The stairs remember my weight differently now. Each step carries less purpose, more habit. Wood groans beneath feet that have forgotten how to matter.
Marta's kitchen smells of morning. Bitter tea, yesterday's bread warming, the particular staleness of air that's held too many silences. She doesn't look up. I don't sit down. We perform the choreography of people who've agreed not to notice each other's emptiness.
The door closes behind me with the soft finality of a book nobody finishes.
Edgeharbor spreads before me in shades of gray and commerce. Cobblestones worn smooth by better stories than mine. Shop windows reflecting a figure I recognize but don't claim. The message satchel hangs from my shoulder like an anchor dressed as purpose.
What more could I have done?
The question follows me down Market Street, past the vendors arranging their wares with the careful attention of people who believe in tomorrow. Their voices blend into the ambient hymn of survival. Prices called, bargains offered, the small negotiations that keep the world turning without ever asking why it should.
A child runs past, chasing something invisible. Her laughter cuts through morning air like glass through skin. Clean. Precise. Gone before the wound registers.
I turn onto Caller's Way. My feet know this route. They carry me while my mind circles back, always back, to that courtyard. To blood that looked like philosophy. To eyes that saw straight through my delusions and named them gently.
"You think you wrote me into existence."
Arthur's voice, patient despite the pain. Patient the way adults are patient with children who insist monsters live under beds. Except I wasn't a child. And the monsters were real. And I'd claimed to be their author.
The Academic District rises around me in limestone and ambition. Students hurry past with the focused urgency of people who still believe knowledge leads somewhere. Their robes whisper secrets to the wind. I deliver messages to their professors and wonder if any of them teach courses on the weight of irrelevance.
What did he know that I couldn't see?
The question has bones now. It walks beside me through the Merchant Quarter, where gold changes hands like promises and nobody asks what happens to the broken ones. A shop window shows my reflection between displayed wares. Just another moving shape among the merchandise. Priced to sell. Marked down for quick disposal.
I complete deliveries. Signatures appear on papers. Coins appear in my hand. The city breathes around me in steam and struggle, and I move through it like smoke through ruins. Present but not substantial. Visible but not seen.
Am I just a failure?
The baker takes his message without looking at my face. His hands are covered in flour, white dust that clings like possibility before ovens burn it into something useful. I wonder if he ever thinks about the bread that doesn't rise. The loaves that collapse despite following every rule.
"Sign here," I say.
He signs. We don't discuss failed bread or failed authors. The transaction completes itself while we stand carefully apart from meaning.
The noon bells ring from the Cathedral of Practical Miracles. Twelve notes for twelve hours I've been awake pretending this matters. The sound spreads over rooftops like benediction for people who've forgotten what they're being blessed for.
I eat lunch standing in an alley between buildings. The sandwich tastes like paper and regret. Around me, the city continues its ancient dialogue of debt and desire. Cart wheels argue with cobblestones. Merchants court customers with practiced desperation. Everyone performing their roles with the dedication of people who've never wondered if they're in the wrong story.
Did I not understand what it meant to actually know what the hell is going on?
The thought arrives with the afternoon deliveries. Three more messages to the Guild Quarter. Two contracts for the Lower Banks. Each envelope contains someone else's business, someone else's life moving forward while mine circles the same drain of days.
I watch my hands sort the messages. These fingers that once held a pen and wrote ten pages of what I thought was fiction. Now they just hold other people's correspondence. The demotion feels appropriate. Hands that couldn't save anyone shouldn't pretend they can create.
"You're the Philistine boy," says the textile merchant as I hand her the invoice.
"Yes."
"Haven't seen you around lately."
"I was away."
"Anywhere interesting?"
"No."
She waits for elaboration that doesn't come. Eventually, she signs for the message and returns to her bolts of fabric. Each one waiting to become something. Unlike me, who became nothing and stayed there.
The sun tracks across the sky like a citation for time passing. Shadows lengthen with the patience of inevitable things. My route takes me past the Disputed Zone Monitoring Station. I don't look up. Maya would be at her desk, surrounded by frequencies and charts, tracking dangers that at least have the decency to be obvious.
What kind of person writes ten pages and thinks they've authored reality?
The kind who delivers messages now. The kind who walks familiar streets with unfamiliar feet. The kind who breathes in rhythm with a city that never asked for his contribution.
The Lower Market welcomes me back as the day dies. Vendors pack their unsold hopes into crates for tomorrow's attempts. The evening crowd moves with the exhausted purpose of people heading home to lives they've agreed to call enough.
I have three messages left. My feet continue their work while my mind inventories failures. The way I'd stood in that courtyard, certain I understood something fundamental. The way Arthur had looked at me with the patience reserved for necessary disappointments.
"Create a version of me that found peace," he'd said.
But I couldn't even create a version of myself that mattered.
The last delivery is to a boarding house near the docks. The woman who answers smells like fish oil and fatigue. She signs without reading. I pocket the fee without counting. We complete our transaction in the shared silence of people who've learned not to expect more than this.
The walk back to Central Communications stretches like accusation. Each step a small surrender. I pass places where I used to believe things. The corner where I first wondered about the zones. The bench where I'd written those ten pages. Landmarks of a person I'm no longer sure existed.
Kellan barely looks up when I return the empty satchel.
"All done?"
"Yes."
"Good. Same time tomorrow."
"Yes."
He marks something in his ledger. I exist as a checkmark in someone else's accounting. It feels like the most honest thing that's happened all day.
The evening air tastes like copper and cooling stone. I walk without destination, letting the city's current carry me through streets that blur together in the growing dark. Past windows lit with other people's lives. Past doors that open onto conversations I'll never join.
What more could I have done?
The question has become the answer. Nothing. I could have done nothing more because I was nothing more. A messenger who confused delivery with creation. A reader who thought he was the writer.
The Bent Gear appears before me like punctuation at the end of a sentence nobody wanted to finish. Home. Or at least the place where I keep my things and practice being nobody.
Inside, Marta serves soup to other boarders. They talk around my silence, their voices a comfortable murmur that requires nothing from me. I eat because the body demands fuel even when the mind has given up on destination.
"There was a visitor," Marta says as I stand to leave.
I pause.
"Young woman. Dark skin. Said she'd wait but got called away. Left this."
She hands me a folded paper. Lyka's handwriting. I don't open it.
"Aren't you going to read it?"