The city had dressed its streets in memory. Paper banners cut like lace crossed from balcony to balcony; candles pooled gold in the hollows of windows; photographs bloomed on little altars inside doorways—sepia faces, marigolds, bowls of fruit that remembered fingers. Somewhere a brass band practiced a hymn that had learned to dance.

Robin walked beside her companion as if accompanying a rare book—close enough to guard, never close enough to crease. The air laid soft ash on their tongues: incense, sugar, and a page turned long ago. When she lifted her hand, quill-black sigils brightened along her forearm and a small script-hand unfolded from the shadow of a shop sign to straighten a strand of papel picado that had snagged on a nail. The banner fluttered correctly, the street exhaled.

“This city keeps good footnotes,” she said, chin tipping toward a bronze plaque set into brick. The metal was warm with names; the brick remembered a fire and the buckets that tamed it. Her voice was low and pleasant, the kind a room trusts. “Founders, midwives, a printer who hid forbidden pamphlets under his coat,” she translated, fingertips hovering but never touching. “He spelled courage with bad kerning.” A brief smile. “Charming.”

They turned past a bakery window where sugar skulls waited in neat ranks, each iced with a different smile. A girl pressed her nose to the glass; a grandmother laughed and pretended not to want one. Robin's script-eyes blinked open like petals over the marzipan tray and read the tiny swirls of icing as if they were a friendly cipher. “Sweetness is a language, too,” she murmured.

Crowd-tide swelled and pressed. Robin raised two fingers; a fan of sigil-petals settled over the flagstones at her companion's feet, a ward so polite it seemed like good manners. Shoulders softened. A jostle turned into a sidestep. Behind them, a hand that had thought about a purse remembered it belonged to someone better and withdrew.

They reached a street-corner altar—photos of a woman in gardening gloves, a tin cup of coffee gone cool, a scarf folded with care. The candle nearest the picture guttered, stubborn in the draft. Robin's gaze softened; ink-light pricked like stars along her brow. She leaned only close enough for the flame to hear her and breathed it back to steadiness. “She liked to water the azaleas before the sun,” Robin guessed quietly. “You can see it in the soil on her cuffs.”

A coolness pooled at the altar's base—no malice, only the weight of a story that didn't want to end. Robin's palm hovered above the tin cup. Mnemosyne's Ledger chimed through her bones like a well-tuned fork. “Thank you,” she told the air, gracious and specific, and the coolness lifted as if someone had finally been noticed properly. The candle brightened. Somewhere, a photograph looked a little less like paper and a little more like being remembered.