The Anchorless Market

The Exchange opens at dawn, before the heat begins to ripple the road and lift old scents from the tar. Noa stands under the translucent canopy, watching the vendors arrange their displays: slender glass ampoules laid in velvet trays, each corked with a color and a sigil; wire nests cradling rougher bricks of extracted recall like amber scraped from a tree. The signage misdirects, even the honest shops. Small appeals handwritten on paper placards promise first laughter, crisp seaside wind, the clean click of a newborn tooth against a spoon.

When Noa reaches for the catalog, it hums her name down a spine of laminated pages and invites her to breathe on its sensor. The page flips to a code that is not random. In the column beside a lot number and an estimate glows a note: photobooth fairground whistle, ten seconds, master-grade, unshared. The sampled tone in her jaw is so specific that it stills her.

She does not remember when she first heard her father whistle that way; only that he had a habit of interacting with doors and lifts as if they were instruments. A high-tin note to coax a reluctant latch, a trill for old elevators. But the catalog: fairground photobooth, ten seconds. A fragment spooled from the optic nerve of a donor listed as anonymous, pulled clean and framed, never yet sold.

The bidding for a master begins at a figure Noa cannot touch without burning. At the counter, the broker leans forward and speaks softly about financing packages, about leveraging future recall. Noa asks for a hold anyway, felted token pressed from her heating palm to reserve what she cannot afford. On the screen above the stall, the lot number already attracts a private bid.

The bidder’s handle blooms empty as a ghost, only a small sigil of a finch perched on a wire. It takes only an hour for the reserve to be passed, for the finch to outbid anyone else’s memory of solvency. Noa watches her token turn from pink to ash and leaves the Exchange through a seam with the catalog’s phantom taste of tin still on her tongue. Outside, the walls of her district are painted with murals that shift when the light does.

A child reels away from a nurse in one, both of them animated from borrowed recollection; a whole scene licensed from a popular stream of Ur-mother comfort. The painted nurse knows exactly when to bend, where to put her hand, because some donor learned it perfectly once and they sold it and sold it again. Noa walks toward the hum of the under-market because the surface has already given her a price she cannot pay. Omi’s door is down a gap with rusted steps that smell of oil and rain, marked by a sticker the size of a coin and a fleck of glitter: palimpsest.

Omi is older than their hands look. They keep their nails short and their scalp close-cropped, a booster on their wrist loaded with decay algorithms. Above the workbench, reels of hair-thin filament gleam like cobwebs in dawn frost. Omi does not need Noa to be explicit.

The Collector is discussed in careful terms only when the room’s dampener has sighed to life; the walls absorb names like fabric takes smoke. Calder Finch, Omi says finally, tasting each syllable as if it were printed on their tongue. Omi can ring a bell he cannot make, he has collectors in multiple boroughs keeping masters in climate-controlled vaults until the copy market sweetens again. Omi can try to get Noa into the gallery where Calder shows his trophies, where masters are fed to audiences as amuse-bouches.

It will take a token of trust. The extraction table is a long metal island with a neck-rest that looks like patience. Omi offers Noa a small exchange first, to prove she understands what she is asking. Give a memory that is not load-bearing and on the line of life.

No birthdays. No faces you still need to place in the crowd. Something bright and small to pay the ferryman. Noa lies back and offers the origin of a thin white scar on her shin, a childhood misjudgment on a bicycle, the tinny crunch of a pedal arm biting bone and the metallic bloom of smell, the breathless whuff of the fall.

Omi lays a lattice over the skin at her temples, a mesh that vibrates on a frequency that makes her teeth ache. On the screen, her brain becomes a city’s lights, flickering blocks of stored events that respond when the index phrase is spoken. The lacuna left behind is gentle, a soft sinking rather than a hole torn open. When Omi helps her sit up, Noa cannot remember how she acquired the scar but she can still see its whiteness, all context peeled out and sold in a clear vial with her name redacted.

Omi hands her a card with an address and a time, a simple page embossed with a small finch in a cut-out square. The paper smells of old glue. The gallery requires an implant of etiquette: a patterned behavior to carry her across introductions. Omi slides a coil across the bench.

Noa feels the foreignness of practiced grace settle in behind her eyes like a second tongue. The gallery is a former cold-storage facility kept chilled to preserve both meat and meaning. The walls are the color of smoke, the guests arranged by their degrees of ownership. Some bodies in the room are inhabited by stories that move their hands differently, lending them borrowed calm or courage.

A woman wearing the memory of winning a city marathon leans in a particular way that turns the space around her into a finish line, even now. Servers drift with trays of sensory palate cleansers. Noa tries not to bump her borrowed courtesy against any edges. Then the lights dim and the first master plays, not through speakers or screens but through the thin filament that connects each guest’s wrist to the central spine of the room.

A ten-second burst of garlic frying in butter, first lesson from a loved one, warmth that turns each breathing guest into a kitchen. Noa waits with her entire body. When the fairground begins, it is unmistakable: sun-smacked plastic, sweat-slick laughter, the stink of printer ink, the thick-greased silence between shutter flashes. Somewhere a man whistles once, a bright tin clearing of the throat of a summer that has not moved in decades.

Calder finds her after, perhaps because she stiffens in a way the borrowed manners cannot conceal. Up close, his nose is porous like pumice and his hair is trying not to remember its own original shade. He speaks to the air near her shoulder, in that fashion the truly wealthy have of keeping you slightly displaced. He knows what she wants, he does not feign ignorance.

Masters are not supposed to move; they are meant to be paraded and held, the linchpin of price. He admits he acquired it from a seller who claimed anonymity and who knew exactly how much to ask. For a price, he can let Noa sit with it alone, unmediated by the room’s smoothing spine. Not to buy.

To sit. For a price he then names, and it is not money. He wants Noa’s last conversation with her father, harvested clean and before any repetitions or reworkings. The real version, the dime bright under the couch.

He says it would complete a series he is curating on goodbyes. He smiles and Noa imagines a skylight closing. Noa goes home and sits in a dark kitchen across from a plant that does not understand its place by the window. On the shelf above the sink are vials already sold: small swirls of experiences that once belonged to her and now feed someone else’s need for the first bite of a street peach or the hum of an airplane wing in rain.

Those were trivial exchanges, the price of medicine or rent, bits shaved from the long hedge of a life in order to keep it. She presses her palm to her forehead and extracts a cheaper resource first: she goes back to the Exchange and signs over the story of her first love to a broker whose hands do not tremble when he takes hold of lives. He assures her it will go to good people who want to feel that honest heat without the risks. The extraction feels like peeling wool from thorn, caught in every little hook as it leaves.

After, the pillow she kept from that time looks oddly blank, just an object. With the credit, she buys a retail copy of the fairground whistle, believing that the distinction between master and duplicate is a marketing lie. In her own apartment, fifty steps from the plant, she opens the ampoule. The copy is too smooth.

The grease-slick silence is there, but the silence has been polished until it gleams. The whistle is the right pitch, but the note has been looped to make it fit people better. The ten seconds have stretched into twelve to accommodate a breath somewhere that a demographic prefers. The printer ink smells of nostalgia rather than chemicals.

It is as if someone lifted her to a glass display of the moment and invited her to press her fingers to the case. She sits on the floor and laughs once like a hiccup, then swallows it down and slides the vial back into its foam nest. She goes to see her mother because there are angles of grief that are more survivable in a shared room. Her mother’s memory has been softened by hours spent under purchased weather: sunshine imported by vial to lift a winter that refused to leave.

When Noa tells her about the master and the price, her mother confesses what Noa already suspects in the bones of her days: years ago, she sold off their lesser Sunday mornings, the taste of a particular jam, the careful, careful way skinny fingers were guided through the first embroidery stitch. To pay for a treatment. They both look at each other like ghosts who have not yet agreed about the house. The next day Noa meets Calder in a room that smells of ozone and fruit rind, a neutral, something designed not to lean on memory’s scales.

Consent scrolls across a wall where neither of them looks for long. The table is set with two ports, two filament coils, a decanting column for her data and a coated cylinder for his master. Calibration begins with nothing: a blankness that reads her base hum and shapes the extraction accordingly. Noa does not quite remember the last conversation until the mesh warms; then it arrives in her mouth before it surfaces in her mind, a rasp of her father’s voice as he told her to stop taking buses so late, and then that he was trying not to make demands now that he was in the fraction of time he had left, and that he wanted to be remembered in the middle of a day, not on the edge of night.

He asked her to keep singing in kitchens. It floods her so completely that the grief in it feels cleaner than it ever has. Omi warned her what extraction would do: not erasure so much as siphon, leaving the imprint of what the memory weighed without the picture. Noa tries to hold the words as they move, but her mind is a sieve built to let water through and she is also made of water.

When she sits up, the room is brighter and that particular exchange has already been bottled and sealed in Calder’s cylinder, labeled and expensive. He keeps his side. The master is a slim gold-wash case, pocked where other hands have held it, heavier than its smallness suggests. He leaves her alone on a couch the color of dead moss, and Noa lifts the vial and slots it into the port at her temple as her fingertips forget why they tremble.

The fairground is a body that opens immediately and without question. The light is the color memory always makes of summer, the cutout curtains inside the booth are resurrected in the exact sticky-slick way they tug on skin, the cheap stool wobbles on the same leg as it did then. Her father’s trousers smell faintly of solvent and oranges and the close heat of a day worked under. He whistles because the shutter jams between the second and third frame of the strip, and the sound is so precise that her throat tightens into it.

The flash is a white flower opening and dying. When Noa comes back to the room, she touches the case as if it is a live thing that might crawl away. The memory is perfect. It does not meet her anywhere she expects.

Her father is there in it and she is there too, both of them lit and whole. The conversation that tied the man in that moment to the one who fretted over buses and night has gone; the master has nothing to catch on. It is a jewel that makes her feel like she is looking at a river through armored glass. On the way home the trains sigh in their rails and the city clips its hair short in neon reflections.

Noa walks through corridors where people taste spice on their tongues that they never bought and borrowed bravado drifts from bodies like heat. She counts the faces of those who have rented out their sleep to advertisers, waking with songs already stuck. She stops at the corner by the shop that sells shoulder-sitting pets that hum calmness into the spine. When she gets to her building, the plant by the window has turned its leaves to catch a late pane of light.

Noa puts the gold case on the table and sits with it like a guest. She touches her temples gently and decides to try an experiment that carries no price but time. She takes a blank spool, lays it on the table, and opens the master again. Then she starts talking to the room, not holding the jewel up to a lamp but laying new cloth under it.

She says there was a line for the photobooth and they ate fried dough sprinkled with sugar and the sugar left a lint on his mustache that made her laugh so hard she hiccupped. These things may not be true; maybe it rained that day and the booth was a shelter; it does not matter. She is sewing, and sewing is not lying but making the temperature of a thing habitable. It is not a fix.

The last words she gave will not grow back; there is no place for them to flower now that they have been pruned. But eventually the jewel she bought stops skittering on the tabletop of her mind. It settles into a felted box of small fictions that are also beliefs, and the act of building is its own kind of real. When Noa goes out, she brings the spool of stories to the park and sits by the basin with the cracked fish and offers people a trade she can afford.

If they need something to hold their own unanchored masters, she will give them a little of her scaffolding for free: the way sugar sticks, the look of a wrist throwing a ball, the ache behind the eye when you laugh too hard. People come and sit without naming what they bought and what they lost; they sit because Noa listens and because someone in the city is making space for context to breathe. Omi brings tea sometimes and says nothing about the economics of kindness. Even Calder walks by once, puts a coin in the jar, and since he has no story to take, he leaves with a silent mouth.

Late one night, when the trains have calmed into their regular huffs and the window plant is a dark tongue against the glass, Noa sits with the master in her palm and hums the fairground whistle as best she can. She does not remember where she learned it, not with words that have dates attached, but the tune lives in her body now when the kettle clicks and when doors argue and when a grocery queue needs a little buoyancy. In the morning she carries the gold-wash case down to Omi and they both stand a long time looking at the metal. Noa asks Omi to make a copy everyone can afford, something honest and a little dented, not smoothed into a shape designed to suit.

Omi says it will not be the same and she nods. They do it anyway. The Exchange opens at dawn, and by noon a small vial labeled simply whistle sits between first laughter and the clean click of a newborn tooth. People lift it and some hear only sound.

Others see a booth’s curtain, a summer’s hand. A kid pays with a story about a dog, and Noa keeps the story like a coin in her pocket. On her way home she hears a child make a thin-bright note at a stubborn door, not imitating something bought but because children try anything to make their world move. Noa does not know if she has done anything good.

She thinks about the day her father’s words left and the way the empty answered. The market still eats and will go on eating. The city learns to fold around the hunger. She hums again, the note bouncing off the metal in the hall, and somewhere upstairs, on an old floorboard that always keeps its memory of flex, a neighbor taps their foot until the door opens.