The city kept its better secrets behind shutters stamped with old excuses. To find a missing life you had to know which excuses could be lifted like lids. The Undertakers' Quarter smelled of laurel and old fire; its shops were narrow as promises and twice as difficult to return.
The brass-eyed woman had left me with a direction and a look that read like a challenge. She said, "Begin with the people who remember less than they should." The Undertakers were simple: they remembered endings, the last lines, the final gestures people paid to have recorded and then discarded. They sold the leftovers of stories — folded sentences, clipped goodbyes, receipt-stub funerals — to whoever could barter for them. If Lena had been "finished wrong," then perhaps someone had bought her ending and shelved the rest.
I paced past neon that advertised memorials in polite fonts and through alleys that happened to be named Afterthought and Nearly There. The City, in its economy of absence, built entire professions around tidy conclusions. There were chairs where you could sit and purchase a tidy funeral for a boy you never had, booths that sold you a polite death so you could escape a messy life for a respectable exit. It was commerce disguised as mercy; it smelled expensive.
The first shop I entered was narrow, with curtains like the pages of a closed book. A bell made of dry fingernails announced me. Inside, a man the color of old receipts folded paper into shapes that looked like coffins. He measured endings the way other men measured salt.
"You want endings cheap?" he asked. His voice was the sound of a drawer sliding shut.
"I want a ledger page," I said. "A missing page. One that belongs to Lena."
He cocked his head as if to listen for the name. "Pages are heavy," he said. "They need ballast. What do you offer?"
I thought of the Registry's conditional mark. I thought of the slip burning in my pocket like a single coin. "I have a slip," I offered. "Temporary access."
He laughed. Not unkind. "Child's change. The Registry sells you the right to look and not to touch. I need more than rights. I take what people do not know how to keep for themselves."
"You take what?" I asked.
His eyes, which had no mercy, crinkled. "You've already given them something," he said. "Sleep, a photograph, a night. What else have you got?"
I reached for the torn ticket from the theater and an old lullaby I had bought at the Street-Archives. The man lifted them like he could smell the value. He tapped the ticket and the lullaby, then the scrap of photograph. "Memory," he said. "Memories are currency for amateurs. You need a signature."
"Signature?" The word was raw.
"Cities take back what they can't tax," he said. "To prove authorship you must offer a thing that cannot be forged. Blood sometimes works. More polite relatives swear by keepsakes. Old promises trade well. Or you can write the name yourself in a place the city admits exists."
I had the wrong kind of heart for blood bargaining. The brass-eyed woman had said as much: "Blood may work. Memory often does not." I had no desire to be tested against that litmus. Instead I tried the thing I feared would be refused — I offered a promise.
I unfolded a scrap of a letter I kept folded in my wallet, the one I'd never mailed to my sister. Inside, in cramped, stubborn handwriting, I had written something like an oath: I will not let you be finished wrong. I offered that line as if it were a coin.
He read it and whistled. "Honest currency," he said. "A promise bound tight. That will get you a foot in the door."
He led me through a back doorway to a dim room where the walls were hung with hooks holding names on tags. Some tags were expensive—cloth stitched with gold thread; others were cheap, grocery-store tags with holes punched through them. "Pick a hook," he said. "Names will remind you where people were lost."
I picked a hook at random. The tag read only: Ledger 127B. He produced a drawer and slid out a thin folio smelling faintly of iron and burnt tea. The ledger page inside was stitched to an envelope, and on the envelope, in a hand I did not recognize, someone had written a single line: Discontinued — reassigned.
I drew a breath and felt the city at my back, patient and indifferent. The folio was warm as if someone had just touched it. When I opened it the page was mostly blank except for one marginal scrawl, written upside down: For debts paid in promises, repay in truth.
The Undertaker looked at me. "You didn't expect easy answers," he said. "No one does. The city's ledgers are bureaucratic things pierced with superstition. This one's been handled by a client who prefers absence to controversy."
"Who is the client?" I asked. My voice wanted sharpness.
He shrugged. "A name across many accounts. A hand that buys endings wholesale and files them under Clean. They prefer not to be named. They prefer the city to forget the price."
"That's who discontinued Lena," I said.
"For now," he corrected. "Discontinued can be temporary. We sell what we can, but someone with enough leverage can repurchase a life for their own library."
"Then where is the ledger's missing page?" The question felt absurd as soon as I asked it.
"The missing page is seldom missing by accident," he said. "It is misplaced on purpose. It travels. Sometimes it ends up inside the very people who seek it. Sometimes it is sewn into coats. Sometimes—" He paused and smiled a smile full of teeth and receipts. "Sometimes the missing page is the only thing someone refused to finish."
I spent my last acceptable promise—my unsent vow—on that thin folio and left with the envelope under my arm and a new problem in my mouth. The brass-eyed woman had taught me to start where people remembered less, but she had not told me how ugly memory's economy could be: how often endings were moved like chess pieces by hands that measured out grief in installments.
On the street a child tried to sell me a name in exchange for a pocket watch. I had no coin. The city hummed, indifferent and tidy. The envelope in my pocket was heavier than the upright knowledge of its price. Inside, the blankness on the page felt like a dare.
I had begun with a scrap of photograph and a cracked reminder; now I had a ledger page that demanded a truth I could not yet speak. The conditional mark from the Registry burned in my wallet like a single match. I had two choices: follow the page to wherever the client kept their purchases, or write a truth so loud the city could not refuse to hear.
Ahead, the brass-eyed woman waited in the theater's doorway as if she had been expecting my return. She looked at the envelope and then at me, her expression folding into something like approval.
"You brought ballast," she said. She folded her arms. "Now finish it—or be finished by it."
I held the folio like a promise about to be cashed. The city tightened around us, listening for the sound of a sentence that could not be politely dismissed.