Every Loop Costs a Friend

Chapter 7 - No One Remembers

Chapter 7 · 2,182 words

The assembly yard was full.

Three expedition teams stood in formation on the packed dirt, their gear clinking as they shifted weight and adjusted straps. Officers moved between them with clipboards. A Copper-rank quartermaster was doing a final equipment count, calling out numbers to an assistant who scribbled on a ledger.

Soren scanned the faces.

Eamon's team. Eastern quadrant. Seven Initiates. The girl with braided hair. The broad man. A thin boy who kept swallowing. He counted them once. Twice.

Sabine should be standing between the broad man and the thin boy. That was her position in the formation. Second from the left in the support line, where she could see both flanks and call out adjustments. She had stood there during the briefing, adjusting her sword belt, making a quiet comment to Kael that Soren hadn't quite heard.

The space was empty. The emptiness felt wrong. The formation had closed around the gap as though it had always been there. The broad man and the thin boy stood shoulder to shoulder with no space between them, no awareness that a position was missing.

Soren's chest tightened. He looked at Kael.

Kael was three positions down, checking his gauntlets. He caught Soren's eye and gave a brief nod. Nothing special, just the acknowledgment of a teammate. Normal. Unbothered.

Soren raised his hand. "Initiate Ashfall."

Eamon glanced over. "Problem?"

"Initiate Solise. Sabine Solise. She—" Soren looked at the gap in the formation. "She's not here."

Eamon frowned. The slow kind, the one that meant the question hadn't landed. "Who?"

"Solise. Sabine Solise. She was assigned to our team. She was standing right here during the briefing—"

"Ashfall, we have seven Initiates on this roster. That's the full complement." Eamon tapped his clipboard. "Check the assignment sheet if you want."

Soren's hands were cold. "The assignment sheet. Yes. Where is it?"

Eamon pointed toward the briefing hall. "Quartermaster's office. But I'm telling you, we're at full strength."

Soren broke formation. He didn't ask permission. He walked across the assembly yard toward the briefing hall, his boots loud on the packed dirt. Behind him, he heard Eamon say something to the team. He didn't look back.

The quartermaster's office was a narrow room off the main briefing hall, its walls lined with filing cabinets and supply manifests. The quartermaster, a thick-set Copper-rank named Ulric, looked up from his ledger as Soren entered.

"Initiate. Assembly's in the yard."

"Initiate Solise. Sabine Solise. Her assignment sheet."

Ulric blinked. "Solise?" He opened a drawer and pulled out a stack of assignment cards, flipping through them with a practiced thumb. "I don't have a Solise. We have Ashfall, Varden, Trell, Roth, Beck, Callis, and—" He counted them off. Seven names.

"She was here yesterday." Soren's voice was too loud. He lowered it. "She was at the briefing. She was in the formation."

Ulric's eyes went flat. He closed the drawer. "I don't have a Solise on any roster, Initiate. Never have, as far as I know. You sure you're not thinking of another guild?"

Soren turned and walked out.

The bunk room.

He took the stairs two at a time. The bunk room door was heavy oak, scarred with years of boot marks. He pushed it open.

Six bunks on each side of the narrow room. Twelve total. The institutional gray walls reflected the single overhead lamp. The air smelled of wool blankets and boot leather.

Sabine's bunk had been third from the door on the left side. She had kept it neat. Blanket folded tight, pillow centered, a small wooden box under the mattress that she'd shown Soren two days ago. *My brother's letters,* she'd said. *The only thing I brought from home.*

The third bunk from the door on the left side was a storage shelf.

Surplus packs stacked on it. Three canvas supply bags, a coiled rope, a dented helmet that probably belonged to someone who'd graduated to Copper rank. Dust lined the top edge. A cobweb bridged the corner where the wall met the frame. The shelf had been there for weeks.

Soren stood in the doorway and stared at the shelf.

His hands were shaking. He put them in his jacket pockets. The surplus packs were ordinary. The rope was ordinary. Nothing about the shelf suggested that it had ever been anything other than what it was now.

He went to the guild records room.

The records room was on the second floor. A larger space with long tables and leather-bound rosters chained to reading stands. A junior clerk sat at the front desk, copying entries from a field report into the permanent ledger.

"Initiate roster," Soren said. "Current cycle."

The clerk pointed to a reading stand. "Third from the left."

Soren found the roster. It was a heavy volume, bound in cracked brown leather, its pages thick with names written in careful guild script. He turned to the Initiate listings and ran his finger down the column.

Ashfall, Soren. Varden, Kael. Trell, Roth. Beck, Callis.

No Solise.

He turned the page. The previous cycle's roster. No Solise. The cycle before that. No Solise. He went back through three months of rosters, his finger moving faster, his breathing louder in the quiet room.

Nothing.

The ink was clean. The pages were intact. There was no sign of alteration. No scraped parchment where a name had been removed, no discoloration from erased entries. The rosters were exactly what they appeared to be: complete, unmodified records of guild personnel.

Sabine Solise had never existed.

Soren closed the roster. The leather cover made a soft sound against the reading stand. The clerk at the front desk didn't look up.

He left the records room and stood in the corridor, his back against the stone wall. The corridor was empty. Somewhere below, the assembly yard was still filling with expedition teams. An officer's voice carried up through the stairwell, calling assignments.

Soren pressed his palms against the stone. Cold. Solid. Real.

*She was here. She stood in the common hall and ate oatmeal and told me about her brother. She showed me a wooden box with letters under her bunk. She was real.*

The wooden box.

He went back to the bunk room. The shelf was still there. He pulled the surplus packs off one by one, setting them on the floor. He checked under the shelf. He checked the adjacent bunks. He checked every surface in the room.

No wooden box. No letters. No trace.

The broad man, Trell, came in to grab his backup gauntlets. He stopped when he saw Soren on his knees beside the shelf.

"You looking for something?"

Soren looked up. "The girl who was billeted here. Third bunk. Dark hair, pulled back. About a year older than me."

Trell scratched his neck. "I don't—there's no one in the third bunk. That's the storage shelf. Has been since before I got here."

"You never shared this room with someone named Sabine?"

"Sabine?" Trell's face showed nothing but genuine confusion. "No. I've been in this room for six weeks. It's been twelve bunks the whole time."

He picked up his gauntlets and left.

Soren knelt on the stone floor of the bunk room and tried to remember the sound of Sabine's voice. It was still there. Clear. *My brother needs treatment I can't afford on Initiate pay.*

He stood up.

---

The medical clinic was in the guild's eastern wing. A clean, antiseptic-smelling space with white-washed walls and a row of examination beds behind canvas dividers. A clerk sat at the front desk, organizing treatment schedules on a large ledger.

"I need to find someone," Soren said. "A patient. Young man, chronic condition. Respiratory, I think, or maybe something with his blood. He'd be receiving treatment funded through a guild dependent's account."

The clerk looked up. "Dependent records are in the side office. You'll need authorization from a team leader or an officer."

Soren didn't have authorization. He waited until the clerk turned to file a document, then walked past the desk and into the side office.

The dependent records were in a smaller ledger, organized by account number. Soren didn't have an account number. He opened the ledger to the most recent entries and began scanning.

Names. Treatment types. Fund allocations. No Solise.

He went back further. Page after page of medical dependents. Guild members' families receiving treatment through the guild's health provision. He scanned every entry.

No Solise. No younger brother. No respiratory condition funded through an Initiate's standing.

"You can't be in here."

Soren turned. The clinic's senior healer, a gray-haired woman named Abel, stood in the doorway, her arms crossed.

"I'm looking for someone," Soren said. "A young man. Sabine Solise's brother. She was an Initiate. She was earning guild standing to pay for his treatment."

Abel's expression didn't change. Her voice carried the flat certainty of someone who dealt in inventory and knew what she had. "I don't know a Sabine Solise."

"She was here. She was an Initiate. She had a brother who needed—"

"Initiate." Abel's voice was flat. Certain. "I have worked in this clinic for eleven years. I know every dependent account in this guild. There is no Solise family on our records. There is no Initiate by that name."

Soren looked at the ledger in his hands. The pages were clean. The entries were complete.

"Where would he be?" he said. "If he existed. If someone like him. Young, chronic condition, no family money. Where would he be?"

Abel's expression softened, slightly. "The dependent ward. Third floor of the residential block. But Initiate, if there's no record of him, he's not there."

Soren left the clinic.

The residential block was a ten-minute walk across the guild compound. He climbed the three flights to the dependent ward without thinking about it. His body moving through the building's layout from memory he shouldn't have had. The dependent ward was a long corridor of small rooms, each housing a guild member's family member who needed ongoing care.

He found the room. Or rather, he found the room where Sabine had told him her brother stayed.

Room seven. He opened the door.

A young man sat on the bed, reading a thin volume of poetry. He looked up when Soren entered. He had dark hair. Lighter than Sabine's, but the same texture. The same shape of jaw. The same set of the eyes.

Soren's breath caught.

"Can I help you?" the young man said. His voice was polite. Uncurious.

"You—" Soren stopped. He looked at the room. A single bed. A small table with a water pitcher. A window overlooking the guild's eastern garden. No photographs. No letters. No wooden box.

"Are you looking for someone?" the young man asked.

"Do you have a sister?"

The young man's brow creased. "A sister? No. I'm the only one." He said it without hesitation. The easy answer of someone who had never had a sibling.

Soren looked at his face. The resemblance was there. It was there in the bone structure, in the way his hair fell across his forehead, in the narrow space between his eyes. Sabine's face. The same family.

But the young man didn't see it. He couldn't see it. He had no reference point for comparison.

"I'm sorry," Soren said. "I thought—you looked like someone I knew."

The young man shrugged. Returned to his book.

Soren stood in the doorway. The young man turned a page. The afternoon light came through the window and fell across the bed's wool blanket.

The young man's shoulders held a tension that didn't match the stillness of the rest of his body. He shifted on the bed. He looked at the window. Then back at his book.

"Are you all right?" Soren asked.

"Fine." The young man didn't look up. "Just—odd afternoon. Felt strange when I woke up. Like I'd forgotten something." He turned another page. "Tower's got everyone on edge, I suppose."

Soren left the room.

He walked down the corridor. Down the three flights of stairs. Across the compound toward the assembly yard, where the expedition was still forming up. The afternoon light was flat and gray. The same quality of light he remembered from inside the tower.

Sabine was gone. Not dead. Not transferred. Not forgotten by an act of time.

Gone.

The wooden box under the bunk. The letters from her brother. The dark hair pulled back tight. The way she'd looked at him in the common hall when she told him about the medical treatment. *Every contract, every rank point, it goes to his fund.*

The young man in room seven didn't know her. Didn't know he had a sister. Didn't know that someone had been earning guild standing to pay for his treatment, and that the person had been his sister, and that she was gone.

Soren reached the assembly yard. The expedition was preparing to move out. Eamon's team was in formation. Kael was checking his gauntlets.

Soren took his position. He said nothing.

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