Chapter 7: The Archivist's Choice

Fen gave her the address on a Tuesday, written in pencil on the back of a bus ticket. No commentary. No questions about why she needed it or what she planned to do when she arrived. He slid the ticket across the counter of his shop between a stack of secondhand directories and a tin of paper clips, and Morri picked it up as she would pick up a site reading — with her fingertips, at the edges, as though the information it carried might smudge. She had called him from the payphone outside the municipal baths, the one with the cracked handset and the dial that stuck on seven. Three rings. His voice, flat and unhurried: "Yes." She said Petra's name. He said nothing for a moment that lasted longer than the word had. Then he said, "Come by the shop." And that was it. The bus ticket sat in her coat pocket now, its pencilled address facing inward against the lining. Morri walked east through the Reach's narrowing streets, past the laundry with its perpetual cloud of steam bleeding through a cracked vent, past the newsagent where Mrs. Kessler was arranging the evening edition in stacks that would be half-gone by six. The buildings leaned. They had always leaned here, pressing toward each other across the street like old men sharing a confidence, but she read the lean differently now. Deliberate. Load-bearing walls angled to distribute weight across shared foundations, the whole terrace functioning as a single structural unit. Engineering dressed up as neglect. She turned onto Vetch Lane. The numbers climbed in no particular order — 4, 11, 7, 15 — the original sequence lost to decades of subdivision and readdressing. Petra's building was number 9, a four-storey terrace house divided into flats, its brickwork darkened by…