I Was Marked By The System's Arbiter Chapter 52: The Silver River

The smile on Han Yu’s face remained perfectly static. It was a masterpiece of mimicry—warm, inviting, and utterly devoid of life. The eyes, however, were two voids, absorbing the dim light of the Window Quarter without reflecting a single spark of humanity.

Lin Yue did not blink. He did not recoil. He simply observed the angle of the smile, the lack of tension in the facial muscles, and the way the air seed to stagnate around Han Yu.

"That depends," Lin Yue replied, his voice a flat, clinical line. "On whether ’real’ is defined by the appearance of a person, or the presence of the thing that makes them a person."

Han Yu’s head tilted a fraction of a degree. The movent was too smooth, lacking the organic micro-tremors of a human neck. "A philosophical answer. Very safe. Very... you."

"Lin Yue! Han Yu!" Tang Xin’s voice broke through the tension, sounding frayed and breathless. He was standing a few paces away, glancing nervously between the two of them and the rows of watching silhouettes in the windows. "What the hell are you two doing? We need to move! Now!"

Lin Yue stepped back, breaking the proximity. He didn’t look at Han Yu as he turned toward the group. "We’re fine. Let’s go."

Shen Rui, who had been watching the exchange with an intensity that bordered on hunger, shifted closer to Lin Yue. His voice was a low murmur, barely audible over the wind. "He didn’t answer your question."

"He didn’t have to," Lin Yue whispered back. "The question wasn’t for him. It was for ."

"And the answer?"

Lin Yue just shrugged and didn’t answer his question.

The group resud their trek, but the synchronization of their steps had been shattered. They moved like a wounded animal, clustering together, yet each person maintaining a bubble of distrust. As they exited the heart of the Window Quarter, the architecture began to shift.

The apartnt complexes began to thin. The windows grew fewer, and the silhouettes within them spaced out, until instead of hundreds of watching shapes, there were only dozens, and then a handful, which was sohow harder to shake than the thing itself. The cobblestone narrowed and then widened unexpectedly into broad, flat avenues lined with pale trees whose branches had no leaves and whose bark was the colour of old bone.

A thick, silver mist began to roll in from the edges of the district, clinging to their ankles like cold fingers.

It rolled in from the direction they were walking, low to the ground, silver-white, catching what little grey light filtered through the overcast sky. It pooled around the bases of the trees and crept along the edge of the pavent in a way that tracked the group’s direction, as if the city was exhaling in front of them as they walked.

"Does the air feel... heavier to anyone else?" Wei Ning asked. She was rubbing her temples, her expression pinched.

"It’s just the humidity," Mu Cheng grunted, though he was gripping the strap of his bag with white-knuckled intensity. "Keep your eyes forward. Don’t look at the walls."

They walked in silence for several minutes, the only sound the rhythmic tap-tap-tap of their boots on the stone.

"Wait," Fang Jie said suddenly. He stopped in his tracks, looking confused. "Did... did soone say sothing?"

Tang Xin frowned. "No. We’ve been quiet for five minutes."

"No, I—" Fang Jie paused, his brow furrowing. "I thought I heard a question. About the map. Or maybe a direction?"

"Nobody ntioned a map, kid," Mu Cheng said. "Keep moving."

Lin Yue noted the lapse. It was minor—a montary glitch in short-term mory. He glanced at the others. Wei Ning was staring at her hands, a look of vague disorientation crossing her face.

"I don’t rember which café we were in," Tang Xin said abruptly.

He said it conversationally, the way soone ntions that they can’t recall what they had for breakfast. But the texture was wrong—there was a tightness underneath it, the specific tightness of soone who reached for sothing familiar and found an unexpected absence.

"What?" Mu Cheng said.

"This morning. When we got the rules. What was the café called?" Tang Xin looked around, his eyes moving fast. "I can see it. I rember the chairs, the counter, and the way the window was cracked in the corner. But the na—" He stopped. "It didn’t have a na," he said, then less certainly, "Did it?"

"It had a sign," Wei Ning said. She didn’t look up from where she was watching the mist. "Blue lettering."

"What did the letters say?"

"I don’t..." Wei Ning trailed off. Her jaw tightened slightly.

"mory lapses are normal under high stress," Xia Jingshi said. His tone had the particular flatness of a forr detective reciting sothing he’d been taught. "The cognitive load of the last few hours would account for—"

"I forgot my sister’s phone number," Fang Jie said.

Nobody had a response to that.

"I know it." Fang Jie was staring at his own hand like it had betrayed him. "I’ve known it since I was twelve. I used to call her every week. It was just—it was there—and now it’s—" He pressed his fingers against his temple. "It’s like trying to look at sothing directly, and it keeps sliding out of the corner of your eye."

"When did you last rember it?" Lin Yue asked.

Fang Jie looked at him. "An hour ago? Maybe two? I don’t—" He hesitated. "I don’t know how long we’ve been walking."

Lin Yue said nothing. He had been tracking this since the first instance, three minutes and forty seconds ago, when Tang Xin had reached for the cafe’s mory and found it sared. He had assud it was isolated.

The lapses were spreading.

He tested himself carefully, thodically, the way he always verified data—by isolating a specific mory and checking it against adjacent ones for coherence. His own face in his apartnt window the morning before the Flow had taken him. The particular quality of the light. The crack in the wall beside the window fra of his apartnt. The half-full glass of water on the kitchen counter.

The images in his mory were there, complete and intact.

He didn’t know whether to feel reassured or more concerned by that.

To his right, Shen Rui moved closer under the pretext of navigating a patch of thicker mist.

"You noticed," Shen Rui said, low.

"Fifteen minutes ago."

"The forgetting." Shen Rui’s voice was controlled, but his eyes were moving with a rapid, precise attention that suggested he had been running the sa internal inventory checks Lin Yue had. "It’s environntal. Not psychological."

"It’s both," Lin Yue replied. "The environnt is causing the psychological response. They’re not separable here."

Shen Rui processed this. "How far does it go?"

"I don’t know yet." Lin Yue paused. "Keep a verbal anchor. Sothing concrete that you can repeat to yourself. Sothing that doesn’t depend on mory for its validity—a na, a fact, a promise. Sothing the environnt can’t erase because it isn’t stored in mory, it’s stored in repetition."

Shen Rui was quiet for a mont.

"My mother’s na," he said finally. "Shen Mingzhi."

"Say it again."

"Shen Mingzhi." A breath. "Shen Mingzhi."

"Good."

Lin Yue did not perform the sa exercise. He was aware, in the back of his mind, of a particular silence where he went looking for sothing equivalent. He did not examine it directly.

He looked ahead. The silver mist was thickening, and through the haze, a low, shimring line appeared on the horizon.

They had reached the banks of the Mirror River.

The sight was breathtaking and horrifying in equal asure. The river was wide—perhaps a hundred ters across—and composed entirely of liquid silver. It didn’t flow; it didn’t ripple. The surface was as still as a sheet of polished obsidian, reflecting the grey sky with a clarity that felt predatory.

The river didn’t just reflect the sky; it seed to possess a depth that defied physics. Looking into it felt like looking into a vertical abyss of chro.

There was no sound of rushing water. No splash of fish. No wind. The silence near the river was deeper than the silence of the city; it was a vacuum that seed to swallow the very sound of their breathing.

"It looks like molten glass," Shen Rui whispered, stepping up beside Lin Yue.

Lin Yue observed the river. There was no visible source and no visible end. It simply existed, a silver scar cutting through the landscape. The river didn’t feel like a body of water; it felt like a sentient entity, ancient and patient, waiting for them to approach.

The surface was liquid silver.

Not the silver of ordinary grey water on an overcast day. Silver, tallic, shimring, impossibly reflective, like the surface of a mirror that had been lted and poured into a riverbed. It caught the sky above it and held it there, a perfect inverted image of clouds and pale light. It caught the silhouettes of the trees on the bank. It caught the shapes of the players as they approached the surface.

"Don’t look too long," Mu Cheng warned, his veteran instincts screaming. "I’ve heard of rivers like this in other instances. They don’t just take your reflection; they take your essence."

As if on cue, Fang Jie wandered closer to the bank, drawn by the hypnotic shimr of the silver liquid.

"Fang Jie, get back from the edge," Xia Jingshi ordered.

Fang Jie stopped.

The group spread out along the bank at Mu Cheng’s warning, maintaining a collective distance of roughly two ters from the water’s edge. Close enough to observe, far enough that the observation would cost them ti rather than proximity if sothing happened.

Nothing moved in the river.

Nothing moved on the opposite bank.

The silence here had a different density than the silence of the Window Quarter. That silence had been occupied—the weight of watching things, of attention. This silence was sothing older. It felt less like absence and more like saturation, the silence of a space that had absorbed so much for so long that it had simply stopped giving anything back.

"Don’t look at the water," Mu Cheng said.

But he was already looking. They all were.

That was when it began.

Tang Xin was the first one to react visibly. He stepped back from the bank without aning to, a full half-step, and his hand ca up to his mouth.

"What?" Mu Cheng said, imdiately on alert.

"I can see—" Tang Xin stopped. His jaw worked. "In the water, that’s not—that’s not the sky."

They looked.

He was right.

The river’s surface had stopped reflecting the grey sky above them.

Instead, each player’s section of the water—the strip of silver directly below where each person stood—had shifted. One by one, as if the water was processing them individually, determining what to show.

Where Lin Yue stood, the water was still silver and still.

Where Tang Xin stood, the water showed a hospital hallway. White fluorescent light. A numbered door. A figure behind a curtain. Sothing in the rigid, hunched quality of the silhouette suggesting it was small, or had beco small, from sothing that had happened to it.

Tang Xin looked for exactly four seconds. Then he turned away. His face was completely blank, the specific blankness of a person sealing sothing behind a necessary wall.

Nobody asked.

Wei Ning looked into her section of the water and went very still. Her eyes tracked sothing across the surface, sothing that moved, sothing Lin Yue could not see from his angle. When she looked up again, she had the composed, deliberate quality of soone who had just confird a suspicion they’d spent a long ti refusing to have.

"Don’t look for longer than you have to," Lin Yue said.

"What does it show?" Xia Jingshi asked. Not to anyone specifically. The question of a man who had spent years in investigation, asking sothing he was afraid he already knew the answer to.

The river didn’t reflect the present. It reflected the scars. It dragged the most painful, traumatic mories from the depths of their psyches and laid them bare on the surface of the silver water.

"It’s a mirror of the soul," a voice rasped.

The group jolted, spinning around.

The old man appeared from beneath the bridge.

The bridge was narrow and stone, the kind of functional crossing that cities built and stopped noticing, and it had been so still and grey that Lin Yue had catalogued it as part of the architecture rather than a possible shelter. But from its shadow, an old man erged, pushing a rusted broom across the bridge’s flagstones with the unhurried patience of soone who had been sweeping this sa section of bridge for longer than any of them had been alive.

He was thin. Not the thinness of illness but the thinness of ti, the kind of fra that remained when a person had worn down to the minimum required for continuation. His clothes were grey and worn at every point of friction. His broom was more rust than tal, but he pushed it with the attentiveness of a craftsman with a prized tool.

He looked at the group once, with small, dark eyes that held no surprise whatsoever.

He looked completely ordinary. And in a city of shifting reflections and featureless silhouettes, that ordinariness was the most unsettling thing about him.

"Who are you?" Mu Cheng demanded, stepping in front of the group.

The old man didn’t look up. He continued to sweep the silver dust into a neat pile. "Just a sweeper. The city gets ssy. Lots of things were left behind. Bits of skin, pieces of nas, shards of a first love. I just tidy up."

"Tidy up what?" Xia Jingshi asked, his detective instincts kicking in despite the horror.

The old man finally looked up. His eyes were cloudy, filled with a profound, exhausted sadness.

Then he went back to sweeping.

"Hey!" Tang Xin called out. "Hey, you! Is it safe to cross?"

The old man swept for another three strokes before he answered.

"Safe," he said, without looking up, with the tone of a man repeating a word that had stopped aning anything useful. "Depends on how long you look at it."

The group exchanged glances.

Lin Yue walked toward him.

He stopped at the edge of the bridge, near enough to speak at a normal register, far enough that the old man had the option of ignoring him. "You live here?"

"I sweep here," the old man said. "Different thing."

"What’s your na?" Lin Yue asked.

"They call Old Wu." He didn’t offer more than that. Old Wu, in the way of people whose nas had been abbreviated by long familiarity, or perhaps by long solitude. He swept another stroke. "You’re players."

"Yes."

"You’ve already lost soone."

It wasn’t a question. Lin Yue looked at him carefully. "How do you know that?"

"You’re walking the way people walk when the number is wrong." Old Wu finally stopped sweeping, leaning on the handle of his broom and looking at the river with an expression that had moved past grief into sothing that lived on the other side of grief—a kind of exhausted tenderness. "Used to be I could watch a group co in and count them, and then count again at the river, and compare the numbers. Stopped keeping count eventually. The math was always the sa."

"The river," Lin Yue said. "What does it do?"

Old Wu looked at him sidelong.

"The river drinks," he said.

"Drinks what?" Mu Cheng demanded, from behind Lin Yue. He had moved closer without Lin Yue noticing, drawn in by the conversation despite himself.

"Nas," Old Wu said. "Faces. mories. Whatever people leave behind when they stand too close to things that are older and hungrier than they are." He turned back to the river. "People who linger too long stop rembering which side of the water they belong to."

A heavy silence fell over the group.

A chill ran down Lin Yue’s spine. "You’re saying the river consus identity?"

"That’s not possible," Xia Jingshi said, but he said it without conviction, the protest of a man whose professional frawork was slowly being disassembled around him.

"Brother," Old Wu said, not unkindly, "you’re standing in a city where the reflections walk on their own. You’ve already seen things that aren’t possible. Why should the water be any different?"

Nobody had an answer to that.

"The forgetting," Lin Yue said. "The mory lapses since we left the Window Quarter. That was already the beginning."

Old Wu inclined his head. It wasn’t a confirmation exactly. It was the acknowledgent of soone who saw no point in being gentle about the truth.

"The city takes slowly," he said. "It’s patient. It’s been here a long ti. It knows how to wait." He looked at the group, at Fang Jie specifically, who was standing slightly apart with his arms wrapped around himself.

"Mirrorhaven doesn’t just replace you with a reflection. That’s the crude part. The real work happens here. The city erodes you. It scrapes away the edges of who you are until there’s nothing left but a hollow shell. And a shell is very easy to fill with sothing else." Old Wu continued.

The old man sighed, looking out over the still water. "I rember a woman who used to walk here. She had a laugh that sounded like bells. She lived in the Window Quarter for ten years. One day, she forgot the na of her first love. A week later, she forgot the color of her eyes. By the ti she ca to , she didn’t even rember that she was a woman."

Old Wu’s voice trembled slightly. "She just stood there, staring at the silver, asking who she was. And I couldn’t tell her, because by then, the river had already drunk the answer."

The horror of it sank in. The replacent wasn’t a sudden theft; it was a slow, agonizing disappearance.

"How do we cross?" Mu Cheng demanded. "We can’t stay here."

"Crossing isn’t the hard part," Old Wu said. "The hard part is arriving on the other side as the sa person who started the journey. People who linger too long stop rembering which side of the water they belong to."

"Is there a way to stop it?" Shen Rui asked.

"Anchor yourself," Old Wu said. He reached into his coat pocket and produced a small, flat stone, worn smooth—sothing he’d clearly carried for a long ti. He held it up.

"Sothing physical. Sothing with weight. Sothing your hands know even when your mind doesn’t." He turned it over once, then returned it to his pocket with the careful motion of a man returning sothing precious to its place. "The city takes from the inside. It can’t take what you hold on the outside."

Lin Yue’s eyes had drifted back to the river.

He told himself this was data collection—observing the phenonon systematically rather than experiencing it. He approached the bank with the careful deliberateness of a man who had decided to do sothing he knew he was not going to enjoy.

He looked down.

The silver surface was still. It caught his silhouette—a dark shape against grey sky.

Then, as it had done with the others, the water began to shift. The silver cleared, becoming transparent, becoming a window, the way a mirror becos sothing different when you look through it.

Lin Yue waited.

The others’ mories had appeared quickly. A flash of light, a room, a face, a mont preserved in the amber of the river’s recollection.

He waited for the image. He waited for the orphanage, for the cold nights, for the indifferent guardians, for the years of silence and detachnt. He waited for the one mory that should have been the cornerstone of his trauma.

But the river remained still.

There was no child in a dark room. No failing hands. No betrayal.

Beneath the surface, there was only a void. A blank, expansive stretch of absolute darkness. It wasn’t a mory of darkness; it was the absence of mory. The river was searching, swirling, probing into the depths of Lin Yue’s psyche, but it found nothing it could grip.

No hook. No scar. No wound.

Lin Yue stared into the void, and for the first ti since entering the Flow, he felt a flicker of genuine disturbance. He had always known he was detached, but this was different. The river, which had effortlessly stripped the others of their defenses, could find nothing in him to reflect.

It was as if he were a ghost in his own life.

The water didn’t cloud over or turn black. It simply remained clear, clear as nothing, clear as the space between objects, and in that clarity there was no mory waiting to be excavated, no wound to be pressed upon, no particular darkness to surface.

Only a void.

A flat, featureless, absolute nothing.

Lin Yue stared at it for a long mont.

He had expected sothing. Not necessarily sothing he wanted to see—he hadn’t expected that. He had expected sothing, the way a person walking toward a mirror expects to see a face, regardless of whether they want to examine it. He expected to see the woman that Bai Wuyin was telling him about. The absence of it was not reassuring. It was not evidence of being spared.

It was evidence of sothing else entirely, and he didn’t have a clean word for what it was yet.

"Huh," said a voice beside him.

Old Wu had moved to stand at his elbow without Lin Yue noticing. The old man was looking into the water, at the space where Lin Yue’s mory should have been, with an expression that Lin Yue could not imdiately classify.

There was no fear in his eyes. There was sothing else.

Recognition.

"What?" Lin Yue said.

Old Wu was quiet for a mont.

"The river doesn’t know what to do with you," he said.

"What do you an?" Lin Yue asked.

Old Wu’s expression remained resigned. "Most people are like cracked mirrors. The river just finds the cracks and pours itself in. But you... you’re a solid sheet of glass. No cracks. No gaps. You’ve stabilized the void inside you so thoroughly that the river can’t find a way in."

"Is that a good thing?"

Old Wu gave a small, sad smile. "It ans you’re stable. But stability in a place like this is a very lonely thing, young man. The river doesn’t hate you. It’s just... confused. You are a variable that cannot be calculated. A book that cannot be read."

Lin Yue looked back at the void in the water. He felt a strange, hollow sensation in his chest. He had spent his entire life building walls to protect himself from pain, and now those walls were making him invisible to the very essence of the city.

"We need anchors," Lin Yue said, turning back to the group. "Now. Before we move any further."

"Anchors," Mu Cheng repeated.

"Physical objects. Sothing with personal significance. Sothing you can hold." He looked around the group. "The mory erosion follows a gradient. The further we travel without anchoring, the worse the loss becos."

The group moved with the sudden, urgent practicality of people who had been given a concrete task at exactly the mont when abstraction had started to feel unbearable.

Mu Cheng held a folded photograph with the edges worn soft by repeated handling.

Tang Xin had a keychain. Four keys and a plastic charm shaped like a small orange cat. He closed his fingers around it, and his breathing steadied, marginally.

Wei Ning pressed her fingertips against the inside of her own wrist, not searching for a pulse but pressing against an old scar there, sothing that could be felt rather than rembered.

Xia Jingshi held a badge. Old, out of its jurisdiction, belonging to a career that may have ended badly, judging by the particular way he held it—like sothing he needed to rember being, even if the mory hurt.

Han Yu reached into his jacket and took a gold lighter. He turned it over once between his fingers.

Lin Yue watched the lighter. Han Yu’s fingers moved over it with appropriate familiarity. The motion was right. The weight of it in his grip, the particular habit of turning it once before stopping, these were genuine-looking mories encoded in the hands.

Han Yu looked up and caught Lin Yue watching.

He smiled.

Lin Yue looked at his own hands. He had nothing. No heirlooms, no tokens of affection, no ntos of a lost ho. He had spent his life ensuring he owned nothing that could be taken away.

"I don’t have anything," Lin Yue whispered.

Shen Rui, who had been silent, reached out. He took Lin Yue’s hand—a brief, firm pressure that sent a jolt of electricity through Lin Yue’s detached composure.

"You have us," Shen Rui said, his voice low and steady. "That’s a concrete fact. We are here. You are here. Use the group as your anchor."

Lin Yue looked at Shen Rui. The man’s eyes were searching, intense, and for a fleeting second, Lin Yue felt a connection that wasn’t based on logic or survival. It was a warm feeling that he could not na.

"I’ll be your anchor if you’ll be mine," Shen Rui added, a small, knowing smile touching his lips.

Lin Yue didn’t pull his hand away. "Thank you."

Then Lin Yue looked at Fang Jie.

Fang Jie was standing completely still.

"Fang Jie," Lin Yue said. "Your anchor."

Fang Jie didn’t move.

"Fang Jie."

The young man turned slowly. He had the expression of soone who was looking at the world from a slight distance, as though sothing thin but impenetrable had slid between him and everything around him.

"I—" He stopped. His brow furrowed. "What’s..." He stopped again.

"I... I can’t..."

They all turned to Fang Jie. The boy was staring at the coin in his hand, his face a mask of absolute terror. He was shaking, his breathing coming in ragged, shallow bursts.

"What is it, kid?" Mu Cheng asked, stepping forward.

Fang Jie’s voice dropped to a whisper, a sound of pure, existential horror. "I can’t rember my na."

"I know it," he said. His voice was too controlled, the control of soone gripping very hard to keep sothing from falling. "I know it. It starts with F—"

"Fang Jie," Tang Xin said sharply.

Fang Jie looked at him. "What?"

"Your na. Fang Jie."

Sothing moved across Fang Jie’s face—not relief, not yet. More like a person hearing a word in a language they used to speak fluently and finding that they cannot rember what it ans.

"Fang Jie," he repeated, slowly, testing it. Like tasting sothing to determine whether it belongs to you.

His eyes filled.

"I couldn’t—" His voice cracked. "I couldn’t rember my own na. That’s—" He pressed his hand over his mouth. "How long until I forget everything else? How long until there’s nothing left?"

"It can be reversed," Lin Yue said.

"Can it?" Fang Jie looked at him. "You don’t know that."

Lin Yue did not answer because Fang Jie was right. He didn’t know that.

"Find sothing to hold," Lin Yue said instead. "Anything. Check your pockets."

Fang Jie’s hands moved chanically through his jacket. He pulled out a small rubber band. A receipt from before the Flow, crumpled and pale with handling. A fragnt of a pencil, worn to a stub.

He held the stub.

"What is it?" Mu Cheng asked.

"I was studying," Fang Jie said, his voice rough. "Before all this. For a licensing exam. I used this one until it ran out." He turned it over. "I kept it because I thought—when I passed, I’d throw it away. Seed like a good gesture." He pressed his fingers around it. "I haven’t passed yet."

The not-yet was doing a lot of work in that sentence.

Nobody said anything.

Old Wu, from his place by the bridge, swept three quiet strokes and said nothing either, but the quality of his silence was compassionate.

As the group began to move, clutching their anchors with white-knuckled desperation, they navigated the invisible bridge. Every step was a gamble. Every mont spent near the water was a risk.

They were almost halfway across when the silence of the river was finally broken.

There was no splash. No sound of movent.

But as Lin Yue looked down into the silver liquid beside his foot, he saw sothing break the surface.

A hand.

It was pale—almost translucent—and its skin had the sheen of polished silver. It didn’t erge with a struggle; it simply rose, slowly and deliberately, as if it had always been there, waiting for the right mont to manifest.

The hand was slender, the fingers long and elegant, but the skin was stretched tight over the bone, giving it a skeletal, uncanny appearance.

And the hand was clutching sothing.

Lin Yue narrowed his eyes, leaning in.

The hand was holding a piece of clothing. A scrap of fabric, torn and stained, but unmistakably recognizable.

It was a piece of a sleeve—the exact fabric, color, and weave of the jacket that Mu Cheng was currently wearing.

Mu Cheng froze, his gaze dropping to the silver hand. He looked at his own sleeve. It was intact. There were no tears. No missing pieces.

But the hand in the river was holding a piece of him.

"How..." Mu Cheng whispered, his voice trembling. "I haven’t... I haven’t lost any of my clothes."

Lin Yue stared at the hand. The implication was imdiate and horrifying.

The river hadn’t just taken their mories. It had already begun to collect pieces of them—physical fragnts of their existence—without them even noticing.

The hand didn’t attack. It didn’t try to pull them in. It simply remained there, hovering a few inches above the silver surface, holding the scrap of fabric like a trophy.

The hand held the piece of clothing above the silver surface, and the silver surface held the reflection of the hand, and in the reflection, the grip was slightly different—the fingers arranged in the precise configuration of soone handing sothing over rather than holding onto it.

An offering, Lin Yue thought. Or a demonstration.

The question that ford in the silence, in the space between the standing players and the silver water, was one that none of them said out loud but all of them were thinking.

If it already has that—

What else has it taken?

What have we already lost that we no longer rember losing?

The hand remained above the water.

The silver surface remained still.

And the city waited, with the ancient patience of sothing that knew that ti was always on its side.