Chapter 13 — Mira's Mother (Last Seen on Page 142)

The ink here is still wet. If you touch it, you'll see why.

The first word I wrote was NO.

The Mayor's grinning mouth sealed itself like a licked envelope. Miss Wicker made a strangled sound and clutched her throat, her voice cancelled mid-syllable.

Dad's hand tightened on my shoulder. "You can't just delete them. The story won't hold. It needs something to replace them."

From somewhere deep in the crumbling walls, barely audible over the grinding gears:

Mira. Find me.

I opened the town ledger that lay beneath the pedestal—the last official record, the last place her name had been entered before they'd begun erasing it. Page 142. The paper was warm. When I touched it, the text rearranged itself into a map of the cemetery, a single mausoleum marked in red ink that pulsed like a vein.

"She's not gone," Dad said. "They stored her."

We ran through the collapsing town. The streets did strange things as the story came undone—lampposts folded into paper planes, the sky peeled back in long strips to reveal margin notes written in God's cramped handwriting, people I'd known my whole life flickered and simplified, reduced to their essential descriptions. Mrs. Peabody became, briefly, a grocery list with sensible shoes. Mr. Donahue was a cloud of flour and the smell of something good.

The mausoleum stood solid amid the disintegration. Its door was embossed with one word:

ARCHIVES.

Inside: filing cabinets reaching up into darkness. Each drawer labelled.

Daniel Birch—Deleted Scenes.

Eleanor Birch—Alternate Endings.

Mira Birch—First Draft.

My drawer, when I pulled it open, held one sentence on continuous loop:

Mira was a good girl who didn't ask questions.

I slammed it shut and found Mom's drawer.

One page. Her last note, the one she'd written before they took her:

The Press doesn't just print lies. It binds them. Tear out the colophon page to—

Censored. The rest, a black smear.

The Mayor came through the wall behind us—half his face gone, the remaining half grinning with too many teeth.

"Too late," he said. "The epilogue's already written."

The floor opened.

We fell.