The first moth came on a night that smelled of iron and blown-out candles. Calder found it trapped under the eave of a railway bridge, its wings mottled with dust from cities he did not know, as if someone had stitched other people’s departures into its skin. He cupped it in his palm and felt a tiny, steady tremor beneath the fine hairs, as if the insect was carrying a ledger against its ribs.

He did not believe in signs, at least not the tidy sort other men sold in markets. Furthermore, he believed in small objects that kept you honest: a matchbox with a bird carved on its lid, a ribbon knotted so tight he had never learned how to undo it, a coin with one edge worn smooth from being held too long. The moth was none of those things. It was a summons.

There is always a seam if you have learned where to look. That night, it lay in a coin-shaped pool of rain where the gutter met the curb. Calder pressed his heel into the water and felt the pavement give, as if a page in the street had been loosened. Light bent. The world folded like a hand closing. He stepped through because his body remembered how hunger felt.

The town he fell into was built on absence. It had two harbors: one for ships and one for names. People came at dawn with glass jars and slips of paper and set them into the Name-Harbor like offerings. The jars bobbed gently, labels bobbing with them—FIRST DOG, MOTHER’S SONG, CHILDHOOD STREET. Notices were nailed to pilings in careful, practiced script: NO KISSING; CONFESS ONLY IN LIGHT; DO NOT SPEAK A NAME AFTER SUNSET. The instructions read as if written by someone who had learned the hard arithmetic of trade-offs.

Calder walked among the stalls with his hands empty of pretense. He watched how people carried their jars: balanced, fingers curled to the necks like they might drop if they loosened their hold. Two children swapped a jar between them the way other children pass contraband candy; an old man cupped a jar to his chest and closed his eyes, the way a man might hold a cup of hot tea against a sudden cold. The rules made the appetite inside Calder acute—restrictions are an invitation in the bones.

She was under an awning that smelled of brine and old paper. Driftwood hair, mouth practiced into neutrality, a river-scar thin across her wrist. She balanced a small jar on her palm like a coin on a fingertip. When her eyes met Calder’s she did not smile. She set the lid on with the slow habit of someone who has fitted lids to jars for a long time.

She kissed him because she could not kiss him.

It was a quick press of lips, courteous and boxed-in, as if both wanted only to remember the shape of contact. Her finger, when it brushed his sleeve, left a faint salt smear. The kiss tasted of apple skin and copper. When they broke apart, she looked at him as if reading an account. “Do you know the cost?” she asked, voice like a coin slid across wood.

Calder laughed—a polite sound he had learned to keep in his pockets after other crossings. “I always know the cost,” he said, and told himself the truth in a way that was half belief, half wish.

That night he slept on a bench by the Name-Harbor with the moth nestling in his collar. In dreams, the jars drifted like small planets; slips of paper bobbed beneath their corks—AUNT MARISSA; THE LULLABY; THE JOKE ABOUT A PIG. He woke with a hollow where a joke had been. He reached for a card his mother had once pressed into his palm, and could not remember why it had mattered. The particular laugh—sudden, hot, the one that used to make sauce sputter and chairs scrape back—had thinned to a schematic echo. He could form the sound, but not the warmth that made it his.

He walked the quay until the tide left the harbor lopsided and the jars listed like tired boats. In one a child’s handwriting leaned like reeds; in another a name blurred under a cloud of seaweed. Theft felt obscene in that hush; the town catalogued loss as if loss were delicate and should be preserved.

A man approached him with a ledger bound in leather the color of old kelp. He introduced himself as the Keeper of Returns and held the book open with fingers that knew the weight of accounts. Pages were scored with neat names and smaller notes: traded for safety; surrendered to tide; reclaimed with apology.

“You will be asked to give,” the Keeper said. “You will be asked to trade. The sea prefers balance.”

“What if I refuse?” Calder asked. The question was half experiment, half challenge.

“Refusal is a currency too,” the Keeper answered. “It buys watchfulness. Sometimes watchfulness is a sentence.”

Calder watched a woman pry a lid from a jar and suck the name from the slip like a sweet. Her face changed while she swallowed; for a moment she seemed fuller, then emptier, as if the name had been a bridge that, once taken, left two banks staring across at one another. The economy here did not destroy; it relocated. Affection, shame, memory—everything became an object, filed away, insured against further harm.

In a tavern, sailors spoke low of winters when the sea took lullabies and returned only the shapes of them. An old woman told how she had confessed too much one season and lost the name that used to make a child answer. She could hum the tune still, she said, but when she did the name was a blank where the feeling should be.

Fog rolled in like a made-up thing, soft as a shroud. Calder found the woman again near the market. Her jar sat open between her knees; inside floated a single slip of paper, neat handwriting leaning slightly to the right.

“You will keep coming to places that ask you to pay,” she said, not unkindly. “You will keep signing for the feeling of your teeth being bared. Why do you think you will be spared?”

He looked down at the moth tucking itself into the cloth of his coat and felt the answer as a sudden nakedness. “I expect nothing,” he said—true, and the beginning of a lie. He wanted, fiercely, to be spared what the seam had stolen: the private markers that made him himself. He wanted a ledger that read STOP HERE.

“You will not be spared,” she said. “You will be recorded.”

Her scar—the pale river in her skin—glinted in the harbor light. When she watched someone open a jar, she folded her fingers in the same small movement, as if weighing invisible coins. Calder saw the gesture now and banked it like a mark to find again.

He left a coin on the bench before he walked away, a blunt apology to a town that kept sorrow like a civic duty. The seam closed behind him with the soft, decisive click of a page shut. Rain-slick cobbles reappeared, as if the harbor had been nothing more than a rumor. The moth freed itself from his collar and settled at the base of his throat like a small, insistent warning.

He laughed aloud, a habit against tidy accounts. The sound fit its place—polished, hollow—and left him with a new ache: not the sharp, private thrill of transgression, but the knowledge that everything he took would be logged, cross-referenced, and held in someone else’s hand. The cost, he understood with a slow, cold clarity, could be more elaborate than the appetite that drove him.

The moth folded itself inside Calder’s coat like a wet scrap of paper. It trembled against his ribs whenever the seams in the world shifted; he had learned to follow that tremor the way other men follow music. A coin-shaped pool in the gutter held the seam that night. He slid his heel into it and felt the street tilt as if someone had pressed a thumb into glass.

He came out on a narrow quay under a low, washed sky. Wooden houses leaned toward the water as if they were listening for gossip. A wind bell at the pier’s end ticked like a reprimand. Jars bobbed in the Name-Harbor, their glass necks catching the light; people carried them like bread, lids clipped with the careful hands of those who had learned how to keep secrets from drowning. Notices were nailed in neat script to the posts: NO KISSING; CONFESS ONLY IN LIGHT; DO NOT SPEAK A NAME AFTER SUNSET. The rules read like remedies; someone, long ago, had learned them the way you learn to avoid a burn.

Calder’s pockets were full of little talismans: a matchbox with a bird scratched on its lid, a coin that had never found a hand to exchange it with, a ribbon knotted tight. He watched the market without meaning to, the way you watch a wave arrive and then decide if you will step in. Two children passed a jar between them like contraband; an old man cupped a jar to his chest and closed his eyes, as if holding someone’s warmth. The town’s restraint made Calder’s appetite sharper—rules always did.

She was under an awning that smelled of old paper and brine, a small glass jar balanced on her palm. Driftwood hair, a mouth practiced into neutral, and a scar on her wrist that split the skin like a river. When their eyes met, she did not smile. She fitted the jar’s lid with a care that read less like ceremony and more like habit.

She kissed him because she could not kiss him.

It was sudden and courteous, the sort of kiss you give to remember how hands meet. Her finger brushed his sleeve and left a trace of salt on his wrist. The kiss tasted faintly of apples and copper. When they broke apart, she looked at him as if reading a ledger. “Do you know the cost?” she asked, voice small as a coin slid across wood.

Calder laughed, the same polite sound he carried like a badge from other crossings. “I always know the cost,” he said, and told himself the truth in a way that was half-confidence, half-denial.

That night he slept on a bench by the harbor with the moth nesting in his collar. In his dreams, jars drifted like planets; slips of paper with neat handwriting bobbed underwater: AUNT MARISSA; FIRST DOG; THE JOKE ABOUT A PIG. He woke with a hollow where a joke had been. He reached into his pocket for a card his mother had once pressed into his hand, and could not remember why the card mattered. The family laugh, the one that had made sauce sputter and chairs scrape back, had thinned into a polite echo. He could shape the sound in its place, but the knot that had made it his—its history, its warmth—was gone.

He walked the quay until the tide ran out of the harbor and the jars listed at odd angles. In one a child’s handwriting leaned like reed strokes; in another a name blurred under a cloud of seaweed. He thought of taking a jar, of opening one for examination, but the town’s hush made theft feel obscene rather than possible.

A man with a ledger bound in leather the color of

The seam was a hairline crack in a shop window no larger than a thumbprint. Calder found it the way he found seams—by pressing where the world might, by habit, give. He slid a nail into the fissure and the street blinked away.

He arrived in a city of glass that smelled of lacquer and old perfume. Buildings rose like silvered cliffs; reflections multiplied until edges dissolved, and you could stand inside an idea and lose the shape of yourself. Alleys were lined with stalls where glassmakers sold looking-glasses that promised the face you deserved, mirrors that kept what you would give them, panes that remembered names you had not yet learned to hate. Light here came tempered, held back like breath.

The moth rode low against his sternum, its wings leaving a suit of other towns on the lining of his coat. He had kissed in a harbor and paid a price that echoed inside him like a missing bell. The city felt like another test: what would you trade to see yourself whole, and would seeing be the same as having?

The first mirror he passed did not show his face. It showed the small room he once slept in: plaster cracked where a fist had struck the wall, a sailor poster peeling at the corner, a wooden chair with a toothless smile carved into its back. He stepped close; his breath fogged the glass, and the tenderness it stirred nearly undid him.

He kept walking.

A vendor with fingers silver-stained leaned over a tray of hand-polished discs and offered Calder a palm-sized mirror wrapped in velvet. “This shows you what you are willing to lose,” the vendor said, smiling like someone who sold sorrow by weight.

Calder took it because curiosity had the same stubbornness as hunger, and because he told himself he could bargain better than most. The mirror’s surface breathed like water. For an instant he thought he saw the lost laugh bobbing under the glass like a gull; the image slipped and resolved into a cold pane that returned to his profile, precise and judging.

Mirrors here were not impartial. They asked and they took. In a shop on a quieter lane one mirror kept a marginal list of names; another offered a face without its earned marks, then, with mirror-cruelty, showed that face bearing someone else’s scars.

He found Liora among latticeworks of panes, a shop that smelled of paper and river mud. She arranged glass with small, exacting movements. The scar across her palm—thin as a dried creek—caught the streetlight when she turned. This time she was a keeper of mirrors: she polished rims with a rag so threadbare it folded around glass like a familiar hand.

“You find the loud ones first,” she said, half a smile at the corner of her mouth. Her voice scraped a place in him, he had not known was raw.

“You make it easy,” he said. She made nothing easy. She made moments precise and therefore more exacting.

Not only that, but she handed him a small mirror the color of old rain. When he looked, he saw himself bent over a table he had never known, hands stained with ink he had not yet spilled. Above his head, the moth loomed, pinned like a specimen. On the table lay a ledger whose handwriting might once have been his and might never belong to anyone. The vision was a ledger falling open: accounts arranging themselves.

“Mirrors collect,” Liora said. “They keep what we refuse to hold inside. They remember trades you thought you’d made in silence.” Her fingertip traced the frame as if reading Braille. “What would you trade to take something back?”

He thought of the laugh, the card his mother had pressed into his hand, the warmth that had bled out of him like water left on low heat. He imagined paying with a scar taken from his palm, a name surrendered to the sea. The question moved in him like something waiting to be fed.

Before he could answer, a woman in a shop across the street opened a pane and stepped out of her reflection as easily as stepping from one room to another. She moved with the simple confidence of someone who had surrendered enough to leave a lighter self behind; in the angle of her jaw there was the wrongness of someone who had traded too much. Liora watched her with a tightened expression.

“It pulls,” the mirror-woman said, voice like glass in a quiet room. “It takes what is not nailed down. You do not always know which part of you will wake missing.”

Her reflection remained in the frame like a passenger left on a platform. Liora’s fingers tightened on the rag. “They teach sinners here to call themselves saints,” she said. “They think if they can name the loss, they can own it like property.”

Calder folded that to the harbor’s jars in his mind—the careful lids, the neat slips of paper—and felt the seams stitch together: trade, balance, an economy of absence. He was a ledger in motion, a man who kept signing his own name in the blank spaces and promising, always, that the next line would be the end.

He carried a small, messy ledger in his inside pocket: receipts, scrawled numbers, a joke crossed out. Furthermore, he thought of adding the mirror’s vision to it and, with the practiced caution of someone who habitually cheats warning, laughed—a brittle sound—and set the disc back on the vendor’s tray.

“Not everything can be reclaimed,” Liora said first, blunt and unsoftened. Then, softer: “Not everything should be.”

He left the shop with the moth heavier against his chest, wings dusted like an old map. The city of mirrors slid behind him and folded shut with a sound like slow, polite applause. The seam narrowed to a chalk line beneath his shoe; the glass stitched back into the street. He walked on with two truths sharpening in him: every world wanted its due, and their ledgers had a way of reading him into a stranger.

At the corner he checked his hands; they looked the same—pale, careful, a little frayed at the nails. He pressed the bird-matchbox into his palm and felt its roughness. The moth stuttered and, for the first time since he had carried it, Calder wondered whose hands had last held such a creature and what they had given away to keep the memory of it.