The registry received people the way a pier received ships: quietly, with practiced indifference. Representatives in pale coats sat behind high counters, their stamps and seals laid out like instruments of a ritual. People came with folded pages; the clerks fed them to vents that hummed and spat back tags. The system moved with the soft certainty of an old machine that had learned the human shape.
Nox walked into that place holding his three small witnesses — the shoe, the wooden horse, the ribbon — like relics in a thief's fist. The air smelled of ink and boiled paper; a clerk looked at him the way someone looks at a page that does not belong to any book they recognize. Lian kept a small distance, eyes never leaving the registrar who spoke in the official, soluble voice of institutions.
A man called Kerran rose to meet them. Representative Kerran was narrower in person than on his notices, with a face that suggested someone who had grown used to erasing emphasis. He moved with the neat economy of someone who had learned to say little and mean less.
"We have a provisional review," he said, reading the line on the paper with the attention of a scribe who enjoys the sound of a sentence more than its truth. "An anomaly appears associated with your name — or nameless presence, perhaps." His smile did not reach his eyes.
Nox felt the coat close a fraction. "They sent the notice," he said.
Kerran steepled his fingers. "Yes. We do our due diligence. There are a few options. We can—" he pushed a slate across the counter and pointed with a pen that smelled faintly of lemon, "—file you as a registered person by appending a provisional identity. It is imperfect, but it allows the registry to affirm you when others forget. Alternatively, we may classify you as unowned. In that case the registry will mark your form as ANOMALY: UNOWNED and keep a minimal entry for municipal purposes. There are consequences either way."
Lian's jaw worked. "What are the consequences?" she asked.
Kerran's manner was of someone reciting mercy. "If we append a provisional identity, we will attach a marker. The marker acts as a ledger's promise: when the city queries a name, the marker routes inquiries here. It is a tether. However, such markers require collateral of one kind or another. The archive requires something to anchor the promise."
Nox tightened his fingers around the shoe. Collateral. The word fell into him like a stone in a well.
"What kind of collateral?" he asked.
Kerran leaned forward, and in that small move the room narrowed. "Collateral may be a physical witness — an object tied to a memory — or a voluntary transfer of a memory fragment. The registry prefers the first. Objects are concrete. Memories, however, are messy and often unstable. If you provide an object that remembers you, it complicates the registry's taxonomy less."
Marek's token, Lian had said, worked like a place-holder with the registry's logic. But the registry did not trust tokens from private hands. They trusted only what their own hands touched and sealed.
The representative's voice softened. "I will be frank. If you refuse collateral and refuse to be made part of a provisional file, we will classify you as unowned. That does not mean you vanish. It means the city treats your presence as an error to be contained. People pass you without confirmation. Children will not be assigned your name in play. Clerks will not file requests in your favor. It is a cage of polite neglect."
Nox thought of being a bracket, of the registry writing a neat line and closing the drawer on him. He thought of something worse: being placed so carefully under watch that his movements were translated into annotations, his gestures sterilized into entries.
"Can the registry take a memory even if I don't volunteer?" Lian asked. Her voice was small, the danger behind it sharp.
Kerran's face was as blank as a new page. "We may petition for compelled reconciliation in certain circumstances," he said. "But the archive prefers consent. Coercion breeds instability."
Lian glared at him. "Consent extracted under threat is not consent."
Kerran inclined his head, which was the most human concession he permitted. "We do our best to avoid philosophical debates at the counters," he said. "Practicalities are the registry's true currency."
At that moment a clerk passed, carrying a thin pamphlet bound with twine. The pamphlet had a title set with a careful hand: On the Mercy of Ordered Pages. A line under the title was familiar enough to pull at the edges of Nox's memory: by Ilmar. The name, when it reached him, felt like a quotation he had once known and forgotten.
Kerran saw him look and said nothing, though his fingers tightened on the edge of the pamphlet like a man gripping a ledger he did not want to hand back. "Ilmar is...a thinker many consult," he offered mildly. "His essays articulate the care the archive must take. We are custodians, not tyrants."
Lian's face went hard. "Ilmar argues that hiding truth is mercy," she said. "That is not care — it is quarantine."
Kerran's smile was the patient kind. "Mercy is often administered with a scalpel," he said. "Not all medicine is gentle."
Nox watched the pamphlet as Kerran folded it under the counter. He had heard the name Ilmar as a shadow, a doctrine. Hearing it in the registry felt like discovering a watermark on a page you had trusted. The pamphlet's presence was a small, public proof that the ideas Ilmar carried had seeped into policy. They were not separate men in distant rooms; they were the grammar of how the city explained itself.
"Will you accept the collateral of an object?" Kerran asked gently.
Nox thought of the shoe and the horse and the ribbon. Each was a small anchor. Each might buy him a tethered name. Each might demand repayment in ways he did not yet understand.
He thought, too, of the laugh. The absence it left sat at the hollow of his chest like a tooth pulled clean. Whatever had been taken from him might never be returned, even in an archive drawer. He had glimpsed the cost and felt it spread like a bruise.
"Give me time," he said instead. Time, he knew, was a dangerous currency in a ledgered city. Time allowed a clerk to read the margins and decide how loud an anomaly would be.
Kerran's eyebrows rose. "You have one week," he said, voice like a paradox presented as charity. "Arrange collateral, or we file the unowned notice. The archive offers support in reconciliation—if you present yourself willingly, the process is smoother."
Lian stepped forward before Nox could speak. "I will be his sponsor," she said. The words tasted of both bravery and a dangerous promise. "I will vouch for him. I will attach my name to his provisional file."
The room inhaled like someone pressing a hand to a bruise. Kerran's face tightened in the registry's practiced way. "Sponsorship is not without risk," he said. "If a sponsor fails to provide collateral, the sponsor's own files may be examined. It places one under audit."
Lian's hand did not tremble when she offered herself. She put her fingers briefly on Nox's sleeve and then withdrew them again as if to sever the tie politely. Her face was brave in a way that made Nox want to both embrace and push her away.
Nox did not let her decide for him. He would not let another person carry the legal weight for his presence. But seeing Lian step forward—saying he mattered enough to stake herself—unsettled him with an odd warmth.
"Thank you," he said to her, and the word was a small, private debt.
Kerran watched them both and then nodded once. "Very well. We will accept provisional sponsorship. Bring the necessary witness token or object within the week. Until then, both parties will be listed as under provisional review. There will be an observer assigned to check compliance."
They left the registry with an official line in their steps and a private unease in their chests. The ledger had given them a compromise: a promise with a waiting period and a condition that might yet demand collateral. Lian kept her face on, trading quick barbs with street vendors as if to prove the world had not yet narrowed entirely.
When Nox folded the registry notice into his coat, the paper felt cooler than the one he had received at his door. It was polite, stamped, and carried a low threat shaped like an expiration date. He thought of Marek's token and the shop's porcupine fingers. He thought of Ilmar's pamphlet, and how ideas, once bound and folded, migrated into forms and offices where their edges became law.
That night he placed the shoe, the horse, the ribbon, and the registry's notice beneath his pillow like a tiny safe. He lay awake and tried to remember the laugh again, to catch its half-second brightness and hold it like a coin. It slid away. He pressed his hand over the thin spot in his chest where absence lived and, for the first time since pulling the thread, feared not loss but the price of being kept.
Outside the compound, the city took another long breath and turned a page.