Taken in by the Sextons, Edda Mercer learns the trade she was born for and forbidden: how the world’s forgetting is written into a great ledger and made to hold, how a memory is minted into a grey coin, what it costs the hand that wields the spade. Every marvel is paid for in the self, and she is only beginning to learn her price.
In the deepest room of the archive she finds a record of the erased, and in it a drowned district that answers to a name no one ever gave her. The order teaches that the buried should stay buried. Edda has never once been able to leave a buried thing alone. The further she reads, the closer she comes to the one truth the Sextons purged her kind to keep down.
She came to learn the craft. She is learning what it was built to keep from her.
