In Unread Alley, in the Sunken Reef District, memory-weavers earn twenty-two coins to stay alive by reading the last three seconds of the dead. Ji Chao has been at it for more than two years, and never once seen himself in someone else's memories. As a member of the Blank Person sequence, he takes up no space and leaves no trace in anyone's recollections. But in the last three seconds of Old Chen's life, the man who had hauled cargo at the Third Dock for twenty years, Ji Chao's nineteen-year-old face was embedded there, plain as day. A written mark slashed diagonally in from the lower-right corner of the image, its bright line ragged as if scratched by a chicken's claw. Whoever made it didn't know how to write; they'd forced it in by brute strength. Chen and Ji Chao had only met twice in their lives and exchanged fewer than ten words. The inspection broadcast lights were already coming on one after another. Reading officer Rui Du blocked the doorway, demanding to read the cargo. Ji Chao pressed the real box against his skin and slipped it into his sleeve, then handed over an empty one, betting that the other man wouldn't be able to read anything from it. But why was Ji Chao's face in Old Chen's memory? Who had written it in? And whose mind would be marked into a dead person's memories next? The body that had surfaced in Uncle Chang Qi's shop next door was nearly finished being turned over.
