“You've said it seven times since I walked in.”
Martin Tan stared at Julian Chow.
There were no mirrors in the monitoring room, only six displays. Each held a pale version of Martin: at the elevator, in the open office, on the level-eight fire stairs, before the isolated review station, and in two corridors where nothing now moved. None of them was speaking.
“What exactly did I say?”
“One word. Sister.”
“In a sentence?”
“No. You say it softly every few seconds. Like you're checking whether the word is still there.”
Martin opened the medical patch report on his wrist. Breathing normal. Pulse elevated but stable. Across the last five minutes, the throat sensor had registered seven minor vibrations and classified them as clearing the throat.
“Tell me if it happens again.”
“It just did.”
“When?”
“Before you said again.”
Martin took a sheet of paper and wrote the time at the top. Beneath it: I may be forgetting things I have just said.
The ink remained on the page.
He pushed the note towards Julian. “Keep this.”
Julian did not take it. “You need a hospital.”
“The medical system cleared me.”
“You've spent the past hour proving systems can be wrong.”
Martin looked up. Julian rarely used that tone with him. Five years of working together had taught him when not to interfere. It had also taught him how efficiently Martin could translate concern into noise.
“I need to find something at home.”
“What?”
“The doorbell.”
“At two in the morning?”
“Not the bell itself. A photograph.”
Julian glanced at the blue lines on the spectrum display, then at the slight shape beneath Martin's jacket. “And when you find it?”
Martin had no answer.
Procedure said to seal the terminal, request a neurological assessment, notify their supervisor and surrender the case to higher clearance. Every step would protect the people in the room. Every step would also allow the countdown to resume.
“Stay here,” Martin said. “Keep the station offline. If someone comes to take over, make them write Ian Cheong's name on paper first.”
“Why?”
“See if they still remember it after they finish.”
Julian finally picked up Martin's note. He folded it into quarters and placed it in his shirt pocket. “Message me before three. If you don't, I'll report you missing.”
It was both a threat and a promise.
The rain had weakened by the time Martin left Tianheng Tower. A skin of water lay beneath the elevated tracks, breaking the colour of the billboards beneath each passing tyre and knitting it together again after the traffic moved on.
His route service offered a twenty-four-minute journey home. A green shield marked it as the lowest available risk.
Martin dismissed it.
He took an older road south, adding twelve minutes to the drive.
He did not know why the phrase avoid the safest route had entered his thoughts. It belonged to no part of the night he could remember. It simply lay across his mind like a cable with neither end connected.
His mother lived in an old apartment block that had been refurbished without being changed. The sundry shop downstairs was shuttered, its faded water-delivery number still pasted across the metal. Rain ticked from the awning. Inside the guard post, a television played a late-night repeat with the sound off.
Martin rang the bell at 2:13 a.m.
Slippers crossed the floor almost immediately.
His mother opened the door. She did not ask why he had come. She looked at his shoulders first. “You fell?”
“Who told you?”
“You're standing crooked.” She stepped aside. “Come in. Don't bring water onto the tiles.”
Martin looked down. His shoes had been dry for nearly an hour.
The living-room light was warm and slightly too dim. Half-folded clothes occupied the sofa. A glass of water sat untouched on the coffee table. The television had gone to sleep. His mother was in nightclothes, but she had not been sleeping. She looked like someone who had been waiting without knowing whom to expect.
“I want to see the old photographs,” Martin said.
Her hand paused on the lock. “Now?”
“From before I was fifteen.”
“We lost a lot when we moved.”
“What about the rest?”
She studied his face, then the pocket of his jacket. “Back of the storage cabinet. Get them yourself.”
Mothballs and old paper breathed out when he opened the cabinet. Martin removed two plastic crates. The first contained Victor Tan's files, expired warranties and keys to locks that no longer existed. Three albums lay at the bottom of the second crate, wrapped twice in clear plastic.
His mother went to boil water. She did not offer to help.
Martin opened the first album on the dining table.
He had never liked family albums. They promoted moments to importance without evidence, while the decisions that altered a household usually occurred outside the frame. Tonight he was not looking for memory. He was looking for quantity.
Victor. His mother. Martin.
Three.
Three in the park. Three around a birthday cake. Three wearing new clothes at the front door. Every image confirmed the childhood Martin remembered. Even when cousins and grandparents crowded the frame, there was only one child between his parents.
No pale blue hair clip.
No rabbit bowl.
No fourth chair.
Martin slowed down. He examined not only who was present, but how bodies had been arranged: which way a shoulder turned, where a hand rested, whether the composition still made sense when one edge was cropped.
On page seventeen, his mother stood beside him at the zoo with her left hand curved around empty air. A pram blocked the lower half of the photograph. She might simply have been moving aside.
On page twenty-three, a birthday cake had been cut into four pieces beside three plates. The fourth piece could have belonged to whoever held the camera.
On page thirty, Victor had photographed mother and son on a beach. Neither looked into the lens. Both were watching the same child-high point beyond the left edge, where the frame contained only bleached sand.
Every irregularity had a reasonable answer.
There were enough answers to feel curated.
Martin opened the official family record beside the album. The system recognised every face. Victor was marked deceased. His mother's address had changed three times. Martin's childhood registration connected cleanly to his employment at the Municipal Data Consistency Center. The three relationship lines were intact, with no gap requiring a fourth person.
He checked the dates year by year. Nursery pickup records named his parents and an uncle. His primary-school medical file called him an only child. The old apartment listed three permanent occupants. Even its utility model had estimated the average household population at 2.97.
The records agreed so precisely that doubt began to resemble negligence.
Martin closed the official page and returned to paper.
Six rectangular shadows showed where photographs had once been removed from different parts of the album. No page was torn out. Someone had selected one image from six separate years.
Mould damage, Martin thought. His mother had thrown them away.
He wrote that explanation down too. Tonight, every sensible answer arrived before he had properly formed the question.
His mother returned with a tray. “Which year are you looking for?”
“Before we moved out of the old flat.”
Porcelain touched porcelain. “Why?”
“I heard the doorbell.”
She set down the tray harder than necessary. “Your father always said he would repair it. Then we moved.”
“What was wrong with it?”
“The second note was slow.”
Her answer came too quickly.
Martin watched her turn towards the kettle, pretending the detail belonged to anyone who had lived there.
“How slow?”
“How would I remember?”
He arranged the four spectral images on the table. The blue marks rose and fell across black backgrounds. His mother glanced once, then placed a teacup over the last pair of traces.
“Don't bring work home.”
There were four cups on the table.
Martin said nothing at first.
One cup for him. One for his mother. A third sat at Victor's old place with its handle turned to the right—a habit that could outlive a husband. The fourth was smaller, white porcelain ringed with blue stars, and had been set to Martin's left.
It was already filled.
“Is someone coming?”
His mother followed his gaze.
Her face emptied, then tightened with a brief, naked panic. Not confusion at finding the wrong object. Fear at discovering that her body had done something it was not supposed to reveal.
“I took out one too many.”
She reached for it. Martin placed his palm over the rim first.
The tea was warm. A circle still moved across its surface. She had not removed an empty cup by accident. She had poured tea for a fourth person.
“Whose is it?”
“An old cup.”
“Who used it?”
“No one.”
His mother withdrew her hand and returned to the kitchen. She began washing a kettle that was already clean. Water filled the silence between them.
Martin took out the hair clip.
The evidence bag settled beside the small cup. The blue star inside and the blue stars on the porcelain looked like pieces of a set separated for years.
The water stopped.
His mother did not return.
Martin opened the second album. Its plastic sleeves were newer, though the photographs were older and had been rearranged. The spacing between them was exact. Only the left margin was consistently half a centimetre wider than necessary.
He removed each photograph and held it to the light. Most backs were blank. A few carried dates or locations in Victor's blue-black ink. His father had written an open 4 and crossed every 7 through the middle.
A brown envelope had been tucked into the final sleeve. It held photographs taken in the old flat before the move: living room, kitchen, Victor's open doorbell casing, the folding table by the window.
The table was against the wall. Three chairs.
The reverse was blank.
The next photograph was a family portrait.
Victor stood beside the window with one hand on teenage Martin's shoulder. His mother sat on the arm of the rattan sofa, leaning slightly left. The crop was tight. All three people fit inside it. No one had left space for a missing child.
A perfectly ordinary family of three.
Martin was about to return it to the envelope when he noticed a patch of colour at the extreme left.
Behind his mother's lowered arm, four fingers entered the frame.
A child's left hand.
It reached in from outside the photograph and lightly gripped the fabric of his mother's house dress. The crop had removed the thumb, wrist and body. The fingers were narrow. One nail carried a flake of pale blue polish.
Martin stopped breathing.
There was no splice, no double exposure, no rough edge from cutting another relative out. The shadows on the child's fingers matched the shadows in the room. When the shutter had closed, that hand had been holding his mother.
Something struck the kitchen floor.
His mother came out and saw the photograph.
The kettle slipped from her hand onto the carpet. It did not break.
“Give me that.”
Martin had never heard her use that voice. It was neither a request nor a mother's command. It was fear compressed until only instinct remained.
“Whose hand is this?”
“The photograph is damaged.”
“Paper doesn't grow fingers.”
She came around the table and caught one corner. Martin held the opposite side. Neither pulled. The smallest pressure might tear the child from the image a second time.
“You should not be looking at these,” she said.
“Why?”
“Because your father already—”
The sentence stopped.
“Already what?”
Recognition began to drain from her eyes. She looked at the photograph, then at Martin, as though she had forgotten why she was standing there. After several seconds, she released the print and bent to retrieve the kettle.
“It's late,” she said in her ordinary voice. “You have work tomorrow.”
She carried the fourth cup into the kitchen. As she passed him, her free hand still moved protectively across the left side of the photograph, shielding a child who did not exist from the hot kettle.
Martin looked down.
The small hand remained on the front of the print.
He turned it over.
Victor's blue-black ink had faded to grey. A date had bled away, but two lines remained legible.
MARTIN TAN. CLARA TAN.
DON'T LET HIM FORGET A SECOND TIME.