never seen, smiling at cameras held by unseen photographers.

Several photographs had been turned toward the wall.

One had been covered with a piece of black cloth.

Amara pointed toward them.

“What are those?”

“Things people leave behind.”

“Photographs?”

“Sometimes.”

“What do people leave behind other than photographs?”

Elodie considered the question.

“Promises. Regrets. Names. The last words they wish they'd said to someone. The first words they wish they'd never said.”

She paused.

“Sometimes, they leave behind the people they used to be.”

Amara thought of Lydia's bedroom, untouched for seven years. The hairbrush on the dresser. The old jumper draped over the chair. The mug with a chipped handle that their mother had refused to throw away.

“What happens to the people who leave these things?”

Elodie didn't answer immediately.

Instead, she walked to a shelf and took down a small wooden box. She placed it on the counter between them.

The lid was engraved with a crescent moon.

Amara's stomach tightened.

“I've seen that symbol before.”

“I'm sure you have.”

“Where did you get this?”

“It was returned to the shop yesterday.”

“By whom?”

Elodie looked directly at her.

“By someone who said you would come.”

Amara opened the box.

Inside lay a silver pendant shaped like a crescent moon.

For a moment, the shop seemed to tilt around her.

She knew that pendant. She had bought it with money saved from weeks of lunch allowances, then wrapped it in cheap blue paper and given it to Lydia for her sixteenth birthday.

Lydia had worn it almost every day.

Amara had seen it in the photograph on the train.

She reached into the box, her fingers trembling.

The pendant was cold.

Beneath it lay a narrow strip of paper.

There were only two words written on it.

Not yours.

Amara looked up.

“What does that mean?”

Elodie had gone very still.

“Put it back.”

“No.”

“Amara.”

It was the first time Elodie had said her name without sounding surprised by it. Amara noticed.

“You know who this belongs to.”

Elodie said nothing.

“You know my sister.”

“I knew someone who wore that pendant.”

“Lydia Baker.”

The name seemed to disturb the air.

A watch on the nearest shelf stopped ticking.

The music box fell silent.

Somewhere upstairs, a door slammed.

Elodie reached across the counter and shut the wooden box.

“You shouldn't say names carelessly here.”

“Why?”

“Because this city has a terrible habit of keeping what it hears.”

Amara pulled the box back toward herself.

“Then let it keep this. Lydia Baker. My sister. She disappeared seven years ago, and I want to know where she is.”

Elodie looked as though Amara had struck her.

For one brief moment, her carefully guarded expression fell away, revealing something raw and almost unbearable beneath it.

Then she turned toward the staircase.

“Wait here.”

“I'm not going anywhere.”

“Good,” Elodie said. “Because I don't think the door would let you.”

She climbed the stairs.

Amara stood alone behind the counter, listening to the soft creak of each step. She should have followed.

She knew that.

But something on the counter had caught her attention.

The blank book Elodie had been writing in.

Its pages were no longer empty.

Words had begun appearing across them, one line at a time, in dark ink that seemed to seep through the paper from somewhere underneath.

Amara leaned closer.

AMARA BAKER

Beneath her name, a second line appeared.

ARRIVED: OCTOBER 14

Then a third.

STATUS: REMEMBERED

Amara exhaled shakily.

A final line began to form.

The letters appeared slowly, as if the book were struggling to write them. ASSOCIATED MEMORY: LYDIA BAKER

The ink paused.

Then, beneath it, another line emerged.

STATUS: REMOVED

Amara stopped breathing.

She read the words again.

Removed.

Not lost.

Not dead.

Removed.

The staircase creaked overhead.

Amara slammed the book shut.

When Elodie returned, she was carrying a small brass key on a chain. Her face had gone pale, and she kept glancing toward the shop windows as though expecting someone to be standing outside.

She placed the key in Amara's palm.

“Take this.”

“What does it open?”

“A room at the House of Unclaimed Things.”

“That sounds encouraging.”

“It isn't.”

“Then why am I going there?”

“Because someone has left something for you, and if you don't collect it before midnight, the city will decide it belongs to someone else.”

Amara curled her fingers around the key.

“Who left it?”

Elodie hesitated.

“Kai.”

Amara's eyes narrowed.

“Of course he did.”

“He asked me to give you the key if you arrived.”

“When did he ask you?”

Elodie looked at the black cloth covering the photograph on the wall.

“A long time ago.”

“How long?”

“I don't know.”

“Convenient.”

“Not particularly.” Elodie gave her a tired look. “You'd be surprised how inconvenient it is to forget your own life.”

Amara studied her.

There was something strange about Elodie that went beyond the way she spoke. She seemed to be searching for memories as she spoke, reaching into a room inside herself and finding that someone had rearranged the furniture.

Amara understood that feeling too well.

“Do you remember Lydia?” she asked.

Elodie looked at her for a long time.

“I remember that someone important is missing.”

“That's not the same thing.”

“No,” Elodie said softly. “It isn't.”

Amara slipped the key into her coat pocket.

She had come to the city to find her sister. She wasn't going to let another person tell her what she could or couldn't ask.

But as she turned toward the door, Elodie spoke again.

“Amara?”

She looked back.

“If you see a girl in a yellow raincoat, don't follow her into the river.”

Amara's stomach dropped.

“Why would Lydia be in a river?”

Elodie didn't answer.

Instead, she looked toward the shop window.

Outside, the rain had begun to fall upward.

And reflected in the glass, standing directly behind Amara, was a girl wearing a yellow raincoat.

Amara spun around.

The shop was empty.

When she looked back at the window, the reflection had vanished.

Only a small white rose remained on the counter.

Its petals were wet.

And tucked between its thorns was a note in Lydia's handwriting.

Don't trust the boy with the camera.

CHAPTER FOUR

The House of Unclaimed Things

Amara read the note three times.

Don't trust the boy with the camera.

The handwriting was Lydia's. The warning was unmistakably hers, too. Lydia had never trusted anyone who smiled too easily, and she had once spent an entire afternoon convincing Amara that their neighbour was a secret criminal because he owned three identical umbrellas.

She had been wrong about the neighbour.

She had been right about the umbrellas.

Amara folded the note and slipped it into her pocket.

“Is this supposed to mean something to me?” she asked.

Elodie was already tidying the counter, placing the wooden box back on its shelf and straightening a stack of envelopes that had not moved.

“I think it means you should be careful.”

“That's not an answer.”

“It's the only one I have.”

“Do you all practise saying that in the mirror?”

Elodie gave her a tired smile.

“Only on Thursdays.”

Amara almost smiled back. Almost.

Instead, she took the brass key from her pocket and held it up.

“Where is this house?”

“Follow Bellweather Lane until you reach the fountain. Cross the bridge behind it. You'll see a building with a green door.”

“What does it look like?”

“A house.”

“Thank you. That's very helpful.”

“You're welcome.”

Amara turned toward the exit, then stopped.

“Why are you helping me?”

Elodie's expression shifted. For a moment, she looked younger, and much more frightened.

“Because once, someone helped me.”

“Who?”

Elodie looked down at the blank book on the counter.

“I wish I could remember.”

There it was again.

That terrible, familiar emptiness.

Amara left before she could ask another question.

Outside, Bellweather Lane had changed.

The clouds inside the lanterns had darkened, and the street was busier than before. People moved past carrying paper bags, umbrellas that bloomed like flowers, and cages containing tiny stars. A man in a velvet suit sold handwritten apologies from a wooden cart. Across from him, a little girl was teaching a flock of pigeons to recite the alphabet.

Nobody seemed to find any of it unusual.

Amara wondered how long it would take before she stopped finding it unusual, too.

She followed Elodie's directions, passing the bakery with the moon-shaped cakes and a shop selling spectacles that allowed their owners to see through closed doors.

At the end of the lane, she found the fountain.

It stood in the centre of a small square, surrounded by white roses. Instead of water, the fountain contained hundreds of folded paper boats. They circled a marble statue of a woman whose face had been worn smooth by time.

A plaque at the statue's feet read:

FOR THOSE WHO LEFT WITHOUT SAYING GOODBYE.

Amara looked away.

There were too many things in this city that seemed determined to remind her of Lydia. She crossed the narrow bridge behind the fountain.

On the other side stood a green door set into a tall, narrow building. The house leaned slightly to the left, its upper windows crowded with potted plants. A brass number hung above the entrance.

Seven.

Amara tried the key.

It turned easily.

The door opened onto a hallway that smelled of cedarwood, old paper, and the faint sweetness of dried flowers.

She stepped inside.

“Hello?”

Her voice disappeared into the house.

There was no response.

The hallway was lined with small wooden drawers, each labelled with a name and a date. Some labels had been scratched out. Others were so old that the ink had faded into pale blue smudges.

Amara approached the nearest drawer.

MARGARET BELL — 12 JUNE 1947

The next read:

THOMAS REED — 3 NOVEMBER 1982

Farther down, she found one with no name at all.

Only a date.

14 OCTOBER

Today's date.

A cold sensation travelled down her spine.

She pulled the drawer open.

Inside lay a single silver button.

She recognised it immediately.

It had belonged to the yellow raincoat Lydia wore the day she disappeared.

Amara remembered sewing it back on after it came loose near the kitchen sink. Lydia had complained that Amara's stitches looked like a spider had suffered a personal crisis, then kissed her cheek and declared that the coat was better than new.

Amara closed her hand around the button.

Seven years.

Seven years of searching through old reports, school records, hospital admissions, and every photograph she could find. Seven years of asking people whether they had seen a girl with dark hair and a crescent-moon pendant.

And here, in a house she had never visited, someone had kept a button from her sister's coat.

Someone knew.

She continued down the hallway.

At the very end stood a staircase, its wooden steps descending into darkness. A small sign hung beside it.

UNCLAIMED THINGS: LOWER FLOOR

Beneath that, in smaller letters:

VISITORS ARE ADVISED NOT TO TOUCH ANYTHING

THAT RECOGNISES THEM.

Amara stared at the sign.

Then she went downstairs.

The lower floor was not a basement.

It was a library.

Shelves stretched farther than the walls could possibly allow, disappearing into a darkness punctuated by small golden lamps. Instead of books, the shelves held objects of every shape and size: cracked mirrors, glass bottles, old photographs, children's drawings, pocket watches, porcelain dolls, and hundreds of keys.

Each object had a small tag attached to it.

Some tags contained names.

Others contained sentences.

The apology he never made.

The summer she stopped believing in magic.

The last time they were all together.

Amara walked slowly between the shelves.

She passed a glass jar containing a single red leaf. Its tag read:

AUTUMN, BEFORE THE ACCIDENT.

A pair of spectacles rested on a velvet cushion.

THE FACE HE COULD NO LONGER REMEMBER.

There was a music box that played without being wound.

A SONG FOR SOMEONE WHO NEVER CAME HOME.

Amara stopped in front of a shelf of photographs.

Every picture showed a doorway.

Some were ordinary front doors, painted in cheerful colours. Others belonged to grand houses, abandoned cottages, or buildings that had long since been demolished.

In every photograph, someone stood just outside the frame.

Amara leaned closer.

In one picture, a small hand reached around the edge of a door.

In another, a shadow fell across the floor.

And in the last photograph on the shelf, a girl in a yellow raincoat stood with her back to the camera.

Amara snatched it from its place.

The photograph was warm beneath her fingers.

She turned it over.

There was no message.

Only a small number stamped in the corner.

017

“That's not yours.”

Amara spun around.

Kai stood at the end of the aisle.

His dark coat was damp, and his hair was untidy from the rain. His camera hung from his shoulder, its strap twisted around one hand.

For the first time since meeting him, he looked genuinely angry.

Amara held the photograph against her chest.

“You've got some nerve.”

“I told you not to come here alone.”

“You told me not to chase my sister. You told me not to answer a voice on a train. You told me a lot of things, actually. I'm beginning to think you enjoy hearing yourself speak.”

Kai walked toward her.

“Give me the photograph.”

“No.”

“Amara.”

“Don't say my name like you have any right to.”

He stopped.

The words seemed to strike somewhere deeper than she intended. For a moment, neither of them moved.

Then Kai glanced at the photograph in her hand.

“Where did you find that?”

“On the shelf.”

“You shouldn't have touched it.”

“Apparently, I shouldn't do anything in this city.”

“You shouldn't touch something that recognises you.” Amara glanced at the sign behind her.

“Is that what it means?”

“Yes.”

“What happens if I do?”

Kai looked at the photograph.

“Sometimes, it remembers you back.”

The air between them seemed to grow colder.

Amara turned the photograph over again.

“Who is she?”

“You already know.”

“My sister?”

He didn't answer.

“Then why are you keeping photographs of her?”

“I'm not keeping them.”

“That's funny. Because I seem to keep finding them wherever you are.” Kai's jaw tightened.

“I didn't put that photograph there.”

“But you know what it is.”

“Yes.”

“Then tell me.”

He looked at her for a long time.

When he finally spoke, his voice was quieter.

“It's a memory that hasn't decided who it belongs to.”

Amara stared at him.

“That doesn't even make sense.”

“Not everything in this city is supposed to.”

“Stop hiding behind that excuse.”

“I'm not hiding.”

“Then look me in the eye and tell me you don't know where Lydia is.”

Kai met her gaze.

For one strange second, Amara thought he might tell her everything.

Instead, he said, “I don't know where your sister is.”

She searched his face for a lie.

She found something worse.

He was telling the truth.

At least, he believed he was.

Amara lowered the photograph slightly.

“Then why do you look at me like that?”

“Like what?”

“Like you're sorry.”

Kai looked away.

“Because I am.”

“For what?”

He opened his mouth.

A bell rang somewhere above them.

The sound was soft, almost delicate, but Kai's entire expression changed. He turned toward the staircase.

“We need to leave.”

“No. You're going to tell me—”

“Now.”

Something in his voice made her stop.

From the far end of the library came a slow, scraping sound.

One of the drawers was opening.

Amara watched as a wooden drawer slid out from a shelf several metres away. It moved by itself, inch by inch, until it reached its limit.

A small white envelope lay inside.

Her name was written across it.

Amara Baker.

The handwriting was unfamiliar.

Kai stepped in front of her.

“Don't touch it.”

She stared at the envelope.

“Why?”

“Because I don't know what it is.”

“You don't know?”

“No.”

That frightened her more than anything else he had said.

Kai always seemed to know something. Even when he refused to explain, even when he looked at her as though he were searching for a memory he couldn't quite reach, there was always the sense that he understood more than he admitted.

But now, he looked genuinely uncertain.

The envelope trembled inside the drawer.

Then a voice emerged from it.

“Amara?”

Lydia.

Not a voice pretending to be Lydia. Not the imitation she'd heard on the train.

This voice was softer. Younger. Familiar in the way of things that belonged to childhood, before memory became something she had to work to preserve.

“Amara, it's me.”

Her knees nearly gave way.

Kai reached for her arm.

She stepped out of his grasp.

“Lydia?”

The envelope went still.

Then the voice whispered, “I'm sorry I left you.”

Amara took one step forward.

Kai caught her hand.

“Listen to me. Whatever that is, it isn't safe.”

“What if it is her?”

“What if it isn't?”

“What if I've spent seven years looking for her and this is the first time she's actually answered me?”

Kai had no reply.

Amara pulled free.

She walked toward the drawer.

The envelope was trembling again, its corners lifting and falling as though something inside were breathing.

She reached for it.

The moment her fingers touched the paper, every lamp in the library went out. In the darkness, something moved between the shelves.

Amara heard Kai say her name.

Then came a second voice.

A voice so close to her ear that she felt the words against her skin.

“Don't let him remember.”

A flash of light illuminated the aisle.

For an instant, Amara saw a girl standing at the end of the shelf.

Yellow raincoat.

Dark hair.

Silver crescent pendant.

Lydia looked exactly as she had seven years ago.

Her eyes were wide with fear.

She raised one hand and pressed a finger to her lips.

Then she looked directly at Kai.

And shook her head.

The lights returned.

The girl was gone.

The drawer slammed shut.

Amara stood frozen, the envelope clutched in her hand.

Kai was staring at her.

Not at the envelope.

At her.

His face had gone completely white.

“What?” Amara demanded.

He didn't answer.

“Kai, what did you see?”

He took a step backward.

For the first time, he looked at her not with guilt or sadness, but with fear. “You have to leave the city.”

Amara laughed once, a short and disbelieving sound.

“Absolutely not.”

“Amara, listen to me.”

“No. I've been listening to everyone since I arrived, and all they've done is tell me what not to do. My sister is here. I saw her.”

“You saw something that looked like her.”

“It knew my name.”

“So does the city.”

“It knew you, too.”

Kai fell silent.

Amara's anger sharpened.

“What did she mean?”

“Who?”

“Don't do that. You heard her. She said, 'Don't let him remember.' What does that mean?”

Kai looked down at the camera hanging from his shoulder.

His fingers were trembling.

“I don't know.”

“You're lying.”

“I wish I were.”

Amara held the envelope between them.

“Then help me understand this.”

She turned it over.

There was a message on the back, written in the same unfamiliar handwriting.

WHEN THE CLOCK STRIKES THIRTEEN, ASK KAISER WILDE WHAT HE DID ON OCTOBER FOURTEENTH.

Amara read it twice.

Then she looked up.

“What happened on October fourteenth?”

Kai didn't speak.

Above them, somewhere in the impossible depths of the house, a clock began to strike. One.

Two.

Three.

Amara watched Kai's face as the bells continued.

Four.

Five.

Six.

His expression had gone rigid.

Seven.

Eight.

Nine.

He backed away from her.

Ten.

Eleven.

Twelve.

The final chime never came.

Instead, every clock in the House of Unclaimed Things stopped at once. Kai closed his eyes.

And whispered a name Amara had never heard before. “Lydia.”

CHAPTER FIVE

Thirteen Is Not a Number

“Kai.”

He didn't open his eyes.

“Kai, look at me.”

His name seemed to pull him back from somewhere far away. He blinked, drew a breath, and looked at Amara as though he had forgotten where he was.

Or who she was.

For one terrible second, his expression was entirely blank.

Then recognition returned.

“Did you hear that?” he asked.

“Hear what?”

“The bells.”

“They stopped.”

“No.” He looked toward the ceiling. “They stopped counting.”

Amara glanced at the envelope in her hand.

“I'm more interested in the part where you said my sister's name.”

Kai rubbed a hand over his face.

“I know.”

“You said it like you knew her.”

“I did know her.”

The words were so simple that Amara almost failed to understand them. She stared at him.

“You knew Lydia?”

Kai looked at the floor.

“Yes.”

“How long?”

“I don't know.”

“Don't you dare give me that answer again.”

“Amara—”

“Was she here? Did she come to this city before she disappeared? Did you know where she was going? Did you know she was going to leave?”

Each question came faster than the last. Seven years of uncertainty pressed against her ribs, demanding to be let out.

Kai waited until she had finished.

“I knew her here,” he said. “I remember her here. But there are things I can't remember clearly, and every time I try to force them, something changes.”

“What changes?”

“Sometimes it's the details. Sometimes it's the order of things.” He swallowed. “Sometimes I forget what I was trying to remember in the first place.”

Amara thought of Elodie's blank book.

Of the words that had appeared and the name that had been marked removed.

She wanted to believe there was a reasonable explanation for all of it. A trick. A conspiracy. Some elaborate cruelty arranged by people who had discovered how to exploit a missing girl's photograph.

But the city had too many impossible corners, and the train had crossed a sea that didn't exist.

She was beginning to suspect that reason was not going to be much help. “Tell me what happened on October fourteenth.”

Kai looked at the envelope.

“I can't.”

“Won't or can't?”

“I don't know.”

She turned away before she said something she couldn't take back.

The library was slowly returning to its former stillness. Lamps flickered back to life along the shelves. The drawers had closed. The photographs hung motionless in their places.

Only the envelope remained in her hand.

Amara slipped it into the notebook.

“Fine.”

Kai looked up.

“Fine?”

“I'll find out another way.”

“You don't understand what you're dealing with.”

“Then explain it to me.”

He said nothing.

“That's what I thought.”

She started toward the stairs.

“Amara, wait.”

She stopped but didn't turn around.

“There are things in this city that can wear a memory like a face,” he said. “They can sound like someone you love. They can remember things you thought only the two of you knew. And sometimes, they aren't pretending.”

She looked back.

“What does that mean?”

“It means I don't know whether the girl you saw was Lydia.”

“But you think she was.”

His silence was answer enough.

Amara descended the first step.

“Then I'm going to find her.”

Kai followed.

“And if she isn't what you remember?”

Amara stopped again.

She thought of the yellow raincoat, the crescent pendant, and the voice in the envelope apologising for leaving her alone.

“I've spent seven years missing someone,” she said. “I can survive finding out the truth about her.”

She continued upstairs.

Behind her, Kai whispered, “I'm not sure the city can.”

The House of Unclaimed Things had acquired a new door.

Amara was certain it hadn't been there before. She would have noticed a narrow red door between the staircase and the hallway, especially one with a brass handle shaped like a human hand.

Now it stood open.

Beyond it lay a small room with a single chair, a writing desk, and a mirror covered in a white sheet.

On the desk sat a cup of tea.

Steam rose from it in delicate spirals.

Amara stopped in the doorway.

“Was this here earlier?”

Kai glanced into the room.

“No.”

“Does the house usually grow extra rooms?”

“Not that I've noticed.”

“Wonderful.”

She stepped inside.

A folded piece of paper lay beside the teacup. Unlike the envelope, it had no name on it.

Amara opened it.

If you wish to find the girl in the yellow coat, go to the clocktower before the last bell. Beneath the sentence, someone had written a second line in smaller letters. Go alone.

Amara read it twice.

“That's convenient,” she murmured.

Kai leaned over her shoulder.

“Don't.”

She folded the paper.

“You really need to expand your vocabulary.”

“I'm serious.”

“So am I.”

He reached for the note, but she pulled it away.

“Why would I go alone?” she asked. “Because the note says so? Because someone wants me separated from the only person who might know something?”

“Exactly.”

Amara frowned.

“That was surprisingly reasonable.”

“I'm capable of it occasionally.”

She studied him.

The tension around his mouth had eased, but his eyes were still troubled. He looked tired in a way that had nothing to do with sleep.

“Did you know this room existed?” she asked.

“No.”

“Did you write the note?”

“No.”

“Then someone else wants me at the clocktower.”

“Yes.”

“Someone who knows I'm here.”

Kai glanced toward the window.

“Someone who knew you were coming long before either of us did.”

Amara looked down at the paper again.

The clocktower stood at the centre of the city, its thirteen faces visible from almost every street. She had seen it from the train, rising above the rooftops like a dark finger pointed at the sky.

If Lydia had left something there, Amara would find it.

If the city wanted to frighten her away, it was too late.

She tucked the note into her pocket.

“I'm going.”

Kai exhaled slowly.

“Then I'm coming with you.”

“The note says alone.”

“The note can be disappointed.”

For the first time since the library, Amara almost smiled.

“Try to keep up, then.”

They emerged onto Bellweather Lane beneath a sky that had turned the colour of bruised plums.

The shops were closing.

A tailor drew the curtains over a display of coats. The bookseller carried a stack of books through a door that disappeared behind him. The man who sold handwritten apologies was packing his cart, carefully separating the apologies that had been accepted from those that had not.

Amara slowed beside him.

One of the papers had fallen to the cobblestones.

She picked it up.

It read:

I'm sorry I made you believe you were difficult to love.

Amara stared at the sentence.

Something tightened in her chest.

She thought of Lydia at fifteen, sitting cross-legged on Amara's bedroom floor, complaining that nobody understood her. She remembered how she'd laughed and told Lydia she was being dramatic.

Lydia had gone quiet after that.

The next morning, she'd acted as if nothing had happened.

Amara had never apologised.

She hadn't even remembered the conversation until now.

“Keep it,” the vendor said.

Amara looked up.

“I don't need it.”

“Then someone else might.”

She returned the paper to the cart and hurried after Kai.

They crossed the square with the fountain of paper boats. The white roses surrounding it had closed their petals, though the sky was not yet dark.

At the far end of the bridge, a narrow street climbed between two tall buildings. The clocktower stood at its end.

The closer they came, the stranger the city became.

The street lamps dimmed as they passed beneath them. The windows on either side reflected a different sky, each one showing a shade of violet that did not match the real one. From somewhere above, a woman's voice sang a melody Amara recognised from her childhood.

She couldn't remember where she'd heard it.

She only knew that Lydia used to hum it when she was nervous.

Amara stopped.

“Do you hear that?”

Kai nodded.

“Don't follow the music.”

“Why?”

“Because it's leading us somewhere.”

“Isn't that the point?”

“Not always.”

Amara listened.

The melody floated down from an open window on the third floor of a building covered in ivy. A woman stood behind the glass, her face obscured by a curtain. She sang without moving her lips.

Then, very slowly, she raised one hand and pointed toward the clocktower. Amara felt the hair on her arms rise.

“Who is she?”

Kai didn't look up.

“Seraphina.”

“You know her?”

“Everyone knows Seraphina.”

“That's not what I asked.”

“No,” he said. “It's not.”

He took her by the elbow and guided her onward.

Amara allowed it, though she made a mental note to demand an explanation later. The clocktower grew larger with every step.

Its walls were made of dark stone, threaded with veins of silver that glimmered faintly beneath the surface. The thirteen clock faces were arranged in a circle around the uppermost chamber. Twelve had ordinary hands and numbers.

The thirteenth had neither.

It was a smooth, black face that reflected the city below.

Amara looked up.

For a moment, she thought she saw someone standing behind the glass. A girl.

Dark hair. Yellow coat.

Then the reflection shifted, and she was looking at her own face.

“Don't stare at it,” Kai said.

“Why?”

“Because it stares back.”

Amara looked away.

At the base of the tower stood a narrow wooden door. No handle. No keyhole. Only a small brass plaque.

THE CLOCKTOWER KEEPS WHAT THE CITY CANNOT AFFORD TO LOSE. Beneath it, someone had scratched a message into the stone.

AND WHAT IT CANNOT BEAR TO RETURN.

Amara ran her fingers over the words.

“Which one is Lydia?”

Kai stood beside her, silent.

She turned to him.

“Which one?”

“I don't know.”

For a moment, she wanted to be angry. It would have been easier if he were a liar, a villain, someone she could point to and blame.

But he looked as lost as she felt.

She took the brass key from her pocket.

The one Elodie had given her.

It was small and ordinary, except for the crescent moon engraved near its head. Amara held it against the door.

Somewhere inside the tower, a mechanism clicked.

The door opened.

Cold air rushed out, carrying the scent of dust and rain.

Beyond the threshold, a staircase wound upward into darkness.

At the foot of the stairs lay a single yellow button.

Amara picked it up.

On its reverse, someone had scratched two initials.

L.B.

She closed her fist around it.

“I'm going in.”

Kai looked toward the top of the tower.

“I know.”

“You can stay here if you want.”

He gave her a strange, humourless smile.

“I've been waiting outside this door for seven years.”

Amara froze.

Seven years.

The same length of time Lydia had been missing.

She looked at him, but before she could ask what he meant, a bell sounded from somewhere above them.

Once.

The sound travelled down the staircase, shaking dust from the walls.

Then came a second bell.

Kai went pale.

“Amara,” he said, “whatever you see up there, don't look at the thirteenth clock.” A third bell rang.

Amara tightened her grip on the button.

“Why?”

Kai looked at her with an expression she would remember for a long time. “Because the last person who looked at it remembered everything.”

He swallowed.

“And the city has been trying to make him forget ever since.”

Amara climbed the stairs.

She counted them as she went.

Twenty-three. Twenty-four. Twenty-five.

The staircase curved upward, though the tower seemed too narrow to contain so many steps. The air grew colder. The sound of the bells faded until all she could hear was the soft scrape of her shoes against stone.

At the top stood a wooden door with a small glass window.

Light spilled through it.

Amara pushed the door open.

The room beyond was filled with clocks.

Hundreds of them.

They hung from the walls, stood on tables, crowded the shelves, and dangled from the ceiling on thin silver chains. Some were enormous, their faces as wide as windows. Others were no larger than coins.

Every clock showed a different time.

Except for one.

At the centre of the room, beneath a pool of pale light, stood a grandfather clock with a yellow ribbon tied around its handle.

Its hands were frozen at eleven eleven.

Amara approached it slowly.

There was a photograph tucked into the frame.

She pulled it free.

The image showed Lydia standing in front of the clocktower, her yellow raincoat unbuttoned and her hair blowing across her face. She looked older than she had in the photograph on the train. Perhaps seventeen. Perhaps eighteen.

Beside her stood Kai.

He was younger, though not by much.

His camera hung from his shoulder, and his hand was wrapped around Lydia's. They were smiling at each other.

On the back, in Lydia's handwriting, was a date.

14 OCTOBER — THE NIGHT WE CHANGED EVERYTHING.

Amara read the words again.

Then she heard a whisper behind her.

“Amara?”

She turned.

Lydia stood in the doorway.

Her yellow raincoat was wet. Her silver pendant glimmered against her throat. She looked exactly as she had in the photograph, except for the expression on her face.

She wasn't smiling.

She was crying.

“You came,” Lydia whispered.

Amara couldn't move.

For seven years, she had imagined this moment in a thousand different ways. She had pictured running into Lydia's arms, demanding answers, asking why she had left. She had imagined being angry, being relieved, being unable to speak.

She had never imagined that her sister would look at her as though she had come too late.

“Lydia?”

Her sister shook her head.

“I'm sorry.”

Amara took a step forward.

“Where have you been?”

“I can't explain.”

“Then try.”

Lydia looked toward the grandfather clock.

The frozen hands began to move.

Eleven twelve.

Amara stared.

Eleven thirteen.

The clock chimed once.

Lydia's expression changed.

Fear swept across her face so quickly that Amara barely recognised it. “Listen to me,” Lydia said. “You have to leave before it strikes thirteen.” “What happens when it strikes thirteen?”

Lydia reached for her hand.

Her fingers were cold.

“Everyone remembers what they lost.”

The clock chimed again.

Amara felt the room shudder.

“What did you lose?”

Lydia looked at her.

“You.”

Then the thirteenth bell rang.

And every clock in the room began to run backward.

CHAPTER SIX

The Things That Run Backward

The first clock shattered.

Its face split down the middle, and a shower of glass fell onto the floor. Before the pieces could hit the ground, they rose again, assembling themselves in midair until the clock was whole.

Then it began to tick backward.

Every other clock followed.

The room filled with the sound of reversed time: hundreds of hands turning counterclockwise, springs unwinding, pendulums swinging in the wrong direction. The grandfather clock at the centre of the room groaned, its wooden frame bending as though something enormous were pressing against it from the inside.

Lydia grabbed Amara's hand.

“Come on.”

Amara held on to her sister.

She had imagined this moment for seven years. In those imagined reunions, Lydia had always been warm, solid, unmistakably real. Amara had imagined the familiar weight of her against her shoulder, the smell of her shampoo, the way she would complain that Amara had grown taller without her.

But Lydia's fingers felt like ice.

“I'm not leaving you again,” Amara said.

“You have to.”

“No.”

“Amara, please.”

“You don't get to disappear for seven years and then tell me to leave!”

The words came out harsher than she intended.

Lydia flinched.

For one terrible second, Amara saw the girl she remembered—the older sister who had taught her to ride a bicycle, who had held her hand through thunderstorms, who had once sat awake until sunrise because Amara was afraid of a nightmare she couldn't describe.

Then the room lurched.

The photograph in Amara's other hand began to change.

The image of Lydia and Kai blurred. Their faces faded, then reappeared. In one version, Lydia stood alone. In another, Kai was looking away from her. In a third, there was a third person between them, a girl whose face had been scratched out.

Amara dropped the photograph.

It landed face-up on the floor.

The image settled.

Now it showed Lydia standing beside the grandfather clock, her expression solemn. Kai was nowhere in the picture.

Instead, Amara stood beside her sister.

She was wearing the clothes she had on now.

Amara stared at it.

“That hasn't happened yet.”

Lydia followed her gaze.

“Oh,” she whispered.

“What?”

Lydia looked frightened in a way that made Amara's stomach turn.

“It's getting worse.”

“What is?”

“The city.”

A crack travelled across the ceiling.

Dust drifted down around them, though the clocktower had stood for centuries without a mark. Through the window, Amara could see the rooftops of the city shifting. Buildings leaned toward one another. Bridges folded into impossible angles. Lights went out along entire streets, one after another.

Somewhere in the distance, a woman screamed.

Lydia pulled Amara toward the door.

“Don't look at the clocks. Don't listen if they call you. And whatever happens, don't let the city take your name.”

Amara stumbled after her.

“What does that even mean?”

“It means you have to remember who you are.”

“I know who I am!”

“Do you?”

Lydia stopped so abruptly that Amara nearly collided with her.

For a moment, they stood face-to-face.

Lydia's eyes were the same dark brown Amara remembered, but something moved behind them—something distant and exhausted, like a person watching a familiar house burn from across the street.

“Tell me something,” Lydia said. “Something only you would remember.” Amara blinked.

“What?”

“Anything. Tell me something about us.”

“Why?”

“Please.”

Amara searched her sister's face.

“Remember when you stole Umi's car keys because you wanted to drive to the beach at midnight?”

Lydia gave a small, startled laugh.

“You told her it was your idea.”

“It was your idea.”

“You were the one who knew where she kept the spare key.”

“Because you told me!”

For a brief moment, they were themselves again. Two sisters arguing over a ridiculous memory, as though seven years hadn't passed and nothing terrible had happened.

Then Lydia's smile faded.

“Good,” she whispered. “You still remember.”

“Of course I remember.”

Lydia looked away.

“Not everyone does.”

The grandfather clock struck again.

Lydia's hand tightened around Amara's.

“Come on.”

They reached the door just as the clocktower gave a violent shudder. The staircase beyond had changed. The steps spiralled downward into a darkness that seemed to stretch much farther than the tower could possibly contain.

Lydia pulled Amara through the doorway.

Behind them, the grandfather clock stopped ticking.

Silence fell.

Not ordinary silence, but something heavier—a silence that swallowed the sound of their breathing and made the entire world feel as though it were holding its breath.

Then a voice spoke from inside the clock.

“Amara Baker.”

Lydia went rigid.

The voice sounded like Amara herself.

Not the voice she had now, but the voice she might have had years ago. Younger. Softer. Unafraid.

“Amara Baker,” it repeated. “You have been here before.”

Amara turned toward the room.

Lydia caught her chin and forced her to look away.

“Don't answer.”

“But—”

“Don't.”

The voice inside the clock laughed.

“You always do this,” it said. “You leave before you remember.”

Amara felt a sudden, sharp pressure behind her eyes.

For an instant, she saw a different staircase.

A hand reaching for hers.

A door closing.

A girl crying in the dark.

Then the image vanished.

“What was that?” she whispered.

Lydia didn't answer.

She was staring at Amara's face as though she had seen something there that she desperately hoped wasn't real.

“Lydia?”

Her sister stepped backward.

“No,” she whispered. “No, no, no.”

“What?”

“You're remembering.”

“Remembering what?”

Lydia shook her head.

“I can't do this again.”

She released Amara's hand.

“Lydia, wait!”

But her sister was already running down the staircase.

Amara followed.

The steps twisted beneath her feet. The walls seemed to stretch and contract with every turn. At one landing, she passed a window that looked out onto a summer afternoon. A little girl sat beneath a tree, reading a book with a yellow cover. At the next, she passed a window showing a winter night, snow falling upward past a row of dark houses.

Then came a window overlooking her childhood home.

The kitchen light was on.

Her mother stood at the counter, stirring a pot. Lydia sat at the table, swinging her legs, a half-finished maths worksheet in front of her.

Amara stopped.

The scene was so ordinary that it hurt.

She could almost smell the rice cooking. She could hear Lydia complaining about homework, could see her mother pretending not to smile.

A life that had existed.

A life that had ended.

A life Amara would never have again.

“Amara!”

Lydia's voice came from below.

Amara forced herself to move.

By the time she reached the bottom of the staircase, her sister was standing in front of the tower's entrance. The door was open, and beyond it lay a street Amara had never seen before.

The sky was darker here.

The buildings were narrower, their windows shuttered. No lanterns floated overhead. No music drifted from the shops.

Only a line of white roses grew along the edge of the pavement.

Lydia stood among them, breathing hard.

“Where are we?” Amara asked.

“The part of the city people pretend doesn't exist.”

“That's very reassuring.”

Lydia gave her a look.

“You haven't changed.”

The words struck Amara with unexpected force.

She had changed. She had grown older, learned to hide her grief behind ordinary conversations, learned to stop mentioning Lydia when people began looking uncomfortable. She had learned how to live in a world where the person who knew her longest had vanished without explanation.

But perhaps, somewhere beneath all that, she was still the girl who would follow her sister anywhere.

Even here.

Especially here.

“Lydia,” she said, quieter now. “Why did you leave?”

Her sister's expression crumpled.

“I didn't mean to.”

“Then what happened?”

Lydia looked toward the darkened street.

“I made a promise.”

“To whom?”

“To someone who should never have asked me for one.”

Amara waited.

Lydia's hands trembled.

“I thought I could fix it. I thought if I came here, I could put everything back the way it was.”

“What was wrong?”

Lydia looked at her.

“You were missing.”

Amara stared.

“That doesn't make sense. I was at home.”

“No.” Lydia shook her head. “You were missing before you were born. Or after. I don't know anymore.”

She pressed her hands to her temples.

“It's difficult to explain. The city doesn't keep time the way the rest of the world does. Sometimes it remembers things that haven't happened. Sometimes it forgets things that have. And sometimes it takes something from one person to give it to another.”

Amara felt cold.

“What did it take from you?”

Lydia didn't answer.

Instead, she reached for the crescent pendant at her throat.

“This belonged to you first.”

Amara looked down at her own neck.

She wore no necklace.

But she remembered buying the pendant for Lydia's sixteenth birthday. She remembered saving the money, wrapping it in blue paper, and watching Lydia's face light up when she opened it.

“It was my gift to you.”

Lydia smiled sadly.

“That isn't how I remember it.”

Amara opened her mouth, then closed it.

She didn't know what to say.

Before she could try, footsteps sounded behind them.

Slow, measured footsteps.

Lydia's face changed.

“No,” she whispered.

Amara turned.

Kai stood at the entrance to the street, his camera in one hand. He looked as though he had run the entire way from the clocktower.

For a moment, he stared at Lydia.

Then he said, “You're not supposed to be here.”

Lydia's expression hardened.

“Neither are you.”

Kai took a step forward.

“Lydia, listen to me.”

“No.”

“Please.”

“You had seven years to ask me to listen.”

Amara looked between them.

Seven years.

The words had begun to take on a shape she didn't understand.

“What happened seven years ago?” she demanded.

Neither of them answered.

“Why do you both keep talking as if I should know something?”

Kai looked at her.

“Because you do.”

Amara felt anger rise in her chest.

“Then tell me!”

A gust of wind swept through the street. The white roses bent toward the pavement, their petals turning translucent.

Lydia stepped away from Kai.

“You can't tell her,” she said.

“Why not?”

“Because if she remembers everything, the city will know.”

Kai's face tightened.

“It already knows she's here.”

“Not everything.”

He looked at Amara.

For the first time, she saw something like fear in his eyes—not fear of the city, or of Lydia, but of Amara herself.

Lydia noticed it too.

“See?” she whispered. “It's already happening.”

A bell rang in the distance.

Not from the clocktower.

From somewhere beneath the street.

The stones trembled. A thin crack opened between the cobblestones, and a violet light spilled through it.

Lydia seized Amara's hand.

“You have to go.”

“No!”

“Amara, please. You can't stay here.”

“I just found you!”

“I know.”

“Then why are you leaving again?”

Lydia's eyes filled with tears.

“Because I love you.”

She pressed the crescent pendant into Amara's palm.

“And because I can't let you remember what you did.”

The crack widened.

Kai lunged toward them, but the street folded between one breath and the next.

For an instant, Amara saw a city beneath the city—a maze of empty rooms, endless staircases, and doors standing open in the dark.

Then the ground gave way.

Amara fell.

She reached for Lydia.

Her sister reached back.

Their fingers brushed.

And then the darkness took them both.

Amara woke on a pavement beneath a violet sky.

For a long moment, she lay still, trying to understand why her cheek hurt and why the air smelled of rain.

Then she sat up.

She was alone.

The street was quiet. The white roses had vanished. The crack in the ground had disappeared as though it had never existed.

Kai knelt beside her.

His camera lay broken on the pavement.

“Where is she?” Amara demanded.

He didn't answer.

“Where's Lydia?”

Kai looked at her with an expression she couldn't read.

Then he said, “Who?”

Amara stopped breathing.

She stared at him.

“Don't.”

He frowned.

“Don't what?”

“Don't pretend you don't know who I'm talking about.”

Kai looked genuinely confused.

“Amara, what happened?”

She scrambled to her feet.

“Lydia. My sister. The girl in the yellow raincoat. She was right here.”

Kai rose slowly.

“There was no one here.”

Amara stared at him in disbelief.

“You spoke to her.”

“Who?”

“You said her name!”

His expression tightened, and he pressed his fingers to his forehead.

“I—”

For a moment, something flickered across his face.

Recognition.

Pain.

A name he was desperately trying to remember.

Then it was gone.

He looked at her helplessly.

“I'm sorry.”

Amara stepped away from him.

“No.”

She took the silver pendant from her pocket.

The crescent moon lay cold in her palm.

“I'm not doing this again.”

She closed her fingers around it and walked away.

Kai called after her, but she didn't stop.

She had found Lydia.

She had spoken to her.

She had touched her hand.

Whatever the city wanted her to believe, Amara knew those things had happened.

And if the city could take a memory from someone who had lived it, then remembering was no longer enough.

She needed proof.

Something the city couldn't rewrite.

Something that could survive being forgotten.

Behind her, Kai picked up his broken camera.

The cracked display flickered once.

A photograph appeared on the screen.

It showed Amara standing alone on the empty street.

But in the reflection of a darkened window behind her, another figure stood watching. A girl in a yellow raincoat.

On the bottom of the photograph, a line of text appeared.

ONE MEMORY RECOVERED.

Then, beneath it:

TWO MEMORIES LOST.

Kai stared at the screen.

He had no idea who the girl in the photograph was.

He only knew that he was crying.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The Gallery of Almosts

By morning, Amara had decided three things.

First, she would never trust Kai Wilde again.

Second, she would find a way out of the city, even if she had to climb over every rooftop and swim across whatever impossible body of water surrounded it.

Third, she would not forget Lydia.

The third decision was the only one she trusted herself to keep.

She had written Lydia's name twenty-seven times in her notebook before dawn. She had written down everything she could remember about the previous night: the clocktower, the backward clocks, the girl in the yellow raincoat, the pendant, the street of white roses.

She had recorded every word Lydia had said.

You were missing before you were born.

I can't let you remember what you did.

The last sentence made her hand shake whenever she read it.

What could she possibly have done?

She had been a child when Lydia disappeared. She had been at home, asleep in her bed, dreaming of nothing more sinister than the school holiday that was supposed to begin the following week.

At least, that was what she remembered.

Amara closed the notebook.

The room around her was quiet.

She had spent the night at a small inn called The House of Moths, which she had found after walking until the streets began to look unfamiliar even by the city's standards. Its owner, an elderly woman with a cloud of silver hair, had given her a key without asking her name.

“You look like someone who needs a room,” the woman had said.

Amara had been too tired to ask what that meant.

Now, sunlight filtered through the curtains, turning the dust in the air to gold. She rose and crossed to the window.

Bellweather Lane stretched below her, already busy with morning shoppers. A boy on a bicycle delivered newspapers to houses that had no letterboxes. A woman carried a basket of

flowers that changed colour whenever she passed a shadow. Across the street, a man stood outside a shop, arguing with his own reflection.

The city was awake.

And apparently, it had decided to behave itself.

Amara almost laughed.

Then she looked down at the notebook in her hands.

Lydia's handwriting stared back at her.

If we ever find it, don't let me go alone.

There was something she had missed.

She was sure of it.

Lydia had drawn the city years before she disappeared. She had written about it in her notebooks, sketched its bridges, and somehow known about the shop on Bellweather Lane.

But why?

Had Lydia visited the city before October fourteenth? Had she dreamed of it the same way Amara had?

Or had one of them been remembering something that had never happened? Amara needed answers.

And there was one person in the city who might have them.

Not Kai.

Elodie.

The Street of Second Chances was busier in daylight.

Its shops stood shoulder to shoulder beneath crooked awnings, and the air was filled with the sounds of merchants calling to customers. A woman sold jars of laughter from a cart. A little boy traded a chipped marble for a memory of summer. At the corner, a man in a long blue coat offered to repair broken promises, though his sign warned that some promises could only be made worse.

Amara found the shop exactly where she had left it.

SECOND CHANCES

Bought, sold, and sometimes returned.

The bell above the door rang as she entered.

Elodie was behind the counter, sorting a stack of envelopes.

She looked up.

“You're back.”

“Were you expecting me?”

“No.”

“Then you're getting better at sounding surprised.”

Elodie placed the envelopes aside.

“Did you find what you were looking for?”

Amara thought of Lydia's face, the coldness of her hand, and the way the street had opened beneath them.

“No.”

Elodie's expression softened.

“I'm sorry.”

“I don't need you to be sorry. I need you to tell me what you know.”

“About what?”

“Lydia.”

At the name, Elodie's fingers tightened around the edge of the counter.

Amara noticed.

“You do remember her.”

“I remember a girl.”

“What did she look like?”

Elodie closed her eyes briefly.

“Dark hair. A yellow coat. A silver necklace.”

Amara's heart lurched.

“That's her.”

“I know.”

“How?”

Elodie opened her eyes.

“Because she came here.”

About the Competition

The Global Poetry and Creative Writing Competition 2026 by Hashtag Kalakar celebrates the art of storytelling and poetic expression. This esteemed event brings together writers and poets from around the world, offering them a platform to share their unique voices and imaginative creations. Participants explore various themes and styles, contributing to a rich tapestry of contemporary literature and poetry.

We extend our heartfelt thanks to ALIYA DINA BINTI MOHD SOPHIE JAILANI for sharing "Before The Memories Fade" with us. This enchanting piece is a testament to the power of narrative and imagination. We are honored to feature it in the Global Poetry and Creative Writing Competition 2026, and we look forward to seeing how this story continues to inspire and resonate with readers.

About Hashtag Kalakar

Hashtag Kalakar is a creative platform dedicated to providing artists, writers, singers and other creative talents with opportunities to showcase their work and reach wider audiences through competitions, features and creative initiatives.